ONE OF MY FAVORITE PLACES WHEN I LIVED IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK...
WAS THE VILLAGE SURROUNDING SECOND AVENUE AND NINTH STREET.  The northern border was 14th Street, only five blocks away, but the main drag was 2nd Avenue.  From 1880, this had become the center of what was known as the Jewish Rialto, where Yiddish variations of the 14th Street formulas were staged for Jewish immigrant audiences.  But its great days had come to an end for a number of reasons, primarily because of the erosion of the Yiddish language.  But along 2nd Avenue there still remained traces of what had passed.


  "In those days," a neighborhood Rabbi told me, "You'd see a delicatessen store here (where you ordered a glass tea with goodies) and the Gem Spa (offering egg creams in Manhattan).  There was Ratner's, a dairy restaurant near East 6th Street, which was famous for cheese blintzes, kreplaches, latkes, in spite of the legendary rudeness of the waiters; and Yiddish newspapers on newsstands, and on weekends, you could see cars from the United Jewish Appeal roaming the side streets, visiting old people who had been left behind by children and grandchildren, and lived in tenements that had no heat or too many flights of stairs to climb."


  When you walk those streets today, you think of those people and marvel at how long they held on to their small pieces of New York.  Old photographs of the Lower East Side show how that world once looked.  They are like characters in a long novel, immigrants arriving in the port of New York, the anti-Semitic violence of 1906, the General Slocum disaster, where more than a thousand German children died in the sinking of that excursion ship in the East River.  Many of them moved uptown, to Yorkville and other places.  The entire area from the Bowery to the East River, from Houston Street to the Brooklyn Bridge, was then called the Lower East Side, and it was overwhelmingly Jewish and poor.  For many of them, it was the only America they ever knew. 


  For most of the  immigrants, the Lower East Side was a place of grueling work and invincible hope.  This was the area in which my mother and her family once lived with a Jewish family for a short time after they arrived in the Harbor of New York from Belgium in 1907.  Her family was cast into a large, teeming, indifferent city, the men took whatever work they could find, primarily in sweat-shops, while the women did piecework in the crowded kitchens.  Few envisioned anything as extravagant as a career.  That would be for their American children.  The hope for many was to own a pushcart or possibly a small shop.  I remember wandering the area once, looking at each and every building, and imagining where it was that my mother and her family may have lived.




  As I walked the Lower East Side, Katz's Deli was still open on Houston Street, as is the Yonah Shimmel Knish Bakery, the store where my mother's brother, Charlie, once swept the floor for 5 cents per week, has been there since 1910.  There are kosher bakeries along Grand Street near the East River.  But when I walked along the length of Hester Street, one of the legendary streets of the New York Jewish past, every single store now has a sign in Chinese.  The sidewalks were  dense with people: artists in paint-spattered jeans; bearded poets; gay young men and women it two and threes; careening drunken college boys; and tourists with startled eyes. 


  But they were sidewalks where my mother had once walked...and it was a marvelous show.  

IN THE WINTER OF 1946, THE CHAT 'N CHEW RESTAURANT WAS LOCATED...
AT THE CORNER OF COLFAX AVENUE AND JASMINE STREET in Denver, Col0rado.  The first General Assembly of the United Nations had opened in London on January 10th of that year, which happened to be on the same day that a young girl was found stuffed inside of the trunk of a tan 1936 Chevrolet in the Chat 'N Chew parking lot, half-frozen but still alive.  Great piles of snow had filled the lot for a couple of days, and the police were baffled by the fact that nobody had noticed the automobile or heard her screaming for help.  Her name was Geri Derryberry.  Geri was my next door neighbor.


  Through our living room door that evening came Bobby Nix, gruff, friendly, our neighbor from across the street, and his wife Martha, followed by his neighbor Donald, tall and lean and grave, and his wife, Nellie, who was chubby and large and sobbing uncontrollably.  They all looked grim.  They talked in whispers.  My Dad went to the front window and peered through the curtains out at the street darkened street.  My Mother cried.  For a long time, I sat on the living room carpet near the window, watching everyone, wondering what was going on.  My Dad told me what had happened to Jerry.  The two of us were 10 years old.  Geri and I had lived through the war years.  We had laughed together.  We had played together.  We had told one another our most intimate secrets.  She was my best friend.  Nothing like this had ever happened to any of the kids in the neighborhood before.  When the telephone rang, my Dad answered it, listened for a moment, then hung up.  An extended silence followed before my Dad said that Geri had died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital...

   The radio was filled with the news.  The tan Chevrolet had belonged to her father.  He was missing.  As was her mother.  In the windows of the neighborhood now you saw people peering out through their curtains out at the street, watching the police entering and exiting the Derryberry house.  We were no longer allowed to walk to school by ourselves.  The neighborhood was filled with fear.  Rife with rumor. Like other families, we had no idea what had happened to her mother and father or why she had gotten stuffed into the trunk of the family car.  Do you think her mother and father put her in the trunk? I asked my mother one night.  She could not give me an answer. 


   Her father, Dewey, had worked at the main office of a Denver firm named Toner's, a manufacturer  of peanut butter, which was housed near Lowery Air Force Base, several miles from where we lived.  Her mother, Iris, would pack lunch for Geri, give her a kiss out on the front porch every morning, and the two of us would walk to school together.  She always seemed happy.  Now she was dead. On some days, police detectives would come to Montclair Elementary School, to question us about Jerry.  We all pretty much told them the same thing: that she was a nice, average girl with a wonderful sense of humor.   Within days, I knew that my life would now be different, and the principle reason was: I was now afraid of strangers.  I would imagine them moving along the street behind me, scurrying into alley corners so that they could not be seen.  At night, I was afraid that they would come through my bedroom window and kidnap me.  And then I would cry, because I still missed Geri.


   In the fall, we started school again.  We learned songs.  We made paintings and studied English and math.  Then it was winter again.  Piles of snow filled the schoolyard for weeks; and once on a class trip to City Park I took a great mound of pure fresh-driven snow in my mittens and began to toss it against the branches of a snow-laden pine tree.  I didn't know exactly know why;   the snow was so clean and white, and it somehow made me feel as safe and secure as I had once felt when Geri was still alive.  I wondered why the police hadn't solved the mystery of her death or her mother and father's disappearance.  There were more questions than answers.  Eventually, throughout the oncoming years,  the unsolved mystery would eventually fade into distant memory and the neighborhood would, once again, feel safe.  Unfortunately, although we did not know it at the time, our neighborhood was far from safe...


 
  ...We were unaware that a 19 year old young man behind our house on Kearney Street daily tightened a rope around his neck, running it through the tub drain, pulling it tight until he was almost choking himself to death; all done  in order for him to derive sexual pleasure.  He had recently been diagnosed as antisocial and sadomasochistic, but his psychiatrist assured his mother that he "would grow out of it."  He didn't.


   His name was Harvey Murry Glatman.  


  In the fall of 1946, seven months after Jerry had died and her mother and father disappeared, Harvey packed his bags and went off to Boulder, Colorado, kidnapped a young woman and then went away to jail for 8 months.  Upon his release, he took a trip to Albany, New York, where he slammed 3 women to the ground, was caught by the police, diagnosed as a psychopath, and spent a bit more time behind bars at the Reception Center in Elmira New York, then went off to Sing Sing Prison for the next 10 years. 


   Harvey sat in his cell, wishing he were home, so he returned to Denver after his release in 1957, was back in his mother's loving arms, and landed himself a job as a TV repairman without a background check.  But Harvey soon grew tired of Denver and his father's nagging, so he moved out to Los Angeles later that year, and became a photographer of female models for pulp fiction magazines.  He wasn't sure how to control his urges, which were growing by leaps-and-bounds, so he decided to lure his models to his apartment, strangle them as he photographed them easing into their deaths, placed their bodies in his 1951 Dodge Coronet, dumped their remains in the desert; and was tabbed by the Los Angeles press as "The Lonely Hearts Killer."  He was then finally arrested when he had been caught in the act of kidnapping a 4th victim, led the police to the toolbox containing pictures of 3 other victims, which were taken as he was strangling them to death, was found guilty, and then executed in the gas chamber of San Quentin Prison on September 18th in 1959. 


 
  That winter, I had returned to Denver for Christmas vacation during my first year of graduate school, and my Dad and I watched through the kitchen window as Mrs. Glatman was shoveling the snow off of her back porch.  He said that she and Mister Glatman had turned into recluses, hardly ever leaving their house, no longer speaking to neighbors, nor were the neighbors speaking to them, mostly due to the fact that they did not know what to say, particularly after Mrs. Glatman told Bobby Nix's wife Martha that Harvey had been a busboy at the Chat 'N Chew shortly before Geri's mother and father disappeared and Geri was stuffed inside of the trunk of a tan Chevrolet.  Harvey's lurid desires had yet to be detected by the authorities, but prior to the discovery of Geri inside of the Chevrolet trunk, Harvey had suddenly up and quit his busboy job, and was last seen speeding-off of the Chat 'N Chew parking lot in his new 1946 Dodge Custom Convertible...


 
   ...And for some odd reason, upon hearing what Harvey had done, and wondering what had really happened to Geri's mother and father, I somehow immediately thought of Lizzie Boren and the poem: Lizzie Borden took an ax, gave her mother 40 whacks, when she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41..."  

EARLY ON, HE OUGHT TO HAVE LEARNED...

THAT THERE WERE LIMITS TO THE MYTH of being a social drinker.  On one afternoon in December of 1998,  he found himself drinking at a bar on East 42nd Street and 3rd Avenue in New York.  It was no surprise that the bartender and waitresses knew him by name, said that he had a hilarious gift of narrative, was a man full of wit and charm, and he was the life of the party.  He had become a part of the daily saloon fraternity of regulars.  Other people came in.  He ordered another drink.  And another shortly thereafter.  More laughs and drinks followed, and when he departed the bar early in the evening, he felt sober, seeing things clearly and thinking lucidly.  But he was half-drunk, bumping into a garbage can as he wended his way back home.

  On Summer weekends, there were parties out in the Hampton's.  Lovely women and elegant men gathered at charity events, drank excellent wine and other high-class beverages, wonderful gatherings on the beach at night, with fires glowing against the dark waters of the Atlantic Ocean, tables filled with gigantic offerings of lobster and steak and caviar; and, of course, bottle upon bottle of the finest booze money could buy.  He had learned to be an erudite guest and an absolute asshole at the same time.  Some of what he said was embarrassing, full of platitude and cliche.

  Behind all of this were some unacceptable facts.  At the college where he taught writing, he could talk about the problems, doubts, mistakes, and felonies of other writers, he didn't have to deal with himself.  He certainly didn't have to look at what he was becoming.  It was obvious that he could no longer hold his liquor.  One afternoon he found himself drinking in a Bowery dive with one of his students, a young African-American man, who was the best writer in his class.  They talked about Eugene O'Neill and The Iceman Cometh and  about J.P. Doneavy's  The Ginger Man, a book about an irresponsible drunk...They talked and drank, and drank and talked, until the young man staggered into the night.  He sat alone at the bar and wept.

  Something shifted in him during that conversation.  He thought he'd drink forever.  That night he thought of something he had never thought about before, in the world of a drunk there was no such thing as forever.  As that fall turned into winter, he began to feel that there was a world out there somewhere beyond the bar scene.  The old dream of the writing life blossomed again.  He had embraced alcohol, struggled with it, was hurt by it, and finally wanted to leave it behind.  He was aware that it offered many rewards: confidence for the shy, clarity for the uncertain, solace to the wounded and lonely, and above all, the elusive promises of friendship.  In the snug darkness of saloons, he had found what he had thought was comfort. 



  When winter came, so did a decision.  He didn't join Alcoholics Anonymous.  He didn't check out other help.  He just stopped.  His goal was modest: one month without drinking.  For the first few weeks, that wasn't easy.  He had to break the habits of a lifetime.  He urged himself to live in a state of complete consciousness, even when that meant pain and boredom.  He now had a craving for sugar and began to eat more ice cream and candy than he had since he was a boy.  In the mornings, he also began to feel clear and fresh.

   When the month was up, he set a deadline for a second month.  Another month went by, and now his mind was teeming with ideas.  He began listening to music again, filled his Wednesday and Saturday  afternoons with Broadway matinees,  and became greedy for what he had missed.  He went back to the bar on 42nd Street again.  Everyone knew he was off the sauce and smiled in a knowing way when he ordered a ginger ale.  He had one major ally among the bar regulars: an older gentleman who, a few months earlier, had his doctor order him to stop drinking.  He still arrived every day in the afternoon.  But he did it all on Sprite and Coca-Cola.  You won't have as many laughs, he said.  But the laughs you do have will really be funny because they will be genuine.

  The temptation to begin drinking again grew weaker, and then, before the next summer came, evaporated almost completely.  He had replaced the habit of drinking with non drinking, still visited bars, listened to the stories, but even the bartenders immediately knew to give him a soda the moment he walked in. 

  And by the following winter, he went for a walk in the snow.  He wandered into a park, and stood under a dense pine tree and then imagined figures coming down the hills and across the snowy meadows.  Down there, by the lake was his first girlfriend.  He and his childhood buddies were belly whopping in the snow of an east Denver park.  His mother in a blue smock, was calling him home for dinner.  He heard his father singing his favorite Vaughn Monroe tune, Ghost Riders in the Sky..."An' old cowpoke went riding out one dark and windy day..."  All memories of those days before he ever took his first drink.  And he realized that he could now love his life, with all with all its hurts and injuries and failures, and the things he now saw clearly, was a life without the golden blur of booze.  He reached down and took a fresh mound of fresh snow in his hands and began to eat.  He was now home free.

  He, of course, is me...

this tale of a man with backbone and courage began:

ON THE LAST SUNDAY IN AUGUST OF 1930,...
WHILE THE MAN'S WIFE AND INFANT SON were attending morning Mass at Our Lady of Lourdes Roman Catholic Church, a man by the name of Quentin Viscus sat in his home in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, ate a Planter's peanut bar, downed oatmeal, sipped his coffee with sugar and cream, got up and went into the living room, destroyed all the family pictures in which he appeared, strolled out to the garage in his robe and pajamas and slippers, grabbed his rifle, and blew his brains out. 

  Quentin had been a candy bar salesman.  His business had crashed along with the Stock Market in 1929.  When Mary Viscus realized what her husband had done and that he was not coming back, she took a job as a customer service manager at Freitag's Delicatessen during the day and a change clerk in the Lorimer Street station of the BMT at night, while her  son Quincy was in the care of Mary's mother, Myra.  Myra had once been a vaudeville dancer who was forced to retire when she broke her leg on the stage of the Halsey Theater.  Myra had been married to a man named Bart, who was also a vaudeville performer at the Halsey, famous for saying funny things, getting laughs, and being shot to death by a fellow performer in a pool room brawl on Herkimer Street in 1924. 

  And for some odd reason, at some point around 1937 when he was 8 years-old, little Quincy decided that he wanted to be in show business, too.  "The problem with that was this: the older I got, the uglier I became," he told me.  "By the time I was in 2nd grade, the girls started calling me the 'Moose' and 'Horse Face.'  The moniker 'Moose' has pretty much stuck ever since."  That aside, when he graduated from P.S. 74, he talked himself into the school play, as the lead in The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo, won rave reviews, and realized that ugly wasn't all that bad; then went on to Adams High School, where he starred as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.  Standing at 4 inches over six-feet tall, he was great at being terrible and disgusting.  Quincy had finally arrived at something he loved to do and figured that he had the looks to do it.  He smiled at me, and said, "The good thing about being born ugly is that you never lose your looks.  If you're born a pretty-boy, just like clockwork, the looks are bound to eventually go kerplop...and then what do you have?" 

  It was in July 1946, that his Grandmother Myra died of a heart attack and his Mother passed away in September of the same year from a brain tumor.  By 1947, two years after World War Two had come to an end, Quincy was 18, on his own, had officially changed his first name to Moose, and was moving around, playing monsters at a neighborhood theater in Philadelphia, a small theater in Cranberry Lake, and for a few weeks in Singac, New Jersey, and by day made extra money hustling pool.  "The next thing I know," he said, "I'm out in Hollywood doing stand-in work in the movie Abbot and Costello Meet Frankstein and Amazing Mr. X, after meeting an agent in Newark, who told me that he loved the way I looked.  Next thing I know, my agent is propositioning me and took a grab at my crotch.  I smack him in the face, break his nose, and land in the L.A. County Jail and am sent to the prison farm.  This was in September of '48, the same week the actor Robert Mitchum was out for a night on the town, arrested for smoking pot in the Laurel Canyon area of L.A., tossed into jail, and we mopped floors together.  I was 19.  He was 31.  He liked me.  I liked him.  He loved the fact that I'd changed my name from Quincy to Moose, so he took me under his wing and made me promise to keep in touch after we were released." 

  Even with an Oscar Nomination, Mitchum was afraid that his career was over.  He was wrong.  He was bigger box-office than ever.  He kept his eye on Moose, got Moose stand-in parts in The Red Pony and The Big Steal, as well as The Racket and Macao.  By 1952, Moose felt guilty for not having enlisted in the Army.  The Korean War had begun in June of 1950, and he had evaded the draft for over 2 years, so at the age of 23, he found himself  in Korea, where battles with names like Old Baldy  and Bloody Ridge were fought.  It was in a battle named Pork Chop Hill when Moose stepped on a land-mine and got both legs blown-off, spent the next 2 years at The Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C. recovering, and had to figure out what he was going to do for the rest of his life.  "I knew I wasn't the most romantic looking son of a bitch in the first place, and now I had no legs.  Right-off-the-bat, I swore I would never do what my Daddy had done, I didn't want to become one of the worst drinkers in the history of show business, I never really expected anything from Hollywood.  I just didn't know what in the hell I was going to do next, so I got myself a couple of prosthetic legs and learned to walk on crutches."  He gave a small smile, and added: "I even gave some thought to changing my name from Moose  to Stumpy." 

  He was finally released from Walter Reed in April of 1957 at the age of 28, and decided that he wanted to go see the world-famous Las Vegas Strip, began playing poker at casinos like The Thunderbird and Club Bingo, as well as the famous Flamingo, all of which offered him free drinks, comped rooms and fine meals, because he was not only a Veteran, but a double amputee.  During this period, Moose met a young dancer named Libby Greenwood, who was 10 years younger than he was, she took a liking to him, and they began to see one another on a regular basis.  But most of the time, he was at the blackjack and poker tables.  Sometimes he went to see the shows along the strip, his favorites were Charo, the wife of band leader Xavier Cugat, mostly due to the fact that she was sexy, and Don Rickles, because Moose thought Rickles was almost as ugly as he was. He hadn't even begun to guess what might lay ahead, what he might or might not do next.  "It wasn't like employers were standing in line and eager to hire unsightly amputees,"he said.

  But Moose remembers the time fondly.  It was then that he thought he might be able to make a living as a gambler.  He also bought a wedding and engagement ring for Libby, just in case he might summon the courage to eventually ask her to marry him.  By 1960, he was moving around, playing at almost every blackjack table in Vegas, and making a good living.  Libby and Moose married in June of 1961.  She expected something like a conventional home life; she was a good Catholic, gave him a daughter who they named Maria on September 1st in 1962, but never got the home life she desired and divorced Moose in 1964.  "I was devastated," Moose remembers.  "I felt like a flop and called myself all sorts of names."  The real trouble was that Moose did not know what to do about it.  He begged Libby to come back to him.  She eventually did.  They remarried in August of 1965.

  Moose is sitting in a wheelchair out in the backyard of his home in Sacramento and smoking a cigar, while he continues to tell me his story.  I ask him what came next.  He smiles, staring at the smoke from his cigar, gives another small smile.  "I'd made a hefty amount of money gambling and  Libby thought I ought to get an education, since I was now a father, so I went to the University of Nevada, got myself a Bachelor of Arts Degree, liked studying more than I ever thought I would, and earned myself a Law Degree.  More than anyone else, my wife gave me courage and advice.  So at the age of 43, I became a lawyer for the disabled, moved out here to Sacramento, raised a daughter who became a doctor.  There were things I always wanted to do and didn't," Moose says.  "But the best thing that ever happened to me was that I was lucky enough to have my wife and kid."

  For years, he had thought about his Father.  So in 2009, at the age of 80, he decided that he would take a trip back to Brooklyn, made his way to the Riverside Chapel on Flatbush Avenue, crossed the lumpy grass in his wheelchair, looked down at his Father's headstone, and said:  "You don't know what you have missed on, Dad, doing what you did to yourself.  The real trouble with a guy like you is that you lacked courage, and I'm sorry that you never gave me the chance to know you.  I think we might have had some good times together."  He stared at the smoke from the cigar, "I just thought he ought to know that..."  He looked at me, and added: "All in all, I've been very lucky guy..."

it was then that Libby walked out the back door and gave him a wink and hug and a kiss.   

her story of bygone days began with:

"IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT...
I REMEMBER ONLY THE VISION of amber ash floating slowly upward with the wind beneath the darkened sky, as I watched what I thought were the cindered remains of my mother and father and older sister and brother floating away, mingled with 782 other Jewish men and women and children who had been put to their deaths throughout that dreadful night.  It was the 7th day of September in 1943.  I had turned 9 the day before..."  

  ...She then went on to haltingly describe her surrounding, explaining that barrack huts lay ahead of her, watch towers were to her left and right, with a nine-foot stone wall guarding the perimeter.  At the main gate was Guard Tower A with the words "Arbet Macht Frei (labor makes you free) etched beneath the tower.  She has other memories, as well: Those of watching the construction of a gas chamber and oven by Commandant Anton Kanidle in March of 1943, which had been initiated as a means to kill larger numbers of prisoners; of the equilateral triangle with a semi-circular roll call area, a layout intended to allow machine gun posts in the entrance gate to dominate the camp; and the additional area (sonder lager) outside of the main camp perimeter to the north; built in 1941 for special prisoners that the regime wished to isolate for future medical experimentation.  She was 35 Kilometers north of Berlin, housed in Ornanienburg, Germany inside of the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp.

  In early morning of that dire day, alone in a drowsy fog of fright, she began to think for the first time about death; to to summarize her life, searching for meaning or drafting some imaginary future for herself that did not include death and destruction and fear, and wondered how she could manage a life without a mother or father or sister and brother.  It seemed absurd, even outrageous, to think she would never taste freedom again, never set her eyes upon the light spilling over the valleys of her beloved Bavarian Alps, or look at paintings in the magnificent Nationalgalerie in Berlin.   And what about the worlds she had yet to see and the adventures she might never experience?  She had memory of someone shouting, "God, please let me die!"  

  Beyond that long morning, she remembered only memories of being escorted to Sonder Lager to be experimented on by Nazi doctors, who put tubes in her arms, of foraging for food while the guards played handball and ate thick pork and sausage sandwiches as her fellow inmates starved to death, she watched the guards smile at her and throw kisses at her, walk over and lift her up and slam her viciously to the ground; of her looking up at them and whispering to herself, "I swear to God, I will outlive all you...!"  And when the Soviet Army liberated Sachsenhausen on April 22nd in 1945, she and other survivors pointed out the most despicable guards to the Soviets, then watched in silence as each of them were lined-up and shot to death by a machine gun.  "I could not help myself," she said, "As their blood-spattered bodies fell to the ground, I smiled, then went over to the corpses and spat on each and every one of them..." 

  Once liberated, she returned to Berlin, where worked every day, seven days a week at any job she get, her body ached with anxiety, her mood was irritable, her night dreams grew wild with unconscious memories of her past, but she saved her money; and after saving enough of it, she landed in the harbor of New York in the fall of 1952.  She was now 18, and was delighted to hear the music of Benny Goodman from a radio in the corner stationary store, to be where there were apartments with three bedrooms and views of the river, where she could hurry across the street and stand under the Biltmore clock, with rain falling in her hair, where waitresses called her honey, and she slept with windows open to the air of a wonderful spring night.  At last, she felt safe.

  She had turned into an impossibly beautiful girl, and worked at the Figaro, where the most gorgeous waitresses worked at night, and modeled for magazines like Vogue and Cosmopolitan during the day.  "I was very fortunate to have been blessed with good genes," she said.  On one rainy evening in the winter of 1958, she was home alone when the telephone rang.  She picked up the receiver, looking out at the street, and heard one of the most familiar voices of the century.  It was Frank Sinatra.  They had met earlier that year through Shirley MacLaine, who had become her friend, and it was clear to her that Sinatra admired her honesty, loved her beauty, and in some complicated way was a little afraid of her.  They would be friends until the day he died.

  Then, in 1963, everything changed.  That year she arrived in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico at the age of 29 and on vacation, when  John Huston arrived with a crew of 130 to direct the movie version of Tennessee Williams's Night of the Iguana. Huston approached her while she was dining in a restaurant called El Panorama, told her that she reminded him of Ava Gardner, and asked if she would like to be a stand-in for Miss Gardner in the movie he was shooting.  Miss Garner had abandoned Hollywood for Europe after disastrous marriages to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra.  She politely declined the offer, saying that she was a friend of Mister Sinatra.  

  She excused herself, went for a stroll and then back to her hotel, where she could walk onto the balcony and look out over the town to the sea, and made the decision that this was where she might want to live.  The following morning, she met a brown-skinned man named Marcos, who was 40.  "I come on my horse in the morning from there, up by Nayarit," he said.  "I give people rides.  They pay me.  Then I go home." He smiled broadly at her, then added, "And all day while I am working I am in a beautiful place."  She decided to stay awhile longer.  She would wander down to Le Bistro, on the island in the river, and hear good recorded jazz, have a wonderful laugh at the restaurant called La Fuente de la Puente (The Fountain on the Bridge), and hear the sound of the rooster at dawn with the healing benevolence of the sun and the salt of the sea.  She was in a place very charming and not damaged.

  "I go to New York, and it's cold outside in Winter and sweltering inside in Summer.  But there the windows were always open," she said.  So she bought into a small bed-and-breakfast 6 room Inn near the El Panorama Restaurant, which had a small flower shop in the lobby that sold wild orchids, roses, and African  tulips; as well as another space for Mexican folk art; and stayed in Puerto Vallarta.

  It was late in the afternoon of July 6th in 1968, when a man in a yellow long-sleeved shirt walked into her flower shop and introduced himself as David Marwell, said that he was the director of the Berlin Document Center and a key investigator in the hunt for Nazi war criminals Klaus Barbie and Josef Mengele, and that if she wouldn't mind, he would like to have a talk with her.  She, of course, immediately agreed.  They walked along a crowded street where kids were pedaling tricycles down a steep hill and people in sandals and straw hats were licking shaved ice and eating watermelon.  He then told her that her brother and sister were still alive, that they had been sent to the Mauthausen Concentration Camp in Austria prior to the death of her mother and father, survived, and were living on the American West Coast, unaware until only recently that she, too, might still be alive.

  They had gone to Hungary after the war's end, he said, and lived in Prague, which was then under the domination of the Soviet Union.  In 1956, Stalin ism was still in power, its authority reinforce by the need (real or imaginary) to resist an outside threat.  A student protest began, which turned into a revolution, her brother and sister fighting with the students for freedom, with the slogan: We are not going to do to them what they have done to us.  "That would be the worst corruption of this revolution's ideals.  We want a country that is generous and decent, and where every man can speak his peace." said one filmmaker named Antonin Masa.  And they won.  Her brother, however, had been severely beaten by a Soviet soldier, suffered a spinal injury, and her sister insisted that they come to America for medical treatment.

  And then she paused for a moment, looked at me with tears in her eyes, and said: "After an initial period of bafflement, I knew that this was going to be the most wonderful day of my life.  My mother and father, Janice and Irving, were dead.  My sister and brother, Benjamin and Elyse, were alive! I asked Mister Marwell how he had found me.  He said that my sister Elyse had been leafing through an old copy of Vogue Magazine, saw a photograph of me, thought that I bore more than a striking resemblance to our mother and wrote to him with background information on the family, asking him that if he had either the time or inclination, she would like to see if  he could find out more about me, to find out if I might be her sister."

  Over the years, wildly fluctuation of emotions had become a basic  component of her life - she wanted to erase all memory of Sachsenhausen - to become urbane by living in the city of New York, and in some critical way, mark those long ago days of experience in World War Two off the stage of her history.  She now knew that was impossible.  She was  almost 34 years-old, and another new beginning lay ahead.  After bidding David Marwell goodbye at the airport, she returned back home and made a telephone call to an old friend, telling him the astonishing news about her brother and sister, that she had her sister's telephone number, but did not know how to begin the conversation.   Frank Sinatra told her that he would get in touch with her, make arrangements for the three of them to meet, would get back with her when that was done, and that she ought to immediately fly back to New York.  "I'll get back with you in a jiffy, Kid."   He hung up. He called back within the hour.  She called the airport to make a reservation... 

  ...And on the 2nd day of August in 1968, she took a cab to Jilly's, a seedy time warp of a saloon at the Eight Avenue end of 52nd Street in the city of New York.  It was Frank Sinatra's favorite hang-out.  "Yes, ma am," the maître d' said.  "Mr. Sinatra has a table for me," she replied.  He turned, his eyes moving past the empty tables at the booths in the left-hand corner against the wall.  Sinatra looked up from a booth and smiled, and she was let through.  A woman and man were sitting to his left and his right.  "Hey, Lady," Sinatra said brightly, coming around the end of the booth and giving her a hug.  "I've got a reservation for the three of you at the Waldorf, a limo outside to take you there, and insofar as the meal is concerned, the tab is on me." Sinatra paused paused for a moment before he added, "Oh, yeah, by the way, this is your brother and sister.  Grab a seat." 

  She moved clumsily toward the table, Benjamin and Elyse stood up.  And her blue eyes looked at two people she had once dearly loved and who she thought were dead.  Elyse and Benjamin moved slowly around the table.  The three of them hugged in silence, broke out in tears, stared in awe at one another, and then began to laugh.  "Gotta go," Sinatra said with a smile.  He gave her a wink, and departed.  The three of them sat down and talked for six hours.

  After that, the limousine pulled up in front of the Waldorf, where the three siblings would stay for another week, getting to know each other all over again.  Benjamin was now living in Sacramento, California and made his living as a Medical Doctor; Elyse was an Assistant Professor, teaching literature at Stanford University in Stanford, California.  Both of them had never married. Enchanted with Puerto Vallarta on a visit shortly after that, Elyse and Benjamin would continue to drop in on her for one month each and every summer after that, where they caught up on decades of lost laughter and missed love.

  It was in May of 1998, Frank Sinatra passed-away, and she flew to California to attend his funeral.  "Most mourners gathered there talked of the symmetries of his legend," she said.  "I thought of him as a good and dear friend, who once was a boy on a Hoboken street in his Fauntleroy suit, who a half century later, was still trying to figure out what it all meant.  He made my life whole again, and to this day,  I miss him."  She gave a smile, then added: "Frank was like the song he made famous, he always did it his way." 

  By then, she was 63 years old.  Her sister had passed-away from natural causes that same year and after attending her funeral, she knew that she had arrived at last in that peculiar zone where she was no longer young  and not yet old, which caused her personal astonishment.  She had live a life, and felt far from finished with that splendid accident, knowing that the path was heading inexorably through the evening to the barn.  And not far away, up ahead, perhaps over that next lavender hill, lay death; so she decided to come full-circle and return to Sachsenhausen  to give her mother and father, Janice and Irving, a final farewell.  

  "I recalled the starvation, disease and forced labor," she began. "Explored the execution grounds, crematorium, pathology laboratory, hospital and the 'pit' into which the bodies had been thrown, and felt remorse that the two of them had died when they were still in command of their youth.  I could not help but feel that my mother and father were smiling down at me, and that itself was worth the trip. My mother and father and I had now, somehow, come full-circle..."

  Her name is Elsibeth.

  She will turn 80 this September.  Now suffering from a disease called macular degeneration, which  causes loss of central vision, she is now resides in Sacramento, California, where she came to take care of her brother Benjamin, who had cancer and passed away in 2010; and with the role of the dice and sheer good fortune, my being a volunteer to senior citizens, I began to read to her three times per week not many months ago, and am eternally grateful that she has shared her bygone days with me...



she recently made the decision to return to Puerto Vallarta come Spring and I thank God that she came into my life, and will forever miss her and the majesty of her courageous heart and soul...

SINCE THE DAYS OF THE ALLEGED "GREAT COMMUNICATOR,"
RONALD REAGAN, WHEN WE AMERICANS WERE URGED to forget Vietnam and forget Watergate, use borrowed money to indulge in mindless pleasures and worry about payback later, because everything would somehow charmingly "Trickle Down" to economic nirvana and save us all; the demand for a national amnesia began and we slowly slid into an almost totalitarian-like state.  


  It commenced quickly after the attack of 9-11, at the urging of our President, Georgie W., and his Vice President, Dickey C., when our nation began to demand Good Old Draconian Measures to deal with our real or imagined disorders.  We were now willing to lie about who our enemies actually were, and to happily surrender the Bill of Rights if it meant clearing the streets of domestic enemies like the Blacks and Latinos and abortion clinics and the poor and food stamps and voting rights and women's rights; and whatever other ills we thought need to be eradicated.  With the arrival of the Tea Party, the love of this fierce spectacle grew.  Nothing made their blood quicken faster than the spirit of revenge and absolute animosity.  


  For many, this is uncomfortably familiar.  We once had a blacklist that prevented writers, directors, and actors from working in television or movies - on ideological grounds.  During the McCarthy era, we lost scientists, schoolteachers, and scholars, on ideological grounds.  And now,  once again, our religious Right continues trying to impose its party line on everything from a minimum-wage to the content of our cable news.  We have a free press, but the majority of our newspapers wouldn't challenge the intelligence of a flea.  Certainly, in our mass media, we seldom see, read, or hear from Americans without an ideological bias, if we do hear from reporters without propaganda or oratory, they are dismissed as disloyal Americans.  Take a glance at any American best-seller list, or the shelves of any bookstore in a shopping mall, and see what we Americans have chosen to do with our freedoms - nowhere else on the face of the earth would the corrupt thoughts of  a Glen Beck or a Sarah Palin be on a best-seller list.  If it's history, most of us yawn.  If it resembles a bad movie, we snap to attention.

  There are reasons here for all of this.   The Tea Party, after an initial period of confusion, is now gaining ground in the American political  system.  The minority controls the majority.  This has become a struggle of choice.  We lack the courage to confront these barbarians, thus the tail has begun wagging the dog.  At the heart of this grim little crusade, they have grander plans for all of us.  They want government to disappear.  They want the poor to evaporate.  They want women to obey and stay in their place.  Like all the people who brought us prohibition and the Mob, the Tea Party and their allies want to impose their vision and their rules on the entire country.  The lunatics are laughing at us.  The likes of Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan and Rand Paul are urging their colleagues in the Congress and the Senate to make the furious, fear-driven visions of America into the law of the land.

  If we are to win this revolution, in must be with a triumph of human intelligence, over the oligarchy of the stupid, with our country's best writers and statesmen and sociologists and scientists. and not allow world-class talents to be silenced, jailed, or driven into the exile of retreat by the national stupidity of ass-kissing, careerist, hacks.  We have a choice to make and there is no one else to make it other than us...

ONE SNOWY WINTER MORNING...

MANY YEARS AGO IN THE CITY of New York, I spoke to a young woman who was addicted to heroine and crack cocaine.  She was twenty, emaciated, with ancient eyes full of pain and loss and dread.  She was living in a one room in a welfare hotel with her two children, who were two, and four years of age.  Her story was the usual tangle of human despair: early pregnancy, dropping out of school, vanished men, smack and then crack and finally heroine.  She began to give blow jobs to men in the darkened porn theaters surrounding Times Square to pay for her addiction, while her children waited for her outside for her on the street.  I asked her why she did drugs.  She shrugged in a vacant way and really couldn't answer beyond: "makes me feel kind of human. "  While we talked and she told me her tale of misery and disorder, while her children stared up at the two of us with a disengaged and somewhat lost look.

  On my walk back to my office in the snow, I thought about the woman and her spiritless children, and my own hard-boiled indifference.  I'd heard so many versions of the same story that I almost never thought about them anymore; knowing that in a hundred cities, women like her are moving in the same meaningless direction.  Down through the years, a series of homeless men approached me for change, most of them junkies.  Others sat in doorways, staring at nothing.  They were the casualties of our time of plague in a country that holds only 2 percent of the world's population, but consumes 65 percent of the world's supply of hard drugs. And I began to wonder why do so many millions of Americans of all ages, races, and classes choose to spend all or part of their lives in such a perplexed state of mind? 

  When you ask them why they do it, none can give sensible answers.  They stutter about the pain in the world, about despair or boredom, the urgent need for magic or pleasure in lives that are empty of both.  But then they just shrug. Americans have the money to buy drugs; the supply is plentiful.  When you ask any of our politicians why this is happening, they offer the traditional American excuse: It's Somebody Else's Fault.  But they never ask why so many Americans demand the toxic poison. Until the early 1960s, narcotics were still marginal to American life.  As a kid in the '40's and '50's,, drugs were a minor side-show, a kind of a dark little rumor, one which was termed as "reefer madness," and the bebop generation of jazz musicians began to get jammed with horse.  And then came another addiction...Television!

  Television, like drugs, dominates the lives of its addicts.  And though lonely Americans leave their sets on without watching them, using them as electronic companions, television usually absorbs its viewers the way drugs absorb their users.  Viewers can't work or play while watching television; kids can't go out of the house to play with other kids; we no longer read; we don't leave he house to go to a movie, we just plug into pay-for-view; we don't enjoy taking a walk, or quarrel and compromise with other human beings.  In short, we have become asocial.  So are drug addicts.

 We have now become a country of cheap emotional manipulation.  For years now, the cable and television executives have told us that they are giving people what they want.  That might be true.  But so is the Norte del Valle drug cartel.  Is it any wonder that we now rank 19th on the list of international intelligence quotients , behind countries like Japan and Taiwan, Austria and Germany, Belgium and Italy, to name only a few; or rank 23rd in literacy proficiency, behind countries like Finland and Greenland and Lithuania and, of course, Japan?  

  We do, however, take first place by watching, on average, 23 hours a week, the images spewing forth from our TV sets, which gives us the gold medal in the couch potato Olympics, thus bringing upon ourselves an endless amount of days and nights spent in a state of self-induced mental impairment by losing almost one day per week ogling the tube.  Perhaps, for now, we just have to discover a way to switch off the remote and begin reading and walking and talking to one another again...