it has been thirty-two years now, and I still pause to wonder how she has lasted as long as she has?


SHE WAS ONLY TWENTY-FOUR YEARS OF AGE...
WHEN SHE FIRST BURST ON THE SCENE IN 1982.  It didn't much matter that she couldn't sing very well, that she was an ordinary dancer, that there were many women of more refined beauty, and certainly more with raw talent.  All that mattered was that she became the greatest musical force of the AIDS generation. 


  Madonna was hip to something huge: AIDS made sexual freedom a ghastly joke, the most ferocious sexually transmitted disease of the century had arrived, and she became the triumphant mistress of her medium: the sexual imagination. In  an age when real sex could lead to horror and death, there  she was: a woman who was reckless, bawdy, laughing and offering us all the consolation of our outrageous illusions.  In almost every version of her public self, she appeared as a fearless sexual adventurer, sharing sex with strangers, colliding with rough trade, risking pain or humiliation to break beyond the pleasure beyond all conventional frontiers.  With music, dance and, above all, image, she challenged organized religion, and the middle class that spawned her.  


  What seemed to be a preposterous narcissism on her part, seems to have been done with a wink, a hint that we were a bit more than stupid to take her seriously.  She became a caricature with a style appropriated from the gay underworld on the eve of AIDS.  With leather and whips and chains and a self-conscious insistence on sex in her performance.  They all seemed to enjoy it.  She somehow knew that the only safe sex was that of the illusion and not reality.  Like Michael Jackson, the accused pedophile, Madonna, the pseudo temptress, vaulted to stardom with videos, a form thick with imagery that sometimes triumphed  over the reality of lyrics.  Jackson's images were charged with rage, Madonna's with frank and open sexuality.  But as the Eighties went on, as the graves filled with the young dead, as AIDS defied a cure, Madonna's images became more obviously infused with a dark comic spirit.  It was as if she were saying: I know this is a lie and you know this is a lie, but it's all I have to give. 


  She  then wrote a book that she decided to call Sex, which was a celebration of the counterfeit, the pages offering little more than blasphemous pleasure, written by a peroxide blond, containing everything short of actual fucking.  And that, of course, was the point: It wasn't real and the reading audience knew it wasn't real and Madonna knew it wasn't real and it went on to become the number-one best-seller in the nation - which might tell something about America.  There is no doubt about it: Madonna is one-smart-cookie.  Who else would have had the drive and genius to be aware that the possibility of death is always a marvelous corrective to human behavior, and she could become wealthy through the fine  art of illusion?...


  ...And the only consolation I have at this point-in-time...


  ...Is that she is not nearly as popular as she once used to be...

 a short tale about a man named john, who had once was a student of mine:

AN ARTIFICIAL CHRISTMAS TREE STOOD...

IN THE CORNER OF THE WAITING ROOM, with a bunched up white towel at its base pretending to be snow.  Unmatched sticks of cheap furniture, some wicker, some plastic, were awkwardly arranged around the edges of the room.  It could have been the antiseptic lobby of a cheap hotel except for the view through the picture window behind the Christmas tree: the two parallel steel-mesh fences topped with barbed wire and a small slope of sour lawn rising toward blank walls and tan brick buildings. 


  The barbed wire made it clear that this was a jail.  


  So did the posted rule against bringing drugs or alcohol on visits; so does the order to place wallets and handbags in a locker in the far corner, along with all cash in excess of $5, any pens, notebooks, tape recorders, books, all hats and overcoats; and so does the stamping of your hand with invisible ink, the emptying of pockets into a plastic tray, the body search, the passage through a metal detector.   With the rules of entrance obeyed, I walk down a long, wide ramp into the prison, pause at a sign forbidding weapons beyond that point, and wait for the steel-rimmed glass door to be opened.  Up ahead there were more doors, with guards and a couple of prisoners moving languidly along a corridor.  The door in front of me pops with a click.  I turn  to the guard  booth and and my pass to a guard, an ultraviolet light certifies the stamp on my hand, and I am then instructed to go to the visitor's lounge.  I do what I am told and wait.  In the lounge a dozen couples sit facing each other on thick plastic-covered chairs, glancing tensely at the clock, conscious of time.  Behind them a wall of picture windows opens upon a vista of grey grass and blank, tan walls.  Then suddenly, from another door, John appears.  He smiles, gives me a hug, and says, "How are you, professor?"


  Two-years had passed since he vanished from my writing class at Interboro Institute in the City of New York.  He was convicted of killing the boyfriend of his sister after he had learned that the man had raped her.  But if there is any anger in him or a sense of humiliation, neither is visible on the grey morning.  He is wearing jeans and a black T-shirt - with his prison number hand-lettered over his heart - and to a visitor who had first met him 3 years before, he looks taller than he once did.  He smiles in an ironic way and says, "I wasn't sure you would come."  


 
  We walk to the chairs, and John sits with his back to the picture windows.  His hair is cropped tight, and his once-clean-shaven face now wears a mustache. "I want to thank you for sending me so many books," he says.  "I mean, you didn't have to do that for me." 


  On the phone, with the great metallic racket of prison in the background, or here in the visiting room, he makes it clear that the doesn't want to talk much about the past.  About the rape of his sister and the murder of her boyfriend.  Nor does he want to speak at length when, as a raw teenager from a South Bronx ghetto, he learned how to read from the only teacher he ever had, a woman by the name of Bess Tyne, who thought that he had a future beyond police stations and jail.  He doesn't want to talk about his flamboyant father whose slithery influence led all the boys in his family into petty crime.  He is embarrassed and uncomfortable discussing his lost freedom and how he squandered away his new way of life in one moment of anger.  What he wants to talk about is what he is doing now, and what he is doing is time. 


  History is filled with tales of men who used prison to educate themselves.  Cervantes began Don Quixote in a Spanish prison, and Pancho Villa read that book, slowly and painfully, while caged in the Santiago Tlateloco prison in Mexico City more than three-hundred years later.  Thousands have discovered that nobody can imprison the mind.  In the end, Malcolm X triumphed over the joints of Massachusetts, Solzhenitsyn over Stalin's gulags, and Antonio Gramsci over Mussolini's jails.  I don't mean to compare my friend John or the facilities at the Rikers Island Correctional Facility to the gulags; he is not serving his 15 year sentence for his ideas.  But he understands the opportunity offered doing time and has chosen to seize the day.


  And so John embarked on an astonishing campaign of exuberant and eclectic self-education.  Early on he had read Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, "and his writing knocked me out.  It was like any good book: He sounded like he was talking directly to me and The Old Man and the Sea gave  me a sense of well-being and peace.  There were other books too, like George Jackson's prison book, Soledad Brother, which I read after I came in here.  He made me understand about the way black men like me end up in prison, but he didn't feel sorry for himself. Which made me continue to want to become a writer.  I read The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas, aware that the grandmother of the French writer was a black woman from Haiti.  I identify with that book. And that led me back to you.  I want to find out how to really write well. I have a favor to ask."


  He pauses for a moment, turns and glances at the window.  Fat white snowlakes are now falling from the steel colored sky, out there in the world of highways, diners, car washes, motels, and nightclubs.  Another prisoner's name is called, a and an Asian man rises and touches his wife's face.  Time is running out.


    John asks me the favor.  I am happy to comply.  A guard calls his name.  Our time is up.  John rises slowly.  He tells me to send his best to his former classmates at Interboro.  I say that I will do that.  I promise him I will see him on the next visitation day, and that I will give him the favor he has asked of me: I will more than happy to give him the writing lessons he desires of me on each and every visitation day from that day forward.    


  We embrace awkwardly.  He then turns and nods politely to the guard and flashes a final goodbye grin my way.  "Thank you, Professor," he says, and returns to to the world of rules, to sleep another night where the snow never falls...


  ...And back to the place from where he would eventually write a book, which is due to be published within a year...

my own definition of a hero:


"DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS A MAN...

MUST GO WHO IS NOT HIMSELF MEAN,  who is neither tarnished nor afraid.  He is the hero.  He is everything.  He must be a complete man, and yet and unusual man.  A man of of honor.  The best man in this world and a good enough man for any world."  Raymond Chandler, author of crime stories and novels, wrote these words as his definition of a hero. 


  When I think of a hero, it would be someone with swaggering energy, a person  to whom all things seem possible, one filled with intellectual depth, a splendid sense-of humor; who could walk down the  rain-soaked avenue of some sleazy hamlet, beneath all glitter and neon and dangerous shadows with a confident strut and the heart of an artist; one who sees  all citizens as human and when he spots a down-and-0uter on a corner, wonders how that person got to be who they have now become, and think that there must be a story here - because that person was once only 5  years-old; a person who at one time held the gaudiest of dreams and found life to be full of vicious betrayals.   On some late night, I can picture him standing in some grainy doorway, peering out at his lurid city, and wanting to be nowhere else other than where he is.  And, of course, he would also believe that in some dark way all could be redeemed by love.


 
  He would love other things too: all forms of music, nightclub comics, cheap vaudeville jokes, a favorite baseball team; good food and Fred Astaire and air hockey and children; as well as boxing and football and hot-dogs with mustard; along with brandy and good wine and margaritas and animals.  Simply put, he wants to be the best at what he does.  In that romantic quest, he drives himself hard by studying and reading good literature and listening to fine jazz; and builds his confidence with both humor and reflection.  He would also be horrified at the scale and stupidly brutal way that so many American men treated women and the morally corrosive realities of our current political system. 


  After family and friends and lovers, he would admire writers more than anyone else, and be a careful, intelligent reader.  He would have read E.L. Doctrow and Peter Mass and Bud Schulberg and Ernest Hemingway; have an extraordinary good ear for listening to others, and not  be lukewarm about anything that life has to offer.  He would respond to amazing moments in his own life in the way an audience might, with genuine appreciation and with the gift of fine laughter.


  He would also be a man who, when he met someone for the first time, he would know everything about you.  He had done his research, he would know who you were, what you had accomplished, and then he would tell you that you best work lies ahead, urge you to do more, inform you that you were far more capable than you thought you were, and continue to build your confidence by making you feel  that your own progress forward was his as well; that every time out of the chute, you would only need to ask, and he would be there in your corner.  


  But above all else, he would also be a man who took to heart a quote from the Irish statesman, Edmund Burke: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."


  In other words, he would be me...


 ...If I only had the courage to become him...

how my aversion to sewed prunes led to a love of the brooklyn dodgers and brought me closer to my "big shot" dad...

IN THE FALL OF THE YEAR THE WAR ENDED...

IN 1945, ON THE RADIO THEY WERE TALKING about starvation in Japan and Europe.  My mother used this information whenever she served stewed prunes for breakfast.  What do you mean, they make you gag?  she would ask me.  Don't you know they're starving in Europe?  Yes, we both know that they're starving, my dad would answer, but it doesn't look like we're doing much better here in Denver, Bertha.   And in order to down  the prunes, I conjured up pictures from the concentration camps, whispering words  "Buchenwald" and "Auschwitz," I imagined emaciated men in striped pajamas walk through the front door of our house, all of them barefoot, their eyes were dots in black holes, their arms like dowels; and I'd say to myself, You have it good, Dick, you have food to eat,  you are not fatherless, motherless, you are not a starving Jew, and they would probably enjoy stewed prunes.  Almost always, that didn't seem to help. 


  By that time, the rationing of shoes had ended, then of meat, and finally of butter; and I was still eating stewed prunes.  Once a week, I would haul my 9 year-old body down Colfax Avenue, my head bent against the biting winter wind in order to buy 2 loaves of fresh bread for my family in a bakery next to the Bluebird movie house; and if needed, and mine were worn to a stub, I then would walk down to a stationary store to buy myself number 2 Eberhard Faber pencils to draw cartoons with.  


  It was nearing Christmas, I was walking home late in the afternoon, and saw a burly man with a blackened face.  He was delivering coal.  I then saw another man arrive with a turkey.  I asked my Dad who the men were and was told by my Father, lodge  brothers.  What lodge brothers?    They are members of the Masonic Lodge, Son, he answered.  Well, if they give you turkey and coal, what do you give them in return? I asked.  Loyalty, he said.  They have just elected me president, and we are having a party to celebrate.  


  In my mind, my Dad was now a big shot; and in the spring of 1946, a few weeks after I had become a Cub Scout, I realized what a big shot could do, when my Father informed my Mother that he never wanted to eat another prune ever again; and the very next morning, Mom made pancakes-and-eggs and I never saw a single prune on my breakfast plate from that day forward. 


  Not only had my prayers been answered, I also discovered one of my Dad's passions.  I would understand later that baseball was what he thought truly made him an American, that the sports pages were as crucial to him as the Constitution. and that he loved the game of baseball  almost as much as he loved my Mother.  He also loved the Brooklyn Dodgers and his love of the Dodgers brought me closer to my Dad.  Dad respected Leo Durocher, who was the manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers throughout the war, and Eddie Stanky, the grizzled little second baseman.  And now that the war was over and here they were coming back to the baseball fields.  Dodger war veterans were joining the players who were Dodgers through the war years: Pete Reiser and Pee Wee Reese and Carl Furillo and hundreds of others, and we would listen to  Red Barber broadcast their games and announcing other names like:  Augie Galan and Ducky Medwick and Dixie Walker.  


  The Dodgers started winning from opening day, and we could hear Red Barber, who made the games live in our heads with a gorgeous reality.   Both The Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News covered the Dodgers in encyclopedic detail and even carried long reports on the Dodger farm teams in Montreal and St. Paul.  And we learned that in 1946 up in Montreal, the Dodgers had one spectacular rookie.  He was tearing up the league.  His name was John Roosevelt Robinson.  He was a negro.


  You can't have a nigger on a major league team, a neighbor of ours said.


  He can hit, my Dad replied.  He can run.  He can steal bases.  Who cares if he's colored?


  He'll never make it, the neighbor said. 


  I'll bet you 100 dollars that he will.


  My Dad won the bet.


  Then one evening the following spring, my Father came home from work with a great smile on his face.  How would you to go to a Dodger game? he said.  They are playing an exhibition game against the Cardinals at the Denver Bears Stadium.  That Sunday, the two of us, in his old Chevrolet, parked on a street next to the stadium, and then watched thousands of people walking into the ballpark.  And there it was: green and verdant and more beautiful than any place I had ever seen.  And I was there with my Dad.  And they were there too.  I had only seen pictures of them in The Rocky Mountain News or The Denver Post.  Down on the field, the Dodgers were taking batting practice.  Here was Furillo.  That was Pee Wee Reese, slapping balls into center field.  And running through the grass, Pistol Pete Reiser.


  What do you think? my Dad asked.


  I love it, I whispered.


  I loved him, as well...


  ..He was the biggest and best "Big Shot" that any boy could ever have...


  ...And on top of that, he was my Dad...


  ...And I was there with my Father on the best day of my entire life...

   

 

the lesson his sister janice taught me after jimmy birdsong died:

THE SUNDAY NEWSPAPERS TOLD THE STORY...

OF THE INVASION IN AN IMPERFECT WAY. On Sunday, June 24th in 1950, seven divisions of North Korean troops and 150 Korean tanks crossed the 38th parallel.  The Sunday newspapers made clear that there was a crisis of some sort, but were unclear as to what kind of a catastrophe it might turn out to be.  President Truman was flying back to Washington from a vacation in Independence, Missouri, while General MacArthur was huddling with his staff at his headquarters in Tokyo.  Dean Atcheson, the Secretary of State, had called an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council.  Insofar as we kids were concerned, this wasn't another Pearl Harbor; it was some kind of distant battle between Koreans, a kind of civil war, which had nothing to do with us.  So all of us from the neighborhood went to have a picnic in Denver's City Park.  The older guys were laughing with their girlfriends on blankets.  Jimmy Birdsong came running up laughing.  He had gotten naked on a dare.  The girls were giggling and blushing.  Jimmy continued running around and everyone cheered. 

  By Monday everybody was talking about Korea.  We were in another war.   It didn't matter that there was no direct attack on Americans.  We were a part of the United Nations.  We might have to go.  By Friday, the first American troops were on their way to the fighting.  And by the fourth of July, the mood of the neighborhood had forever changed.  It was clear now: the older guys like Jimmy were going off to war.  President Truman was calling it a "police action," but everyone else called it a war.  If you were 18, you could be drafted.  In August, the reserves were called up, including many men who had fought in World War II.  Soul had fallen, then the South Korean army was destroyed, and the American troops had faulty equipment.  If you went away, you drew a number from the draft board that sent you to Korea to die.

  On the 23rd day of November, Jimmy Birdsong  died in Korea, while I was eating Thansgiving dinner with relatives in relatives in Greeley, Colorado. 

   In early December,  I saw his sisters, Julia and Janice, sitting with his mother and father on the  front porch of where they lived.  They were silent, and I didn't know what to say; I kept walking.  What could I say?  That Jimmy had died for his country?  He died for someone else's country.  Could I say he was a good man and great American?  I barely knew him because he was older than I was.  He was one of us, part of the Neighborhood I had grown up in, but I never really got to close enough to know him all that well, other than show him the latest cartoon character I had drawn, and he told me that he thought I was good.  When I went back to school in the fall, my mind was scrambled.  Many classmates had brothers who had been drafted or called up.  Almost everybody thought that communism had to be stopped.  I tried to make sense of this.  If it was important enough to fight communists, would it mean that one day I would be called up too and have to die like Jimmy did? 

  On the television, Cardinal Spellman kept warning about how America was in danger of destruction at the hands of the communists, those in Russia, those close to home.  The Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News were full of frantic warnings about commie pinkos.    The unshaven Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin, his brows kissing in a thuggish way,  was now working with another unshaven character from California named Richard Nixon.  Cardinal Spellman loved them both.  All three of these men wanted to forever rid America of evil doing communists. When the McCarthy Hearings began, and as I watched him on TV, my feelings of unease deepened.  I remember seeing a comic book that showed communist mobs attacking Saint Patrick's Cathedral.  That winter, other comic book heroes were going to war too.  Steve Canyon enlisted in the air force, Bill Mauldin was sent to Korea, and his characters Willie and Joe found themselves at another war front after World War II.  The comics grew darker.  As did my view of the world.

  On March 29th in 1951, an American couple by the name of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of espionage, and I read in The Rocky Mountain News that there would be a rally for their defense in City Park.  I attempted to get some of the guys from school to go with me to the rally, and one of them said: What are you, some kind of a commie?  I said no; but it was a kind of history and I wanted to see it.  I went alone.  The crowd was small.  It was then that I spotted Jimmy's sister, Janice.  She smiled at me and asked if I would like to walk back to our neighborhood with her.  When the rally ended, we did just that; and as we began to wander toward our neighborhood Janice said: You do know that my mother and father are communists, don't you?  

  I wasn't certain how to respond. 

  Janice could sense that I was confused, and immediately changed the subject by asking me if she could buy me a malted-milk at the Dolly Madison Ice Cream Shop on Colfax  Avenue.  I sat alone with Janice in the booth, making small talk, listening to the jukebox: Teresa Brewer's "Music, Music, Music" and Nat King Cole's "Mona Lisa"  and the Weavers singing "Goodnight Irene." 

  Does it bother you that my family are communists? she finally asked me.  


  
  I'm sorry, I said.  I didn't know you were and  I don't know what to say. 


 
  What religion are you? she asked.  

  Lutheran, I replied.  

  I don't know whether or not you will understand this, she began.  But communism is our religion.  My brother Jimmy's religion.  And mine.  But that does not mean  that do not love America just as much as you Lutherans do.  We do.  If we didn't, Jimmy would not have gone off to war. 

  She started to cry. 

  People in the other booths were looking at us.

  Being a Communist did not stop Jimmy from dying for our country, she said, then wiped away her tears with a paper napkin.  She looked me directly in-the-eye:  The real enemy for Americans, the people that you ought to be frightened of are the megalomaniacs like Senators Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon and Cardinal Spellman, who use religion and fear to divide us.  To rip us apart. They want to blacklist writers and artists.  They are the ones who take pride in executing people, destroying reputations, and ruining careers.   Not us.   She paused, Jimmy once told me that you enjoyed drawing cartoons.  Is that true?  

  It is, I replied.

 One day, Senator McCarthy will be gone, but the Great Fear his hearings have instilled will leave it's mark.  Do me a favor, she said.   I want you to promise me to always remember the words of Walt Kelly in his Pogo cartoon strip: "We have met the enemy, and he is us..."


  ...Janice had taught me a lesson I would never forget with words that I would forever remember....

are we on the road to doomsday?


I ASK THAT QUESTION SIMPLY BECAUSE..
THERE SEEMS TO BE A GREAT DEAL OF political  paranoia running around in the minds of Americans these days. We no longer have trust in government, think of politicians as hoodlums who abscond money for things they don't believe in with techniques resembling the Mob, in order to remain in office.  Year after year there is no significant legislation passed by either the Senate or the Congress, and the history of gridlock grows ever more turbulent.  Over at Fox News and MSNBC, various hosts fuel the fire of division, as Rachael Maddow giggles and gestures and Sean Hannity groans and growls, while the radio chatterers like puffball Rush Limbaugh unleash ferocious barrages by manufacturing lies in order to keep his ratings up with the intellectually deprived who are paying his bills; while the Democrats slink slowly away and think of the current president as the enemy, never seem to have heard of him when it comes time for their own re-election; and the orange-hued John Boehner licks his lip prior to another tirade about how evil the Executive Branch of Government seems to be.  


  Observing the felonies and betrayals on both sides of the political aisle, it ought to come as no surprise that we Americans have grown even more cynical and no longer choose to vote.  Even in a world now safe for lobbyists and cynicism, and with the persistent allegation of personal abuse by our current President, which seem to be more a reflex than thought and analysis, this is a country that has elected a Warren G. Harding and Richard Milhous Nixon twice, and one would think that we would have grown used to mindless destruction by now. But we haven't.  These days, escalating by the hour, most members of the Washington press corps now seem to wear a self-absorbed sneer.  They sneer at any expression of idealism.  They sneer at gaffes, mistakes, idiosyncrasies. The assumption seems to be that everyone has a dirty little secret, and one's duty as a journalist is to sniff it out.  Lost in this rancorous process is any regard for compromise.

  Even if we don't vote in every election like we once did we still, of course, remain a people that wants the whole loaf or nothing out of our president and our elected officials.  Make me feel better.  Make me happy.  Make life perfect.  And above all else, don't tell me that the world is complicated.  In foreign engagement, we remain in the thrall of Ronald Reagan's Hollywood worldview, the Big Dumb Ox theory, using naked power to get our way.  After all, if a president won't smash his foreign opponents with icy dispatch, how can he deal with the blacks and the Mexicans and the immigrants and the feminists and the Cubans and the poor and the rich and the disabled and the guys with the hyphens in their names?


  If this continues, our country is doomed.  We are in the midst of the largest immigration wave since the turn of the last century, while our politicians continue to succumb to their own form of tribalism.  They seem unable to want to absorb and assimilate new arrivals.  And if they do, they also insist that to be an American, one must accept the status of victimisation, to hate the government and the president, to fear one's neighbor, to reduce all discourse to the most primitive level. 


  Perhaps it's time for we Americans to think about what we have done to ourselves, time to forever erase the sectarian swine from our political system by voting, to honor good taste and hard work and honor only those who cherish human decency...


  ...We have to stop shouting for a little while and learn how to listen... 

  I

a small tale about the "cartoon character'' who once roamed the streets of New York:


LATE ONE NIGHT MANY YEARS AGO I WALKED INTO A...

JAMMED MANHATTAN RESTAURANT ON RIVERSIDE DRIVE,  a New York hangout favored by baseball players, actors, agents, reporters, and second-string hoodlums.  I was having dinner with a female writer friend of mine, and on this particular night the place was filled with beautiful models and equally handsome men.  The big corner table was filled by Lauren Bacall and two more beautiful women.  Nobody paid attention.  It was business as usual.  Then John Gotti walked in with two very large associates.  The room went silent.  


  Impeccably dressed, his body thick and powerful like a walking fireplug, a diamond ring glistening on the pinkie of his left hand, his small eyes played the room for friends, or danger while a thin smile played across his face.  Gotti was pure Mob.  In fact, at this moment in the long dark history of American organized crime, he was the Boss.  There was only one table empty and Gotti and his friends are led there by the maitre d'.  As the gangsters sat down, the hum of conversation returned, and Gotti's eyes drifted to the corner table.  He gave a small smile to Lauren Bacall.  She did not smile back. 




 Gotti, at 50, was the major Mob leader in the City of New York, but in the world he inhabited there was only one boss at a time, and on that evening in the big city, the time belonged to John Gotti.  He was certainly making the most of it.  Nobody since Al Capone had taken such pleasure in the role so ecstatically, by the media and the public.   On the night he came out of the restaurant on Riverside Drive, the word of where he had been dining had reached the street.  I found myself among a group of tourists, late-night diners, and neighborhood regulars.  Gotti smiled, climbed into a Lincoln, and was driven away.  It was hard to imagine Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, or Carlo Gambino having that effect on people or appearing to welcome the attention so grandly.


  Insofar as I as concerned, he looked like a cartoon character right out of Al Capp's Li'l Abner, a gangster buffoon with carefully manicured hands, his skin so closely shaven it seemed glossy, and the amused and foreboding eyes of what he thought an outlaw should look like, while the cameras recorded every detail.  In short, he wanted to be a gangster who looked like a gangster.  And that was the way Gotti apparently thought that a real gangster ought to look like.  As I stared at him through the crowd in front restaurant on Riverside Drive that night, it was obvious to me that Gotti did not seem to be all that bright.  He was just another swaggering kid from Brooklyn who one day wanted to be somebody. 


  Until December 16th in 1985, not many Americans even knew who Gotti was.  At 5:16 that evening, a neatly dressed  70 year-old man named John Castellano arrived for  a dinner with a companion at Sparks Steak House on East 46th Street.  Castellano looked like he was a businessman, but in fact was the boss of the Gambino crime family, and his companion, Thomas Bilotti, was an underboss.  Neither man made it through the door.  Three gunmen suddenly appeared out of nowhere and blasted them into eternity.  The next day, Gotti had become the boss, and the myth of John Gotti as The Teflon Don had begun. 


  After many trials and acquittals, the myth came to an  abrupt end in the United States Penitentiary  in Marion, Illinois  in solitary confinement on the 10th day of June in 2002, when Gotti died of throat cancer at the age of 61, and we now had one less cartoon character roaming the streets of New York... 

a look back on how the carnage committed by 2 people I once knew led me into thoughts of war and to a man by the name of  Vaclav Havel:


DOWN THROUGH THE YEARS, MY  OWN... 

CURIOSITY HAS CARRIED ME TO MANY places.  I've paid rent in Fargo and Houston and New York.   I've written articles and a book and stage plays in New Jersey and  California and Texas.  There was always a world out there and I wanted to see it. People out there I wanted to get to know. And due to my own curiosity, I was about to meet one of them. 

  It began on a cloudy January morning in 1979, immediately after I had finished interviewing A.J. Foyt, the automobile racing driver, when he suggested that I might be interested in writing an article  about the former wife of one of the employees at his Chevrolet dealership in Houston, informing me that she was about to go on trial for the murder of her second husband, and that he could make arrangements for me to meet with her before the trial began.  I was instantly fascinated by the attractively-petite young woman, as well as the unusual circumstances surrounding the murder itself; and was eagerly awaiting the opportunity of sitting through her trial.
  


  Her name was Diana.   She had been accused of shooting her common-law husband Lloyd through the head as awakened one morning after a good night's sleep, dragging his corpse out into the garage, hacking his body apart with a chainsaw  into 5 rather grisly pieces, then stuffing him into several hefty trash bags before her 2 children came home from school.  Diana then prepared dinner for her children, read them a story, tucked them safely into bed, lugged Lloyd's remains into her Cadillac trunk,  then coaxed her first-husband Bernie into babysitting the children while she hauled the body 1,300 miles from Houston to San Bernardino over the next 24 hours.  Bernie would later testify under oath that he was totally unaware of the reason for her rather unexpected trip.  Upon her arrival, Diana's  hope was that her father would lend a hand in getting rid of the corpse by burying the remains beneath the trees of his orange grove stand.  After the initial shock had worn-off, her father did what any sane father would do: he immediately handed his daughter over to the  local authorities.  She was then flown back to Houston in order to stand trial.  


  Within a week, Diana was acquitted, due to the skill of an able attorney who claimed she had been suffering from dissociative amnesia and was completely unaware of what she had done.  It was a year-and-a-half after the trial had come to an end that Diana married for a 3rd time, and Bernie vanished into thin-air.   On the night he went away, it seems that Bernie had managed to loot a large sum of A.J. Foyt's  money out of the Chevrolet dealership's safe, apparently attempted to call me that evening, and I wasn't home.  When I arrived back at the house, the police were there waiting for me.  They quickly brought me up-to-speed on what had transpired at the Chevrolet dealership, informed me that they had traced his last known call to my number; then inquired as to why I thought that he would do something like that.  I gave them the same answer I have given to this day:  "I did  not know."  And yet, I truly do believe that he may have had some sort of a confession to make, and  regret that I had been out for the night... 

  ...Eventually, I would write a play about this rather lurid tale called  Miles to Go, which was produced in London and at the Samuel Beckett Theater in the City of New York.   

  Shortly thereafter, another story came my way through a lawyer who happened to be a very good friend of mine, as well as an associate to the attorney who had earned Diana her acquittal.  His name was Emmett, and this  story involved a man that he knew by the name of Steve.  In theory, Steve was a former soldier and DEA Agent who I would, in due course, cross the Texas-Mexican border with in order to take a peek at an nuclear weapon which he said had been taken from an East Coast armory and transported into Mexico.  He had been sent by our government to disarm the weapon, which had been scheduled to be sent to Cuban rebels, who intended to destroy the Castro regime.  I initially thought that he was either lying or exaggerating, but went along-for-the-ride in order to see it for myself.  It turned out that he was telling the truth. 

  I not only actually saw the bomb:  Along the way, we also had banditos shoot at the two of us, fended-off a pack of rabid coyotes, he taught me how to track animals and toss a Bowie knife in order to nail a  rabbit on the run,  just in case we got hungry and needed a bite to eat.  We eventually stopped to see the most glorious sunset I have ever seen  as it hung above the village of Boquillias del Carmen on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, as we were heading back home to Texas.  Although most folks I knew thought I was insane to have done something like that, I wanted it in my resume...

 ...But due to the secretive nature of this little adventure, governmental restrictions prevented the story ever being published and it remains tucked-away somewhere within my filing cabinet.

  It was, however, because of that journey into Mexico and back that I began to think about war, of Vietnam; the place where Steve  had served.  I realized that I had been  alone in the vast wastelands of Mexico with a man who was apparently a real loony-tune.  He enjoyed telling colorful and somewhat disgusting accounts of the people he had slaughtered, informed me that the war he had fought in had taught him to kill with ease and dispatch, and that  he rather enjoyed doing it, adding that would not mind doing it again if he could find another war to fight.  At that time, the war he had fought in Vietnam was a foreign place to me, but the presence of that war had led our country into the ominous year of Watergate and the steady decline of our economy in 1973 - the war was lost.  It should have been the task of statesmen to arrange its conclusion with some dignity.  They could not bring it off. 

  There were other wars too, which began to fascinate me: a long, grieving drizzle of a war in Northern Ireland; a dirty little war in Nicaragua; the horrendous civil war in Lebanon.  In Beirut and Belfast, the killing was entangled with the dark certainties of religion.  In Nicaragua, a similar impulse was in play: adepts of the Marxist faith fought against the hired acolytes of the anti-Communist faith, Sandanista against Contra, sometimes brother against brother.  As a former minister, that began to bother me.

  The warring creeds were everywhere in those places, each driven by visions of utopia, each prepared to kill or die to bring their version of God into existence.  In all three parts of the world, the common result was more than human misery.  I found myself trying to understand the motives of the various players, why they were slaughtering others in the name of whomever it was that their God happened to be, but most often I found myself in agreement with E.M. Forester's famous remark: "I do not believe in belief."  From Bosnia to the Persian Gulf, human beings still killed each other over belief.

  Ten years after Diana's trial had come to an end and my sojourn with Steve was over and done with, I witnessed one of the greatest changes in the streets and squares of Prague in 1989 on my television set.  In a matter of days, the brave men and women of Civic Action led by a writer named Vaclav Havel, brought down the Communist regime. They did it by speaking truth to power.  Human beings were free at last, and in  spite of having once been in the company of 2 folks who seemed to enjoy killing other people, perhaps with men like Vaclav Havel, there was hope for mankind after all, and even if it was only via my TV set, I was glad that the entire world had a ringside ticket to his show... 

I  first met the man whose full name I never got to know who taught me a lesson that I would never forget...


IN THE SUMMER OF 1960, WHEN I WAS WORKING PART-TIME...
AT THE FREMONT TRIBUNE,  AN AFTERNOON TABLOID in Fremont, Nebraska; while attending Central Lutheran Theological Seminary. I started my shift at four p.m. and finished most evenings at eight.  Then, if I had a few dollars in my pocket, I would walk over to Al's Cafe on South Bell Street and eat either a chicken-fried steak or have a ham sandwich with an ice-cold beer at the bar.  I was in the company of the real reporters.  They scrutinized stories, including my own, examined the next day's headlines with a bilious eye, and issued fierce criticisms and hilarious indictments about the publisher of the newspaper, who they obviously were not fond of.  They told me what I should never do again when I wrote a story, how  not to repeat the obvious barbarism of past mistakes, and I would listen to all of them, trying to fill in the blanks of my education as a writer, a task I was never certain I would ever be able to complete.


 
  One evening, I was alone at the bar, when I took note of the man who had always seemed to be listening to our ongoing conversations. He was, of course, usually drunk.  He was tall, gaunt, sardonic, intense, and rumor had it that he had once been a reporter from the City of New York who had fallen on hard times, due to his fondness for alcohol.  On that particular evening, he asked if he could buy me a drink, introduced himself only as Crosley, said that he had once worked for The New York Herald, was born a Catholic in Scotland in the cellar of an orphanage in Glasgow, arrived at Ellis Island when he was twelve with two-dollars in his pocket and a dry-goods box, then began selling copies of a newspaper called The New York Sun for four cents a copy.   By the time he turned fifteen, he said that he had discovered that he could write, by the time he turned twenty, he had developed a crucial  part of the newspaper formula: the endless New York appetite for murder, and thus became a reporter for The New York Herald in that peculiar and somewhat less than exquisite field of expertise. 


  He had developed an interest in that kind of a story when he had come across a tale in the archives the the old New York Sun, which had been written by James Gordon Bennett back in 1836. It was about a twenty-three-year-old prostitute who called herself Helen Jewett.  On the Saturday night of April 9th in 1836, her body had been found smoldering on the bed of a bordello at 41 Thomas Street. Crosley then informed me that his mother had been a Glasgow prostitute and that she too had been murdered in a bordello bed.  Helen Jewett had been hit on the head with a small ax and then set on fire, his mother had been strangled to death Saturday night of September 3rd in 1910, then tossed into an alley behind the bordello.  Neither crime was ever solved.


  It was one of those accidents of timing that changed everything for him.  He soon became fascinated about the concept of a man or woman turning to dust at the hand of another man or woman who would eventually turn into dust themselves.  He slowly began to discover the lineaments of a corpse as one would the beauties of a statue of marble.  It was the most remarkable sight he had ever beheld.  He informed me that the first corpse he ever saw was that of a young woman.  One arm lay over her stomach, the other was inverted and hanging over her head, and bloody gashes ran along her right temple.  He knew  that he had found something that would shake the genteel world of the business-oriented newspapers of the day, and thus his career was born.


  He went on and on with other stories about his being a crime reporter.  The sights he saw began to destroy him.  He said he was both appalled and fascinated by the crude sensationalism, that the coarsening of life in New York brought back memories of his own mother, she became an immense ghost in every aspect of his life, and it eventually drove him to drink.  He began having chaotic and agonizing nightmares, which caused him to drink even more.


  He then looked me in-the-eye, and said:  "Allow me to give you a bit of advice.  Never allow the ghosts of your past to disrupt your future dreams..."


  ...I never saw Crosley again...


...But his advice has forever remained with me... 

nostalgia is a peculiar word which...


DENOTES THAT SOMETHING VALUABLE IS FOREVER BEHIND US...
AND THAT AN "IS" HAS SOMEHOW NOW BECOME  BECOME "WAS."  It involves an almost fatalistic acceptance of the permanent presence of loss.  Whatever you have lost, you will not get it back: not that much beloved brother or sister or mother or father , not the Brooklyn Dodgers or New York Giants, not that splendid bar called Jack Dempsey's on Broadway and Forty-Ninth Street in the City of New York, or that place that you once went to see Andy Warhol and other celebrities by the name of Studio 54 over on West Fifty-Fourth.  It also erupts in me whenever I see a fragment of the newsreel showing a President of the United in the rear seat of a black limousine with the back of his head exploding into the lap of his wife.


  Nostalgia is about real things gone.




  Our losses would accumulate, of course, with the violent destruction of the World Trade Center.  A Tuesday turned into a Wednesday and something of value was behind us forever.  After the murderous morning of September 11th in 2001, with the ferocious human toll, it was no longer the just loss of the building themselves, it was that the comparative innocence of America  had forever disappeared along with 3,000 innocent lives.  On September 12th in 2001, millions of us wept over the horrors of the day before.  Many mourned their own dead and the deaths of folks they never knew.  More millions grieved for the world that had existed on September 10th.  For a while, many of us experienced various degrees of fury.  We knew that we had lived in the world before the fanatics changed it forever.  With all the flaws, horrors, disappointments, cruelties, we would remember that lost world all of our days and most of our nights from that day forward, but would get up in the morning, and go to work. 


  Nobody ran. 


  Our only consolation would be nostalgia. 



  Perhaps that tough nostalgia helps explain America.  It is built into our codes, like DNA, and beyond the explanation of constant change, there is a constant change, there is another thread in our deepest emotion.  I believe that American nostalgia comes from that extraordinary process that created our Nation: immigration.  Every American stresses the role of immigration, because the tale of our country cannot be told without it.  Starting in the early nineteenth century, our country absorbed millions of European immigrants, many arriving in waves: the Irish in flight from famine in the 1840's; Germans and Europeans after the political furies of 1848; the flood between between 1880 and 1920 of Italians, Eastern European Jews, and others fleeing from debasing poverty or murderous persecution.  We know so much about them, and yet we know so little.  




  Inscribed on the Northeast Corner of the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C. is a quote by William Shakespeare from his play The Tempest: "What's past is prologue..."  Many of those who came to the American shores were illiterate and wrote no letters or memoirs; they were young and poor and could not read those words; the common mixture of overlapping hope served as their personal engines; to raise their children in a place where they would be healthy and educated and all they knew that they would never need to bend their knee to a monarch again.  For the rest of their lives, those first-generation nineteenth-century immigrants would carry with them what their American children could not fully comprehend: the nostalgia for those things they left behind.  Nostalgia for the place where they once ran with other children on summer mornings, the place where all spoke a common language, the place of tradition and certainties, including those that eventually became intolerable.   And yet they came to America with a special sense of hope.


  As they sat late on Saturday nights in summer, with windows open to the cooling air, and heard familiar music in unfamiliar languages, those aching ballads of loss and regret had eased themselves into future hopes and dreams...


  ...The "Is" and "Was" of life's journey came together as one...