memories of 'Lucky,' 'The Duke' and Yakima Canutt...


'A man deserves a second chance,
but keep an eye on him.'
John Wayne

"LUCKY" SEEMED UNEASY ABOUT THE ROLE...

WRITERS  AND ARTISTS IN POLITICS.  'WRITERS and artists like you should refuse to take part in the public life of their country ' he began.  'Particularly when it comes to politics.  Even more so if they're god damned Democrats!'  He then added with a slight smile, 'Your buddy Teddy Kennedy will never get elected President because of Chappaquiddick.  He should've learned to keep his pecker in his pants.'  The somewhat good-natured rant had begun after I had informed him that I was backing Ted Kennedy for the Presidential Election in 1980.  He happened to be a former Marine and 'Hell's Angel,' recently divorced, well-read, a man with one leg, and political advisor to Katherine Whitmire the Mayor of Houston.  He also was the  Committee Chairman for 'The Elect Ronald Regan Presidential Committee.'  We had first met at a singles club in Houston called The Leisure Tree, became good friends, and enjoyed the bicker and squabble of political argument since he was an avid Republican and I was an equally rabid Democrat.  He was ten-years older than I was, looked like a surly Santa Claus with a gruff twinkle in his eye...


     ...And his name was Francis "Lucky" McCreary.

      It was dusk in Zihatanejo, Mexico on a June evening in 1979, and we were at a restaurant called Patys Marimar on La Ropa Beach, which  lay at the edge of the beach itself, while mariachis played songs of love, as we watched the glistening tanned bodies running rapidly to their hotels in the frail afternoon rain.  The aroma of the Mexican evening rose around us.  Beans were frying and fish baking in the restaurant oven stoves, and beyond all of this, stretching to the hard blue line of the horizon, there was the sea, the vast and placid Pacific.  For centuries Zihatanejo had been a fishing village, a few huts thatched with palms dozing along the shore of the great natural harbor called the Casta Grande.   It never became a major port, because the merchants of Mexico preferred to greet their Manila galleons in Acapulco, 145 miles northwest and for years no roads connected the tiny village to the large cities of the  interior; mules  labored for weeks to travel the 483 kilometers to Mexico City, mountainous miles beyond reach.  Then, throughout the 1950's and into the 1960' everything slowly changed.  Along with a town called Ixtapa, Zihatanejo became a tourist attraction, the movie star John Wayne became a regular visitor, and the modern day Zihatanejo was born.

     On our walk earlier in the day from our hotel to the beach, the street was crowded with a mixture of tourists and Mexican families.  The Americans looked pink and awkward.  The Mexicans were friendly, even sweet, but they were more concerned with children than with visitors.  Here, as almost everywhere I had been in Mexico, a visitor senses a relaxed manner among the Mexicans.  Among workers and visitors, no one felt the seething hostility that had begun to rear its head, particularly in Acapulco, where we had been the week before.  "Lucky" and I had both been here several times in recent years.  He loved Zihatanejo and so did I.  We were staying at the La Casa Que Canta Hotel overlooking Zihatanejo Bay and had booked the same suite of rooms in which John Wayne had once stayed.  "Lucky" had insisted that we stay there too.

     The suite was aptly named "The Duke Suite" and the stairs inside led to an open, mahogany wooden floor with a bar and couches and a cool breeze off the ocean.  There were photographs of Wayne, posters of  Island in the Sky and  True Grit and the Quiet Man, and other reminders of the life once lived here.  Wayne had last been in Zihatanejo five-years before.  'He was the greatest single drinker I ever saw,' said a bartender at The Flophouse Bar, who claimed to have known Wayne rather well.  'He loved tequila and never got drunk.'  He then looked at "Lucky" for what seemed to be a very long time and added, 'You were with Wayne once when he came to Zihatanejo  from Newport Beach on his mine-sweeper 'The Wild Goose.'  Here at 'The Flophouse, I mean?'  And "Lucky" replied, 'I was.'   I felt like a child when I asked, 'You knew 'The Duke'?'  And he replied with a smile, 'I did.'

     The following morning we walked down a long dusty road toward 'Chez Arnaldo Beach' to see the home that Wayne had built when he hauled his aging bones to Zihatanejo for the last time.  He had built the house near a small stand of palm trees, 3 miles from the town's center.  It could be reached only from the sea or the small dirt road upon which we were walking.  Today few people could tell you its location.  A caretaker greeted us after "Lucky" had made arrangements with the hotel staff at the La Casa Que Canta Hotel for the visit, specific directions had been written for us, and a caretaker was there to greet us.


     As we were making our way to the top floor of the home,  I was recalling that conversation with the bartender the night before and thought it best not to ask "Lucky" how well he had known Wayne until he was ready to tell me.  The bedroom was now called "The Sagebrush Room."  I found a bookcase against the wall, and among weathered books of Agatha Christie was a copy of Arthur Conan Doyle's 'SirNigel', with a note from Agatha Christie to Wayne telling him that he would enjoy the read and wishing him a Happy Holiday Season,  dated December 17, 1966 - a remnant of some lost Christmas. The place was clean and bright and pleasant.  According to those in town who knew him best, this is where Wayne came to escape his celebrity.  Here, where there were now tasteful wicker chairs and fresh-cut flowers, he would walk out to the balcony and look out over the town to the sea while he puffed away on his Camel cigarettes.  Those who knew him said that as he aged he knew that he had never been considered a serious actor, transformed by time into a cartoon figure of the western hero, he had begun to regret that aspect of his life even with his Oscar win as Best Actor for the movie 'True Grit' in 1969, 17 years after his only other nomination.

     When I heard "Lucky's" voice behind me, I turned to look at him as he said: 'I know you've been wondering about me and Wayne.  I've known 'The Duke' since 1960 when he was in Brackettville, Texas shooting and directing the movie 'The Alamo.'  The movie was shot on the ranch owned by Jim Shannan, who happened to be my uncle; so Wayne give me a bit part even though he was aware that I was a 'Hell's Angel.  Two weeks after I was hired, I lost my leg in a motorcycle accident when I was  drunk and slammed into a truck.  By then, Wayne and I had shared more than a couple of drinks in several Brackettville bars where we played chess and he always won.  He liked me and  I liked him.  He paid for my hospital stay and operation.  Uncle Jim refused to do so because he didn't much like the fact that I'd been drinking at the time of the accident nor was he fond of the Hell's Angels stuff.'   

     His feeling were clearly shared by others who had known him.  On each day more and more Zihatanejo residents told their own stories about "The Duke."  'He was the nicest man in the world,' said a brown-skinned man named Marcos.  'I come home in the morning from taking him on horseback rides.  I give people rides.  They pay me.  Then I come home.  With him, I always came home with more money than I could earn in a month, he gave me cowboy boots and a western shirt and a Stetson hat, and always acted like I was his equal.  He was a man with a kind heart.' 

     As we were walking the beach early one evening, "Lucky" said, 'It was several years after my accident when Wayne called me and asked me since I was a former Marine if I'd like to do another shoot as an extra on a movie he was directing called 'The Green Berets' in 1968 with David Janssen and Jim Hutton.  He told me the movie was about Viet Nam and that there would be a character with one leg who never spoke a single word.  I agreed and the next thing I knew I was in Fort Benning, Georgia shooting the movie....One evening, we went together to a place called 'Bello's Martini and Cigar Bar' and I asked him why he had taken me under his wing.  His reply was simple: 'All of  us are a mixture of some good and some not so good,' he said. 'In considering one's fellow man it's important to remember the good things...we should refrain from making judgement because the fella looks like he's a real SOB and give him a chance to prove you're wrong.'   "Lucky" paused for a moment, then said: 'There is someone I'd like you to meet.  He's a former bronco rider and movie stuntman named Yakima Canutt.'

     The following afternoon, I found myself at a place called Coconuts near the beach, celebrating 'Happy Hour' with "Lucky" and Enos Edward Yakima Canutt, who had known John Wayne since 1932 when Wayne had hired him to do his stunts in a movie by the name of The Shadow of the Eagle.  After an introduction by "Lucky," the drinks began to flow and the conversation began.  It turned out that Yakima, now 80 years-of-age, was a man who seemed taller than he actually was, with a face which looked as if it had been etched in granite.  He had won the title at the age of 17 as 'The World's Best Bronco Buster,' trained Charlton Heston and Steven Boyd for the famous chariot ride in the movie 'Ben-Hur,' and won an honorary Academy Award in 1967 for his  contributions to the movie industry. 

     Down through the years had come to  Zihatanejo with John Wayne on a regular basis. 

     His only comment about Heston was, 'The fucker was a pious prick!' 

     He did, however, love John Wayne. 

     He said that in 1932 when the two of them had first met both of them were working for Monogram Pictures, and the first words out of Wayne's mouth were, 'I've always followed my father's advice: he told me to always keep my word and, second, to never insult anybody intentionally.  If I insult you, you can be god damned sure I mean it.  And third, he told me never to go around looking for trouble.'   If you're OK with all of that, I think we're gonna be friends...And we were and are...As a natter-of-fact, the two-of-us have been coming to Zihatanejo since the mid-5o's.  Played chess here at this very table, got drunk, laughed, and told dirty jokes.'  I told him that my Dad lived in Winerset , Iowa the town in which Wayne had been born, knew Wayne when they were kids, back when his name was Marion Robert Morrison.  And he replied, 'You're dad was a lucky guy.'

     What none of us mentioned was this: Wayne was now in the UCLA Medical Center being treated for another bout of cancer, this time it was cancer of the stomach.  We departed the place called Coconuts at around midnight on June 10th of 1979, and on the morning of June 11th heard the news that John Wayne had died. 

     The entire town of Zihatanejo was in mourning, black was worn by men and women and children, the Cathedral door was draped in black, and the flagpole's flag stood at half-mast, waving slowly in the wind, as "Lucky" and Yakima entered through the cathedral door and two men who had known and loved him bent down at the front of the altar to give John Wayne a final farewell.  They both walked silently back onto the street, bid me a farewell, and flew out of Zihatanejo to attend his funeral and burial at Memorial Park Cemetery in Carona del Mar, West Port Beach.  Etched on his tombstone were these words: 'Feo Fuerte y Formal' in Spanish, when translated to English meant: 'He was ugly, strong, and dignified.'

     In October of that year, my Father died, the man who I most adored in my entire life, one who I forever will pay tribute to in my heart, mind, body and and soul...

      ...By 1986 both "Lucky" and Yakima had passed-away, as well...

     ...I had known 3 men who once knew John Wayne...

     ...My wish is that I had been one of them...

      ...And although I never met him...

     ..I have yet to forget his words: 'Courage is about being scared to death but saddling up anyway...' as well as: 'Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes to us very clean.  It's perfect when it arrives, and puts itself in our hands.  It hopes that we've learned something from yesterday...'

     ...And it is my hope that I have done all of that in some minor way...

'Denver D. Doll' was the man who gave me the courage to obtain my postponed dreams:

'What really knocks me out is a book that,

when you're done reading it, you wish that

the author who wrote it was a terrific

friend of yours and you could call him up

whenever you like.  That doesn't happen

very much, though.'

J.D. Salinger, Catcher on the Rye

ON THE 27TH DAY OF JULY IN 1953...

THE KOREAN WAR ENDED IN A GRIM stalemate.  In September of that year I became a senior at East Denver High School, and first laid eyes on Justin W. Brierly; a closeted homosexual.  He would one day become a character called Denver D. Doll in Jack Kerouac's book On the Road,   published in 1957 and again in Visions of Cody published in 1960.  Brierly had had graduated from Columbia University in the City of New York with both Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, the founders of The Beat Generation, and had mentored another member of the future Beats by the name of Neal Cassady, who he had taken under his wing in the late 1940's at the same high school I was now attending.


     My Dad had told me all about him.  Apparently, Mister Brierly had been a very important person long before he became an East High School English teacher.  He had once taken a leave-of-absence from his teaching duties in order to attend the Yalta Conference in the Crimea in February of 1945, having been invited by Prime Minister Churchill to do so.  This Conference was where President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Premiere Joseph Stalin discussed the re-establishment of the nations of war-torn Europe. What was important to me, however, was the class he now taught was called Advanced Literature and the Art of Writing, and for some odd reason decided that might be where I belonged, so wrote a brief essay as to why I would like admittance to his class,  saying that I wanted to learn about writers and writing in a concrete way.  


     I began to think that I would not get in.


     Then on the opening day of the semester, as I walked  toward the entrance of the high school, I spotted Mister Brierly standing at the entrance.  He looked at me and said,  You have been accepted into my class, Mister Daugs.  There will be 7 of you.  We meet in room number 302 promptly at one o'clock on Monday and Wednesday and Friday afternoons.  If you are late, you will be dismissed and no longer be able to attend.  He reached into his suit pocket and handed me a small card.  I live at 2257 Gilpin Street, my address is on the card.  Our class will meet at my home on Wednesday evenings at 7 o'clock to discuss what we have thus far learned.  He then turned and walked through the entrance door.


     At 48, lean, with a receding hairline and and Hitler-like mustache 43, Mister Brierly was prompt, peculiar, and pompous.  He was involved in both educational endeavors to advance educational values  at and local politics as a city councilman.  He despised segregation in schools and detested politicians who sought power for power's sake.  He had publicly stated to reporters from The Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post that he believed Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy was as ruthless and demonic as Hitler had been, saying that his hunt for communists in America was akin to the assassination of the the European Jewish population, and that the only difference between Hitler and McCarthy was that McCarthy did it with overwrought anger and innuendo and lies rather than with guns and gas and bombs.


     His home on Gilpin Street was located in a small area of shops and two-story homes, and was considered to be in one of the most prestigious of Denver neighborhoods, where we would sit every Wednesday evening in his elegant living room eating delicate English pastries and cakes while sipping on lapsang souchong tea.  On one evening early in December Mister Brierly introduced us to both Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg only as old college friends of his, and we had no idea of the fame which lay ahead for both.


     The first book we were assigned to read was A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and in that romantic novel, I first came across the notion of a separate peace, a peace achieved outside of war.  In the climax of the drama, Frederic Henry deserts to join his woman, Catherine Barkley, leaving behind the abstractions of patriotism, loyalty, and solemn oaths.  To him, living was more important than dying; loving a woman was more important than loving a country.  Mister Brierly then introduced is to a book by Malcolm Crowley called Exile's Return, and I realized that there was another way to make a separate peace: departure.  Faced with an America dedicated to thrift, commercialism, and puritanism, many of the 20's writers and artists became expatriates.  I loved that word.  The expatriate F. Scott Fitzgerald went to the Riviera, T.S. Eliot to London, Katherine Anne Porter to Mexico, Ernest Hemingway to Paris.


     They lived the expatriate life among civilized people (or so I thought), in countries where food and shelter and drink were cheap and the women were beautiful.  In my imagination, searching for absinthe among the Hank Williams - Webb Pierce jukeboxes, Paris became the golden city of my imagination.  It was so in the 1920's, I thought; it must be so now.  I envisioned cafe tables on summer afternoons, smoky dives in the winter, painters on the slopes of Montparanasse, and there, coming in the door striding right out of The Sun Also Rises, was Lady Brett Ashley.  I would read and then reread Hemingway's words when he described Lady Ashley: 'She wore a slip over jersey sweater, and her hair was brushed back like a boy's.  She started that.  She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of that with that wool jersey...'


     One Wednesday in early December instead of eating our usual pastries and cakes, Mister Brierly took us to an 1930 art deco movie theater on Glenarm Place by the name of the Paramount Theater to see an encore presentation of Vincente Minnelli's An American in Paris, and there was Gene Kelly, living on the GI Bill after World War Two - which was for me as I sat in that darkened movie theater, now - telling me that if you can't paint or write in Paris, you might as well marry the girl next door and settle for less than you ought to be.  Gene Kelly had a studio in the Quarter with a bed on pulleys that raised in the morning to the ceiling, and windows open to the air of spring, the Paris rooftops, the cobble stoned street, the bookstalls, and the fresh bread, and, of course, the cafes.  I envisioned myself as Oscar Levant, who was Gene Kelly's best friend.  He was a piano player and the girl they both loved was Leslie Caron.  The music was by George Gershwin, filled with charm and confidence and bittersweet regret.  Paris was a city bright and gay and full of writers and and painters and beautiful women and I wanted it.


     I had other dreams too.  I wanted to finish college and enter the seminary in order to become a Lutheran minister, and after I had done all of that - I could go to Paris and see all the great paintings in the Louvre and read all the writers whose names had been scattered through Crowley's book: Joyce and Pound, Proust and Valery, Verlaine and Rimbaud and Budelaire.  Why not?  I had many years ahead of me.  I planned on finding Cafe Bel Ami and sit at a table and order Fundador and read little magazines too.  And then write all night long.  I would discuss writing with my fellow writers, study cannon law of religion and art...


     ...I never did go to Paris...


    ...Over the following months up until the semester's end, I would sit with Mister Brierly on Wednesday nights after the rest of my class had departed, tell him in detail about my future hopes and dreams, as he sat silently with a small smile on his face and listened without comment.  When the semester came to an end and summer arrived, he phoned one morning and asked if I could take a drive with him into the mountains where we could take a long walk and have a good talk.  I had replied that I would very much like to do that, he picked me up shortly after dawn the next day in his classy black Lotus Mark 4, and we drove off toward the magnificent Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs.


     I took note of a picnic basket resting between the two of us and he said, I took the liberty of packing a small lunch for the two of us.  There are roast beef sandwiches with Dijon mustard  on sourdough bread, lettuce and tomato and cold celery sticks, along with potato chips, a canister of cold iced tea and a wonderful dessert of cherry pistachio tea cakes.  All of which will be served with proper silverware, Waterford crystal glasses atop a red-and-white checkered linen tablecloth.  He then gave a laugh and added, Although I am somewhat of a closet  homosexual and almost everyone I know is aware of that fact, you need not worry about me putting 'the hit' on you.  That is not the reason for our little trip.  I smiled and said, That thought never even entered my mind.  And he replied, Good...


     We arrived at the Garden of the Gods long before noon.  When the Lotus had pulled to a stop he grabbed the picnic basket and we began walking through the green hills toward a small grass-laden park with pine picnic tables.  I summoned the courage to ask him why he had become a teacher and then became known as a mentor for writers.  He replied with a smile, I have always loved writing and writers and schools are where the future talent is.  As he carefully laid the tablecloth and set the silverware and glasses next to our plates, he went on to say: I became fascinated with the minds of writers when I spent time with Ernest Hemingway in Paris at the Cafe Bel Ami and became astonished by the workings of his mind and then went to Mexico City where I became acquainted with Katherine Anne Porter, and eventually met T.S. Elliot when I was in London during the Second World War, as well as having an evening with Winston Churchill at 10 Downing Street, where we smoked Cuban cigars and discussed fine literature.  That was during the time when Prime Minister Churchill had invited me to England as a consultant on the evacuation of children  in urban areas from German bombs.


     He smiled as we sat down to eat and said: I have seen much of the world, had wonderful meals and good times, heard the chimes at midnight from St. Paul's Cathedral in London, spent drowsy summer afternoons in Madrid with Salvador Dali, experienced delightful mornings walking along Krystal Beach in Acapulco with the Mexican writer Octavio Paz.  Paz was the one who said to me: 'Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events.'  I knew at that moment that above all else I had been called to teach.


     After finishing our meal and taking the picnic basket back to the Lotus, we began walking the magnificent trails through stands of pine trees and lovely scenery that surrounded us.  Mister Brierly told me more about himself.  He was now a director of the Central City Opera House and a prominent member of The Performing Arts Society of Denver, as well as a member of The Colorado Outward Bound School.  His tone was matter-of-fact and it was obvious that he was not attempting to impress me.  He was telling me about the life that he had thus far led and how he had become the man that he had turned out to be.


     He told me to never allow myself to lose the illusions of my youth.   To  always live a life filled with heady excitement, that I ought to make my dreams of the ministry a reality and move forward from  there. 


     And as the Colorado evening rose around us: over in the distance we could see the ever deepening Range of the Rocky Mountains beyond, now tinged with the purple and orange from the dying sun, and he said, The reason that you are here with me, Mister Daugs, is that you have more than a modicum of talent as a writer.  I wanted you to know that.  You will, no doubt, live out your other dreams before you return to the art of writing. But there will come a day when that will happen.  I am not a prophet, but I am astute enough to know the inner-workings of a gifted writers mind, and I would appreciate if if you could look me in-the-eye when I tell you this.


     I did.


     And he said:


     I have practiced many trades, had a ringside seat at history, knew know both Roosevelt and Churchill -  before I finally did what I was that 'I truly was meant to do.  My manifest destiny was 'the call to teach.'  One day in the future, you will off somewhere and be thinking of the words of George Bernard Shaw when he wrote: 'You see things; and you say 'why?'  But I dream of things that never were; and say 'Why not?'.  And that will be the day when you become what you were always 'meant' to be, a writer...


     ...And 28 years later, I was...
 

my evening with a man who once had been  called 'A Beautiful Viking God.'


'Down these mean streets a man must go,

who is neither tarnished or afraid.

He is the hero.  He is everything.

He must be a complete man and a common
and yet an unusual man...

He is a lonely man and his pride is that you

will treat him as a proud man or be sorry

that you ever met him...'

Raymond Chandler

A PRUSSIAN GENERAL WAS ONCE QUOTED AS ,SAYING "COURAGE, ABOVE ALL THINGS... 
IS THE FIRST QUALITY OF A HERO." AND ALTHOUGH I DIDN'T KNOW IT AT THE TIME, I was about to meet one.  It was back in December of 1977.  I was in a cocktail bar on Main Street in Houston called Captain Foxhearts' Bad News Bar and so was he.  The place was crowded and I quickly became aware that everyone was furtively staring at a man who was seated at a table: Men were open mouthed and silent.  Women whispering and giggling.  So I turned to have a look for myself and immediately recognized him.  When he spotted me at the bar hunting a seat, he motioned to me and said with a smile: Come on over and sit with me. 


     I had first laid eyes on him in Denver, Colorado back in 1950 when I was 14 years-old sitting in a darkened movie theater and there he was up on the big screen playing opposite Marilyn Monroe and Sam Jaffe in a movie by the name of The Asphalt Jungle, had seen him again in 1958 in another movie called Terror In A Texas Town with Sebastian  Cabot; and had never forgotten him playing the part of General Jack D. Ripper in Doctor Strangelove with Peter Sellers in 1964.  After I had taken a seat in a chair opposite of him and ordered my drink he smiled and said: I can tell you recognized me.  I'm here in Houston on a publicity tour for the new book I've written called 'The Voyage.'  Would you like another drink?  It's on me.


     His name was Sterling Walter Hayden.


     At 61, still lean, bearded, with a tweedy look to his face, he had now also become a writer of note.  He was born in Montclair, New Jersey on the 26th day of March in 1916, at the age of 16 he took a job as a mate on a schooner. At the age of 22 he was awarded his first command.  He eventually became an agent of the OSS (the predecessor of the CIA) during World War Two sailing supplies from Italy to Yugoslavia partisans and then parachuting fascist Croatia and the city of Belgrade, earning himself a Silver Star and a commendation from Yugoslavia's Marshall Tito for bravery under fire. All of which came several years after the 6'-5" young man had gone out to out to Hollywood at the age of 25, became a model and contract player with Paramount Pictures, made a movie with Madelaine Carroll called The Virginian, and became the man the Hollywood tabloids called 'The Most Beautiful Man in Movies' and 'The Beautiful Viking God. He and Madelaine Carroll had fallen in love on The Virginian set and were married in 1942 just before he went off to war.  He left active duty on the day of Christmas Eve in 1945, returned to Hollywood, and divorced Madelaine in 1946.


     In 1947, he then married a classy blond with movie-star looks by the name of Betty Ann de Noon and they eventually had 4 children.  By 1958 that marriage was over too.  He was awarded custody of the children: Christian, Dana, Gretchen, and Matthew because it seemed that Betty Ann had a violent temper and loved to slap the children around.  He made a decison to defy a Court Order and  sailed from  San Francisco to Tahiti on his ship The Wanderer with all 4 of the children aboard, as well as a photographer by the name of Dody Weston Thompson, who recorded on film and in photographs a documentary of life aboard a ship with colorful prints of his children, beautiful Tahitian women, as well as wonderful artifacts along the shore.  All of which was turned into his autobiography in 1963, a book was was aptly named The Wanderer.  By then, he had grown weary of the synthetic Hollywood lifestyle, feeling that he had been on a treadmill, and weary of making movies; so he docked his newly purchased houseboat in Sausalito, California and put the finishing touches on his autobiography.


     We were well into sipping our fourth drink when I asked him what the most memorable day in his  life had been.  Other than the birth of his children he said that it was a winter day in Belgrade, Yugoslavia near the end of 1943 shortly after he had parachuted behind enemy lines. He said that the day had begun when he and 5 partisans blew up a Nazi ammunition's dump at the city's edge and when evening came all 6 of them moved through the city with their guns bristling and eyes of soldiers alert for sudden movement.  While people along the streets stood silent.  A department store had been blown up during the day by German troops, Nazi soldiers had fired upon innocent women and children, 38 citizens were slaughtered, and it was clear that another tragic day lay ahead.  They knew at once that if it took a Thompson sub machine gun, a gelignite in the night, no matter; they would not allow such a day ever to happen again.


     A plan of retaliation was devised overnight by the partisans of Belgrade in the basement of Saint Sava, a Serbian Orthodox Church.  Shortly before dawn on the slate-gray morning that followed, the partisans were hurrying across a field to the edge of a long and winding road. They went through groves of trees, and hid themselves  on a bridge above the road when the saw a convoy of German trucks and marching soldiers headed in their direction with a huge German flag attached to the front of the lead car.  Without a moment's hesitation they began firing at the Germans below.  German soldiers began to run.  Some dived into ditches beside the road.  Others died where they had stood.  Killed before they were able to move.  At first there had been only the snapping of small firearms, and then came the heavier chung-chung-chung of rifles.  The Germans were firing now.  The lead car pulled violently off the road, and smashed into the side of a small building.  Both the driver and the German general who had sat beside him were dead.  Then there was no return fire from down below.  As quickly as the firing had begun, it had now stopped.  The Germans were raising their hands in surrender.  We looked around and knew we were free.  We had saved a city, Hayden said. For the first time in my life I knew that I had done something truly significant.


     It was when we ordered our fifth drink that he returned to talking about the movie business and the shooting of the movie The Godfather in 1972, where he played the part of Captain McClusky a corrupt cop and was shot by Al Pacino in a Bronx restaurant after Pacino had obtained a hidden handgun from the restroom.  He went on to say that Marlon Brando who was playing the title roll of Vito Corleone loved to drink iced-tea between takes.  Hayden and two other actors by the name of Abe Vigota and Al Lettieri had been watching Brando shoot a scene when they came up with the bright idea of spiking Brando's tea with a laxative.  Every time he was about to speak his lines, he pooped his pants, Hayden said with a hearty laugh.  This went on for the majority of the afternoon and into early evening up until Brando was almost too weak to walk and between trips to the bathroom he was farting like crazy.  He realized what we had done so he staggered over to the director, Francis Ford Copla, told Copla what what we had done.  Copla tossed us off the set.  Abe and Al and I then went down the street to a bar, got drunk, and laughed and laughed and laughed.  Brando wasn't the most likable guy in the world and  although his career had been on a downward slide, he was still pretty much of a  primadonna.  It was like we were kids in a candy store and had just heisted all the candy we could eat.


     As he paid for our tab and we walked onto Main Street  as he hailed a cab.  The final thing he said to me was: Just remember that the key to life is not just staying alive.  It is to find something to live for...


     ...By then, Hayden pretty had much disappeared from the Hollywood scene, bought a canal barge in the Netherlands, eventually moving it to Paris, and living on it part of the time as well as spending his time in Wilton, Connecticut and Sausalito, California.  He made an occasional appearance on Tom Snyder's the Tomorrow Show and the Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show talking about his career and his adventures around the world; and would die of prostrate cancer in Sausalito on May 26th in 1986, at the age of 70...


     ...And yet...


     ...I would forever remember a brave man of dignity, humor, and grace who had once bought me 5 drinks back in 1977 in a place called Captain Foxhearts' Bad News Bar...

my slant on life was forever changed on the day I became  an 'invisable man:'


It all began with:


'Yesterday upon a stair,
I met a man who wasn't
there...'
From the poem 'Antigosh'


And ended when:


'I had the blues because I had no shoes
until upon the street I met a man who
had no feet.'
Dennis Watley


Therefore, I must initiate what follows in a kind of historical shorthand:


'OPERATION MINCEMEAT' WAS A SUCCESSFUL DISINFORMATION PLAN...

CONCEIVED BY THE BRITISH DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR WHICH helped to convince the Nazis that The Allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia instead of Sicily, the actual objective. A fellow by the name of Ewin Montagu who happened to be a Naval British Lawyer decided to write a fictional book about this event on weekends when he had a bit more time.  His version of this event became a book by the name 'The Man Who Never Was,'  which was a tale about a fictitious British Officer named Major William Martin whose corpse washed ashore in Spain carrying equally fictitious top-secret documents and personal letters in order to provide the Nazis false information.  The book was eventually made into a movie staring Clifton Webb and Gloria Graham.  What follows, however is not about the movie or book or a tale about Clifton Webb and Gloria Graham.  It is more of a narrative of how I became 'The Man Who Never Was' quite by accident when I happened to drop my wallet on a drug store floor.


     I will begin by saying that I was born back in the day when you could still hear the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner grocery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.  Back then, the taxicabs were all Checkers, with ample room for your legs, and the drivers knew where Denver's Union Station was and always helped you with the luggage.  In that city, there were apartments with three bedrooms and views of the Rocky Mountain Range.  Cars were never double parked.  Shop doors weren't locked in the daytime.  Bus drivers still made change.  All over town, the cops walked the beat and everyone knew their name.  You wore galoshes in the rain. Waitresses called you honey.  You slept with the windows open to the summer night... 


     ...But the time I lost my wallet cities like these had been hammered to dust by time, progress, accident, and greed. I had quite suddenly become an old man 78 years-of-age minus an identity; devoid of having a bank account Visa card, Social Security identification, or a driver's license neatly stuck inside of his wallet and safely hidden in his front pant pocket.  I was informed by my bank that there was longer any money in my account.  It had been breached and  had automatically been closed.  For safety's sake, the bank manager suggested that I open a new account in another bank.  On the basic level, of course, this meant that I was completely out of finances and no longer had a verifiable identity, which meant that I nether had the money or identification in order to accomplish that task. 


      I felt as if a double-decker bus had just run over me.   


     I promptly telephoned the local Social Security office and informed them of my situation and told them of my wallet loss and bank invasion and the suggestion from my former bank that I open a new account in another  facility, which I would be unable to do until they sent me my check.  I was then  put on hold.  As I waited for the voice to return, I was beginning to realize that the proper protocols to resolve my problem would solely be up to me, since I had been waiting for over 20 minutes for them to get back to me. They never did; and it was shortly after that when I began to realize that each day the citizens of our country pass one another in the street and almost never connect, and I was now moving among them without an identity and completely devoid of money. 


     Out on the sidewalks on that Thursday  afternoon plump with spring I watched people moved about, talking with one another, angling through traffic toward a bookstore or a boutique, rushing to pick up children from school, to trade or bargain with each other over a proposed business deal, or just looking up at the sky and thinking about what a wonderful day lay ahead. More than once  I found myself staring up at a signs which read: Chase Bank or The Bank of America, which was the most obvious symbol of any city, with their penthouses snug and distant at the apex.  I had become an individual who was now cut off from the throbbing engine of the city itself; and it was while I stood in line at the Carmichael, California office of the DMV to obtain a new driver's license and senior citizen's ID that I began to experience what I would like to term as: 'The Poor Pitiful Me Syndrome.'  


     I could no longer enter restaurants or shops or movie houses.  And in an important way, this was terribly sad.  The fabled energy of any city is the result of small daily collisions: the push and shove of people on the street, and without it there is a remorseless process which often effects individual lives; it alters the entire way of life. I was now trapped in a  semi-permanent indigence, the steady reminders that there is nothing ennobling about poverty.  These thoughts served as a heartbreaking reminder of others out on the streets without an identity, who daily lived with fruitless encounters and dispiriting defeats and that nothing compared to the life of folks living in a cardboard box on the street.   


     I somehow slowly became aware of the hollow-eyed men in filthy coats imploring me to grant them alms as I passed them on the street; two blocks later, every other woman is beautiful, with dark flirting eyes eating a wonderful lunch at an expensive outside table of a restaurant; at the next corner a religious lunatic pursues you, flailing at you for your sins, preaching your doom in capital letters.  In a little over an hour, I had experienced pity, anger, lust, incomprehension, elation, loss.  


     Having moved to the city of Sacramento 2 years before, I recalled the fact that I had once lived in the City of New York, where all around me lay a Secret City, and now found myself in a city that held secrets, as well.  Houses with lost histories, streets turbulent with emanations of power.  Places so new that the odor of paint stains the air; others so old that they are to a neophyte explorer incredibly new and surprising.  There were, however, other places that only a few knew about; others so commonplace that it is still possible to move around without being appalled by either hollow grandeur or unspeakable degradation. 


     That even here in Sacramento, as you round a corner, a group of hustlers, peddling heroin and crack- cocaine, used books or stolen watches, sees you and they are suddenly tense, poised for action, like an orchestra awaiting a downbeat.  There were were young men  and women on the corner willing to sell their bodies in order to get money in order to live another day.  People without jobs or families or shelter.  This defeated army of mendicants seemed to be made up of the same winos and junkies and the quite literally insane as the City of New York had been.  Sacramento too contained many unwilling recruits that had simply run out of luck.  


     It was my hope that this would not be my unending future.  


      My eventual upswing began as I happened to switch on my television set and  saw the face of a 58 year-old African-American man by the name of Anthony Ray Hinton, a man who had served 30 years on Alabama's Death Row for the murder of 2 fast-food restaurant managers in Birmingham; and after diligent legal work on his behalf by The Equal Justice Initiative had finally gained his freedom.  I doubted that the 'I once was broke and lost my identity for a little while' moan would ever compare to what Mister Hinton had gone through.  That dynamic began to teach me that anything and everything was possible, that I could still go forth in the morning, turn a sudden corner, and discover with astonishment that I was capable of surprise.  On such days, when you surrender to the most romantic emotion of life: You want to live forever...


     ...But there were others out there, men and women with large plastic bags beside them on the sidewalk on El Camino Avenue poking around in a garbage can, eating a piece of uneaten bagel and gathering 4 empty Diet Pepsi cans to stuff into their plastic bag.  Men who glare at you, their yellow-hollowed eyes peering above a mask of thick wiry beards who spit at you and yell:What's choo lookin' at, man?  Ain't you never seen a homeless person before?  As he begins to lift his bag full of rattling cans and running off, talking to himself as he lopes toward another street. And you somehow know that the man with the plastic bag on his shoulder and the split screen in his head wasn't alone, wasn't some municipal oddity.  What is extraordinary is that the general population hasn't risen in outrage.


     Perhaps the cause for this municipal numbness is simple: We have become used to seeing many atrocities on our television sets.  On a day a story breaks about a black man being shot in the back by a white cop, the story has vanished from our from the newspapers and our collective consciousness with an assist from ISIS and who may or may not be announcing that they are running for the presidency of the United States today.  We have little time to mourn the brief event of a black man running away and being slaughtered by a white cop, and could care even less about the guy with the plastic bag on his shoulder and the split screen in his head...


     ...If this attitude continues  and there are only 25 bums on Sacramento's El Camino Avenue now, make way for another 100 in the near future.   If there are 2,000 homeless this year, get ready for 1o,ooo.  Our collective consciousness is dying, we dismiss the street people as something less than human; and nobody seems to care - do we? - the horror is that there is no horror... 


     ...With our American gift for syrupy platitude, nothing will change in the foreseeable future.  The squeegee brigades will continue to appear at major intersections, holding rags to clean auto windshields, grabbing windshield wipers to force compliance; the homeless will rummage through thousands of plastic garbage cans left out for pickup in front of our homes, looking for cans which can be exchanged for cash; and we will continue to complain, enraged by the mere sight of them on our city streets, wishing that they would just forever disappear...


     ...And we should be shamefaced for allowing them to forever remain invisible...

'Television is the first truly democratic
culture - the first culture available to
everybody based upon what people want.
The most terrifying thing is what people
want...'
Clive Barnes


a somewhat short rant:


MOST AMERICANS UNDER THE AGE OF 50...

HAVE NOW SPENT THEIR LIVES ABSORBING television; that is, they've had the structures of drama pounded into them.  Drama is always about imaginary conflict.  So news shows, advertising, and politics are now shaped by these structures.  Nobody will pay any attention to anything as complicated as the part played by Third World Debt or the expanding production of drugs and slaughter along the Texas-Mexico border; it's easier to focus on The Big Bang Theory or The Simpson's, characters born out of escape rather than imagination and avoid the reality that there actually is evil in the world; and as far as the threat of ISIS is concerned, that too is not an immediate reality for most of us to truly care about until it happens here. 


     As a result of living lives in an unreal world, no other people on earth spend so much time whining and talking about their feelings; hundreds of thousands go to shrinks, they buy self-help books by the millions, pour out their intimate confessions to virtual strangers in bars, and our political campaigns are about emotional issues of gridlock and hatred, with the simplicities of adolescence.  Even alleged statesmen cannot start a sentence without criticism of the other side without saying something stupid like the ever-annoying Donald Trump, Our President is not actually an American and I am still on the hunt for his birth-certificate or something equally asinine like eternally stupid  Louie Gohmert who supports the trans-Alaskan pipeline because it would allow the caribou to have more sex. 


     But the point of what follows is not about stupid men. 


      It is getting almost all of our news and information from our television sets.  For example, this is simply not the same experience as reading it in a newspaper.  Reading is active.  Watching television is passive.  The reader must decode little symbols called words, then create images or ideas and make them connect at its most basic level, reading is the act of the imagination.  But the television viewer eliminates that process.  The words are spoken to them by Rachael Maddow or Wolf Blitzer.  There isn't much decoding when watching television, no time to think or ponder before the next set of images or spoken words appears to displace present time.  The reader, being active, works his or her own pace; the viewer, being passive, proceeds at a pace determined by the now.  Except at the highest levels, television never demands that its audience take part in an act of imagination. Reading always does.


     In short, television works on the same imaginative and intellectual level as psychoactive drugs. 


     If prolonged television viewing makes the young passive, it also coincides with the unspoken assumption of most television shows: Life should be easy.  The most complicated events should be summarized on TV new in a minute or less.  Cops always confront murder, chase the criminals, and bring them to justice within an hour.  In commercials, you drink the right beer and you get the girl.  So why should real life be a grind?  Why should any American have to spend years mastering a craft or skill, or work 8 hours a day at an unpleasant job, or endure the compromises and crises of marriage?  Nobody works on television except Cops, doctors, and lawyers.  Love stories are about falling-in-love or breaking up; the long steady growth of marriage - its essential dailiness - is seldom explored, except as comedy.  Life on television is almost always simple: good guys and bad, nice girls and whores, smart guys and dumb.  And if life in the real world isn't that simple, well, hey man, take a snort marijuana or a shot of whiskey, man, be happy, feel good.


    For years, the defenders of televison have argued that the networks are only giving the people what they want.  That might be true.  But so is the Medellin cartel...