mangozeen

64 Days

2012-02-20T16:00:00.000-08:00

Khader Adnan has entered the 64th day of his hunger strike. The 33 year-old has lost a third of his body weight and remains chained to his hospital bed. Israeli authorities insist that the Palestinian spokesman for the Islamic Jihad posed a clear and present threat to their nation. The Israeli courts have yet to charge him with a crime and the judges have refused to end his 'administrative detention'. Islamic Jihad has conducted dozens of attacks in Israel, the West Bank, and Egypt, although Hamas has successfully repressed the organization since 2009. This hunger strike is not about Islamic Jihad. It is a struggle of one man against the oppressors of his people.Khader Adnan.Dying 2 Live.There is no backing down from the truth.

Mike Davis Bass For MC5 RIP

2012-02-20T15:13:00.001-08:00

Rock on Brothers and Sisters.To see him rock please go to the following URL for LOOKING AT YOU by the MC5http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FsvG1wWHIc&feature=relatedThey rock.

KICK OUT THE JAMS by Peter Nolan Smith

2012-02-20T14:20:00.000-08:00

In the fall of 1969 my all-boys parochial school competed with the other Catholic high schools in Boston to sell the most chocolate bars for an arch-diocesan charity. The prize for most sales was a concert by a band from Elektra Records. Most of those schools were located within 128, while ours had access to the affluent South Shore. Rumors abounded that the band would be The Doors. LIGHT MY FIRE had hit # 1 in 1967. Catholic girls loved Morrison. The Lizard King couldn't satisfy all of them, so our 1000-plus strong enrollment scoured the virgin suburbs with boxes of out-dated chocolate bars, dreaming of teenage girls dancing to THE END. Our school had never had a live show in the gym and we beat our nearest rival by over $5000.On the 1st of December our principal ended the morning messages by saying, "I congratulated on the excellent performance in selling the most chocolate bars for the diocese. The cardinal also sends his thanks for the papal recruiting fund. I suppose you're wondering who the band is."I was sitting in English class with thirty-five other seniors. Brother Bede leaned against the blackboard. We started chanting, "Doors, Doors, Doors."The ex-boxer raise a hand to keep us still. My father had seen our teacher fight as a heavyweight at Boston Arena. No one challenged his commands."I'm pleased to announce that Elektra band chosen for the school dance will be the MC5 backed up by a local group, the Odyssey.""MC5?" The school's quarterback pounded on his desk. "Who the fuck are they?"His question stumped everyone in the room."The Motor City 5 are out of Detroit. They opened for Led Zeppelin at the Garden two months ago." Narragansett Beer had hosted its first Tribal Rock Festival to a sell-out crowd of 17,000. "In 1968 the appeared three nights at the Boston Tea Party with the Velvet Underground.""I w-w-wish you w-w-were as good w-w-with English as you are w-w-with rock and roll." Brother Bede had not won that fight in Boston Arena. His stutter was a result of many beatings. "Yes, b-b-brother." I had a stutter too."Who cares about history?" The quarterback glared in my direction, as if I had been the person in charge of deciding which band played at our school. "Are the MC5 any good? I've never heard of them."The majority of the class muttered out their ignorance of the band."Good? They're not playing RAINDROPS KEEP FALLING ON MY HEAD." BJ Thomas' hit was # 1 on the WBZ and most of the other AM stations. Only WBCN-FM played the MC5. I was into rock and roll. My record collection was second to none. I had seen the Turtles, Animals, Shocking Blue, the Remains, and Rocking Ramrods at the Surf Nantasket, the Modern Lovers at Cambridge Commons, the Ultimate Spinach and Beacon Street Union on Boston Commons. My hair ran over the back of my shirt. My mother called me a hippie. "The MC5 are maybe the best live band in America.""Have you ever seen them?" The quarterback had won our school a state championship. He was a god in the eyes of my classmates. His favorite band was the Beatles."No, but I have their live LP. KICK OUT THE JAMS. I can bring it to school tomorrow. We can listen to it in the audio lab during study." I hated the Fab Four."At least they have a record." He wore his hair long like Paul McCartney. His girlfriend was the head cheerleader at our sister school, Our Blessed Virgin High School."And it's better than THE WHITE ALBUM." My girlfriend was cheerleader at the town school. Kyla loved the Beatles and I never told her about my deep dislike for the pop sell-outs. The Beatles had stopped being rock after BEATLES FOR SALE. At least she wasn't into Paul.The quarterback rose from his desk. Brother Bede stepped between us. "Sit down. There'll be no fighting in my class or anywhere else." Brother Bede liked my poetry. He thought it showed promise. He was asst. coach on the football team. The quarterback was his boy. "You have that?""Yes, brother." We shook hands with crunching duel of grips and then took our seats. Neither of us had previous had a bad thought about the other. This escalation of egos was strictly stray testosterones wandering off-course. The quarterback and I nodded a silent agreement to a truce and released our hands. We both rubbed our knuckles on the way back to our desks.During lunch everyone discussed the MC5. Only three other boys had heard of them; my best friend Chuckie Manzi and my two younger cousins."Hippie girls love the MC5. They symbolize revolution. The record opens with the lead singer saying 'motherfucker'." Chuckie listened to the album in my basement. His mother would kill him, if she heard that word in her house. My mother worked during the day. "They have the balls to say 'motherfucker." The quarterback's opinion elevated the MC5 to that of the Kingsmen, who supposedly shouted 'fuck' during LOUIE LOUIE. "They were also the only band to appear at the Chicago Demonstration in 1968 and played for eight hours straight." I learned about the band from the WBCN DJs, who worshipped their non-commercial fervor. "So they're against the war." The quarterback had a brother stationed in Da Nang. His family came from Brockton. It was a city on its knees. The only out for young men was the army or prison. The quarterback was lucky enough to have colleges interested in his arm, but he raised his fist and said, "Bring the troops home."None of us were traitors, but at the end of the school year we were meat for the draft and even high school seniors knew that the Pentagon didn't want to win this war. The next day I brought in the MC5 LP. Our study period was right before lunch. The quarterback and I went up to the audio lab. The librarian lent us headphones. I cued up the first track and turned the volume to 10. John Sinclair introduced the band."Brothers and sisters." The radical from Detroit wanted to hear some revolution and his hoarse voice demanded from the audience at the Grande Ballroom, "Are you ready to testify. I give you a testimonial. The MC5."The feedback guitars and falsetto lead voice caught the quarterback off guard like a safety blitz, but within seconds his head was rocking on his neck and he smiled his approval. Hearing 'motherfucker' on KICK OUT THE JAMS turned his smile into a grin. He pulled off the headphones and said, "They're great, but we have a problem. The brothers will never let them say 'motherfucker' at the concert.""How they going to know about that?" In my minds the brothers listened to folk songs and Georgian chants."Some of them are young. They have contacts with the anti-war movement. We have snitches at school. They're going to find out." The quarterback believed in a good defense and lifted the stylus off the LP. "You never brought this to school.""You want to borrow it?" I rarely lent out records. No one ever gave them back in good condition."You would do that?" The quarterback slipped the record into the cover sleeve with care."We are not the problem." I answered quoting John Sinclair."We are the solution." It was 1969. This was our world.The quarterback instructed his team to squelch any mention of the MC5 and the word motherfucker. His front line were the biggest boys in the school. We reached the Christmas vacation without a breach in our silence. THe quarterback gave back the record on the last day before break."Sorry, but everyone in my town wanted to hear it.""I understand." I resisted checking for scratches and wished him a happy new year. "You too."As soon as he was out of sight, I pulled out the LP. It was untouched.We were the high society.Tickets were going on sale the first day back at school. They cost $2.50 each. I put away $10 for Chuckie, his girlfriend and Kyla. I walked into school in January and headed to the school store. Over a hundred students were lined up for tickets. The Dean of Discipline was asking them about the band."Do they have a hit?" The Dean was fast with his hands."No, brother," answered a nervous sophomore. "Then why are you going?" In his US history class he preached that J Edgar Hoover deserved our respect for fighting godless communism and now suspected suspected something was amiss with the MC5. "They have a new album coming out BACK IN THE USA." Charles Laquidara had mentioned its release on his 10pm shift on WBCN-FM."So they're 'hip'?" The Dean of Discipline kept up with teenage slang to pretend that he wasn't so different from us. The act didn't fool any of us."Yes, brother." Conversations with the Dean was best kept to five words or less. He was a dedicated witch-hunter."I look forward to seeing them." The Dean of Discipline walked away from the queue with his hands in his pockets, but this first round of interrogation was not the last. The Dean was very thorough in his investigation into subversiveness."Keep your mouths shut." I wagged a warning finger at the sophomore. "About what?" "Good answer." Feigning ignorance was an easy strategy to feign before adults. They thought that we were meant to be seen and not heard, but those days ended at our school after last year's strike to abolish the dress code. White shirts and tie were optional and we regarded anyone wearing them as stooges for the old regime.The MC5 show sold out the first day to the amazement of the school principal.The quarterback told him that the student body was charged up about the concert being the first at the school. His hero status convinced the principal that a rock band was no threat to our souls and said that he was looking forward to seeing the group."They're loud.""As long as they don't break the sound barrier, I'll be fine with loud." The quarterback and I felt confident that our deception would skate under the radar, then two nights before the show a disc jockey on WBZ reported on a secret concert by the MC5 at our high school. The second I heard him, I knew this was trouble and I wasn't wrong, for the next morning the principal ended the morning messages by announcing, "It had come to the school's attention that the group scheduled to appear this Saturday night has been involved in an obscenity controversy. School policy strictly bans any curse words by teachers, students, and visitors.""Obviously the principal has never been to football practice." The quarterback quipped from his desk. His coach was renown for his vitriolic outbursts of four-lettered words."Q-q-quiet." Brother Bede's commands were stuttered once and only once. He had earned both our attention and respect over the last four years."Any mention of a bad words mentioned by the band before or during the show will result in my immediate cancellation of the concert. I have contacted the record company and warned them that any incident will incur the full wrath of the arch-diocese of Boston. That is all for today."This heavy-handed suppression of free speech instilled rebellion into our hearts."S-s-slow down, class." Brother Bede sat on the edge of his desk with ON THE ROAD in his hands. We had read A SEPARATE PEACE, CATCHER IN THE RYE, 1984, and BRAVE NEW WORLD under his tutelage. He believed in an open mind. "At least the concert was not cancelled and from what the principal explained to the other brothers, the band only said one bad word on its record. He said nothing about their being revolutionaries."His common sense calmed our young minds and we spread his good news throughout the school. The omission of one word wasn't the end of the world, even though the truth of the matter was that none of us would not be here if our fathers weren't for motherfuckers. Even Jesus had a motherfucker and the word was bantered around the school like a badminton cock at a summer barbecue.The night of the show Chuckie drove us to school. I was wearing a fringed suede jacket and bell-bottom jeans. Kyla was a little Tibetan goddess in her lambskin coat and miniskirt. Snowflakes darted across 128. Chuckie put on WBCN. JJ Jackson was playing PINBALL WIZARD. At Woodstock Abbie Hoffman had seized the mike and denounced the concert was bullshit while John Sinclair was in prison for marijuana. Pete Townsend had driven the Yippie leader with his guitar. Woodstock was about love and peace, not the injustice of the MC5's spokesman languishing in prison for a few joints and tonight was no different.The four of us drank a six-pack of beer in the parking lot. Kyla and I made out in the back seat. The windows fogged with condensation. The heat of our young bodies fogged the windows. Time was lost to passion, but at 8pm Kyla broke our embrace. I caught my breath and refocused on my surroundings. It was 8. I wiped away the condensation on the rear window. The doors to the gym were open."Let's go."As we approached the gym, two hippie girls asked if I had an extra tickets. They were college age. Two more co-eds posed the same question at the door. A pair of freshmen offered to be their dates. The girls did not refuse the request. This was a big show.Inside the deejay was playing popular hits and the gathering crowd danced to Marvin Gaye and Sly. My classmates were costumed in haute Haight-Ashbury. The pungent aroma of marijuana emanated from the bathroom. Three long-haired men in colorful robes exited a minute later. None of them attended Xaverian and they smiled at Kyla with reddened eyes. She clutched my hand. Strange men scared the buxom brunette. I held Kyla close. Her beauty was safe with me.The stage was set up under the basketball net. I recognized the Odyssey from playing at the Surf Nantasket. The quartet looked nervous about performing tonight. They were a cover band. This was a big gig for them. I didn't see any sign of the MC5."Where are they?" the quarterback demanded at the table serving cokes. His girlfriend introduced herself to Kyla. She was as blonde as Peggy Lipton of THE MOD SQUAD. "I heard on WBCN that they were playing an afternoon show in Detroit.""This afternoon?", but Charles Laquidara had told his listeners that the band had been playing an afternoon show in Detroit. They were scheduled to go onstage at 9:30."They're taking a flight to Logan." Driving in a GTO at top speed from Detroit was a six hour trip with police lights in the rearview mirror. I leaned over to the quarterback. He smelled of Brut. It was Joe Namath's cologne. "They'll be here. Just don't tell anyone else. We wouldn't want a riot in here."The Odyssey opened their set with a cover of HEY JOE. I looked at my Timex watch. It was 8:30. The younger students danced to the hits. None of the hippies in the audience paid attention to the group. Some of them looked older than 20. The Dean of Discipline was keeping a close eye on them. Brother Bede had cotton stuffed in his ears. Chuckie and I went outside to finish our beers. The night sky was clear of clouds and the stars showed their power from distant positions in space. A car engine was grinding up the road to the school. A white van slid on black ice into the parking lot. The vehicle accelerated between the rear-ends of our cars and braked before the gym. Five men jumped from the van. It was the MC5. I recognized the lead singer from his Afro. He waved for me to come closer."You go to school here?" His name was Wayne Kramer."Yes, sir." I had never spoken to a famous person. "I'm not a sir, brother. This is Xaverian, right?""Yes." I couldn't bring myself to call him brother. I already had three."Damn, we didn't get lost. Good driving." He slapped the driver on the shoulder. He was Fred Sonic Smith, the guitarist. "Let's get set up. Brother, you want to carry an amp into the gym. The faster we set up, the faster we play for you.""Yes, sir." The sir thing was a hard habit to lose in less than a minute."Cool." He handed Chuckie and me each a large Marshall amp. The Odyssey had finished their set. Chuckie and I hauled the amps to the stage like altar boys carrying Sunday communion to the faithful. The MC5 shook hands walking through the crowd. The hippie girls abandoned the freshmen for the stars of the night. The MC5 were a live band. They performed more than twenty shows a month. The roadies assembled the equipment array within a half hour. The band climbed onto the stage, only to have the principal and Dean of Discipline to confront them. The topic of discussion was no secret to the student body and the murmur of dissent rippled through the audience. The Dean of Discipline shone his grimace of disapproval on us, but Wayne Kramer raised his hand and strode over to the microphone."Brothers and sisters, we're the MC5. You know who we are. You know what we stand for." He turned to the two black-robed brothers. "Your principal had requested that we not use a word during the show. If we don't agree to this condition, we won't be allowed to play and we flew a thousand miles to be with you tonight."Boos rocked the gym."It's just one word. You know the word. We only say it one time. We didn't come here to walk out the door." The lead singer waved for the band to take their places. "We are the MC5 and you are you. One two three."They rocked the building with the MOTOR CITY IS BURNING. Their reputation as a live band was not a myth. The basketball floor bounced with our dancing. Rob Tyner drove the girls crazy with his strut during DOING ALL RIGHT. Mike Davis led the band with a thumping bass and the drummer drove a basic beat into our bones. Kyla sang along to BABY PLEASE DON'T GO. The quarterback and I hugged each other with joy after HIGH SCHOOL. We were seventeen and free. Every song was better than the last and they left us ragged after two hours of solid rock and roll. The set ended with a homage to Chuck Berry and the title track of their new LP, BACK IN THE USA."Thank you, Xaverian." Wayne Kramer shouted into the mike. "Peace, brothers and sisters."The MC5 jumped off the low stage and we chanted out more. We wanted more and stomped the floor to the chant of 'more'. The band emerged from the underneath the bleachers and Wayne Kramer grabbed the mike."We have saved the best for last and we have also kept our promise to the good brothers, but you didn't make any promise," I pointed the microphone into the audience. "Brothers and sisters, It's now time to KICK OUT THE JAMS____"Our voices shouted the word as one.“Motherfucker.”There was no quieting us.The world was on fire and the MC5 set is aflame that night.January 24, 1970.It was only yesterday.

Ebony And Ivory

2012-02-18T13:31:00.001-08:00

Last evening Stan Waits and Ralf Tupay were drinking at the local German beer hall on Fulton Street. The Cuban waitress had long black hair and her divine back was revealed through the horizontal tears in her shirt. We clinked glasses and Ralf said, "I'll never have a girl like that again."

"Maybe not in this city." Younger women mated with their own kind in New York. Men my age were doomed to sleep with old turtles, but this was a big world and I said, "You could have two women like her in Thailand and a different one every evening."

"That's prostitution." Ralf was one of those men who thought that they had never paid for sex. Earlier the 54 year-old had confessed that he had never done drugs. Ralf was a pure soul.

"I like to think of it as young people having fun with older people." I was quoting a top police officer from Bangkok.

"How much would it cost?" Ralf asked with interest.

"$1400 for the flight and then $2000 for a memorable week of wickedness." Worth every baht too.

"You owe it to yourself." Stan Waits had been to Thailand in the 80s. Back then wicked was really wicked, now wicked was only wicked to those who had never been wicked in the past.

"You said you wanted to do drugs and the best thing is to go on a crystal meth binge to two ladyboys. Of course you'll need Cialis to wake up your cock, because meth like coke tends to give you softies."

"I couldn't do that." Ralf was horrified by my suggestion.

"It wouldn't be you doing it. It would be your wicked twin." I sold the idea like a travel agent to Hell.

"And is crystal meth good?"

"No, it's pure evil, but it's the ritual that makes it so interesting." I stayed away from most drugs these days. The chemists constructed them from toxic waste. "This afternoon I read about a white racist who teamed up with a black gang-banger in St. Louis. East St. Louis is almost as evil as North Phillie. some wit called them Ebony and Ivory after that stupid Michael Jackson / Paul McCartney hit from the 70s.

"Nazis meth dealers united with crackheads. Only in St. Louis." Stan had been to the Gateway to the West earlier this year to meet with a window maker. He had stayed in the hotel at night. I couldn't blame him. St. Louis was a ghost town filled with drug zombies.

"They sent out their associates to buy Sudafed in bulk."

"Sudafed?" Ralf knew nothing.

"Over the counter decongestants are the main source for meth in America. Salt and Peppa had about 150 buyers traveling all over Illinois and Missouri buying up cough medicine. 20 to thirty boxes at a time according to the Press. The governor tried to pass a prescription-only status for pseudoephedrine. The drug companies paid their supporters in the state senate to quash the bill."

"So you want me to go to Thailand to do what I could do in St. Louis." Ralf was thinking cheap and heaven on earth didn't come cheap.

"There are no ladyboys in St. Louis. Just Ebony and Ivory and they ain't too good-looking."

The Cuban waitress asked if we wanted another round.

It was my round.

"Yes, please."

She was no ladyboy, but I didn't hold that against her.

She was merely doing her job.Just like two ladyboys in Bangkok.

The Hunger That Speaks Its Name

2012-02-18T11:35:00.000-08:00

Bobby Sands' hunger strike lasted 66 days. Mrs. Thatcher refused to accede to his demands, saying, "Mr. Sands was a convicted criminal. He chose to take his own life. It was a choice that his organisation did not allow to many of its victims."The MP from South Tyrone died at the age of 27. His death was followed by nine others in H-block of the Maze. Kevin Lynch lasted 71 days and Kieran Doherty succumbed to starvation 73 days into his strike. Their sacrifice stirred fire into the IRA's supporters and stiffened resistance to the British occupation of Ulster as well as granted an improvement in the treatment of political prisoners at the Maze and other prisons around the lost provinces of Ireland.Another prisoner has resorted to the same tactic in Palestine, where Khader Adnan has foregone food for 61 days in protest of Israel's , which is used by the occupation forces to detain West Bank Palestinians for six months without charges or trial. Khader Adnan has been receiving glucose, but his doctors have warned that his body is endangered by possible heart failure. He now weighs 40 kilograms according to a report from Al-Jazeera. An appeal for his release has been denied by Israeli authorities, who announced, "Khader Adnan was arrested with an administrative arrest warrant for activities that threaten regional security. This warrant was authorised by a judicial review."A letter smuggled from prison showed Khader's resolve."The Israeli occupation has gone to extremes against our people, especially prisoners. I have been humiliated, beaten, and harassed by interrogators for no reason, and thus I swore to God I would fight the policy of administrative detention to which I and hundreds of my fellow prisoners fell prey. Here I am in a hospital bed surrounded with prison wardens, handcuffed, and my foot tied to the bed. The only thing I can do is offer my soul to God, as I believe righteousness and justice will eventually triumph over tyranny and oppression." Thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank are demonstrating for his release and the Israeli newspaper had demanded that the West Bank spokesman for Islamic Jihad be charged or released for humanitarian reasons. Zionist settlers on the West Bank have beseeched the government to let Mr. Adnan see out his end chained to a bed.His fate will be decided by destiny, but he will not be forgotten, as the crowds on the streets of Palestine cried out, "We are all Khader Adnan."Dying so others can live in freedom.

72 Virgins Versus The Fish Bowl in Pattaya

2012-02-18T09:52:00.000-08:00

72 Houris versus an equal number of Thai masseurs in a Fish Bowl.I know what my choice would be.Then again I am an infidel non-believer

Starving Snowman

2012-02-18T09:42:00.000-08:00

The Swedes have an expression; In spring no one thinks of the snow that fell last year. One Swede might argue that point, for AP reported that police in thenorthern town of Umeaa have rescued a motorist stranded deep snow since December. No one reported the man in his mid-40s as missing and he was in no condition to explain how he came to be stuck in the woods for over two months without food. Police conjectured that the man survived on snow and nothing else. A sleeping bag protected him from the sub-zero temperatures. AP has announced that his current condition is unknown.The New Testament claimed that Jesus went thirty days and thirty nights without substanance. He rejected the offers of Satan and remained true to his calling to be the Messiah.This Swede beat The Son by a month. An Indian swami supposedly lasted years in a state of starvation, but more tragically IRA hunger protestor Bobby Sands went the limit at the Maze Prison in 1981. 66 days on water alone. He died in his cell. A member of Parliament in opposition to Margaret Thatcher.Her heart of stone made him pay the price.Thankfully the Swede was only facing winter and not the Iron Lady.

Screw The 72 Virgins. Give Me Pattaya

2012-02-17T18:02:00.000-08:00

Thai police backtracked the Iranian Bangkok bomber's trail to Pattaya, where the three men spent several nights in the notorious city's Arab quarter partying with several escorts. They played billiards, drank beer, and smoked hookahs in the Balihai bars. According to one of the women her Iranian showed no signs of being on a suicide mission, but this visit to Pattaya revealed a crack in the myth of the 72 virgins as a reward for a suicide bombing.These men wanted their piece of heaven on earth.And Pattaya provided that celestial satisfaction, for in truth the reward of the 72 virgins is a propaganda device by Shin Bet to deflect the purpose of suicide bombers from revenge for Zionist repression to lust-filled death wishes. The Koran or Qur’an condemns suicide. Paradise or 72 virgins is forbidden the suicide. The legend comes from a single passage in a Hadith.“The smallest reward for the people of Paradise is an abode where there are 80,000 servants and 72 wives."Wives not virgins, because sex with a virgin is always a trial.A virgin had no idea what sex is.So the gift of 72 virgins is as much a curse as 72 wives.Of course 72 houris or companions of pure delight are another story in entirety and finding 72 houris in Pattaya is not a challenge for any man living.The city is paradise on earth.And a houris is always a pleasure.

Terror Scampi

2012-02-17T16:30:00.000-08:00

This afternoon the FBI announced that they had arrested a Moroccan man for attempting to attack the Capitol Building with a fake suicide bomb vest presented to the illegal immigrant by undercover G-Men. The FBI associated with his sting operation had presented themselves to the 29 year-old as members of Al-Quada. He had arrived in the USA at age 16 well prior to 9/11.The FBI reported to their media that the public was never in danger.They probably thought the same thing about the hijackers on 9/11.Opps.Police and FBI searched the suspect's house for WMD.They found nothing.The suspect had been married to a Bulgarian woman who denounced him to the authorities after he threatened her with violence.I imagine that her first entreaties to the local police were met with deaf ears.She is now in a hotel room under protective custody."Room service please."

Pregnant Man Kidnapped on Internet

2012-02-17T15:48:00.000-08:00

Maybe I'm crazy, but two days ago I read an article on www.bbcnews.com about a pregnant man in the UK. The photo looked very much like that of a Hawaiian stripper who underwent a sex change operation and had a baby in 2008 as a man. I was going to write about his second miracle of medicine, but today my search for said article on BBC came up with nothing. Not even any ghost URLs on Google. The BBC had erased the entire story from its website and the internet or they were hacked by mischief makers.There will never be a pregnant man.For the simple reason that life begins with the seed of man. The woman is merely the chicken.We were only built for beer bellies.

LiTTLE GTO

2012-02-17T13:31:00.000-08:00

I dream of 1969.
The GTO is red.
A blonde is behind the wheel.
Her skin white.
Untouched by summer.
Spring on a highway heading south
Florida in the distance.
Her hand shifts to fourth.
Her foot presses on the accelerator.
Faster faster.
Go GTO go.
Her name is Dee Dee.
She has too much speed for me
Even in my dreams at the age of 59.Go GTO go.

Tough Israeli Backpackers

2012-02-17T11:28:00.000-08:00

Israeli backpackers were the scourge of the Lonely Planet paths around the world. They argued with shopkeepers in Bali, crammed ten people into a room designed for two, chiseled prices for the cheapest bowl of rice, smoked hash with abandon, and denied any wrongdoing in Palestine. Other travelers avoided them in droves, but they were fearless to a fault having survived extended tours in the Occupied territories and back in the 90s one group of Israelis decided to trek through the mountains of the Karakorum. Within a day tribesmen kidnapped the trekkers at gunpoint and marched them into the terra incognita of the Himalayas. One night a gunman started abusing one of the women. An male Israeli grabbed the AK47 from the tribesman and shot their captors, killing them all along with two of his fellow backpackers.Israeli backpackers were dirty, noisy, and cheap, however in a fight they had hairline triggers. And that is not always a bad thing beyond the land of law and order.

Oh You Roue

2012-02-17T09:23:00.000-08:00

‎

"The only horrible thing in the world is ennui, Dorian. That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness." Lord Henry Wotton says to a young Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde's PORTRAIT OF DORIAN GRAY

FIRST ENCOUNTER by Peter Nolan Smith

2012-02-16T10:21:00.000-08:00

America was in a deep recession during the summer of 1974 and I had returned to Boston after a two-month hitchhiking trip across the USA to discover that banks and corporations weren't hiring long-haired college graduates. I finally found work at the Shaba, an Israeli restaurant on Beacon Hill, as the cook. I had never been to Israel and had never met any Israelis. My knowledge of Middle East cuisine was zero. The young manager, Ari, taught me how to cook falafel, spread hummus and bab-ganoush on a plate, and toasted pita bed. At the end of my training Ali declared that I was head chef. My pay was the minimum wage. I worked sixty hours a week. My take-home pay with overtime was about $130. It was better than nothing.The two waitresses at the Shaba were from Tel Aviv. Ari came from Jerusalem. The three of them ordered me around like a slave, but I didn't mind the bullying from the two girls. They were very cute and I thought I might have a chance with one. Sillva was a skinny redhead with freckles two months out of the army and I sometimes caught her looking at me. She always smiled, as our eyes met for a moment.I was good-looking in a Neanderthal way."Are you doing anything after work?" I asked one night, washing up the dishes. My job included that chore. "I am meeting with friends." Sillva made it sound like none of them were a boyfriend. "I'd invite you, but israelis like hanging out with themselves. It comes from not being able to trust anyone.""Not trust anyone?" I had been a hippie. We believed in peace and love."Israel is surrounded by hostile nations. The Nazis killed Jews and everyone watched. Who should we trust?""I understand." I had dated a Jewish girl in high school. My best friend was a Jew from Long Island. They were nothing like Israelis. I put away the final pot. I was free to go."You do?" She took off her apron. Her hipbones jutted above her jeans. Her skin was darkened by the sun. I imagined her in an army uniform for a second. "Yes, in grammar school I had been beaten by bullies. Everyone watched the show. No one did anything." The three boys were not the SS, but their punches left no marks. "After that I didn't trust too many people either.""Maybe one night, but not tonight."Outside Ari, the other waitress, and Sillva walked toward Charles Street. I was living at home. The last train to Ashmont was at 12. I made it with five minutes to spare. There was no way I would ever get together with Sillva and I resigned myself to being the cook. Life was easy without desire.The next month I labored from 9 in the morning to 11 at night. I never complained about the hours. I needed the money. The three Israelis drank and laughed together in Hebrew. I was an outsider. Sillva and I never had time alone. Ari and the other girl made sure of that.The night Nixon resigned from the White House I was frying falafel in the kitchen and upon hearing the news I ran into the street to join in the celebration. Massachusetts was the only state to vote against Nixon in 1972. Car horns blared throughout the city and I turned around to see the two waitresses standing in the doorway. The manager had the night off."What?""Nixon was a good friend to Israel." Sillva eyed me with suspicion."Every president has been a good friend to Israel." The USA supplied them with arms."Not Eisenhower. He backed Egypt in the seizure of the Sinai Canal." Sillva stepped aside for me to enter the restaurant."Eisenhower was pissed, because the French and English hadn't warned him about the war and this gave the Soviets a free hand in Hungary." I had read about this war in several books. Every author concluded it was a mistake."Who cares about Hungary? They were Nazis." Sillva spat out the accusation without any opening for a rebuttal."Zsa Zsa Gabor is Hungarian. She's no Nazis.""I thought you were different, but you're like everyone else. No one cares about Israel." She was actually close to tears. My attempt to apologize was waved off by her friend."You are what you are. Sorry won't change that.""If you say so." I couldn't see what I had really done wrong, but saying sorry is what you're supposed to say to a crying woman. We didn't speak for the rest of the night. Orders were placed on the counter in silence. I left without a good-bye and the next morning Ari fired me as soon as I walked into the restaurant. "We have a new cook coming from Jerusalem."It was a lie, but I didn't need an explanationEither you were with the Israelis or you were against them. I stopped by the restaurant several times for my last check. The next week the manager said it would be ready later in the day. He was lying, but Sillva said, "Make him his check. He worked for it."As the manager went into the office, I asked Sillva, "I didn't mean to hurt you.""You can not hurt an Israeli. We do not get hurt." "Sorry.""Don't ever say sorry to an Israeli. It's a sign of weakness.""John Wayne said the same thing in THE SEARCHERS." It was my favorite John Ford Movie."Then he must be Israeli too." She turned away, as if she expected me to become a pillar of salt. Ari came back with the check. I cashed it at the bank. I spent the rest of the day at the Sevens on Charles Street. The bar was a dive. None of its patrons cared about Israel. They were there to drink beer and I was too.

Funny Terrorists

2012-02-16T08:31:00.000-08:00

And what if the terrorists got to our cats?

And they should have used this on Bin Laden years ago.

Bombs In Bangkok

2012-02-16T08:19:00.000-08:00

Back in the spring of 1991 I was sitting at the Mae Sai Guest House on the river between Thailand and Burma. Coulds of butterflies floated from flower to flower in the garden and on the opposite bank of the brown stream workers washed red mud from an ancient truck. I was freshly showered after a long day of motorcycling through the rugged mountains straddling the border. The cute waitress served a cold Singha with a smile, then turned her head to the sound of an approaching van. The dusty vehicle stopped in the parking area and seven filthy backpackers exited from the interior. They must have been trekking in the hills. The owner greeted them with a friendly grin, but his mood shifted with what seemed to be a contentious attempt to haggle a better price for the lodgings. The owner shook his finger and said that the guest house was full. The backpackers got back into the van and drove off to another guesthouse down the road. I said nothing, but the owner explained, "Israeli. Want cheap price. Here already cheap. They want four people in one bed. I say no. Israeli always trouble."I shrugged and sucked on my beer. I had seen hundreds of young Israelis on my travels throughout Asia. Most of them had just left the army. Within two weeks their beards and hair grew to biblical lengths and they smoke ganga to achieve a senseless nirvana. Two years of enforcing the occupation in Palestine had broken their minds and they tended to treat people in foreign countries, as if they were Arabs. It wasn't an attractive sight.The next morning I noticed a new sign at the desk of the guest house.NO ISRAELIS.Thailand wasn't my country and I was merely a guest at the small inn. I ordered breakfast and watched the river flow toward the Golden Triangle. That task took up most of the morning.Throughout my travels I have had a few encounters with Israelis. They are happy to be away from their country, but were quick to support the actions of their government in ruling the West Bank and Gaza. They considered all Arabs to be potential terrorists. Their opinion has been backed by bombings of innocent civilians in revenge for Israeli oppression. I only know one way to avoid terrorism.Avoid Israelis and there are none in Sri Racha, where my wife lives with my son, Fenway, but this January the US Embassy warned its citizens about a potential bombing attack on Israeli targets in Thailand such as Koh Samui and Khao Saen Road based on the arrest of an Iranian national after the discovery of explosive devices in a warehouse in Bangkok. The man protested his innocence and Thai tourist authorities questioned the validity of the Shin Bet Intelligence. Tuesday morning several bombs blew up a house off Sukhumvit 71. Four men tried to escape from the ruined house. One woman had already flown to Iran. The above photo shows three of the men and I noticed their footwear.Two of them were wearing sandals.Sneakers are much better for evading pursuit. One man attempted to stop a taxi. The driver refused to give him a ride and the man supposedly threw a grenade at the vehicle. One dropped at his feet and blew off his legs. The police captured his companion at the scene and immigration officials at a Malaysian airport pulled a third man out of the queues.Thai government officials announced on TV that this incident was not the work of internal dark forces, but related to the mounting tensions between Israel and Iran over the development of Teheran's nuclear capabilities. Two other attacks on Israeli diplomats had occurred in Georgia and India earlier in the week, whose modus operandi mirrored the rash of assassination bombings of Key Iranian scientists over the past years.My beautiful friend in Palm Beach wrote to warn me of the danger to US citizens."What do the Iranians have against the Thai?"I responded in a knee-jerk anti-Zionist fashion. "This is bullshit. A bombing campaign promoted by Shin Bet to instill terror so they get a green light to nuke Iran.My beautiful friend in Palm Beach is a little less quick to condemnation."This sounds like Iranians teaming up with Hezbollah. Can't see any Iranian working with or for Shen Bet or any other Israeli group. But, I agree that Israel is the worst kind of aggressor and has been antagonizing the world's Muslims with no thought to the consequences nor are they interested in peaceful accords. There will be more bloodshed and possibly a new war in the region in the near future. This time nukes will be used. Very scary thought."Nuclear war. Just what the Neo-Con Zionists were after in their invasion of Iraq and I called my wife in Sri Racha. Mam said that the bombings had nothing to do with the Thais."Stupid farangs."And the emails to the Bangkok Post showed how panic stricken the western chickens are in Thailand."All iranians, not just them but all people from arab countries diplomats also. They should have their own passport control area at the airport customs checks also. every bag should go through scanners. People through body scanners. Any refusal then arrested and deported. All checks should be made on these people 24 hrs afetr arriving in the country also to see what they say is true, eg hotel staying at etc. A 5th person they are hunting? I would say much more are involved, there is a network here, they should start in Pattaya. As this is where they started from. I am sure they will find many there with no visa's etc."Another added, "I agree, however all Iranian entry into Thailand should be singled out for greater scrutiny. Iranians are large exporters of Drugs and terrorism throughout the world. Now it seems they are importing bombs and terror to Thailand. Possibly they advise the Muslim insurgents of Thailand’s deep south. Thailand should bring the Iranian Ambassador to the carpet and and inform him of Thailand’s anger and also ask for compensation for Thai property damage and injuries sustained by these Iranian Terrorists."The only Iranians who, I have met in Thailand have been clones of their Israeli counterparts.They want to party far from the ever-watchful eyes of their governments.That's not to say that some people don't know how to have fun.AL JAZEERA reported that a Thai police chief saying that, "The target was specific and aimed at Israeli diplomatic staff." Israel's PM warned the world that Iran's offensive would spread worldwide, if not punished for their transgressions.Iran said it wasn't involved in the bombings and blamed the incident on Shin Bet's counter-terrorist squads. "The main goal of the Zionist regime is to conceal its real essence in carrying out terrorist acts particularly assassinating Iran's scientists. We are not accepting, we are denying this and I don't know how they [the Israelis] can assume within a short time of one hour that to say who has done this."I know nothing, but to quote Lao-tzu, the founder of Taoism, "Those that know don't say and those that say don't know."Like I said, "I know nothing."

3Is and a Genie

2012-02-15T16:46:00.000-08:00

An Israeli, an Iranian, and an Irishman are walking in the desert. They discover a brass lantern in the sand. The Israeli rubs it and frees a grateful genie, who explains that he will grant a wish to each of them. The Israeli goes first and demands a wall 100 feet high around all of Biblical Israel with no Muslims. The genji claps his hand and the deed is done. "What about you?" the genie asked the iranian, so says, "I want a wall 200 feet high around the lands of the Muslims and no infidels. The genji claps his hands and the deed is done.The genie turns to the irishman, who says, "Can you fill those walls with whiskey?"We are a sensible people, although an old friend asked after the joke, "Jameson or Bushmills? It matters."Jamesons of course with its pure pot still taste, even though Bushmills is older.

BET ON CRAZY / WHO DONE IT by Peter Nolan Smith

2012-02-15T14:42:00.000-08:00

47th Street was dead on Friday. None of the Hasidim had shown up to work for high holiday of Sukkot. The yidlocks would be out for a week. Gabriel our broker had left us ten big diamonds. I had put them in the window. Gypsies entered every half-hour and asked, “How much for the big stone?”“It ain’t for sale.” I had never sold to a gypsy. They were a WOT or a waste of time. Worse was the possibility that they might rob you. Gippos had a bad reputation for a good reason. They were thieves and I gave them a price. “But the price is 40K.”“$40K for a 6-carat F SI3?” The man was wearing a Italian suit. He was top of the line Roma and had dibs on any score in the Diamond District. “Would you take 20K for it?”“Thanks but no thanks.” The diamond cost me $35,000.“I have the money.” He brandished a roll of hundreds. It was thick enough to be 20K, unless the center was all $1 bills.“Sorry, the price remains 40K. That’s the bottom line gypsy price. No haggling either.” I got 10% of the profit. $500 was half a ticket to Thailand, where my kids lived, but there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in Death Valley of selling this Gippo a toothpick.“Let me speak to your boss.” He waved the money in my face.“So you can waste his time?” I slapped away his hand.“That’s not nice.” He stuck the roll into his jacket.“Hey, that’s depends on how you see it.” I signaled the guard to throw him out.“I’m going, I’m going.” He exited from the exchange. There were other marks on his list. It was Friday and everyone wanted to make money for the weekend.“Good luck.”I sat at my desk and the girls behind the counter asked if i wanted a lobster roll for lunch from the new take-out. Coming from Maine I was eager to try the lunch special. Richie Boy signaled that he was in too, even though lobster was tref or unclean and unfit for consumption according to Jewish tradition, however only one member of our staff was religious. The rest were bacon Jews.Lunch came, we ate, and then discussed the lobster rolls. Cindy thought it was good. She had gone to UMass. Richie Boy was unimpressed. He was nursing a hangover. I had eaten better in Maine, but the Lincolnville Pound was an eight-hour drive from 47nd Street.A hand slapped the window.Lenny.The Hassidic bum was sweating in a tee-shirt. His thinning hair was plastered against his skull. A pudgy hand was twitching for money.“First a gypsy and now Lenny.” Richie Boy had little patience for Lenny. The 53-year-old was a drunken bum. His mouth was a volcano of insults. The fat man called Richie Boy a country-club Jew. Lenny was no Don Rickles, but he made me laugh. I put down my lobster roll and went outside.“Lenny, you’re messing up the window.” His greasy hand imprint was scattered on the glass like prehistoric paintings. “I have to clean it.”“Sorry, Damian.” Lenny was a slob. Filthy tee-shirt and ripped flannel trouser were matched by sneakers shaped like melted cheese. He has been living on the street for more than twenty years and the fat beggar earned more than $200/day. I’ve seen him deposit his daily stash at the bank. Some people said that this lunacy is an act. His eyes told the truth.“No worries.” I liked that he called me ‘Damian’. The name smacked of THE OMEN, the Son of Satan.“You know that the president of Iran said that Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks. He’s stupid, but there are still questions that no one has ever asked about that day. Like how the third building collapsed or how there are no black boxes or how the police found Mohammad Atta’s passport intact or the 15 Saudis. None of them pilots.” Lenny’s rant was punctuated by occasional assaults from his unwashed body.“That’s all old news.” Something was missing.“You want names?”NYPD had installed CCTV on the street. Every words was live. A story like this could lead to dead. Lenny had lived in every homeless shelter on Manhattan. Fear was a stranger and he named names. Current and past. Some people on the street regarded Lenny as a genius. His trajectory revealed a keen intellect dependent on studious reading. “And we bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, because their radio operators were running the war from a supposed safe haven.”1999.“Bill Clinton showed chutzpah that day.”9/11.“You really think a band of fanatics could have executed 9/11. A military operation. Could have been anyone?”“Even the Israelis.” I whispered the word, because any criticism of the Holy Land was off-limits on 47th Street. My pay check was more important than politics. I had four children.“The Chinese were deeply involved in numbers.” Lenny was on the verge of launching into a primal reverie about cardinal numbers. He actually understood Georg Cantor’s set theory. I should have grasped how one-to-one correspondences referred to equality of sets, but I must have slept through that class in high school.“Lenny, I don’t have the time for this.” I had to make a little money. It was Friday. I wanted to buy a box of wine. 3-liters lasted for the weekend.“You got a dollar for the holiday?”I handed him two bills. He wished me luck and called for a blessing on my kids in Thailand. It was Sokkot, a festival to commemorate the wandering the desert. “May you get home soon.”“Thanks.” Seeing my kids was my greatest wish.That and an old motorcycle.I went back inside the diamond exchange hoping to close a deal in the last hours of Friday.Stranger things have happened and stranger things weren’t too much to ask from life, especially with Lenny’s blessing.He was a mitzvah.

AFTERNOON by Tom Poulton

2012-02-15T12:23:00.000-08:00

Now this is a drawing from the 1960s by a great English illustrator.How daring. How very very naughty.Tom Poulton.Now more than ever.

Magic Carpet Ride Over Persia

2012-02-15T12:03:00.000-08:00

In April of 1965 my father came home from work in Boston. His company had offered him a transfer to Iran. The oil-rich country needed skilled communication engineers and my father was one of the best in New England. He sat down my mother and his six children at the kitchen table and proposed that we go overseas for several years.

"It will be a unique experience and the money will be better than here."

"When do we go?" My enthusiasm was sparked by THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM and the Arabian Nights as well as my eternal desire to get the hell out of the suburbs. Iran used to be Persia. The ruler was called the Shah. The religion was Islam. We would be infidels, which was fine by me.

"It'd be in the summer." My father unloosened his tie and looked to my mother.

"What about school?" She had okayed the move to Boston to be closer to her family and have us attended parochial schools.

"There are first-class schools set up for Americans. There are tens of thousands of us there." My father liked to travel. Every other weekend he packed us into the station for a trip to an historical site or mountain or beach.

"What about our friends?" My older brother asked the question which I had been fearing. My other sisters and brothers chorused the same demand.

"You won't remember your friends in five years." I shouted at them. I was the biggest son. My older brother was only older.

"Like you forgot Shane." This was a cruel blow. My older brother knew how to play dirty.

"That's different." Shane and I were best friends. He drowned five years ago in Sebago Lake. We had vowed never to go swimming if we weren't together. I had yet to forgive myself.

"No different. Friends are friends." My older brother liked our hometown. He was going to the best all-boy's parochial high school next year.

"I know." My mother expected the same from me. She wanted me to be a priest. I had yet to tell anyone that I was an atheist. "But we'll have new friends in Iran."

"We have to decide." My father believed in democracy. He had fought in WWII. "All those in favor of going to Iran, raise their right hand."

My father and I were the only two in favor.

"All those opposed."

My mother, brothers, and sisters formed a bloc of five. I looked to my father to veto the outcome, but he put down my mother's arm. She was never going to leave Boston. The change of season was in her blood and my family finished out the 60s on the South Shore.

My first excursion off the North American continent was to London in 1978. My girlfriend was a blonde from Buffalo. Some nights she stayed out late with the photographers. My next-door neighbor was an Iranian. His father had been executed by Savak. Mustaf and I drank beer at a bar in Fulham. His friends educated me to the evils of the Shah. I joined them in demonstrations against his regime without telling my girlfriend. Lisa didn't like Muslims, for their mistreatment of women. Mustaf was a communist. He believed in rights for everyone.

I believed the same, until the Shah was overthrown and the student radicals seized hostages at the US embassy in Teheran.

America was America and I was an American.

"Bomb 'em."

The Pentagon tried to free the hostages and failed in the desert.

Jimmy Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan, who had backdoored an agreement with the mullahs to withhold release of the hostages, so that he could win the presidency.

"We do not deal with terrorists." Old Dutch swore to the country, as his underlings sold arms to the Revolutionary Guards, while supporting Saddam in a desert war.

GW Bush declared Iran to be an Axis of Evil and their president's constant barrage of threat against Israel has racketed the tension of war in the Gulf to a code red danger zone. CNN, NBC, Fox News and all the other right-wing news organization are reporting the build-up of forces to prevent the Iranians from having a nuclear bomb, as if Armageddon was a fait accompli.

"We have built a wide range of options to give the president and we are ready... We are ready today," Vice Admiral Mark Fox said at the headquarters of the 5th Fleet in Manama on Sunday.

"We were ready yesterday." Iran countered on their TV.

And the price of oil soared over the $100/barrel mark enriching Big Oil.

There is no such thing as a free magic carpet ride. although Steppenwolf came close in the late 60s.To hear MAGIC CARPET RIDE please go to this URLhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dFgZy5dRVo&feature=related

Valentine Day ala Thai

2012-02-13T14:48:00.000-08:00

Valentine’s Day has been globalized around the world, although few people know the exact origins of why we send hearts to loved ones. The tradition is mainly attributed to a roman priest Valentine who preform marriages against the wishes of the Roman Emperor. His punishment was execution but not before supposedly addressing a farewell note to his beloved ‘From your Valentine’.Back then priests were not celibate. The Holy Catholic Church makes no mention of this in their treatment of Valentine’s Day. Not that their priests are celibate either. Still the holiday is celebrated around the world and in Thailand it has become the day when young people vow to have sex with their lovers. Thai authorities disapprove of this adaptation of the Valentine rites and officials are posting police near honeymoon hotels to prevent teens from acting on their desires. Contradicting this moral conservatism the Culture Minister has ordered his officers to distribute 10,000 condoms to teens in preparation for their civil disobedience. In truth the boys are praying to be lucky and I know that when I was a teenager girls were thinking in the opposite direction. Most teens will go to eat with their friends and the boys dream about getting the green light as they pay for the meal.Only a few will be so lucky and that’s only because they were lucky before.So Happy Valentine Day youth of the world.I’m celebrating mine with my favorite lover.A bottle of wine.I only wish I was halfway around the world with Fenway's mom.Mam is my real valentine.

BET ON CRAZY / CHINESE FOOD by Peter Nolan Smith

2012-02-13T14:33:00.000-08:00

Last year after Valentine’s Day business on 47th Street got really slow. The rich went on family holidays to St. Barts and Palm Beach. Oil bills taxed New Yorkers to the bone and purchasing a diamond was the last thing on most people’s mind in the dead of winter. Some days no one entered the diamond exchange. At least no one with an honest intention of buying jewelry.

Once we set up the counters and front window, the standard procedure was to plod through the repairs and pick-ups from the setters and polishers. Those tasks usually lasted up to lunch, but not in the last days of February.

By 12am Richie Boy and I were standing around the space heater shooting the shit, discussing our lunch. We ordered Chinese. It was good this time of year. Manny, my boss and Richie Boy’s father, wasn’t happy with our obvious idleness.

“I might as well hired two brooms than you heroes.” Manny hated his help doing nothing.

“There aren’t any customers. What else should we do? Get down on our knees and pray for customers?” Richie Boy’s clientele came from his going out at night. None of them were getting out of bed before noon or out of work until lunch.

“Maybe that would do us some good.” Manny pointed to me. “I got one goy. You must know some prayers for getting money. Who’s the patron saint for money.”

“St. Matthew is the patron saint of money managers. He doesn’t really count.” I had been an altar and a good Catholic in my youth. “Saint Agatha is the patron saint of jewelers. She was martyred for refusing the sexual advances of a Roman. Her body is supposedly incorruptible.”

“Bleech.” The thought of a 2000 year-old virgin corpse disgusted Manny. “But say a little prayer to her. It can’t hurt.”

“I’ve forgotten my prayers.” Some of the nuns learning still stuck with me, but my atheism wasn’t something I mentioned at work.

“Say something. We need money.”

I muttered out several words to St. Agatha in hopes of making a sale, but stopped before saying how much cash I wanted, because lunch had arrived from the Chinese take-out.

“Great, first I have bullshitters and now I have loafers.”

“A man has to eat.” Richie Boy was paying for lunch. “Who ordered General Tso’s chicken?”

“Me.” I loved the succulent meat covered with crunchy batter and the sweet tang of the sauce. None of us ever mentioned the source of the meat until after whoever ordered the General Tso’s chicken had finished their meal. It was just good manners.

“What about me?” Manny asked from his desk. The surface was cluttering with bills, invoices, and folded packets of loose diamonds. He never seemed to make any progress on this pile.

“What you order?” Richie Boy pulled out a plate of dim sum.

“Nothing.” Manny had said earlier that he didn’t want anything.

“Then you get nothing, fat boy.” Richie poked his father’s belly. A good three inches of fat hung over his belt. He liked his food.

“Great.” Manny threw down his pen. “I pay everyone to do nothing and I get to starve.”

“You’re not going to starve. We ordered you Moo Sho Pork.” Richie put Manny’s food on the counter. “Eat here.”

“I’ll eat at my desk.” Manny started pushing his papers aside.

“No you won’t. Last time you did that you ate a diamond with a dumpling.”

“It was only a twenty-pointer.” Manny remembered everything that he had ever done with diamonds. “And I found it two days later.”

“Don’t tell us where. We’re eating.” Richie Boy had a delicate stomach.

Manny stood up and put a paper towel under his collar. His tie was Armani.

Mine was Cerruti. I ate at my desk with a real fork and spoon. Richie was on the phone with his wife. He mumbled out apologies. He had had a late night last evening.

“Were you with my son last night?” Manny was making a small crepe from the pancake accompanying the Moo Shu Pork.

“Only until midnight, then we both went home.” I had left Richie Boy at 11. I had no idea what time he went home.

“You’re a good friend, but a bad liar.” Manny crammed the Moo Shu Pork into his mouth. The sauce dripped on the counter. Pork was tref to most Jews, but Manny, Richie Boy, and everyone from our partners’ firm were bacon Jews. They loved the taste of pork.

“Manny, when you were a kid, did your mother let you eat pork?”

“I’m from Brownsville. We couldn’t afford pork. My mother covered everything in a gravy. I had no idea what we ate. It could have been cat same as that General Tso’s Chicken.”

“Thanks.” I put down my fork.

“What makes you think a Chinaman is going to serve you cat?”

“There are no cats in Chinatown.” Richie Boy shouted from his desk. “We were on Canal Street 20 years and I never saw a single cat and the Italians in Little Italy never let their cats out of the house. Cat makes very good General Tso’s Chicken.”

“If it’s cat, I have to admit cat tastes pretty damn good, but I have a question for you.” I examined a piece of fried chicken without figuring out what part of a chicken it came from. “Why do Jews like Chinese food so much?”

“Because it’s cheap.” Richie Boy never went to Chinese restaurants. He was more into Italian.

“It has nothing to do with the money. Chinese culture and Jewish culture go back thousands of years.” I popped the morsel in my mouth. It tasted like chicken. “They know each other since Adam. Marco Polo found Jews in China. They weren’t their for their health.”

“They probably from one of the lost tribes.” Manny had dropped out of high school at the age of 15. He started working on Canal Street at the age of 16. Chinatown was next door. “My father said we were a lost tribe in America. He was right, but we found China in Brooklyn. When I was a kid, there were Chinese restaurants on every corner and every Sunday the Chinese restaurants were crowded with Jewish families. We never went, because my father was so poor, but sometimes my father would treat us to take-out. We ate on paper plates, but my mother would hide them, so the neighbors wouldn’t know we were so poor. Like she was fooling anyone.”

“So you went, because it was cheap.” Richie Boy wasn’t letting go. Manny liked to save money. He wore the same shirt twice. To prevent his collars from getting dirty, Manny placed a paper towel between his neck and his collar. We called it his ’sweat rag’.

“Sure, it was cheap, but it was also good, plus we ate pork, because eating forbidden foods showed we were Americans. My father never mixed dairy and meat, which the Chinese rarely combine, plus he never ate pork, except at Chinese restaurants. Jake wouldn’t even look at the menu. He’d order #3. Pork Chow Mein. The waiter would say, “#3 and never mention pork. They were respectful that way. Number two, Chinese weren’t goys. At an Italian restaurant there was always a cross on the wall. How can a Jew eat at a restaurant with a Jew nailed to the wall. Feh. But Buddha, he always had a smile and as kids we rubbed his stomach for good luck.”

“You said you didn’t eat at restaurants.” I thought I had caught Manny on this, but he shook his head. “What you think we had telephones back then. Take-out meant you went to the restaurant, ordered, and brought the food home and another thing we weren’t Jews to the Chinese. They thought all white people looked the same, so we were the same as everyone, because they couldn’t care less about anyone as long as you had money.”

“So you never ate in a Chinese restaurant as a kid?” Richie was finished with his dumplings.

“I never said never. We went on Christmas, because they’d be no one there and afterwards we’d go to the movies. Also no one was there too. My old man didn’t like waiting for nothing.” Manny made himself another crepe. He was an expert. “Stop looking at my food. If there’s anything I hate, it’s a schnorrer.”

“Your son is the worst in here.”

“Only because he studied with the best.” Manny bit into the pancake loaded with pork and pointed to the door. Two customers were coming out of the cold. A man and woman. My prayer to St. Agatha had come through.

“Enough talk. Work.”

“You got it.” I put away my food before Richie Boy could get out of their chairs. I was hungry for money and ‘nimmt geld’ or tale money was the first rule of 47th Street. I could eat my lunch later. Chinese food always tastes better with a little money in your pocket. Even cold.

BAD INFLUENCE by Peter Nolan Smith

2012-02-13T08:41:00.000-08:00

Last February the president of a private jet charter service invited me to dinner at the Oyster Bar. We’re old friends, even though his family forced him to quit drugs and drink. Overweight and overdose. Death was knocking on his heart. 2 weeks of cold turkey rehab and Enos was clean for eternity.

“You don’t mind if I bring my girlfriend and her daughter?” Enos liked to compartmentalize his world. I had met his lover once. She was older.

“Why would it bother me?” I was dying for a good plate of oyster followed by a pan-friend lobster stew.

“Just I don’t want to hear anything about a diamond ring.” My boss constantly bugged Enos about not making his girlfriend his wife. Richie Boy was fixated about selling diamonds. He had a lot of expenses.

“You and I go back before I was diamonds.” My cousin Ty Spaulding had introduced us in Hawaii. “The Oyster Bar is about eating fish, oyster, and lobster.”

“Exactly.” Enos was more interested in pussy. He said his girlfriend was great in bed. That was good enough for me. “I’ll see you there a little after 6.”

“I won’t be late.” The Oyster Bar had the best shellfish in New York. The vaulted tile ceiling offered the illusion of timelessness permanence and at 5:50 I descended from the main floor of Grand Central Terminal with an appetite bolstered by memory. I spotted Enos at the entrance.

“Good to see you.” The big man greeted me with toothy exuberance. He was wearing a tailored suit. Business these days was good as long as you dealt the rich.

“It’s been a while.” Maybe two years and Enos didn’t look any heavier than the last time I saw him in Far Rockaway. “How’s your dad?”

“Holding on? What about yours?”

“Passed last November. Don’t say sorry. He had a good life.” My father loved oysters. “He used to eat fried clams from Wollaston Beach and wash them down with a chocolate milk shake. Not even a belch afterwards.”

“I wish I had that stomach.” Enos tapped his bass drum girth.

“Where’s your girls?” Enos had been dating the same woman for over ten years. She had a daughter. I couldn’t remember how old.

“They’ll be coming later.” Enos led me inside the restaurant and we sat at the counter. Tables were for out-of-towners. “Cheryll’s daughter is a vegan. She doesn’t eat fish.”

“No oysters?”

“None.” Enos came from a good Jewish family, but nothing was too tref or unclean for his palate. The ancient waitress approached us with menus. Enos waved them off. “Mind if I order for us?”

“Not at all.” It was his call.

“Clams casino and a glass of Reisling for my friend. I’ll have water.” Enos had stopped drinking and drugs three years ago. It was either cold turkey or a cold grave. He looked better for it.

“I have a question.” The Bangladeshi waiter brought an Austrian Riesling. It tasted of the Danube.

“What?” Enos asked, as if I needed a loan.

“This is a dietary question of religion.” I had sold a big diamond the week before. I had enough money to quit work for a year. April 1 was scheduled to be my last day at the diamond exchange, although Richie Boy thought that I was kidding.

“Meaning a Jewish question.” The waitress placed the clams casino between us.

“Yes.” I had been the sabbath goy for two decades and considered myself a scholar of judaica. “It’s a simple query. Bacon is tref and clams are tref, right?”

“Right.” Enos lipped the delicacy with pleasure.

“So in physics and mathematics two negatives make a positive, right?” I picked up one and popped it in my mouth. The combination was a sin in delight.

“Right.” The first plate of malbecs arrived at the counter.

“So if bacon and shellfish are both tref if you eat them together, does that make them non-tref?”

“According to my calculations, yes. My father would say no.” Enos popped two oysters into his mouth. He might have stopped blow, but he regained an unhealthy appetite for a man approaching 250 at 50 and for good reason. “They’re a mitzvah as long as we eat them before my girlfriend’s daughter arrives. She’s a vegan Nazi.”

“Vegans hate us.” We were omnivores and finished the clams casino, a dozen Malpecs, and a lobster stew before his dates entered the restaurant. I liked Enos’ girlfriend. She was older, but smart and funny. Cheryll also liked Enos, which in many ways was better than loving him.

“This is Naomi.” She introduced her twelve year-old daughter. “She’s an actress in training.”

“Hello.” Acting is the world surrounded by nos. Her skinny daughter might have been small, but her eyes exuded a toughness carved by a thousand refusals. She pointed a finger at my plate “Did you eat dead food?”

“We had a bi-valval feast.” The Malpecs had tasted of a cold Atlantic ocean.

“You’re a bad man.” Her neo-ingenue eyes were trained to seduce casting directors. Her scrawny beauty would blossom into stardom with the right training. At this point her Lolita power could overwhelm the weak. Her succubus eyes disregarded my age. I was simply another old geezer to wrap around her accusing finger.

“You couldn’t believe how bad.” Enos and Cheryll were deep in conversation, happy that I was diverting the little monster. “I was brought up along the coast of Maine. Every summer a whale would get confused in the shoals and end up beached on the sands as the sea retreated on the tide. The fishermen fought off the sharks and cut off the best pieces of whale meat for their families.”

“You ate whale?” Her eyes widened in horror. She was no longer acting.

“And it tasted good. No, actually it was the best thing I’ve eaten in my life.” The story was bullshit, based on a A Whale for the Killing by Farley Mowat, but I had tasted whale meat in Boston’s Haymarket back in 1970 with a hippie friend. We both agreed it was better than beef, but once was enough for a lifetime. I didn’t tell this to the little precious actress.

“You’re worst than bad.”

“Evil?”

“Fucking evil.” Those two words got her mother’s attention off Enos’ cock. Her daughter and I smiled without explanation and I lifted a finger. “I like your conviction. You want me to give your headshot to a casting director?”

I mentioned a name. The woman was the biggest casting director in the city. The skinny waif flip-flopped with delight. Her mother dreamed of Naomi in the movies. Enos would be happy with her asleep in the next room while he was on top of her mother.

“Could you?”

“It’d be my pleasure.”

After all it wasn’t every day you got called evil by a twelve year-old girl.

This is what dreams are made of.

Sugar and spice and everything nice and certainly neither oysters nor whale.

The Cliffs of Moher

2012-02-13T08:07:00.000-08:00

Last Tuesday I boarded a plane at JFK for Orlando, Florida. My two travel companions, AP and his financier Jerry Mumbels, were attending a builders' convention. I was just along for the ride. My seat had been reserved as an after-thought and I was seated by the window in the rear of the plane. The man next to me was about my age. We nodded a weary hello. This flight had been held for a half-hour, so travelers from the UK could make their connection."Where you coming from?""Ireland," he explained how it was cheaper to fly from Dublin to London to JFK than Shannon-JFK direct. "If my wife had been with me, then I would have taken the Shannon flight. Women don't like connections.""I flew from Luxembourg via Paris to JFK. The Heathrow-JFK leg of the flight was $300 more than my roundtrip ticket." I had been planning on flying one-way from Dusseldorf, until Jerry Mumbels offered to purchase my ticket. Sometimes the wealthy have good hearts. "Are you retired in Ireland?" I'm one of the few men my age and class needing to work."No, I'm working at a help center in Cork." He shook his head. "I thought it was going to be an easy job, but we've been dealing with an explosion of suicides.""I read the same in the Guardian." The collapse of the Irish economy had driven a nail of despair into the heart of the nation. "Mostly young men.""Between 16 and 40. We get about twenty calls a day and at least ten suicides a week in Cork and the government refuses to publish the real figures. They are predicting 1000 for this year. A 50% increase over the previous year, but the figures from my office and those around the country paint a very dire picture.""Because they have no hope." Ireland had been on a credit binge. The national debt had led the government to cut aid to all sectors of society except the banks."None at all. Many of the boys I speak with haven't ever had a job and there is no light on the horizon. Russia, Greece, and Spain are suffering similar spikes in suicide and all I hear from the government is more cuts and more cuts.""Damn." I had been in the West of Ireland. The oldest son inherits the farm and the rest of the boys hit the road to Galway or other cities in Ireland or beyond. That safety valve is gone. "I wish you luck over there.""We need luck and not the luck of the Irish."We bad good-bye at the airport in Orlando. The fat Americans seemed untouched by the economic crisis strangling the world economy. Maybe they were better at putting on a brave face. I didn't mention my conversation to AP and Jerry Mumbels. They had their own problems, but once I got to the hotel I went on line to check on the facts as presented by the Irish press.irishcentral.com reported that a suicide prevention group had 'received over 33,000 pleas for help in the past 12 months as the suicide rate rises dramatically.' and that 'police are watching known suicide spots like the quays in Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Waterford.''Corkman Pat Buckley, founder of the charity Let’s Get Together, told the Independent, "The problem with the suicide statistics is that they take about two years to compile and even then they are relatively inaccurate and under-report the true scale of the problem. The problem is now so serious it is terrifying. We’ve battled to raise $7,000 in funds and it was spent on counselling in just a few weeks over November and December.” Minister of State for Health Kathleen Lynch revealed in the Dáil, “The increase is mainly in men in the middle-age group, however, we are also seeing a rise in the number of women dying by suicide, although the numbers are still significantly lower than in men."The State recognizes the seriousness of the problem.The IMF and banks do not care about these people.They think that they are weak links in the mesh of society.Until they too find themselves on the Cliffs of Mohar.The drop tells the truth.

BEAT BY THE OLD AGE TRUCK by Peter Nolan Smith

2012-02-13T07:35:00.000-08:00

 Two years ago New York’s newspapers reported that January had been the warmest January on record and I couldn’t recall a single day since early December with the temperature in the 30s. Late in the month the thermometer hit 45 on a Sunday Morning and I picked up the telephone to call Shannon.

We had been playing basketball together for over twenty-five years. Our first game had been when he was in his teens. The tall photographer lived on the other side of Fort Greene Park. He was always up for a game. Shannon was a native new Yorker.

“You want to shot some ball at deKalb.” The playground was three blocks away from my apartment.

“Sure.” Shannon was willing to meet at 3.

“I’ll warm up before you.”

“You’ll need it, old man.”

“Well, see.” I pulled on my black sneakers and shorts. I thought they made me look thinner. My basketball needed air. I wasn’t putting any in the ball. The depressurized rock stole a better player’s dribble. As I was leaving my landlord’s wife shook her head.

“You have coverage?” She has asked the same question when I had gone sledding with her husband and two kids in Ft. Greene Park.

“No.” My only health plan was wine combined with aspirins. It was a miracle combo, although no protection against a twisted ankle or a popped knee. “I’m just shooting the ball. No games.”

“Right.” Katie’s dismissive comment was for the good of my kids.

“I’ll be careful.” I had to stay healthy at least until I’m 77 when Angie will be 26 and Fenway 21.

Outside the air was cool, not cold. I ran on the sidewalk. My knees creaked with pain. I’ll never be fast again.

Young passers-by checked out my dribbling. That skill was not my forte. Defense was my game. Stopping the scorer was my specialty.

I entered the park and surveyed the courts. The nearest baskets were occupied by young teenagers working a five-on-five. The ones against the fence were dominated by kids, except for the last one, where a lanky 6-4 black teenager practiced set shoots. His release was smooth as Michael Jordan’s bald head and I asked, “Mind if I shoot with you?”

“You want to play one-on-one?” His eyes shined with a competitive urge.

“Let me loose up a little.” Shannon would show up soon and I took a bunch of shots. My aim was off and his ball felt funny in my hands. It was punched to the bursting point. I watched him shoot and tried to hold the ball same as him. My shooting didn’t improve, so I said, “Hit or miss for ball.”

“You want to shoot first?” He bounce-passed the ball to me.

“Thanks.” At my age every advantage was a plus.

My shot from the foul line clanged off the rim.

He buried his shot.

All net.

The next possession he glided to the hoop for a lay-up.

I was already sucking wind. Score 2-0. The following play was a grinding attack in the paint. His shot went off the backboard and in. 3-0. Shannon came into the park and stretched watching us. I scored 3 points in a game to 11.

This kid was good.

He beat Shannon 11-4.

“My name’s Shea like the old Mets baseball park.”

There was nothing old about Shea and I couldn't remember ever being that young.

Our second game repeated the score of the first game.

11-3.

Shea beat me up inside and I fell over twice, blown out of my socks by his move to the hole. If I hadn’t been 57, this would been have a humiliating loss, instead of simply an embarrassing defeat.

Shannon went down 11-6 with a struggle.

Shea was getting tired.

I got a 3-0 lead in the next game. It was all an illusion.

Shea sucked it up and I didn’t score another point. My lungs were red-lining for oxygen and Shea hadn’t even broken a sweat.

The successive games had had a toll on Shea and Shannon had him 9-8.

Two more baskets and he could say in the future that he beat this teenage phenom. Shea didn’t let him get any.

We spoke to Shea. He was a 16 year-old sophomore starting center for the local high school. His team had lost in the play-offs this weekend. He wasn’t happy about his play.

“Truthfully I haven’t played against anyone better than you in all my years.”

“Thanks.” No one ever wanted to tell Shea that. He was that good.

Shannon and I teamed up for a 2-on-2. We lost 15-6. I scored no points. My hang-over was not a factor. My legs were too old for this game. I didn’t deserve to be on the court with Shea or Shannon, but I wasn’t sitting out this season. All I needed to do was practice my outside shot.

I returned to the brownstone with a hobble. Katie looked at me with disgust.

“Some men know when to call it quits.”

“Not me.” Old age is only in my head.

Age is only a number.

My heart is still 15 and my head is much younger.

I wish my body understood that.

Maybe later this summer.

If I’m lucky to last that long.

VOW OF SILENCE by Peter Nolan Smith

2012-02-12T14:50:00.000-08:00

Almost everyone in the world has a phone. Cellular service can connect me with Antarctica or Greenland. I can call Fenway’s mom in Thailand and Mam will pick up the phone. of the USA. Millions of cellular calls and SMS messages crisscross the globe searching billions of destinations. We are so close, yet so far.

This Sunday my phone has yet to ring.

I look out the window of my Fort Greene penthouse. Not a soul is visible in the alleys behind the brownstone. The sky is devoid of airplanes. I could be the Last Man on Earth, but I’m not Mada, Adam’s dead end. AP, my landlord/friend/architect, should be downstairs with loving wife and two adorable children and I opened the door to the stairway.

Yesterday evening AP and I moved a set of headboards from the 3rd Floor to the penthouse landing. They were heavy and luckily neither of us hurt our back.

“Thanks,” AP said, walking down to the 2nd floor.

“No worries.” I ascended the stairs to my apartment.

Those three syllables were my last spoken words.

There was no noise from below.

I called out their names.

No response.

“Hello.”

Still no response and I shut the door.

I was alone and sat by window to more closely examine the windows in the backyard. It was too early for lights and I couldn’t discern any human movement from the neighbors. It was a quiet Sunday. People were out of the streets. This was Brooklyn. Five million people lived in this borough. If the zombies risen from the dead and eaten them along with AP’s familyy, I would have heard the screams. So far today I had heard nothing but the folk songs of Dave Van Ronk, so I resigned myself to a vow of silence rather than the panic of being the last man on Earth, for I had spent many Sundays in a vow of silence.

Today was no different.

People were out there.

They simply weren’t thinking about me.

Back in the late 80s I cut myself off from the rest of the world in my East Village apartment on the weekend. I would spend Sunday morning in bed with a book. A late breakfast was followed by a long afternoon bath with my evening devoted to finishing the book and drinking a bottle of wine. Once or twice during these Sundays I would check the phone to see if there was a dial tone. I was somewhat disappointed to discover that buzz, because it meant I was on my own.

My Sunday vow of silence became a tradition, until I started dating Ms. Carolina. The former beauty queen liked talking and I couldn’t blame her. Ms. Carolina lived in a redneck community below the Mason-Dixon Line. Many of her neighbors entertained very conservative thoughts about the intermingling of races and religions, but I had warned her about my Sunday tradition.

“I don’t speak to anyone.” More like no one spoke to me.

“But you’re an atheist.” Ms. Carolina had been educated at a convent school back in the era when convent schools were convent schools.

“Seneca said, “As often as I have been amongst men, I have returned less a man.”

“Which means?” Ms. Carolina was used to my odd behavior. She thought I was an eccentric.

“After a six days of listening to New York bullshit, I need a day to clear out my head.” I was working as a diamond dealer on West 47th Street. My ear were crammed by the constant blather of my co-workers and clients. New Yorkers, were addicted to the sound of their own voices.

“Don’t worry. I respect your beliefs.” The blonde golfer was a true gentlewoman. “But what about if you just pick up the phone and listen to me. That’s not really breaking your vow of silence.”

“Let me think about this.” One Trappist sect was very strict on silence, but my rest of my life style was a complete rejection of the Cistercian dictates and I told Ms. Carolina, “As long as the phone calls don’t last longer than twenty minutes, I’ll pick up the phone.”

“Thank you.” Her gratitude was sincere.

Ms. Carolina was obliged to attend church every Sunday morning and the service at her husband’s church lasted two and a half hours. Baptists wasted the entire day trying to save their souls. Her congregation was very advanced for the area. They even believed blacks had a soul.

My once-silent phone rang at 11:15.

I was sitting in my bathtub. It was in the kitchen. My apartment was very East Village. I picked up the phone. It was Ms. Carolina. She recounted the preacher’s ranting sermon in accent.

“He believes that all homosexuals are damned to Hell. I told him after the service that I knew that he was going to some Richmond bars where men were dancing with men and gave him a check for $25. It’s going to fix the roof.” Ms. Carolina was originally form New Jersey. Her family was Old Yankee same as half mine. We had more than those genes in common. I knew her husband. He was a gun freak. She kept the conversation low and ended with the wish, “Good luck with your vow of silence.”

Luck wasn’t part of Sunday’s silence.

My ravaging hangover had silted the mouth. I hadn’t really spoken with Ms. Carolina. My function was to listen to a woman’s yearning. I was good at it.

Two weeks passed before Ms. Carolina was able to visit me in New York. We went to a good restaurant. I drank more than I should, but I always did that on Saturday night.

I woke up before her and picked up a book.

Peter Freuchen’s BOOK OF THE ESKIMOS.

A little before 11 Ms. Carolina opened her eyes and said, “Sometimes I think you’re dead when you’re reading. You barely breathe.”

The blonde heiress accepted my shrug as an answer. We had one week a month together. No one got more from me. She deserved more, but I could only give what I had to give.

“You know the Trappist monks never really had a ‘vow of silence’.”

“No.” This was news to me. My mother loved the quietude of their monastery outside of Boston.

“St. Benedict, their founder, had three tenets; stability, fidelity to monastic life, and obedience. Benedict preferred the monks to exist in silence, because speech was disruptive to contemplation.” Ms. Carolina was as good as a nun and only wicked with the lights out.

“He’s got that right.” Like my Irish mother I have the gift of gab, although dampened by my father’s preference for silence. The Maine native had held his piece for years under the blitzkrieg of my mother’s monologues.

“I’ve been to the Trappists monasteries in Belgium. They made good beer. Actually not good, but excellent. “I ever tell you how my ‘vow of silence started?”

“No.” Ms. Carolina was a repository of my vocal history. She had heard many on our road trips through Guatamala, Peru, and the Far West. Listening was one of her better traits.

“Back in 1979 the phone in my 10th Street apartment was shut off.”

“Non-payment.”

“Yes.” I had racked up a $700 bill tracking down the whereabouts of my blonde model from Buffalo. Paris, London, Milano, Hamburg, and points in between. I finally contacted her in Madrid. She told me that she was going out with a dealer in Russian icons. I wouldn’t meet him until Vadim helped finance our after-hours club, The Continental in 1981. My broken heart remained broken all that time. “My service was cut for years. I never could get together the money to pay the bill. The phone gathered dust under the sofa. One Sunday I was watching a BONANZA re-run and a telephone rang. I thought to myself, “That’s funny, I didn’t think they had phones on the Ponderosa.”

“And they didn’t.” Ms. Carolina laughed at the image. She was my best audience.

“No, it was my phone. It rang for a minute and then stopped. I picked up the phone. There was a dial tone. I tried a number.” My parents. I hadn’t spoke to them in ages. “It worked and not only that I could call anywhere in the world.”

“Strange.”

“Even stranger was that the phone would ring the same time every Sunday.”

“During BONANZA.”

“Correct.” I liked the chemistry between Little Joe and Hoss.

“Did you ever pick it up to find out who was calling?”

“No.” I was scared that it wasn’t the blonde model from Buffalo. “The phone stayed in service for two month, then went dead again. After that I never spoke on Sundays. At least until I met you.”

“You’re still quiet on Sundays.”

“I try my best.” I led Ms. Carolina by the hand into my bedroom. There was no need for words in the darkness. Our bodies did the speaking and this Sunday I’ve yet to say a word to a living human being.

It’s 5:48.

I hear AP’s kids downstairs.

There weren't eaten by the zombies.Fenway and Man will be awake soon.Calls on Skype cost nothing.I'm opening a bottle of beer.An Orval.It's a Trappist beer.It pours into my mug.Glug glug glug.No Sunday lasts forever and neither will my silence.

Whitney Houston RIP

2012-02-12T07:23:00.000-08:00

Whitney Houston burst onto the music scene in 1986, scoring # 1 hits with "Saving All My Love for You", "Thinking About You" and "Greatest Love of All," and WHITNEY HOUSTON was that year's top-selling LP. The next year she scored a mega-hit with her single I WANNA LOVE DANCE WITH SOMEBODY. Success after success propelled Whitney into the stratosphere of fame, but the angel fell to earth with her marriage to singer Bobbie Brown. Drugs ravaged her voice throughout the 00s and she fought hard to regain her voice over the past few years. A return to her previous form appeared on the horizon and she traveled to LA to take part in the Grammy Awards.Yesterday she was found dead in her Beverly Hills Hilton hotel room.The cause of her death unknown.Fans and fellow musicians are shocked by her passing. Clive Davis her svengali told a celebrity audience at his Grammy party, "I do have a heavy heart, and I am personally devastated by someone so close to me for so many years." She will be missed by billions.Here's a video of her appearing on the French TV with Serge Gainsbourg in 1986.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMdXi6f5KRgShe was so beautiful in so many ways and that beauty will live in her music.

CHOCOLATE MAN by Peter Nolan Smith

2012-02-10T17:24:00.001-08:00

Maine is the northern most state on the Eastern Seaboard. The distance from its southernmost town to the Potomac River is approximately 500 miles and in the winter of 1863 the 20th Maine Regiment crossed into Virginia to confront the Confederate forces at Fredericksburg in the winter of 1863. They avenged the one-sided slaughter beneath St. Marye's Height with a desperate charge at Gettysburg.“At that crisis, I ordered the bayonet. The word was enough.” The bare steel of Joshua Chamberlain's troops repelled the threat to the Union left and the 20th Maine fought with distinction to war’s bitter end. At Appomattox the mayhem of four bloody years ended with a ceasefire and Colonel Chamberlain and the 20th Maine were present for the formal cessation of hostilities. As the rebel soldiers filed past to surrender their arms and colors, Chamberlain ordered his troops to attention. His memoir THE PASSING OF ARMIES captured the solemn dignity of their submission to a great force.“Gordon, at the head of the marching column, outdoes us in courtesy. He was riding with downcast eyes and more than pensive look; but at this clatter of arms he raises his eyes and instantly catching the significance, wheels his horse with that superb grace of which he is master, drops the point of his sword to his stirrup, gives a command, at which the great Confederate ensign following him is dipped and his decimated brigades, as they reach our right, respond to the ‘carry.’ All the while on our part not a sound of trumpet or drum, not a cheer, nor a word nor motion of man, but awful stillness as if it were the passing of the dead.”After four brutal years of civil war more vengeful Northerners had regarded his chivalry as treason, however to his fellow soldiers Chamberlain's gesture had signaled the resumption of brotherhood and the State of Maine had proudly commemorated the sacrifice of their native sons with bronze statues of facing south. The defeat of the Confederacy had liberated millions of slaves. Few ventured north of the Potomac and by the middle of the 20th Century the black communities of Bangor and Lewiston numbered about 6000 out of a population of one million souls living within the borders of the Pine State. In 1953 Maine was the whitest state in the USA.That spring my father moved his family of five from Boston to Portland. My parents found a newly-built three-bedroom house on McKinley Road. Eastern Heights lay across the harbor. The scent of the sea mixed with the fragrance of fresh bread from the Nissen Bakery near the Back Cove. Work at the phone company was a ten-minute drive down US1. The neighborhood was filled with young couples like themselves. The hordes of children were the result of the Baby Boom and this paradise was called the suburbs. My mother and father wanted this house to be their home.After my father agreed to a closing price my mother asked the real estate agent, if there was a Catholic church nearby. She was Irish-Catholic out of Jamaica Plains. Her family were city people.“Are you Catholic?” The real estate agent made a face. Maine was also a very Protestant state.“Yes.” Our last name was Yankee, but my father had converted to marry my mother. He loved her that much. "You have a problem with that?"“I guess it’s okay, we have a Jew living on the next street.” The man shrugged with indifference. He lived on Bailey's Island in a house over two-hundred years old. Catholics and Jews belonged in this neighborhood and not his."Thanks for telling us." My father's family had come over on the Mayflower. "What about the house?" The agent "We'll let you know."His comments had kiboshed the deal and my father sought out a real estate agency with a French-Canadian name. Canucks were Maine's real minority. The woman selling the house was Mrs. Benoit. The petite brunette lived in the neighborhood and knew the seller. Hearing about the other agent's comments, she loped a thousand dollar off the price."I'll see you in church."We moved into the house that summer and our family paid little attention to our minority status. My older brother, younger sister, and I were blonde-haired and blue-eyed. My mother’s Hibernian beauty and her soaring alto were a welcome additions to cocktail parties in the coastal suburbs north of Portland Mrs. Benoit's son was my age. Shane, my older brother, and I attended a one-room schoolhouse off US 1. Mornings began with the Pledge of Allegiance and a prayer. We were loyal American and the stigma of Catholicism was never mentioned in school, however my mother expressed her loyalty to her Irish blood with green milk on St. Patrick’s Day and the IRA call to arms, “Up the rebels.”Our world was our neighborhood, the school, and church until my father brought home a Zenith black/white TV. My older brother and I were soon obsessed with the Red Sox, HOWDY DOODY, BOZO THE CLOWN, THE YOUNG RASCALS, and THE THREE STOOGES. "Moe, Larry, cheese.” Curly’s cry for the calming cure of cheese was the height of humor for boys under the age of six. “Idiots.” My father hated my comic idols and threatened to throw out the boob tube, however my mother had reserved Sunday evening as family night and every week my father drove into Portland to buy two pizzas, which we ate in the living room watching LASSIE to THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW on CBS. My father ordered my older brother, younger sister, and me to bed at 8 o'clock. One November night my mother let me stay up a little longer to see her favorite program."He should be in bed." My father scrunched his mouth in frustration. His one-on-one time with my mother was governed by our sleeping."He wants to be with me." My mother sensed the childishness slipping from my bones. "You'll spoil him." Life in Maine was hard. "He'll turn out just like you, won't you?" Her hand brushed my crew-cut. Our town was plagued by lice. My father owned electric clippers and shorn our skulls to the bones twice a month."Yes, m'am." I hugged her with all my might. She smelled of fresh bread. The whole house smelled the same. The wind was from the south and Nissan Bakery was working a night shift."Be quiet and don't ask any questions. Your father likes this show."Throughout the opening segment of THE JACK BENNY SHOW my parents laughed at Jack Benny’s stinginess and the man who said, “Yeeee-essss?”, but I came to life when a dark-skinned man appeared on the TV.“A chocolate man.” I sat up straight on the sofa and stared at the TV screen. Jack Benny's servant was darker than a Hershey Bar. His face was round and his hair was slick as a grease stain at the garage on Route 1."He's not a chocolate man." My father's voice spiked with exasperation. He wanted to watch his program without my interruption. "He's Rochester.""Rochester?" My teacher had taught the classroom a song about his kind. "You mean like Little Black Sambo?""No, he's called a negro or colored." My mother informed me."His people came from Africa as slaves. A war was fought to free them.""Like Moses freed the Israelites?" I attended Sunday school after Mass. Our teacher had read us Exodus this morning."Yes, only there Moses was Abraham Lincoln. His face is on the penny.""Why's he speaking different from us?" He sounded funny.A commercial came on the TV and my My mother stood up to clear off the plates and dishes."They have their own way of speaking," she said on her way into the kitchen."You mean like Mrs. Benoit's mother?" Shane's white-haired grandmother spoke German. She had been born in Europe."Sort of like they speak another version of English. You know Amos and Andy?” My father believed in telling us the truth as he saw it."Yes." I had heard them on the radio. “Those are Negroes too.” He went onto say that their roles were stereotypes. We had an RCA record player. Mono. Not stereo.“If blacks are on TV, why don’t they live with us?”“Negroes live in their own communities. It’s better that way. Everyone staying with their own kind.” My mother re-entered the living room. She from Jamaica Plain in Boston. Her neighborhood was Irish. She had met my father in the elevator of the 51 Oliver Street Telephone Building.“You’re Irish and Dad’s English. Shouldn't you have stayed with your own kind?”"That’s different.”“How?” I had no idea about kinds.“Just is?” My mother’s patience was wearing thin. She wanted peace and quiet and most of all golden silence during these Sunday TV sessions and what my mother wanted she got from both my father and us.We ceased to call Rochester ‘Chocolate Man’. Jack Benny was even less funny as before, but at Underwood Primary School our classmates explored the borders of kind. Steve Gordon was a Yid. Shane Benoit was called a ‘Canuck’. My brother and I were Micks. There were Negroes. When Shane Benoit joked in class about “Micks’, Miss Stange, our teacher, lectured the K-2 students on the propriety of race.“I don’t want to hear that word again or any of the other words.” The stout teacher sternly warned that any infraction of her edict would warrant a meeting with our parents, but they were the source of these words.The older men had fought ‘Krauts’ ‘Wops’, and ‘Japs’. The enemy of Korean War veterans was labeled ‘Chinks’. During our Davy Crockett phase we killed thousands of ‘Spics’ surrounding the Alamo. Negroes were spared our bullets, after learning that the Boston Celtics’ Bill Russell was a Negro. His stop of a Syracuse National player’s shot at the end of overtime had stolen the voice of Johnny Most, the Celtics radio announcer.Steven Gordon had been to Boston Garden and informed us that the Jones boys were not brothers. They weren’t black either.“More brown. Like different shades of chocolate. And they don’t like being called ‘negro’ or ‘colored’. They want to called ‘black’.” Steven went on to say that he didn’t want to hear the words ‘kike’ or ‘yid’. Steven was bigger than the rest of us and his father let us watch Red Sox baseball games on their color TV. The entire team was white. Only three teams in the American League had black players; Carlos Paula of the Washington Senators, Ozzie Virgil of the Detroit Tigers, and Elston Howard of the Damned Yankees. That summer the Red Sox finished 3rd in the league. Steven Gordon’s father said that they needed a black player like Satchel Paige.“Who was Satchel Paige?” I asked in total ignorance.“Only the best pitcher of all time. He couldn’t play in the big leagues because of the color clause. No blacks. No way.” Steven’s father was a tall man with a big nose. He liked to fish by the dock at the end of the street. He gave his catch to the poorer families in the town.“He played for the St. Louis Browns in 1948. Subbed for Bob Lemon. He took it soft on the first two batters, but struck out Whitey Platt so bad that he lost touch the grip of his bat and it ended up down near 3rd base.” Mr. Gordon recounted the at-bat, as if he had been there that day “He would have been rookie of the year, except he was 42. Best pitcher ever was.”Chaney, my older brother, and I accepted his judgment. Mr. Gordon knew his baseball. He was first pick in the neighborhood baseball games. His pitch got across the plate with speed. Only Charleen Davis hit him with regularity. The 15 year-old girl would have been the best player in Falmouth Foresides, except girls were banned from Little League.Every time my family went into Portland for dinner, I searched the streets for a black face. There were none downtown or the docks. My Aunt Sally said that Westbrook had a black postman and supposedly migrant workers from Jamaica picked apples in the orchard farms. I never saw any, so I served as a substitute for our neighborhood. The summer sun failed to burn my skin. My tan was darker than that of my brothers and sisters. My mother called me ‘Black Irish’.“After the failure of the Spanish Armada the galleons escaped the English fleet by sailing down the west coast of Ireland.” My mother was an endless source of Irish lore. “Many of the ship wrecked on the rocks. Some of the survivors were Moors. They came from Africa. Maybe a little of them got in your blood.”Labor Day families deserted the Foresides. We spent our long weekend at my grandmother's cabin on Watchic Pond. Shane Benoit went to Sebago Lake. Steven Gordon visited relatives in Boston. When he returned from his vacation, he told us on the first day of school, “There are hundreds of blacks moving into Roxbury.”He made it sound like an invasion.“Why?” I thought blacks avoided the far north, because the climate was too cold.“Because the KKK are hanging them from the trees. Lynchings. Murder. Burning houses.”“Why?”“Because they don’t know their place,” Steven said with sadness. “The Nazis did the same to the Jews. We were lucky. My grandmother had to leave Prague, because she was a commie.”“A commie?” Nothing was worse than being a commie in the 50s, but his grandmother was a sweet old woman. Her apple pie spiced with cinnamon was good enough to be a sin.“Not really, but her name was on a list.” She had told us many times about escaping the Nazis by riding on top of a train. Shane's mother had been 10. She spoke with a funny accent too."So we're all like the blacks?" My grandmother fled Ireland at age 12. Nana told a story about an uncle shot by the Black and Tans. My mother had few good words for the British. "Our families came to America to avoid getting killed.""Except the blacks were brought here as slaves." Steven looked at Shane and me. in chains by men with whips and chains and those men are still living down in the South.""They have to be old." The Civil War was almost a hundred years ago and slaves had been here a long time before that according to Mrs. Stange,"Not them, but their children's children's, but the black kids I met were funny."Steven spellbound us with tales of the city.There was another world beyond Falmouth Foresides and Maine.Every Sunday night I watched THE JACK BENNY SHOW with a hidden agenda. Jack Benny’s character treated his valet more as a friend than a worker and with good reason. Rochester was smarter than the rest of the cast. And funny too. I laughed at his jokes. So did my older brother.A few days short of the Columbus Day holiday my father, mother, and my younger sisters and brother traveled south to Boston. My older brother and I had school. My grandmother took care of us the whole week. On Friday Edith packed our bags and drove us to Union Station below Western Promenade. She parked her brand-new VW Beetle and we walked inside the granite building to buy tickets.Only two."What about you?" I asked in terror. Our days were supervised by parents, teachers, family, and babysitters. This couldn’t be right. Someone had convinced our grandmother to sell us into slavery. This awful person must have paid her $1000. That was the price for a new Volkswagen.“I’m not going to Boston, but don’t worry the porters will take care of you. They knew your grandfather.” Edith had met our grandfather in France during World War I. He had been a doctor and she was a nurse. “He treated them like white people.”"Aren't they white?" Neither my father nor my mother had said anything about traveling without an adult. Surprises were reserved for cheeseburgers at Simpson’s or a trip to Old Orchard Beach."No, they're African-Americans." Edith sat us on a passenger car. There were only three other travelers. The men had heavy faces and smoked unfiltered cigarettes. They looked foreign. My grandmother caught the terror in my eyes. "Are you scared?" She pinned tickets on our jackets along with name tags. "Yes." I hoped that she would change her mind."You'll be fine." She handed us two Italian sandwiches without onions and peppers along with two bottles of Orange Crush. Napkins too plus $5. “Your mother will be waiting at the other end. North Station. Think of this as your first adventure. You know your great-grandfather sailed around the world when he was only 10.”I wouldn’t be 10 for another four years. My older brother was in shock. Edith exited from the train and waved from the covered platform. My older brother and I ran down the aisle to join her, but the train lurched from a dead stop and pulled out of the station. Jumping off was not an option and I led my older brother back to our seats.He clutched my hand as tightly as he had seized my body after our father had thrown us off the dock into Watchic Pond last summer.Thirty years earlier his father had taught him the same ‘sink or swim’ technique. I dog-paddled to the surface, but my older brother panicked and climbed on my back, dragging me underwater My head sunk underwater. My father finally came to our rescue and stood us up. My grandmother, Uncle Russ, Aunt Sally, and my sisters and brother laughed, as we discovered that the water was only shoulder-deep. My mother didn’t think it was so funny.“6 inches is enough to drown in.” Mothers liked their children safe and safe did not include being alone on a train. I turned around to see a giant black man in a uniform approaching our seats. His skin was the color of burnt coal. I tapped my brother on the leg and whispered, “A chocolate man.” “Ain’t no chocolate this dark.” The words rumbled from the forge in his large belly. “I think of myself as the color of black coffee. No milk. No cream. But plenty of sugar. Black as Africa. You ever seen a black man before?”“No, sir,” My brother and I replied with a machine gun stutter.“The times there are a-changin’. White boys callin’ a colored man ‘sir’.” He pocketed our tickets and leaned over to check out the nametags. His over-sized body smelled of hard soap and cold water.“We’re not supposed to call black man ‘colored’.” My answer straightened up the conductor.“And who told you that?” The hands resting on his hips were the size of my head. “My teacher.” African savages tortured white hunters in Tarzan movies. Maine was gone. we were in Africa.“Me and my friends decided that. We don’t like what the KKK is doing.” My older brother broke out of his catatonic sate. “Is that so?” His yellow-rimmed eyes were taking no prisoner.“Yes, sir.” My hands were trembling so hard that my soda was fizzling out of the bottle. The conductor snatched the Coke from my hand and wiped the foam with a snow-white napkin. “Sorry to scare you like that. You the grandsons of Doctor Smith. He was good to my people. I’ll be as good to you. My name is Leroy Brown. But you can call me Leroy.”His smile melted my fear. He had never been a bad man. “Good to meet you, Leroy.” This was the first time that I had ever called an adult by their first name and I offered my hand. “Good to meet you.” His hand swallowed mine. Children were to be seen a little and heard even less. This family rule was not in effect with Leroy and I asked without any hesitation, “Do you know Bill Russell?”“Do I know Bill Russell?” His laugh shivered the windows. “This train’s final destination is North Station. Above the station is the Boston Garden.”“The home of the Boston Celtics.” My brother had found his nerve too.“Champions 1957 and next year too.”“The Jones Boys.” KC and Sam.“You know your basketball. I see Bill Russell from time to time. He’s a warrior on the hardwoods and I’ll tell you why after this stop.” The train pulled into Old Orchard Beach. The amusement park was closed for the winter, which was a long season in Maine. My brother and I stuck straws in our sodas. We unfolded the Italians on our laps. The smell was too enticing to wait for lunch. Leroy joined us half way through the sandwiches.“I like Italian sandwiches. Good eating. Cheap too. Now where was we?” We relived the 1957 Championship season game by game through Saco, Wells, Dover, Exeter, Haverhill, and Woburn, where he added an aside that Woburn was the birthplace of the fried clams.“A trainman fried them up in batter. Woodman’s in Essex claimed the honor, but we railmen know the truth. Your other grandfather was one of us. A trolley man out of Forest Hills.”“You know him?” My Irish grandfather had died two months before my birth. My mother never spoke about him.“He worked the Forest Hill Station as a trolley man. He got my cousin a job as a mechanic. Broke the color line for us.” The passenger car was half-filled and Leroy leaned over to whisper, “The Irish were scared of us. They thought we were after their jobs. Your grandfather was union through and through. As long as you were union he didn’t care what color was your skin.”“Thanks.” I had no memories of him.“It’s a long life and long time and a small world. Anyway Game 7 a few seconds left in regulation. Inbounds pass to Coleman. Russell is on the baseline, but he somehow blocks the shot. Overtime starts with only 7 Hawks left on the court. In the final seconds the score is 127-125. Bob Petit’s shot rolls around the rim and out. Celtics win their first championship.”The crowd listening to Leroy burst into applause. The Red Sox haven’t played in the World Series since 1918. The Bruins exiled to the lower ranks of the NHL. One black man had brought Boston the Big Win.Bill Russell.White-Black. Not important.The train crossed a river.“Only a few more minutes to North Station. Been good ridin’ with you boys. Your grandfathers were good men and they ain’t easy to find. You keep up their good work.”Leroy escorted us off the train. My mother and father were waiting on the platform. So was my grandmother Nana. She thanked Leroy with a tip before hugging us, as if we had crossed the Atlantic. I waved good-bye to Leroy. He waved like we would see him tomorrow. I wished it was true, but tomorrow we weren't going anywhere.Later that night my older brother and I fought over the $5 from Edith. We decided to split it 50/50. It was only right and we went to sleep content in the knowledge that there were no Chocolate Men and blacks weren’t really black.It would take a long time to learn how different, but better late then later for white boys, especially Black Irish boys to discover that we all loved chocolate.

Attica In Trang Prison

2012-02-10T16:41:00.000-08:00

In August 1971 over half the inmates at New York's Attica State Prison took control of the correction facilities in response to a prisoner being subjected to torture in his cell. 33 officers held hostage by the rioters and state officials agreed to most of the demands, however Governor Rockefeller refused to grant amnesty and the removal of the prison warden. State police assaulted the cellblocks with a hail of bullets killing ten hostages and twenty-nine inmates. The main complaints from the prisoners was overcrowding and this problem affects prison everywhere and last week Thai prisoners at the Trang Prison seized control of their dormitories to protest all manners of abuse such as lack of medical treatment, scarcity of clean drinking water, restrictions of mail and contract with families as well as vicious mistreatment of prisoners.The warden retook the prison with attack squads of over 300 wardens, police and volunteers. Riot leaders were sent to other correctional institutions throughout the nation, where conditions are equally grim. The police played down the validity of the complaints by declaring that the ringleaders were drug dealers and that in the future drug traffickers will be exiled to Thailand's Khao Bin max-security prison.Over 70% of Thai prisoners are convicted on drug charges.In the past three years the population has increased from 180,000 to 250,000 in a penal system built to hold a little over a 100,000.I have had Thai friends sentenced to prison and they emerged from their incarceration broken men and women.They were guilty of a crime, but deserving of such a punishment.Only one word comes to mind.ATTICA

Wagging Tails

2012-02-10T07:18:00.000-08:00

"In the whole history of the world there is but one thing that money can not buy... to wit the wag of a dog's tail" josh billings 19th century american humoristPhoto by Stefania Fumo

Oipho IMF

2012-02-10T07:15:00.000-08:00

Western culture hails ancient Greece as the birthplace of its civilization. Throughout the 5th through 4th centuries BC Greece formed the basis of politics, architecture, art scientific thought, literature, and philosophy, but the nation has fallen on hard times due to its inescapable debt crisis for not following the classical advice Mēdèn ágan or nothing in excess.The Euro Economic Zone has offered to save Greece from default with demands of draconian cuts in income and services only to have demonstrators riot in the Athens and trade union strike for 48 hours. Sunday the national parliament will vote on the economic measures. Agreement to the pact will free up 130 billion Euros and enslave the Greek nation to the Eurozone for decades to come. There is another course and that is to tell the IMF, World Bank, and the Germans 'oipho' which in ancient Greek means 'fuck off' and go the way of Iceland. For those bankers without any classical education than the Greeks can tell them 'pidaksu'. Throw in the bird and they'll get the idea, for Tí eúkolon? Tò állōi hypotíthesthai.In other words;"What is easy? To advise another." — ThalesTo walk in their shoes is another story.

Tabula Rasa Abracadabra

2012-02-09T16:43:00.000-08:00

The BBC reported today that Greece will have to accept new conditions for their bailout of 130 Billion Euros and one of which will be austere reductions to the public budget as well as salary reductions in the private sector. The Greek government has been backed into a corner by a debt greater than its annual GDP and a violent reaction by its populace to a long series of cuts to income and services. CBS NEWS recounted on its website that the leaders of Greece have kicked their addiction to debt, but CBS NEWS only wants to paint a pretty picture of a very ugly dog. There is no way for the Greeks to ever pay back this debt. Playing off 160% of your GDP is a Mission Impossible. I know because I was in the same situation with my credit card debt in 2007. I asked for relief. The bank said no. I could them that there was no way I could pay off the debt as long as the interest was so high. The banks did not care about me. They only cared about their profits, so I cut up my credit cards and mailed them back to the banks."I am dead."Banks will not accept this behavior from sovereign nations, but writing off the debt of Greece isn't so easy, because the major economic players in Europe do not want to print the money to pay off the deficit to keep the value of the Euro up to buy oil, cheap goods from China, and pay for the lifestyles of the rich and Greece is only one of many nations on the edge of default.Unemployment in the ailing European countries has risen to 20%.Ireland is experiencing a wave of suicides.People in Portugal are talking about revolution.And the technocrats simply say cut cut cut.But there is another more radical solution.Greece should attack the USA and say that they did it, because they are backing Iran. Nobody in America can find Greece on a world map and the Pentagon will be happy to have another war on its hands with Iraq over and Afghanistan on the wane.A nice tidy $250 billion war would cover Greece's debt to the last drachma.So they lose Athens and the Acropolis.It's not too much to ask to wipe the slate clean.Tabula Rasa came from Aristole in his thesis De Anima or On the Soul, although the great philosopher was more concerned with the human intellect than owing your soul to the devil.I tried to translate this Latin phrase into Greek.It came out tabula rasa.I have one and it feels good, but then I never went to war and the Greek government doesn't have to either.They just have to tell the banks.Fuck off.Iceland went belly up and they haven't sunk into the Atlantic. Of course they don't have MacDonald's anymore, but that's a blessing.Tabula rasa abracadabra.As magic as clicking your heels and finding yourself back in Kansas.ps Tabula Rasa is a hoot 'em up video game for eternally pubescent cyber mass-murderers.

Panic At 39,000 Feet

2012-02-09T15:48:00.000-08:00

Millions of passengers fly on commercial airplanes every day. Before take-off stewards and stewardesses stand in the aisles to give safety instructions. They point out emergency exits and show how to put on life vests accompanied by a video. Most people ignore these demonstrations, but two days ago on a flight from JFK to Orlando I noticed that during the segment about air masks that the actors pretending to be passengers calmly slipping the plastic breathing apparatuses over their faces and thought that if and when the air masks dropped from the ceiling of a 757 I am going into a EXORCIST level panic.There will be no calming me down, for if you keep your head while everyone around you is losing theirs, then you don't understand the seriousness of the situation. FREAK OUT

Technicolor Web Of Sound RIP

2012-02-09T15:28:00.000-08:00

Sadly my favorite internet radio station, Technicolor Web Of Sound has been pulled from the web without an explanation.See this youtube entryhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAWTK1UEZr0Paul is gone.Hopefully he will return from the netherworld to transport us back in time to the era of errors.The Summer of Love.In the meanwhile go to psychedelicjukebox, which I found thanks to fans of the ever-acid TWOS.Old hippies never die, we just move to the country.

Mud Superman

2012-02-06T13:53:00.000-08:00

Back in 1990 I traveled around the world on a circumnavigational ticket from New York to LA to Biak to Bali to Jakarta to Sumatra to Penang. From that old port I rode a train north to Surathani and then continued onto Bangkok and farther north to Chiang Mai. I stayed at the Top North Guest House within the walled city. The month was April and the temperature scorched my breath. The hotel had a swimming pool shaded by trees. I spent most of day wallowing in the shallow end, but once the sun dropped behind Doi Suthep I wandered along narrow sois to ancient temples and beer bars. A farang bookshop at the Eastern Gate rented dirt bikes.125 cc MTXs and 250cc ATXs. $10 OR $12 a day.The owner was wizened Australian yellowed by malaria. His wife glowered in the kitchen. She clearly didn't trust westerners. "He's an American. Not an Israeli." Jerry wagged his finger at his diminutive wife. It was tinted by nicotine. He wasn't planning on leaving a good-looking corpse."All farangs, all men, kee." She wrapped herself in a wraith of wrath."Kee?" My Thai consisted of 'sawatdee kap' and 'eek nung kuat beer' plus 'unai hong nam'. Hello and more beer were almost as important as 'where's the bathroom'. My stomach was having a hard time adjusting to real Thai food."Kee means shit. The Thais are the French of the Orient. They think they are better than anyone else and in some ways they aren't wrong. This country was never conquered by the west." He smiled at his wife. He was also proud of Thailand and whipped out a map of the tribal hills on the Burma border."Mai Hong Son was one of the last market towns on the Silk Route." The broken nail of his index finger tapped a location to the west of Chiang Mai. "You could fly there for $15, but the road there can take up to ten hours. Every corner is a turn into the 15th century. The Thais are trying to pave it, but the steep hills eat up the road like land sharks.""I'll take the 250." I had a Triumph Tiger 650cc back in New York. Power was good for speed in getting someplace and getting out of it too. I gave him my passport as a guarantee and motored around town like Marlon Brando in THE WILD ONES. The bike had short pipes. They glowed red from the exhaust. The backfires spat a blue flames. I returned to the hotel and went to sleep early. Ten hours could become fifteen easy.The next morning I woke at dawn and ate a quick breakfast. After checking my bag with the hotel, I strapped a small daypack to the bike and pointed the front wheel north. The Trans-Asia Highway was unpocked by potholes and I turned off the smooth road at the turn-off for Mai Hong Song. Construction crews and their heavy trucks were grinding up the two-lander without mercy. I weaved through the swatches of destructed pavement in 2nd gear, climbing into the mountains scarred by the slash and burn agriculture of the hill tribes. I felt the centuries disappearing with every mile. The unpaved section of the road were ankle deep in a red dust. I wore a scarf over my mouth and nose. Sunglasses protected my eyes, but my denim jacket and jeans were caked with powdery dirt. Opium trucks rolled past police barriers without inspection and I promised myself a taste in Mae Hong Song. It would go good with beer.A little after noon I topped a crest of a pass. The sun was burning the slopes to a cinder and the temperature was roiling a touch under 100F. I spotted three buses stopped at the bottom of the valley and slowed down to a stop. Their passengers were sheltering under the shades of withered trees. The drivers stood at the edge of a 25 meter stretch of dried mud in the middle of which was a 10 meter bog. The Thais looked at me and I looked at them. One of the drivers waved his hands, as if to say getting across this mire was impossible. He hadn't seen Evel Knevel leap Caesar's fountains in Las Vegas and I u-turned the bike spraying a rat tail of parched earth.200 meters back up the road I reversed direction and braked the 250cc ATX to a stop. The Thai men at the side of the road rose to their feet. The women stopped eating and stared at the farang on the bike. Their children ran closer to the edge of the soggy road. They knew that there was going to be a show. In their minds all farangs were crazy.The drivers stood in the way. I waved them away and revved the motor. As long as front tire stayed up and the rear wheel spun at top speed, then I could hydroplane across the fetid mud. I torgued out the bike at 7000 rpms and dropped it to 1000. I was ready and tore down the pitted road, hitting the dried goop at 90 kph. My only protection was my courage. I wasn't wearing a helmet. I made it halfway across before the front tire gave way to gravity and the bike stops on a coin. I was thrusted off the seat like Superman and landed in the goo face first. I rose from the muck and Thais laughed like maddened hyenas. I was covered from head to foot like a troglydite. The men helped me hauled the stalled bike from the bog and I promised to buy them beer in Mai Hong Sing.It was only another five hours away and the mud saved me from the sun.The bus rolled into Mae Hong Song around midnight.I had beer waiting.And my clothes were clean.Those were the days.

2012-02-06T09:41:00.000-08:00

Thailand is renowned as the Land of Smiles. Every year the country is host to millions of tourists. These visitors for the most part return home extolling the hospitality of the Thais. Few foreigners understand that the Thais have as many smiles as the Eskimos have names for snow and the nation has been showing its best face during the current political crisis. Red shirt supporters grinning in defiance of the government. Threat of private armies. Coup or ga boht.

Nothing is what it seems and it's all thanks to the Thai library of smiles.

Take a look and see;

- yim tak tai: The polite smile, used for strangers

- feun yim: The “I-am-forced-to-smile-even-I-do-not-want-to” smile

- yim cheuat cheuan: The winner’s smile over a rival

- yim tang nam dtah: The truly happy smile

- yim tak tan: The “sorry-you-are-wrong-again” smile

- yim sao: The smile masking sadness or unhappiness

- yim mee lay-nai: The evil smile

- yim cheun chom: The admiring smile

- yim yor: The arrogant smile

- yim mai ork: The forced smile

- yim yair-yair: The smile to apologize and take the heat out of an awkward, embarrassing situation

- yim hairng: The nervous, apologetic smile

- yim soo: The “it-cannot-get-any-worse-therefore-I-better-smile” smile

Read more: http://absolutelybangkok.com/the-thai-smile/#ixzz0fAgo08X4

I'm particularly impressed by the last offering 'yim yor' or the smile that says I'm right and you're wrong.

Anyone who has lived in Thailand has seen that smile too many times to count, but worse probably didn't recognize the accusatory grin either because they thought that they were so right that they could never be wrong.

I've never done that, because I'm never right.

The End Of An Era

2012-02-06T05:22:00.000-08:00

Five Super Bowls appearances resulted in three championships for the New England Patriots during the Belichek-Brady era and both those post-season losses came at the hands of Giants quarterbacked by Eli Manning. Each of those games were decided in the last minute by spectacular passes against a weary secondary and the result in 2012 mirrored the defeat of 2008, but in reality this year's match-up was determined very early in the 1st quarter by an intentional grounding call against Tom Brady, which resulted in a safety and a punt to the Giants.Of course my sister calling during the game was the kiss of death."Are you watching the game?" I was watching the game with a long-time friend in the West Village. He was a Packers fan. We had $20 on the game. it was a friendly bet."No." She was working on test papers for her college students."I can't talk. It's bad luck to speak with someone not watching the game." The damage was done and then I looked over my shoulder at Bill's Italian wife. The director from Pescara was busy writing a film proposal. Two negatives made a positive and I relaxed a little with the Patriots leading by a point into half-time.Madonna's greatest show on Earth was a disaster. She opened the set with VOGUE, her smash hit from the last century. Her dance routine reminded me of an aging quarterback running from a blood-thristy linebacker. She was slow. Faster than me, but I wasn't on stage before a billion people. She kept her promise not to have a costume malfunction such as the one in which Janet Jackson displayed her nipple to Justin Timberlake. The thought of seeing her 40 long flapper sent shivers down my spine, but when play resumed, I wallowed in a quiet calm with a Brady score. It wasn't enough and the clock ticked away with the ball in the Giants possession.I bit off three fingernails and gnawed them smooth, as the Blue scored a TD with 56 seconds to go.Damn the safety, damn my sister, damn VOGUE.I couldn't get it out of my head.That old witch had ear-wormed me and maybe the Patriots too.A Hail Mary pass into the end zone resulted in nothing.Game over.The Giants win.I can't remember the score, but I rode home to Brooklyn on the A train listening to recaps of the Superbowl. I really didn't hear them , because my ears were ringing with VOGUE.The curse of Madonna.The bitch.Time to put on some MC5.To hear the instrumental version of the MC5's HIGH SCHOOL please go to the following URLhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6XV2OblHvo

GO PATRIOTS

2012-02-05T09:37:00.000-08:00

In 2008 I watched the New England Patriots play the New York Giants in Superbowl XLII from halfway around the world in Pattaya. My team had coasted to a 19-0 record and were looking to close out a perfect season. Destiny was thwarted by a late drive in which the Giants QB miraculously connected with his receiver to propel them into history 17-14. I drowned my sorrow in beer.Four years later the two teams are meeting in Superbowl IXL.I left Pattaya two weeks ago for New York via Luxembourg and London. Everyone in this city is rooting for the Giants, even Jets fans.But not me.I remain true to my roots. It's GO PATRIOTS from start to finish. And I can always drown myself in beer no matter what.

BETTING THE OTHER WAY / Bet On Crazy by Peter Nolan Smith

2012-02-05T09:19:00.000-08:00

 Betting on the Superbowl has been an American tradition since the first game in 1967. Betting was another part of that tradition and for two weeks before the Big Game the diamond dealers and jewelers had been wagering bets on pools, the point spread, the over-under, which teams scores first, and the MVP. Some claimed to have a system, but Richie Boy and I bet the Superbowl according to the Manny Principle, which was that his father, Manny, had never won a bet on the NFL’s final game.

1990s championship game posed the 49ers against the Broncos in New Orleans. All week Richie Boy’s older brother, Googs, Domingo, and I had been badgering the diamond dealer for his pick and on Friday afternoon we intensified the pressure.

“Who you like?” Richie Boy liked to get things out in the open.

“Anytime I tell you, I lose.” Manny told us on Friday.

“But if you lose, we win.” Googs had won $1000 betting on the 49ers 19 1/2 point advantage over the Chargers.

“And I didn’t see a penny from any of you gonifs.” The sixty year-old Brownsville native wasn’t superstitious, but this losing streak was a long-running joke amongst his friends and family. “You’re invited to watch the game at my apartment. There’ll be food, booze, and a big TV, but you want to make a bet, use your head not mine.”

Manny sat at his desk and didn’t speak to us for the rest of the day. Richie made two sales on diamonds memoed from the Randolph firm across the aisle. Domingo and I spent the afternoon schlepping orders from the polishers to the setters to the polishers again and back to the store.

At closing we locked the goods in the safe and Manny paid our salaries. We got paid in $100 bills. Normally we were out the door a second later, but not tonight.

“C’mon, Dad, give us a break.” Richie Boy was pleading on bended knees, which wasn’t easy since he had popped both ACLs in Jackson Hole the previous winter.

“What break?” Manny leaned back in his chair.

“You know.”

We weren’t the only ones waiting for his prediction. Mr. Randolph had his hearing aid turned up to 10. The Jamaican guard was eavesdropping at the counter and we all turned our heads to a knock on the door.

A tall man was standing outside. It was Uncle Seymour. The guard unlocked the door. Manny took one look at his lanky brother and said angrily, “You don’t come to see me here all year and now you show up like a long-lost shoe.”

“Don’t have a cow.” Seymour was a die-hard gambler. “I was only passing by.”

“Passing by, my brother, the ex-cop, passing by on the way back from the track.”

“Ain’t no racing this time of year.” The ex-cop loved the horses and donated a smaller share of his pension to OTB. Seymour turned to Richie Boy. “He’s not telling us, is he?”

“No.” Richie Boy shook his head. “The old bastard thinks he’ll win, if he doesn’t tell us.”

“Win?” Seymour laughed as only an older brother can laugh at his younger brother.

“What?” Manny was hot. “You think I can’t win on this bet?”

“Manny, I love you, but you haven’t won a Superbowl bet since the Jets lost to the Colts.”

“That’s not Manny’s fault.” I had to defend my boss on this point. Maybe he’d give me his bet and I could double up on the $500 in my pocket.

“Ass-kisser.” Googs called them as he saw them.

“No, Manny was fucked by a fixed game.”

“They don’t fix the Superbowl.” Seymour’s statement was more a question than a challenge.

“No, four years ago I’m sitting at a hotel in Paris. I run into Bubba Smith of the Baltimore Colts who’s promoting POLICE ACADEMY and I ask him after a few drinks, “How you lose that game to the Jets?” At first I thought he would take off my head, instead he whispered, “They got to the quarterbacks.”

“Quarterbacks?” Seymour remembered his name.

“Both of them.” The bookies had threatened to kill their families. Manny’s streak was intact according to my reckoning.

“They fixed the quarterback?” Manny had won a G on that bet.

“Why you think Joe Namath was so confident. He knew the fix was in.”

“It was only one game.”

“What about 1979? All the smart money went on Pittsburgh to cover the 3.5 spread, then the bookies stretched it to 4.5. You might remember the game but Dallas trailed 35-17 with 7 minutes left, but somehow come back to score 2 TDs and beat the spread, fucking everyone who bet the Steelers.”

“I lost that bet too.” Manny pounded his desk. He hated the bookies.

“I won.” I knew Manny thanks to his brother working with me at Hurrah, a punk disco on West 62nd Street and had bet my salary on Seymour’s recommendation of the Manny Principle.

“Dad, you’re gonna lose. Nothing you do can stop you losing the Superbowl.” Googs was in debt to his car dealer. “I win and I’m good for the winter. Think of your kids. Me and Richie.”

Manny eyed us all. Domingo and I were almost family. “No.”

“Dad,” Richie Boy spoke with a soft tone that he used it to close deals. “How much you gonna bet. $500? $1000. You tell us your choice and we’ll make good your loss.”

“A real hero.” Manny waggled his head in defiance. “You want me to lose.”

“I don’t want you to lose, but you’re going to lose.” Richie held up 10 C-notes. “You lose every year. Not on everything. Just the Superbowl. We’ll make good for you.”

“You want me to bet. I lose the bet and then you pay me the money.”

“Simple. You come out ahead.”

“What makes you so sure that I won’t win this year.”

“Manny?” Richie Boy, Googs, and Seymour shrugged sympathetically in unison.

“I can’t win with you guys. I bet the Broncos.” He threw his hands in the air and stood up to get his coat.

“You bet the Broncos?” Seymour demanded incredulously, since the 49ers had lost their two regular season games by only 5 total points. “You know something we don’t know.”

“Only that John Elway is going to win a Super Bowl.” Manny pointed a finger at his son. “Okay big shot, just remember what you said, because this year I’m winning big.”

“Right.” Richie Boy and I nodded to each other and left to place our bets on the 49ers.

That Sunday we went to Manny’s apartment in Grammercy Park. He had a spread from Little Italy on the table. The couch was big enough to take Googs, Seymour, Richie Boy, his wife from Buffalo, and his two high school friends; Werthel and RD.

“You watch. Denver’s gonna win.” Manny poured us wine.

“Better not.” Googs had everything riding on San Francisco.

“I can’t wait to hear your tears.”

Of course there was no weeping or gnashing of teeth. The 49ers blew out Denver.

“Thanks, Manny.” We were richer men for ignoring his advice.

Richie Boy paid his father $1000 for his loss and we drank the rest of the wine toasting Manny, but the diamond dealer was in too good a mood for my tastes and when we went out onto the balcony for some air, I asked, “Why you in such a good mood?”

“Because I bet the 49ers.” He checked to make sure no one was listening to this news.

“But you told us that you bet the Broncos?”

“And you believe everything someone tells you?” Manny liked answering a question with a question. “Don’t believe nothing and don’t tell anyone this either.”

“Why you tell me?”

“Because no matter if I tell you not to, I know you’ll tell your friend Richie that I bet on the 49ers and I want to see his face on Monday.”

“But you took $1000 from him?”

“No, he gave it to me.” Manny looked over his shoulder and smiled, “Everyone’s much happier thinking I have a curse. Why spoil their good time?”

I felt bad about saying nothing to Richie Boy about his father’s bet that day, because he was so happy, but Monday would be a different story and I wanted to see his face too. Like I said I was almost family.

The Harp - London

2012-02-05T06:42:00.000-08:00

Brock Dundee led the way to the Harp."Last year it was voted the best pub in England Harp," the Scot announced with proprietarily pride, as we walked through Covent Garden purpose."Does that mean the beer is warm and the food bad?" Back in the 70s the East Village Social Club had a sign out front stating 'Bad food and warm beer." It was my favorite after-hour hang-out. No one went there."The beer will be delicious and who goes to a pub for food?" Brock pointed straight up Chandros Street to a narrow public house. "The owner opens up the three windows in the warm weather.""Not a chance of that today." The temperature in London was hovering around 0 Fahrenheit. The grey clouds were low with the weight of snow and I wore three layers of clothing."Depends on what you think is warm." Brock came from the Highlands, where mothers bathed their babes in ice water in preparation for the Scottish summers."This is nothing." I came from Maine. "Back in the 50s we used to jump from the second story of our house into deep drifts of snow. Winter lasted from November to April and the Kancamagus Highway crossing the White Mountains rarely opened before May.""You can talk all you want, but I went to an English boarding school. Unheated dormitories. No heat. One blanket. Too little food. And let's not forget the punishments." Brock's education explained the famed stiff upper lip of the British. Prisoners never wanted to show weakness to their warders. "Okay, you win." I gave up magnanimously, since my funds were low and Brock was footing this venture, plus THE HARP was blazed atop the pub in green. "Is this pub Irish?""Does the Pope shit in the woods?" Brock opened the door and we entered beer paradise. The Harp was a throwback to the 50s. There was no TVs showing football replays and no music. This pub was for drinking beer. The girl behind the bar smiled a welcome and I allowed Brock to order the beers. "This is a copper bar." Brock indicated to the left. "So I see." Several groups of men were trapped in talk. They had the look of the 'filth'. One of them caught my gaze. We nodded to each other. I could past for a cop in any country thanks to the Irish in me."Cheers." Brock handed me a Harveys. It was a real beer and the second tasted as good as the first and the third was even better, so I had a fourth. I don't remember what I had as a fifth, but it went well with the wild game sausage and chips.The Harp proved there still is an England, especially if the pub is Irish.The Harp pub is located in Covent Garden, close to Charing Cross rail and tube stations and just round the corner from Trafalgar Square. Their address is 47 Chandos Place, Covent Garden, London, WC2N4HS. They can be reached by phone at 020-7836-0291.

George Washington In London

2012-02-05T05:12:00.000-08:00

Last week I was waiting for Brock Dundee in Trafalgar Square in London. Tourists were mounting the four lions at the foot of Lord Nelson's Column for photos and art lovers were queuing before the National Gallery to view the Leonardo Da Vinci exhibition, while busy Londoners strode across the square for various rendezvouses in the capitol. Brock Showed up on time and I asked him, if he wanted to see the exhibition."Queue up with tourists?" He shook with revulsion. "Better I take you to the best pub in London. It's right around the corner.""Sounds good to me." It was already past noon and we walked toward St. Martin in the Fields. A familiar personage posed in bronze on a thick plinth. "I had forgotten George Washington was here." The statue had been donated by the people of Virginia."Supposedly the soil underneath the statue had been imported from the USA." Brock had lived in New York for a number of years. He had almost married the most beautiful girl in the city. "What for?" The Scot had even written a play for her. It had something to do with a revolt on a Caribbean island. She left him for Hollywood. We didn't talk about those days."The Father Of Your Nation once said he would never step foot on British soil again.""Washington had never been to England." I had minored in American History at university. "You're forgetting that America was British soil before the Revolution." Brock hooked his arm with mine. "Let's get us some beer.""In honor of George." I headed east with a parting nod. "He was a man who never lied." Brock was an historian too."Just like my father." My old man came from the same stock, only we hailed from Maine.There were no statues in London honoring anyone from the Pine Tree State..I know, because I googled it.

Ben Gazzara RIP

2012-02-05T04:16:00.000-08:00

The actor Ben Gazarra passed away last week. He starred in TV and movies for over sixty years, but I will always remember him from his staggering honest role as a luckless LA strip club owner. The 1976 John Cassavetes film opens with Cosmo Vitelli paying off a gambling debt to a loanshark at a outdoor coffee.Vitelli - Late?Loanshark - Right on time.No dialogue after that exchange. Only Gazarra's hard stares of exasperation.It doesn't get much better than that and to view this opening scene please go to the following URLhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtFyKbrqgvIIt's a masterpiece.

RICHARD IS A FORKHEAD by Peter Nolan Smith

2012-02-04T08:43:00.000-08:00

In July of 1977 I discovered my roommate stealing my tip money and moved to a SRO room on West 10th Street and 5th Avenue. A bed and four walls cost $44/week. I was making about $200 at the restaurant and after work I took the subway from 60th and Lex to the Astor Place. Usually too wound up to fall asleep I killed several hours drinking a dive bars before returning to my miserable room. I wasn’t making any friends.

One wintry December I was stumbling back from a derelict bar at the corner of the Bowery and Houston. My fingers and feet were freezing from the cold. The wind slashed through my thin clothing. The thump of a bass emanated from within a white stucco building. It was rock and roll at its purest, but could have been choir music for all I cared.

I wanted warm and pushed open the heavy wooden door.

The leather-jacketed bass player had friends on stage; a guitarist, drummer, drums, and a lead singer with stringy long hair poised over the audience like a praying mantis in a similar leather jacket. The crowd was pushed back and forth, as if the floor was pulsating in time to the 3-chord progression.

Recognizing the song as the 45rpm version of THE Rivieras’ CALIFORNIA SUN, I stepped forward to join the frenzy. A huge hand blocked my way.

“$5.” The monstrous bouncer wore a yellow construction.

“Who are they?” I handed over the fiver.

“The Ramones.”

And I like that I became a regular at CBGBs. My attire switched from hippie to punk overnight. Every night I hung out at the bar. None of the stars of the scene were my friend.

My only talent was playing pinball.

My scores were #1 on the SLASH and KISS machines.

If I kicked the KISS machine right, it would gush quarters like a slot machine. Several punks thought I was Tommy the Pinball Wizard’s illegitimate brother, but I was a nobody, which was okay, since being a punk was all about not caring about being nobody.

Not everyone felt the same way. Blondie was getting noticed by the record companies. So were the Talking Heads and every girl in the place loved Richard. His best song was our anthem.

A lot of punkers were jealous of Richard, especially the younger boys seeking to escape obscurity. A teenage runaway formed the power-pop trio and he wrote a song RICHARD IS A FORKHEAD in reference to the Richard’s spiked hair. The girls loved his hair, but their love wasn’t strong enough to levitate his group onto the charts.

I admired Richard for his failure throughout 1978 and 1979, even though it was obvious that he wanted a greater success from his young life than sleeping with college girls.

I stopped going to CBGBs after breaking up with my hillbilly girlfriend. My new love was a blonde model. We lasted 9 months. Her last sentence was telling.

“You might want to spend the rest of your life playing pinball, but I want more.”

Lisa deserted me for a Russian icon smuggler. He had money. I had a pocket of quarter to play pinball and a small apartment in the East Village. It was no contest.

A year later in 1981 I moved to Paris to work for a French magazine’s nightclub.One night a New Wave girl band played at our club. The leader singer had a crooked nose, bedraggled hair, but once she hit the stage, she emanated a savaged beauty meant for a dark room. Her lanky body encircled the mike stand like a boa crushing its prey. In some ways she was a female version of Richard.

After the show we spoke about New York. Her husband played for Richard’s band. Claudia laughed about RICHARD IS A FORKHEAD. We ate at an African restaurant in Les Halles. At dawn she said, “I have to go to Lille.”

“Like Cinderella.”

“I don’t think Cinderella went to Lille.”

“I guess not.” The fairy tale never said where Cinderella lived.

Claudia kissed me on the cheek and got into the band’s van. No glass slipper marked her departure. I didn’t date any princesses.

Only French girls.

One of them was a tousled-hair singer who had lived in New York during 1976. Lizzie said that I had once refused her entrance to an after-hours club on 14th Street. I remembered frog-marching a crazy French girl onto the sidewalk. She didn’t hold the forceful eviction against me.

“I was fighting with my boyfriend.” She told me about a spike-haired singer in the East Village, while we were in bed later that evening.

“Richard.” It was the first time I was ever jealous of him.

“You are jealous.” She laughed easy. I liked her for that.

“Don’t be silly. Richard and I were not boyfriend and girlfriend.” She lit a cigarette. The tobacco turned her kisses into ashtrays. Her skin smelled of unfiltered Camels. Lizzie loved her smoke.

“And what about us?” I wasn’t all that much into kissing with Lizzie.

“We are just friends. Richard helped me with my book. Patti Smith too.” Lizzie was famous in Paris. She appeared with her Fender Jazzmaster guitar on TV. I kept our affair a secret. We lasted until a Christmas vacation on the Isle of Wight.

We said good-bye on Boxing Day. She went off to Africa and I remained in Paris for another two years before returning to the USA to write screenplays for porno films in North Hollywood. Within a month the quasi-mafia producer fired me for being too intellectual. This accomplishment would have made Lizzie proud.

Back in New York I rode motorcycles and worked at the Milk Bar. Richard came to the door. I had never spoken to him before, but he said, “I think we have a mutual friend.”

“Who?” I knew exactly who.

“I saw Lizzie in Paris. She says hello.” Richard was friendlier than I had imagined and I bought him a drink. After the second he said, “Lizzie told me about you naming me Forkhead.”

“That wasn’t me.” The distinction belonged to lead guitarist of the Ghosts.

“I know, but it’s a better story that way.” Richard no longer sported spikes. “By the way she called you ‘suedehead’, which is funny coming from someone with a hair like a crow’s nest.”

“More a bird’s nest.” My hair lay like a thick rug on my head. I never just a comb.

“Depends on your perspective.” Richard was taller than me. He tipped the bartender $5. She smiled at him in recognition of his legend. Punk would be punk without him.

“I’ll see you around.”

We lived in the East VillageIt wasn’t often, but occasionally I’d run into him on the street. He invited me to his poetry readings at the St. Mark’s Church. Someone said that he edited several alternative magazines. I submitted short stories to all of them. He never mentioned them afterwards. I didn’t blame him. My typing, grammar, and spelling were atrocious.

I went away to France in 1989. Lizzie was going out with an art dealer. She and I played squash in Les Halles. She beat me mercilessly, despite wheezing after every shot. I spoke about Richard during a break.

“Richard is so funny. I think he was jealous of you.”

“Jealous for what?”

“For you being with me.”

“You told him about that?” Our affair was still a secret on my end.

“Maybe, it isn’t important anymore.”

“No.” I had been in love several times in the interim. None of them a success.

“Then let’s not worry about the past.” Lizzie served the ball against the wall for an ace. She won every game. We went to dinner in the Marais and I said, “Loser pays.”

“It wasn’t much of a game.”

“Not considering that I was once the 17th-ranked tennis player in the USA.”

“You were?”

“Yes, my friend lied to his father about my ranking.”

“So you weren’t the 17th-ranked player in America?”

“Do I look like I could have ever been the 17th ranked tennis player in America.” I said it so she wouldn’t believe me and added, “I let you win fair and square.”

“I’m not sure.”

“Up to you.”

We said good-bye in Les Halles. Neither of us suggested a nightcap. We had become just friends.

And so was with Richard, but whoever had seen Lizzie last would tell the other about the latest news.

In the 90s I started taking around-the-world trips.

Richard was fascinated by my tales of opium dens on the Burmese border. I thought about writing a down-and-out travel book. I wrote several chapters and gave them to a literary agent. He hated my typing and I went back to selling diamonds on 47th Street.

It was a 9-6 job. I wore a suit and tie. The money was good. I went out at night, but not late.

One night at a party on St. Marks I spotted richard with Claudia. I hadn’t seen her since Paris. Richard was busy with the guests. He kept looking at Claudia.

“Are you two a thing?”

“Richard’s no one’s thing. You have a girlfriend?”

“No, I had a Spanish girlfriend, but I thew her out for being unfaithful. My next-door neighbor loved her and she curse me.”

“Curse you?”

“A Santeria curse and I haven’t had sex since then.”

“Really.”

“100%.” There was no other explanation for my celibacy.

“Maybe I can help you change that.” She asked me to walk to my place. She spent the night. Her husband was taking care of their son. She had to leave before dawn.

“Like Cinderella.” I joked with a towel around my waist.

“You’re certainly no Prince Charming.”

Claudia walked down the hallway to the stairs. Mrs. Adorno opened the door. The old bruja had witnessed more than a few women come and go in and out of my life. Her one good eye squinted in my direction. She said something in Spanish, then mumbled, “Sex not love. Siempre.”

“Not always.” I said, but I wanted more from a woman than sex and tried to be romantic with Claudia. We went to the movies, made love, took holidays, and hiked with her son. I wasn’t prepared for her saying after two months. “This isn’t working out.”

“What isn’t?” I felt dumb, because we saw each other several times a week. The sex was good.

“You and me. I want something more from a relationship than this and someone wants to give it to me. Richard.”

“Richard?” I had no chance against a rock god.

“Yes, he called to say he really wanted to be with me. I have to give it a chance.”

“I understand.”

Mrs. Adorno’s curse was stronger than both of us.

I gave her my blessing and started drinking on my own. It wouldn’t take off the curse, but stopped my thinking of Claudia. Of course Richard wasn’t forever and one winter evening Claudia phoned to say it was over.

“Can i come over?”

“The answer is yes, but I’m leaving for Thailand within a week.”

“All you men are alike. You leave when the going gets tough.”

She hung up before I could defend myself.

Six months later travels took six months and I returned to work the Christmas season on West 47th Street. I bumped into Richard at an art opening. Neither of us spoke about Claudia, but he said, “We should play tennis sometime.”

“Tennis?”

“Lizzie said you were good at squash. You must be able to play tennis. I belong to the club over on the East River. We can play whenever you want.”

“It’s wintertime.” I hadn’t been on a tennis court since 1975.

“The cold scare you?” This was a challenge.

“Not in the least.” I was from Maine. We had two seasons. Winter and preparing for winter. “Name the day.”

“Tomorrow is supposed to be sunny in the high 40s.”

“Sounds good.”

“Say noon.”

“Noon it is.”

I stopped drinking the cheap wine. Showing up sober was the only advantage I could gain by an early departure. I went to sleep dreaming about overhead lobs.

Not only Richard regarded with match as important.

I only wished I knew was the prize.

I called in sick in the morning. My boss let us have ‘drunk days’.

The temperature warmed up by noon to almost 50. Richard was waiting by the riverside court. He had brought an extra racket.

“Your choice.”

I selected the one more tightly strung without knowing if that was better or not. I was no Arthur Ashe and proved it throughout the next hour. I lost set after set, until it was match point.

“You don’t play often, do you?” Richard smashed an ace to my left.

“Not for years.”

“Lizzie told me you were once the 17th-ranked tennis player in America.”

“That was a joke. I was once down in the South of France and my friend told his father that I was the 17th-ranked tennis player two years previous. I said it wasn’t true, but his father thought I was being humble and scheduled an exhibition at the local tennis club. I was presented to the town’s mayor and the club president. My friend whispered that they expected me to play the provincial champion.”

“And did you?”

“No way. I said that I was under contract and couldn’t play anywhere without signed agreements. A little later his father found out the truth. He didn’t think it was funny at first, but everyone else did. I felt the same way as him. You always do when you’re the joke.”

“Now, I feel the same way. I really thought you a good player.” This was not about Claudia, but Lizzie.

“Maybe I am. Maybe I was taking it easy on you.” I knew the truth.

“What about another match?” He wanted to know it too.

“Sorry, I’m under contract.” I handed back the racket and walked away from the court with a smile on my lips.

After that day Richard and I didn’t see each other for several years. I was either working or away in Asia writing novels no one wanted to publish. At least my typing was getting better. Finally I left the States to live in Thailand. I had a baby with my wife. Maybe it was mine. I didn’t ask too many questions.

In April 2004 I returned to New York. My Israeli subleasee had squealed to my landlord in hopes of getting my apartment. An eviction notice was issued in both our names. I threw her out on the street.

Mrs. Adorno said nothing this time. My landlord paid $8000 to insure I left the flat. I didn’t want to stay in New York anymore. I was 50 and it was a tough city for the old. The day before my flight to Bangkok, I spotted Richard walking on 1st Avenue.

He smiled upon seeing me, then frowned, “I got bad news. Lizzie died this week. She was buried in the South of France. Her ashes floated out to sea with the flowers.”

“Did you go?”

“No, I only heard about it after the fact.” He shuffled several folders of manuscripts between hands. “That leaves only you and me.”

We had nothing else in common and the words died out like a fire left unwatched. I told him I was leaving the city for good.

“No one leaves the city for good.” He had been living there for over 30 years.

“I am.”

“No, you’ll be back, if only to prove you’re the 17th ranked tennis player.”

“Yeah, there’s always that. See you around Forkhead.”

“You too, Suedehead.”

I waved good-bye. We would see each other another time, because none of us were leaving New York forever. Not even our ghosts, for the dead lived forever in the past in those stuck in the present.

The # Of Us

2012-02-04T08:10:00.000-08:00

Two days ago I flew west from Paris. The Airbus A 380 is the biggest passenger aircraft in the commercial fleets. When I asked the Air France stewardess about the seating, she replied, "546 passengers and a crew of 34.""Merci." I thanked her in French. More than 200 million people speak that language out of a population of 7 billion and I took out my cellphone to calculate the percentage seven billion people were on this massive plane. It was a long flight and I had already watched all the movies.The figure came out to be .000000081428571%.580 was the same number of townspeople living in Isleboro, Maine, but this number is only .0000000058% of the total number of people who have lived since 50,000BC. This demographic number comes from a study by the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, which I read on BBCNEWS.Arthur C Clarke in 2001: A Space Odyssey wrote back in 1968, "Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living."We are numerous. By the way the total number of people who have lived has been calculated to 107,602,707,791.Thankfully only 580 of them were on that A380.Another fifty and the behemoth would have never left the Earth.

The # Of Me

2012-02-04T04:51:00.000-08:00

This morning I googled a friend's name. Nine of him lived in the USA, although the number dropped to one once I typed in his middle edition. I'm not so scarce. There are over 66,000 Peter Smiths in the USA. They live in every state of the union. They work at most professions. I know none.Once I entered in my middle name, I became unique on goggle except for another Peter Nolan-Smith in Canada and he uses an hyphen, so I am one out of 66,000.1/66000 = 1 / 66 000 = 1.51515152 × 10-5That's 10 to the 5th power.Some maps are 1/66000.Same as me.The one and only of my kind.But isn't everyone.ps the photo is Keira Knightley from BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM.She's one of a kind too.Just like everyone in the world, past, present, and future.

Wendell Berry Quote On Food

2012-02-03T11:53:00.000-08:00

I once brought a head of broccoli to the counter of a supermarket outside of Poughkeepsie.The young cashier regarded it with an alien's disgust for earth."What is it?""Broccoli." It's one of the few words that is the same around the world."I've never seen it before." She was probably 17."Have you been working here long?" I thought maybe she was a trainee."A year." The teenager smirked like I couldn't tell she was not a rookie."Oh." I realized in that time no shopper had ever bought broccoli in that supermarket and put the head down thinking it might have been there for years.America, you are what you don't eat.

Addi Luxembourg

2012-02-03T11:41:00.000-08:00

Most of my departures are without good-byes. Family and friends have offered to accompany me to airports and train stations. I have told them not to bother. My reason has nothing to do with sad farewells, but an old love for the title of the film NOBODY WAVED GOODBYE, even though I never saw the movie.This year I left Bangkok, Dussefdorf, Koln, and London alone. No good-byes. No tears. No sorrow.A day ago Madame l'Ambassador's driver accompanied me to Aeroport Luxembourg. Francois didn't understand why I had to go two hours ahead of time. I explained about my fear of missing flights. It has happened twice and I've never counted the times that I've arrived late at a train station. "Pas de problem." Francois might not have understood my phobia, but he was Madame l'Ambassador's driver and I was the unofficial writer in residence. My wish was my command. Arriving at the aeroport I understood his quixotic opinion. The Grand Duchy is a small country and the airport terminal was correspondingly tiny. The queue before the check-in counter consisted of me. Francois smiled with pleasure. He had delivered me to the airport in time. I walked him outside to the Jaguar and before he got into the car, he waved good-bye."Come back soon."It was a good thing to here and I shouted back. "I will." Maybe I should make this good-bye thing a habit.It feels good.

Safe And Sound

2012-02-03T11:24:00.000-08:00

Seven months ago I left my apartment in Fort Greene for Thailand and an extended stay in Europe as the unofficial writer in residence in Luxembourg. Yesterday morning I departed from the Grand Duchy aeroport and arrived at JFK in the late afternoon. For once my bag was the first off the gigantic A380 and I cleared passport control and customs within minutes to catch the air shuttle to Howard Beach and the A train onward to Fort Greene.I trudged to South Oxford Street with my heavy bag strapped over my shoulder. The neighborhood looked the same and I approached the brownstone with key in hand. It didn't work and I rang the buzzer. My landlord opened the door with a smile and a hug. AP's happiness had very little to do with my owing several months' rent. He was a good friend long before he became my landlord. "Have you lost weight?" I asked dropping my bag on the polished wooden floor."I don't think so.""Really?" I didn't think so either, but I know everyone loves to hear that question."Let's get you upstairs." AP hefted my bag and we climbed the four flights of stairs to the top floor and opened the door. It looked practically the same as when I had departed for Asia in July. No one had slept in the bed and the place actually seemed clean."How's it feel?""Like I never left." And that was a weird feeling. Nothing is ever the same, but I could tell no one stayed here in my absence. AP and I went into the kitchen. My bottle of Jameson's was untouched and I searched for two shot glasses. There were none, because there never had been any. "A toast." I was a half world away from my children and 3500 miles from the residence."Why not?" AP was a like mind."To a safe return." I lifted the bottle to my lips. The whiskey tasted of Ireland. I passed the bottle to AP. He took a long tug. These were hard times, but they were always better with friends. I was back in Brooklyn.Safe and sound.

A DANGEROUS METHOD - MOVIE

2012-02-03T06:29:00.000-08:00

This past month in Thailand I bought a number of DVDs from the bootleggers in Sri Racha and Bangkok. The quality of each one was less than 90%, but at my house the TV is tuned to either Thai TV or my son Fenway's cartoons, so I retreat to our bedroom to view the poorly recorded films, one of which was A DANGEROUS METHOD. This movie recounted the psychological menage a trois between Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Sabina Spielrein played by Keira Knightley. Her interpretation of Jung's patient was marked by the tightening of the jaw, whenever Sabrina entered into one of her manic stages. I was so unsettled by this mirroring of my own psychosis that I ejected the DVD from my laptop and later threw it in the trash. She was that good.Maybe I'll get to see it on a plane.Even though it's not really a plane movie.

You Bet I Would # 13 / A 2fer.

2012-02-01T03:10:00.000-08:00

Stunning Keira Knightley by Norman Jean Roy for GQ March 2012, styled by Sascha Lilic in a Yves Saint Laurent jumpsuit and a pair of Gucci heels.

Stunning Keira Knightley by Norman Jean Roy for GQ March 2012, styled by Sascha Lilic in Maison Martin Margiela jacket and Gucci shorts

- 8 Centigrade Luxembourg

2012-02-01T03:01:00.000-08:00

Last evening Madame l'Ambassador drove from Oxford to Luxembourg in frigid temperature. The interior of the Porsche Boxster was well-heated and I dozed off several times in the passenger seat. Upon waking each time I asked, if she wanted me to drive. Thankfully Madame l'Ambassador refused every offer, as the Porsche ate the motorways of England, France, Belgium, and Luxembourg. On one occasion a bump woke me. I rubbed my eyes and put on my glasses. It was 2am and we were not on the autoroute, but a small side road in a dark suburb."Where are we?" "Someplace near Lille." Madame l'Ambassador explained that she had missed the turning for Bruxelles. "I'm trying to find an entrance to the autoroute."I sat up in my seat and surveyed our surroundings. No signs indicated the right direction and the sky was blanketed by ominous snow clouds. Madame l'Ambassador was not accepting advice. She had erred exiting from the autoroute, but had a sense of where she should be other than the frozen purgatory of here. The temperature gauge on the dashboard read - 5 Centigrade or 20 Fahrenheit. It wasn't arctic conditions, but winter had finally come to Northern Europe.Madame l'Ambassador and I argued through the outskirts of Lille, but she finally found the autoroute and we were soon zooming at 90 mph or 150 kph. Luxembourg was two hours to the east.The highway was apocalyptically empty. Most of the trucks were parked in the rest areas and only a few cars braved the post-midnight solitude. Snow covered the ground after Namur and deepened in the Ardennes. We arrived at the Residence a little before 5am. The two of us unpacked the car and hurried into bed. Madame l'Ambassador to hers and I to mine on the top floor.Before going to sleep I touched the window. If it had been metal, then my flesh would have stuck. Glass was much more forever and I hoped than dawn would bring some light. I was back in Mittel Europa.

When Mitt Romney Comes To Town

2012-01-31T04:53:00.000-08:00

Mitt Romney THE # 1 GOP candidate for president has been touting his record as a job creator."I spent my whole life in the private sector, 25 years in the private sector. I understand that when government takes more money out of the hands of people, it makes it more difficult for them to buy things. If they can't buy things, the economy doesn't grow. If the economy doesn't grow, we don't put Americans to work."Read more: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/mitt_romney.html#ixzz1l0pc1KkoThe following film shows another angle on the Republican front runner.His holding company BAIN destroyed a number of American companies in order to sell off the capital assets.Greed for profits.Please go to this URL to view WHEN ROMNEY COMES TO TOWNThe story of when the American Dream wasn't enough. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLWnB9FGmWE

Jowls of Death

2012-01-31T04:21:00.000-08:00

Last Wednesday I crossed the Channel to the UK and for the last several days and nights I have been wandering around London; seeing the film FLANGAGAN'S WAKE at Bafta, visiting the National Art Gallery for a viewing of David Hockney's exhibition, walking in Richmond Park, strolling through Putney and hampstead Heaths, drinking at the Harp Pub outside Waterloo, and a teenage party in Nottinghill Gate. It was good seeing my friends and meeting new people, but the constant craving for attention left little time for writing, so please excuse my absence over the last week.It was well intentioned.Tonight it's back to Luxembourg and then a flight to New York. "Start spreading the news."The Jowls of Death is coming your way.

Submissive Asian Woman

2012-01-31T03:58:00.000-08:00

Saturday evening I accompanied a female friend to a party in Nottinghill Gate. Our mutual associate was hosting an 18th birthday bash for his daughter. Youth downstairs with the DJ and adults in the kitchen with the wine and booze. MOre old faces popped up during the evening and I was introduced to a longtime comrade's mistress. I congratulated the long-nosed blonde on their 6 month daughter. The baby was lovely and my comrade was happy to be a father. His mistress had heard about my living in Thailand and my family there, saying within ten seconds of our shaking hands, "Asian women must be nice.""In what sense?" I had a good idea where this comment was heading."In that they're so submissive." Her smile was slathered by a smirk."Submissive?" Western women hated the idea of western men with another race and I slashed at the mistress with a hushed viciousness. "I've lived all over the world and been with many women. I've never known one race to be submissive; not niggers, chinks, gooks, or honkies like yourself, but I do know how white people use racism to feel good about themselves."I walked away thinking I had said enough, but realized that I was wrong and reversed my tracks."Have you ever lived anywhere but England." I knew the answer. "No, you go on vacations and make observations that reinforce your prejudices. The only women I know that are submissive are those who have been beaten by men or society or their family and that can happen anywhere. In the UK one in twenty women have been raped. Is that submission? No, it's subjugation. In the USA that figure jumps to one in four. And what happens afterwards. The women are too shamed to report the assaults. Now that's submission.""I'm a feminist." She offered in her defense. "Only for your own kind and not women of another color, so you're a racist feminist." I had said enough and went for a glass of wine. My old comrade followed and I looked at my feet, thinking about how to apologize. He poured me some white. "You were right. She's just the mother of my baby and nothing more." My comrade's late wife had been my good friend. She was Jamaican. My comrade was white. Racism was not in either of their blood."Well, something more, because your daughter wasn't born from immaculate conception.""No." He looked over his shoulder at his mistress. She wasn't in the least bit contrite. "She's no Virgin Mary, but she is submissive in bed.""Better you than me." My lovely wife in Thailand was submissive only to her love for me. "Mine is a terror. I'm the one on the bottom in bed and I wouldn't have it any other way.""Lucky man." My comrade clinked my glass and we drank to the liberation of women, for love is as much about taking as giving, and I like to give it all.

Stuck In Heathrow

2012-01-28T07:38:00.000-08:00

This unplanned trip to London gave me a chance to connect with friends. The past three days were a whirlwind of old faces combined with new places. Our previous haunts have been upscaled into more lucrative venues. At art galleries, museums, parks, and restaurants we caught up on the years. Everyone was kind enough to say that I hadn't changed physically and my cousin Sara held a mirror to my reality during last night's ride from Brixton, claiming my life is the same as it ever was even with child. "You work, you write, you travel. What's the change?" Longtime friends are ruthless after a few drinks.And we had a few more glasses at her house and I fell asleep on the floor watching a bootleg version of HUGO. In the morning I ignored the cellphone's playing an insipid song, however the caller persisted in attempting to reach me. I finally shrugged off the wraps of a mild hangover and pushed the answer tab on the screen with the intention of telling the person on the other end to call me later."I'm at the airport waiting for my flight at 3." It was Persian Nick. The TV producer was a busy man. During the week he had less than a half-minute to field my calls."3?" I checked the time on the cellphone. "That's four hours from now.""There's a reason.""You're incredibly anal and have to be at the airport hours before departure." That was my modus operandi."No." This was a guessing game."You flight was cancelled." "Close.""You missed your flight." "Correct." Persian Nick was heading off Istanbul to celebrate his wife's 40th birthday. He had arrived at the airport too late. This was not a good start for a holiday and he knew it.

Shockingly Hockney

2012-01-27T11:17:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I ran into my friend Sven in Mayfair. We hadn't seen each other in years. The Swedish art dealer had been living in London for the past three years and judging from his size and paintings of the walls business was booming for his gallery. Over a cup of tea we spoke about old times and cleared up why a deal in Florida had ended in failure. The executors of the estate had hogswaggled us with deception. Sven had lost a major client and two of my good friends don't answer my phone calls."They'll get over it." Sven had been in the art world for ages."Yeah." My metier was diamonds. What we say we will do, we will do. "Me too.""Did you lose any money?" He had flown a client from Hong Kong to see a sculpture in Florida. The client had four-star tastes. The hotel room service bill ran into the thousands. "No.""Then it was merely a waste of time.""You got that right." I had a long fuse, but when lit it stayed lit at a low simmer. I changed the subject and mentioned a desire to view the David Hockney's THE BIGGER PICTURE."Really?" Sven explained that he belonged to Royal Art Academy. It was a five minute walk from his gallery. "Would you care to go?""Certainly." Several London friends had mentioned that tickets were a hot sell and going with Sven was a freebie. We threw on our coats and walked through the heavy foot traffic on Picadilly. Sven smoked two cigarettes on the way and, as we entered the cobble-stoned courtyard, he said, "I was here for the opening. I counted twelve celebrities. I came out for a cigarette and ran into the artist.""Hockney?" "He was dying for a cigarette. We spoke for several minutes and he said that he didn't trust anyone who didn't smoke.""My grandfather said, "Never trust anyone who puts ketchup on his hot dog."" He came from Maine. People from that state trusted in tradition."Hot dogs." Sven had lived a long time in America. "They are so evil.""But great at a baseball game with a cold beer." I was a devoted Red Sox fan. Fenway Franks are manna to the faithful, although I would take a bullet to the head before I brought a Bud Lite to my lips. "Disgusting." Sven shivered with disgust and stubbed out his cigarette, as we threaded the spaces between three tightly packed queues of ticket-seekers. Sven flashed his membership card and a security person opened the ropes for the friend's entrance. A young blonde girl handed us two tickets and we strolled into the exhibition with a guide book or headset explaining the works."You know this won't take long." I explained how in the early 80s that the bartender from the Studio of Rue du Temple and I toured the Louvre in less than fifteen minutes. Tony came up with the idea that the painting should be looking at us. "He thought that we could absorb the art through osmosis like molecules moving through fluids. We kept our heads down and if one of us looked at a painting, then he would have to pay for dinner. We ended our visits at the Mona Lisa.""And you'd looked at her." Sven knew the museums of Europe inside and out. Research was his forte."No, we'd turn our heads to the left to admire l'Hermaphordite and then caress its cold marble skin."Sven shook his head. Art existed on a higher plane than our mortal lives. A guard punched our tickets and we joined the horde of Hockney admirers. His work surrounded us. Sven said that there were over 150 tableaus dedicated to the change of season in his birthplace. The vibrant colors stolen from a harlequin clown's suit were strangers to Yorkshire, unless its famed pudding was made from Jello. Sven further informed me, "These aren't even paintings. He did them with an iPad. Take a look. There are no brush strokes. These are prints. He can make millions of them."We strode through the exhibition. I stopped at the Grand Canyon works. They looked nothing like the real thing, but captured the breath of the desert chasm. A row of purple logs portrayed a demented judge of color and Woldgate Woods evoked the need to light a fire in autumn. Wefinished the exhibition in less than ten minutes. I could have spent hours. We shucked the crowd inside the academy and stepped outside into the crisp evening air. Sven lit a cigarette and I wondered how he survived trans-oceanic plane flights. I looked back at the thickening lines before the entrance. "Back in the 60s and 70s no one went to museums. That was the only way we could walk through the Louvre that fast." I reflected back on the empty galleries. The dust devils on the wooden floors were the size of rats. The air smelled of the ancien regime. Those days were long gone and I shrugged off the years. The Worseley was across the street."Let's go get a beer.""I don't drink beer." Sven puffed on his nail."And I don't put ketchup on hot dogs."Like I said it was a tradition.http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/hockney/

Cheap Money

2012-01-26T04:15:00.000-08:00

The US Federal Reserve announced its plans to hold interest rates at zero to .25% for the next three years, although several board members argued for a rise this year and a near majority of the members suggested an increase for 2013. The Federal Reserve claimed inflation is running at 2% and on which planet are these financial wizards living. Prices on essential have rocketed the past few years without any salvation from wages. A dollar buys less and less, so consumers buy less and manufacturers produce less to guarantee demand will not cheapen their products, thereby cutting into profits.The stock market rallied upon hearing the news.Wall Street loves cheap money, for what is good for Wall Street is good for Wall Street alone.And they are way less than 1%.

Road Trip From Mittel Europa

2012-01-25T03:33:00.000-08:00

Leaving Mittel Europa in a Porsche headed to catch the Chunnel train underneath the Channel.Madame L'Ambassador at the wheel.She doesn't trust me to drive.I wonder why.Ready Steady Go.

The Debt Of A Nation

2012-01-25T03:08:00.000-08:00

When Madame Ambassador had phoned with the offer to be her 'unofficial writer in residence' at her posting in Mittel Europa, she had asked, "Do you have an evening suit?""Of course," I replied without hesitation from my apartment in Fort Greene."Good, because you'll be needing it. There will be plenty of balls and galas," her aristocratic intonations painted a 'pas encore vu' vision of black ties and satin gowns."I'll be ready." In America tuxedos are dragged out of the closet only for weddings. No one wears them to funerals.After hanging up on Madame Ambassador, I tried on my evening suit and was pleased to discover my waist wedged into the trousers and the jacket was loose on my upper body. I had bought it over 15 years ago. My roommate/landlord entered the top-floor apartment with a bong and asked, "Where are you going?""To Europe.""Europe?" I explained about my appointment. AP knew Madame Ambassador. He eyed my trousers."Does that hurt?""No," I wasn't giving him the pleasure of the truth, but the next day I had the tailor let out the waist an inch. The fit felt much better.A month later I flew to Europe and unpacked my clothing into a closet atop the residence. "Where's the evening suit?" Madame Ambassador was wearing a smart skirt-jacket combo from a well-known design. She smiled upon seeing me in formal wear. "You clean up good. Next week is the military ball. I expect you to look your best."That evening at the gala I was freshly showered, shaved, and shoes shined to a gleam. Madame Ambassador was pleased to have a well-attired escort. She was no longer with her husband. The civilian guests conjectured about our relationship. It has been purely platonic for thirty years. The military were more circumspect with their assumptions and I drank with colonels, captains, and naval commanders. The head general of the host nation was at our table. His glorious dress uniform shamed me, but he was a man used to the admiration of his troops and we spoke about the Civil War and Joshua Chamberlain's bayonet charge at Gettysburg. The gala had a raffle to benefit its charity. I bought several tickets. The general discreetly tapped my shoulder and asked for 20 Euros. I slipped a blue bill under the table and he winked his thanks. Generals like the very wealthy, royalty, and poor people don't carry money. Neither of tickets were winners and later that night at the residence I related to Madame's military attache my loan to the general."How much was it?" The commander pulled out his wallet."20 euros." About $27 and I waved my hand in refusal. "But that's fine. I like the idea of a general owing me money. Especially the head of the army."Madame Ambassador and I joked about this debt for the following months and the story became funnier over the next months, for I ran into the general on several occasions without his reaching into his pocket. Most recently at last week's military ball. We spoke for several seconds and he held out his hand. I thought that he might be cuffing 20 euros in secret, but his hand was empty.After he walked away, I scratched my head. I owe money to my friends for a long time. If I have it in my pocket, I pay them. Obviously the military have a different set of rules, then again I never asked for the 20, because I hold the debt of his nation in the palm of my hand.It feels like good luck.

DOWN THE COAST by Peter Nolan Smith

2012-01-24T03:27:00.000-08:00

Skyline Drive crested the steep bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean and the bright California sun crowned the hills with a golden nimbus. Hundreds of identical houses snaked up the streets of Daly City and trails of smoke floated from countless backyards, as suburban families celebrated Memorial Day with barbecues. A seared hamburger would have tasted good, but I hiked south on the dusty breakdown lane with my thumb out to traffic. No one in those houses knew my name.

To the high school teenagers in the passing cars I was another long-haired hippie leaving San Francisco. The Summer of Love had ended seven years ago and the children of the Silent Majority shouted out, “Get a hair cut.”

I held up the peace sign.

They flipped me the bird.

Walking was getting me nowhere and I put down my canvas bag at junction of Route 35 and the PCH. It seemed a good place to hitchhike.

The curved onramp required vehicles to slow down to 20 mph and the wide merging lane offered motorists a safe place to stop, however over two hundred cars passed me in thirty minutes and other than the raucous teenagers not a single driver looked in my direction. I was stranded on the PCH.

Solo female drivers convicted me of rape and many of the male motorists glared, as if I had betrayed my country. At least no one was throwing beer bottles at me.

The next exit lay a mile ahead.

Walking on the highway was forbidden by state law and I took off my leather jacket. The sun was hot and my canteen was empty. Cars passed me and a few drivers pointed to indicate that they were turning off the road in a short distance. It felt funny to be at the mercy of strangers.

Yesterday my two friends and I had crossed Nevada in a drive-away car. I had racked up over $300 at a rustic casino in Elko. My winning streak at blackjack had run hot all the way to Reno. It had been my 22nd birthday.

Another fifty cars got on the PCH before a late-model Volvo sedan stopped on the shoulder. The young driver pushed open the door.

"Excuse the mess." Thousands of pamphlets were stacked on the rear seat. The overflow spilled onto the front seat and floor.

“No worries.” I sat with my canvas bag on my lap and my sleeping bag crammed between my legs.

“I’m only going to Half Moon Bay.” He fought to find first gear and his feet flopped up and down on the gas and clutch.

“That’s fine.” The beach town was a short ride down the coast and I joked, “I was starting to think that I was a permanent fixture back there."

"Glad to be of help." The driver didn’t laugh, as the Volvo lurched down the PCH. He wasn’t used to driving a stick. "Where you headed, friend?"

"South." My final destination was Encinitas, a beach town north of San Diego.

"My name’s Evan." His austere black suit with the pressed white shirt and black tie was out of place in California as was his papery skin toasted by the sun to a blistered pink and he paused a second before asking, "Are you a believer?"

"In what?" My lack of belief was a private affair.

"The truth. I’m on a mission to bring the word to California" The brochures on the dashboard were blazoned with LDS.

“You’re a Mormon?” It was a good guess.

Young Mormon missionaries in similar suits rode bicycles or the trolleys around Boston promoting their Church. I had never seen one in a car.

“Yes, I am.” The driver admitted with pride, as he narrowly missed the curb.

“How long you been driving?” I buckled my seatbelt.

“About two weeks. Sorry, if I’m scaring you.” His cheeks reddened with embarrassment.

“Drive slow and you’ll be fine.” 30 mph was too fast for him.

“Yes, sir.” He downshifted into 3rd and whistled in appreciation of his accomplishment. The Volvo didn’t have a radio. The LDS regarded love songs as a threat to morality.

“Saving souls in San Francisco must be a challenge.” Drugs were ravaging the Haight-Ashbury, North Beach’s strip clubs and massage parlors offered satisfaction on every levels, and hordes of young homosexuals were transforming distressed neighborhoods in their vision of Sodom.

“There are no souls to save in heaven, plus I’ve been preparing for this mission since I was a boy, so my resolve is steel and my mission is clear.” Evans's eyes shone with an unprotected innocence. Mormon boys were reared without television, radio, or movies and their elders forbad contact of any kind with young girls. Evan even smelled like a virgin. He tapped the pamphlet in my hand and recounted Joseph Smith's meeting his angel in 1823, as if he had been standing next to his prophet. "Morani gave him gold plates inscribed with the true history of the world."

"I know the story." Having resisted the indoctrination of priests and nuns, I wasn’t in the mood to hear the young man’s preaching on chastity and cut short his spiel by saying, "My great-great-great grand uncle was Joseph Smith."

"You're joking?" The driver studied my face to compare my features with his memory of the Founder's portrait.

"I admit that there's not much of a resemblance." Joseph Smith had a long nose, but my ancestor also wore his brown hair over the collar. "His family hailed from Vermont and ours was from Maine. Winters in both state are long."

“What does winter have to do with Joseph Smith?”

“Long winters give a man time to think.” In Joseph Smith’s case too much time, but neither my aunt nor father had bothered to expand on our connection to the distant relative and I detoured off the subject into my family history in Maine, interrupting the tale with frequent warnings about parked cars and oncoming traffic. Evan was a terrible driver.

“My great-grandfather disappeared from Georgia.” My aunt had a single photo of her grandfather. He looked more like Joseph Smith than me. “He might have had gambling debts.”

“Gambling is a sin.” He stamped on the brake with two feet, as we entered Half Moon Bay.

“I know that all too well.” Yesterday I had learned the dangers of gambling the hard way.

“Drinking and fornication are vices of the Devil too.” He flicked on the left turn signal and pulled off the PCH at Route 92. “Tis is as far as I go.”

“Thanks for the ride.” I got out of the Volvo and tossed the pamphlet on the seat. It hadn’t been written for me.

“You really relate to Joseph Smith?” Evan might have been young, but his eyes peered into mine to divine the truth.

“People on the road will tell you anything you want to hear in order to get from point A to point B.” I answered his question with honesty. “As for me being related to Joseph Smith. It’s the truth as far as I know it.”

“You don’t look a thing like him at all.” Evan frowned with distrust and drove off with gears grinding. He had been a good listener and a horrible driver.

I filled up my canteen at a gas station and stood on the side of the road. The hills bordering the sea were covered by sun-blasted scrub brush. They would have been mountains back East. Huge swells spread into the crescent bay and surfers in black wetsuits skated the face of monstrous waves. I could have watched them for hours, but a 1973 Impala sedan stopped within three minutes. The Zenith TV salesman brought me as far as San Gregorio Beach. He asked if I wanted to join him drink at his motel room.

“There are some fun girls there, if you know what I mean.” The chubby thirty year-old slicked back his hair with Vaseline.

“I can guess, but I’ll keep heading south.” My funds had suffered a loss in Reno, but prostitutes were never in my budget.

“Suit yourself.” He pulled over to the curb and revved the engine with impatience, as I got out of the car. No one liked being alone on a holiday.

The Impala crossed the highway and the driver waved good-bye, as he walked into the lounge attached to the hotel.

I walked to a better spot for hitchhiking.

The high bluff offered a unbroken vista of the tumultuous expanse of water. After crossing the Isthmus of Panama the Spanish explorer Balboa had sarcastically called this body of water ‘La Pacifica’. Vengeful waves crashed on the beach without cessation. This was not a kind sea.

I stuck out my thumbs. Traffic on the PCH was less than up north. I was well out of the suburbs

Twenty minutes later a silver Porsche 911 swept onto the shoulder. I jumped out of the way, as the tires sprayed pebbles over my boots. A dust cloud swarmed over the sports coupe and I leaned over to the open window. A jazz song was playing on the stereo.

“Don’t worry, I’m not drunk.” The long-haired blonde driver flicked up the lock and sighed with mocked exasperation, “I just like to drive fast. You have a problem with speed?”

“Not as long as we stay on the road.” James Dean had been killed in a Porsche Spyder the same color. I dropped my bags in the narrow back seat and the driver stepped on the gas. He expertly shifted through the gears, as we sped past a Pomponio State Beach packed with beach-goers. California’s beach culture was impervious to the recession.

"Where you going?" The air smelled of ocean.

"I'm headed to Santa Cruz," A paisley silk scarf was wrapped around his head and blonde strands streamed over his shoulders. The driver glanced over at me, as if she was studying my face. "What about you?"

"South to Encinitas." A sidelong glance confirmed that he was wearing a silky mini-skirt with knee-high boots. For a few seconds I thought that he was someone famous, but there was no way that Peggy Lipton of THE MOD SQUAD was a man. “It’s south of LA.”

"Anything below of Santa Barbara is too square for me." The driver passed me a burning joint. His fingernails were buffed to a sheen. "Too much oil, cars, and military."

"I have a friend waiting for me there." The weed tasted of Oaxaca and candy-flavored lipstick. The tip of the joint was tinted pink. California attracted all kinds.

"A friend sounds so mysterious." The driver sighed with the grace of Tallulah Bankhead. The speedometer was wavering at 75 and he shut off the radio.. "Do tell, my name's Maya."

"Yesterday was my birthday." Jack Kerouac in ON THE ROAD wrote that one of the toughest things about hitchhiking was proving to the driver that they hadn’t made a mistake picking you up and I decided to entertain Maya with my sad tale. “My friends and I were driving across Nevada. I gambled at every town and was up $1000 in Reno. A beautiful waitress in a miniskirt served me a drink. It was the first of many. I remember begging my friend for money, then the next morning I woke next to the Truckee River. My pockets were empty. I thought that Reno had stolen my birthday.”

“Casinos are good at getting your very last dollars.”

“Thankfully my friend had been lying. When we dropped off the drive-away car in Lodi, my friend returned my money.”

“So you weren’t broke?” Maya laughed at my reversal of fortune.

“ Yes.” I hadn’t thought the story was that funny this morning.

"You poor baby." Maya brushed a strand of hair from his face. “But you were right. Your friend is really a friend. He could have told you that he had given you the money and kept it for himself?”

“AK isn’t like that.” I had been friends with the New Yorker for the past two years. Our only fight was about the Beatles. I hated HEY JUDE.

“It’s good having good friends.” Maya's speaking like a woman wasn't an act. Her voice quirked to a contralto, as he asked, "How long were you in San Francisco?"

“Less than an hour.” The Haight had been rough on my first two visits, but this time a gang of muggers had attacked me in Golden Gate Park. They wanted my money as much as the casino in Reno. “It’s changed a lot.”

"More than you can imagine. The city was so hip before the Summer of Love. The hippies, diggers, freaks, and blacks were one big happy family free to do anything we wanted, but the family grew too big in 1967. I was beaten up twice for being who I am. Anyone who could fled the city for the country. I made it as far as Santa Cruz." Maya shifted into top gear on a straightaway south of Pescadero. The Porsche topped a 100, then decelerated to the speed limit coming over a hill. A CHiP's cruiser was parked behind a tree on the other side.

"That officer is looking to ruin some family’s holiday for driving 60.” Maya beeped his horn and on the downward slope flicked his headlights at cars to warn of the speed trap. "Where you crashing tonight?”

“I was going to sleep in the redwoods.” The sun was an hour from setting in the ocean. Santa Cruz was not far away at this speed, but Big Sur was beyond my reach for today.

“You can stay with me. I have a spare room couch, steak in the fridge and wine too.” Maya was slightly older than me and her eyes looked like they had seen too much. “You’re not afraid, are you?”

My nights dancing at the 1270 Club in Boston had cured my fear of queers. The boys at that bar liked straight men. Maya was the same.

“Not at all.” Maya wasn’t an ax murderer, but my mother would pray for my salvation, if I accepted the generosity of a crossdresser. “More curious.”

"Like I AM CURIOUS YELLOW." Maya carved a strand of hair from his face with a long fingernail. “Some people say I look like the actress.”

“They must be blind. You’re much prettier.” The Swedish film had been banned in Boston for scenes of fake intercourse. It was too slow for my tastes. “And I prefer hard-core films."

"You're getting better and better."

We discussed about porno films of the early 70s for the rest of the drive to Santa Cruz. Maya was a fan of MISTY BEETHOVEN, while I preferred BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR. Both of us were critical of the smash hit DEEP THROAT.

"The actors were so hairy." Maya shivered in his bucket seat. "You're not hairy, are you?"

"Only my legs and ass." I wouldn't have had this conversation with any of my friends, but on the road I was a stranger passing through town like an extra in a porno movie.

"Like a satyr." Maya smiled with pleasure. Our barriers were broken by each other's anonymity. We could be anyone to each other, because tomorrow we would be someone else.

Maya's house was located on a forested river outside of Santa Cruz. A grove of redwoods lay at the end of a small lawn. A light breeze tickled the wind chimes on the porch. Maya opened the front door and flicked on the lights. The living room's decor crossbred the West Coast with Asia. Some of the oriental furniture dated back to the last century. Somehow Maya had money. I was polite enough to not ask the source.

"The guest room is in the back." Maya lit candles scented with cinnamon. "Sorry, I have no TV, but I left it behind in San Francisco. Here watch the sky and the wind"

"I'm good with no TV. Mind if I pick out a record?" I put down my bag and eyed her collection of jazz, soul, classical, and rock stacked next to an expensive stereo system.

"As long as it's not WALK ON THE WILD SIDE." Maya's sigh betrayed having heard Lou Reed's tribute to hustlers and queens too many times in too many places. "Or even worse LOLA."

"How about Marvin Gaye?" I picked out WHAT’S GOING ON. It had been huge in 1971.

“I saw him in Oakland this year. My ears rang for a week from the shrieks of his fans.” Maya lay on the Chinese couch like an opium smoker awaiting their pipe. The concert was recorded for a live album. His pose was stolen from a Renaissance painting that I recognized from my Art History 101 class. I think it was a Klimt. "Are you planning to leave soon?”

"No." I cued up the title track and sat by her feet. The polish on his toenails matched his fingernails.

"Then take off your jacket and make yourself comfortable." Maya opened a jar and handed me a pill. It was a Quaalude. He pointed to a hallway. "You can even have a shower. I promise I won't watch."

"Thanks." I washed down the muscle relaxant with wine.

"You've done these before?" Maya screwed back on the lid.

"My high school friend worked at a drug store." Donnie stole pills for our parties. Few of us smoked pot. Weed couldn't compare with downers and uppers.

"High school boys and Quaaludes?"

"All Catholic boys in uniforms." It had been an all-boys school.

"Stop. Go. You're driving me crazy."

I put my bag in the small guest room. A clean white towel lay on the single bed, as if Maya had been expecting company. I stripped off my jeans and tee-shirt and went across the narrow corridor to a bathroom with a shower. Maya had changed the record to SOMETHING ELSE by Mlles Davis.

I took my time wading America from my skin and toweled myself dry before returning to the guest room. My clothes were folded on a chair and a black silk robe hung over the chair. Maya was offering a choice and I entered the living room in the robe. Logs were burning in the fireplace.

"I knew it was your size." Maya stood by the stereo. His high heels lay on the floor. Without them her green eyes met mine. Maya touched my back. It had been months.

"You like some cocaine?" Four white lines were spread on a mirror.

"Why stop now?" I huffed two lines and I sat back on the sofa, expecting Maya to make a move, instead the blonde picked out an album with a familiar cover.

"You like TIME OUT?"

"Dave Brubeck. 1950s. Paul Desmond's TAKE FIVE." There wasn't much better from a white man.

"So you're smarter than you look."

"Only a little."

We drank wine and traded choices of music. I put on John Coltrane's MY FAVORITE THINGS, Maya followed with SOMETHIN’ ELSE. We had steaks and rice for dinner. The second bottle of wine went slower than the first. The couch was big enough for two.

The night filled in the trees and shadows crawled from the corners of the living room. In the glow of the embers she was Peggy Lipton. Maya caressed my chest.

“Thank you for staying.”
“I really didn’;t have anywhere to go.”

“Was that all?”

“Like I said I was curious.” The first kiss was strange. Maya wasn’t neither a man nor a woman. She was something else.

“You said I was pretty before.” Maya’s hand was soft. “Did you mean it?”

“No, I should have said that you were beautiful.” I undid the bra. Maya’s chest was as flat as the girl on the cover of BLIND FAITH’s LP. The skin was smooth as ice.

“It’s not easy being me, because being me depends on being something I’m not.” Maya kept on her silk panties.

“It’s not easy being me either.” I had my share of problems. Maya was not one of them. “But here no one can say anything against you. No one will attack you for being you. Not with me here.”

“I can be anything for you.” Maya smelled of an expensive French perfume.

“Just be you for right now.”

“Can you pretend that I’m a woman?” Maya’s eyes shut, as if he was making a wish.

“I don’t have to pretend.” I pulled Maya close. Neither of us wanted to be anywhere, but here.

In the morning we woke in bed covered by sheets. The sun peeked through the drawn curtains. Maya was naked next to me. His hand was fondling my penis. 1974 was seven years after the Summer of Love. Our side had stopped the War in Vietnam. Sexual freedom was our reward.

I had Maya more than twice that day. We didn’t leave the house for two more days. Our weekend was turning into a honeymoon. Nothing so good lasted forever just like a winning streak at blackjack.

On the fourth morning the telephone rang, as we breakfasted in the living room. Maya answered with a finger raised to his lips. I tried to be discreet, but I heard everything.

The man on the other end was her lover. He was coming to visit this afternoon.

I got off the couch and went to the guest room. I dressed in my clothes for the first time in days and returned to the living room with my bag in hand. I sat on my couch.

“Are you going?” Maya hung up the phone and bit his lip. The silk robe slipped off his right shoulder. His skin was bruised my my hands. We had had a good time. “You’re more than welcome to stay.”

“I know, but your friend might think otherwise, besides my friend is waiting.” AK and I had not specified a date, but if I didn’t go now, there was a danger that I never go.

“Yes, we all have friends.” The sentence was tinged with jealousy. “You’re not angry, are you?”

“Angry for what?” For the last few days we had been man and woman. One phone call had broken the magic. Once more I was straight and Maya was a man. “It was good to meet you.”

“Is that all?” Maya sounded in love and love was a madness not magic.

“Maybe a little more, but it’s time for me to go.”

“Now?” Maya opened the robe.

“Not just yet.” I pulled Maya close.

An hour later we were driving down the PCH. Maya wanted to drop me south of Monterrey. He drove the Porsche 5 mph below the speed limit on the highway south from Santa Cruz.

“I could pay for you to stay in a motel for a few days and pick you up.” Maya was having a hard time letting go. He was wearing a tan suede vest cinched tight by laces and matching suede pants. Mirrored sunglasses covered his eyes.

“I’m heading south.” The California sun was harsh this morning.

“Will you come this way again?” Maya asked, as the Porsche crossed the Moss Landing Bridge.

“I don’t know.” I had no plans for my future. We didn’t speak for several miles, as the PCH coasted along the beach and then swept into the outskirts of Monterrey. “Do you mind, if you drop me by the docks. I read Steinbeck’s CANNERY ROW and SWEET THURSDAY.”

“I loved those books too.” Maya pulled off Route 1 and drove down to the piers. The canneries were deserted and only a few fishing ships were in port. He parked by a wharf converted to a restaurant. Tourists admired the sports car and whispered to each other, as if they thought Maya might be famous.

“I guess this is the end of the road.” Maya sniffed back a tear and hurriedly wrote down a phone number. “You come this way. You call me.”
 “It’s a promise.” I stuck the paper in my leather jacket.

“Here’s $20 and two joints. Have lunch on me.”

“You want to have lunch here?”

“No.” Maya shook his head. “These people don’t understand me.”

“I’ll make sure they don’t say anything.”

“It’s not what they say, but I can see what they think in their eyes. This is not my town.”

“I understand.” I put the bill and the joints in the same pocket as Maya’s number.

Supposedly Sonny Barger of the Hells’ Angels said that you weren’t queer as long as money was involved in the sex. No biker had ever defended his quote. I leaned over an kiss Maya good-bye.

“I’ll see you around.” I got out of the car and tapped the hood of the Porsche. The horm beeped once and I stepped away from the car. The tires screeched out of the parking lot and the 911 disappeared into Monterrey.

A fishing boat was putting out to sea. Seagulls glided in its wake. Seals swam in the kelp beds. The perfume on my skin was faint. The smell of the ocean was strong. I hefted my bags over my shoulder and walked along the shore. I was once more alone and alone I was once more myself.

Wanted Man In Georgia

2012-01-23T12:16:00.000-08:00

CBS Atlanta has report that a Georgia judge has demanded President Obama's presence at a hearing to answer the charge that the POTOS isn't a natural born US citizen. Birthers have consistently rejected all evidence of Obama's citizenship such as having an American mother and a birth certificate issued from Hawaii. 13% of Americans believe Obama was born in a foreign country.The citizenship theory arose from the Hillary Clinton camp in the 2008 presidential primaries and since then birthers on each side of the political spectrum have researched every facet surrounding the president's birth and early life. The legal counsel of the White House has failed to convince the judge that this case is frivolous and the president must show up in Georgia or else find himself in contempt of court. I search for the judge's history on Google for a half-hour without finding any reference to him other than the announcement of this lawsuit.It's almost as if he doesn't exist on paper and I have to ask, "Where is his driver's license?" so he can prove that he actually exists on paper as well as in judicial robes.

Kodak Gone Too

2012-01-20T03:50:00.000-08:00

My first camera was a Kodak Brownie. It took good photos. Eastman-Kodak's sales pitch was simple. "You push the button, we do the rest." The word Kodak was synonymous with camera for most of my youth and Eastman-Kodak held a virtual lock on the American market with a 96% share in 1976. Most of my slides were taken on Kodak. The color was warm, whereas Fuji's was cold. None of that quality mattered to consumers. They wanted cheap and yesterday the company filed for bankruptcy after the collapse of print film for cameras and their inability sell digital cameras.Kodak received its name from an abbreviation of the inventor's home state North Dakota, who decided Kodak was better than Nodak.Like GM in the 70s Kodak corporate leadership believed that the American consumer would remain loyal to their product and their lack of vision doomed the company to failure and the most recent CEO off-shored production without regaining market share. If it had been for a billion dollar settlement with LG, Kodak would have gone bust in 2010 and Rochester, New York has seen the Kodak workforce shrink from 60,000 to 7000 with most of them in the bloated corporate structure."Anyone who's dealt with Kodak ... over the last 20 or 30 years has just seen this lumbering dinosaur with wonderful research, coming up with great ideas, but believing that they have some kind of divine right to be the only company selling the means to take pictures." The electronics journalist Barry Fox told Al Jazeera.comAfter over 130 years the Kodak moment passed into extinction along with many other American icons such as Zenith TVs, RCA stereos, and US Steel.America's new cry."We're number nothing."

Then They Were Four

2012-01-20T02:20:00.000-08:00

Front-runner Mitt Romney has a fight on his hands in the GOP South Carolina primary. Texas governor Rick Perry decision to drop out of the race has strengthened two of his challenger ie Rick Santorum and Newt Gringich without helping libertarian Ron Paul. With two days left before voting the race is too close to call and the most recent debate's opening question about Newt Gringich's marital past had the former House leader steaming at the moderator."To take an ex-wife and make it two days before the primary a significant question in a presidential campaign is as close to despicable as anything I can imagine."His attack on the media was greeted with loud applause from the conservative audience, who backed the presidential hopeful's 'open marriage' status with his second wife. Things have changed in the Deep South."How could he ask me for a divorce on Monday and within 48 hours give a speech on family values and talk about how people treat people?" His ex-wife said during an interview.Gringich claimed that she was lying about the claim.But then men always lie when caught in a lie by their wives, even if they are their ex-wives.

Gra-nam Gra-nam Gra-nam

2012-01-19T06:41:00.000-08:00

Last week the Thai police arrested a suspect purportedly planning to bomb the Bangkok Habad center and Khao San restaurants popular with Americans and Israelis. The US embassy issued a heightened alert on its website.January 13, 2012This message alerts U.S. citizens in Thailand that foreign terrorists may be currently looking to conduct attacks against tourist areas in Bangkok in the near future. U.S. citizens are urged to exercise caution when visiting public areas where large groups of Western tourists gather in Bangkok. U.S. citizens are encouraged to maintain a heightened awareness when out in public; be alert for unattended packages/bags in public/crowded places and report any suspicious behavior to the nearest law enforcement personnel. We also encourage you to keep a low profile in public areas, particularly areas frequented by foreign tourists. and warned that terrorists might be seeking to hit Bangkok in the near-future. Experts quickly discounted the validity of such a threat linking the news to the tensions with Iran and the suspect in this case was arrested, because of a head's up by US and Israeli counter-terrorist agencies.The Israelis announced on their website, that other terrorists "managed to escape by plane from Bangkok or by crossing into Laos and catching a flight there, although other sources believe they are still hiding out in Thailand waiting for another chance to strike".Thai police and government officials, having been stung by the complexities of the Viktor Bout case, are questioning the validity of the US embassy alert, especially after the suspect said that the explosive materials were not his and probably had been planted by the Israelis."One evening I was taken out of prison, was placed in a car that drove off with me to a house somewhere. In there, I was interrogated by three men who apparently came from the Mossad. I have their first names. They claimed that I lied about various things."Years ago I was at a guest house in northern Thailand. NO ISRAELIS was written on a sign on the wall. I asked the owner, if he was scared of terrorism."Mai ching. Israel people kee-hio. One man rent room. Ten men sleep in room. Dirty too and fight for be cheap. Mai dee."His testament was proven on more than one occasion on my travels through Asia, so if you really want to avoid terrorism, avoid Israelis.Sorry, but the truth is the truth.Free Palestine.

The Real Budvar aka Budweiser

2012-01-19T06:03:00.000-08:00

For the last month in Thailand I drank nothing but Leo Beer, the occasional Singha and Khang beers, and Khong Tong whiskey in Ban-nok and Sri Racha. My taste buds had been ruined after five months of Belgian and Czech beers in Mittel Europa and this afternoon I'm supping on a Budvar, the original Budweiser, which has been brewed since 1785 in České Budějovice. In a classic case of intellectual property theft Anheuser-Busch expropriated the name Budweiser brand in 1876 setting up a copyright dispute, which Budweiser USA resolved with a cash payment to Budvar.A cop would have hold a gun to my head to force me to drink Budweiser USA.To quote Monty Python - "We find your American beer like making love in a canoe. It's fucking close to water."Or even better."Why is American beer served cold? So you can tell it from urine." - David MoultonBudvar's lager on the other hand backs up what Plato said over 2000 years ago, ""He was a wise man who invented beer."It is so true, if you take Budweiser out of the equation.It sucks.After the Great Britain Beer Festival, in London, all the Presidents of the brewreys decide to go to the pub for a drink. The Coors President said "Can I have the only beer made with Rocky Mountain Spring Water: a Coors, please."The bartender gave him the drink. Then the Budweiser President orders, "The King Of Beers - Budweiser."The bartender proceeds with the order. The Amstel President walks in and orders "The Finest Beer ever."The bartender gives him an Amstel.Then the Guinness President says, "I'll have a coke please."The bartender is taken aback by this but gives the coke to him anyway.All the Presidents looked over at him and said, "Why have you ordered a coke?"He replied, "Well if you all aren't drinking beer, then neither shall I."source: http://www.jokebuddha.com/Budweiser#ixzz1jt54Y8nn

Recall Recall

2012-01-19T01:40:00.000-08:00

here are 70 people named Scott Walker in Wisconsin and one of them in governor.Last December Governor Walker had ridiculed a petition for a recall election by asserting the 'Mickey Mouse' signatures did not count and neither did multiple signings. He cited a classic GOP mantra of the Silent Majority by saying, “For those who don’t want to sign it, their voice should count as much as anyone else’s."Yesterday opposition groups filed a petition with a million signatures seeking a recall election for the state's highest office, which was well in excess of the requisite of half-million signaturesUnited Wisconsin will have an uphill battle. Recall elections are difficult to bring to ballot, especially with Wisconsin's GOP-controlled government, but close to two-thirds of the voters are in favor of recalling the governor according to local polls and those numbers are hard to fight in a national election year.The only successful recall for governor occurred in California with the ouster of Gray Davis.The Big Bear State got Arnold Schwartzenegger as a result and people liked the Terminator.He was famous.By the way Scott Walker is not related to the singer Scott Walker of the Walker Brothers.

Asshole of the Year 2011

2012-01-19T01:16:00.000-08:00

TIME magazine's Person of the Year was the protestor.Governments in Egypt and Tunisia were ousted by people fed up with the status quo of the few rich ruling of the many poor. The western media attempted to portray this change as the seeds of democracy, but were surprised by faceless protestors in America assailing Wall Street and Congress as enemies of the state. Police trained for terrorism by Homeland Security attacked peaceful demonstrations with heavy-handed force and the poster boy for these men in blue was NYPD police lieutenant Joseph Bologna for his pepper-spraying women and punching out anyone in his way.The officer in question has a well-earned reputation for brutality dating back the the GOP convention in 2004 and protests against Iraq War. Bologna was disciplined with the loss of ten vacation days and a transfer to his home borough of Staten Island. He has refused to apologize for the pepper-spraying and said that given the chance he "would do things the same way."For that alone Joseph Bologna is Asshole of 2011.He had a lot of competition and I was one of them.

SOPA and PIPA Defeat

2012-01-18T22:11:00.000-08:00

Yesterday several major internet services blacked out their websites to protest two bills before Congress aimed at stopping online intellectual property theft. Freshman senator from Florida Marco Rubio backed off pushing forward the bills for vote in face of such intense opposition from Wikipedia and blog service WordPress. Hollywood executives backed by former Senate hack Christopher Dodd called the black-out an 'irresponsible stunt', but their opinion was overwhelmed by criticisms that the bills were capable of curbing freedom of speech and knowledgeGoogle did not join the protest, but stated on their site."There are better ways to address piracy than to ask US companies to censor the internet. The foreign rogue sites are in it for the money, and we believe the best way to shut them down is to cut off their sources of funding."The bills are still before Congress and President Obama has threatened to veto them should they reach his desk. deadline.com declared that Hollywood moguls were pulling their support for the president by quoting Hollywood moguls, another movie mogul, one insider, one studio chief who wished to remain anonymous, although Fox Filmed Entertainment Chairman Jim Gianopulos was willing to record to his opposition to the president's oppositionHis boss felt the same way and yesterday Rupert Murdoch slammed the protests on Twitter, attacking Google and the president for allowing theft from his intellectual property empire, although his newspapers are in criminal proceeding for the hacking of personal telephones and emails in the UK. There is only one word for the man.Hypocrite.And we can also add in bastard.

No You Don't

2012-01-18T08:20:00.000-08:00

Hundreds of demonstrators for the OCCUPY CONGRESS gathered in Washington this week to protest the greed of Congress in sucking up the the corporate interests of America and the world. The organizers had been expected thousands to show up in force, but winter campaigns are renown for desertions from the ranks; see Valley Forge and the 1812 Retreat from Moscow. Wait till Spring to rally the troops is my advice, however the Congress was confronted by Wikipedia and several other internet giants on the matter of two bills before the legislature.And here are the reasons as presented by Wikipedia, everyone's memory of what was.Wikipedia is protesting against SOPA and PIPA by blacking out the English Wikipedia for 24 hours, beginning at midnight January 18, Eastern Time. Readers who come to English Wikipedia during the blackout will not be able to read the encyclopedia: instead, you will see messages intended to raise awareness about SOPA and PIPA, and encouraging you to share your views with your elected representatives, and via social media.What are SOPA and PIPA?SOPA and PIPA represent two bills in the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate respectively. SOPA is short for the "Stop Online Piracy Act," and PIPA is an acronym for the "Protect IP Act." ("IP" stands for "intellectual property.") In short, these bills are efforts to stop copyright infringement committed by foreign web sites, but, in our opinion, they do so in a way that actually infringes free expression while harming the Internet. Detailed information about these bills can be found in the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act articles on Wikipedia, which are available during the blackout. GovTrack lets you follow both bills through the legislative process: SOPA on this page, and PIPA on this one. The EFF has summarized why these bills are simply unacceptable in a world that values an open, secure, and free Internet.Why is this happening?Wikipedians have chosen to black out the English Wikipedia for the first time ever, because we are concerned that SOPA and PIPA will severely inhibit people's access to online information. This is not a problem that will solely affect people in the United States: it will affect everyone around the world.Why? SOPA and PIPA are badly drafted legislation that won't be effective in their main goal (to stop copyright infringement), and will cause serious damage to the free and open Internet. They put the burden on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the unnecessary blocking of entire sites. Small sites won't have sufficient resources to defend themselves. Big media companies may seek to cut off funding sources for their foreign competitors, even if copyright isn't being infringed. Foreign sites will be blacklisted, which means they won't show up in major search engines. And, SOPA and PIPA build a framework for future restrictions and suppression.Does this mean that Wikipedia itself is violating copyright laws, or hosting pirated content?No, not at all. Some supporters of SOPA and PIPA characterize everyone who opposes them as cavalier about copyright, but that is not accurate. Wikipedians are knowledgeable about copyright and vigilant in protecting against violations: Wikipedians spend thousands of hours every week reviewing and removing infringing content from the site. We are careful about it because our mission is to share knowledge freely with people all over the world. To that end, all Wikipedians release their contributions under a free license, and all the material we offer is freely licensed. Free licenses are incompatible with copyright infringement, and so infringement is not tolerated.Isn't SOPA dead? Wasn't the bill shelved, and didn't the White House declare that it won't sign anything that resembles the current bill?No, neither SOPA nor PIPA are dead. On January 17th, SOPA's sponsor said the bill will be discussed in early February. There are signs PIPA may be debated on the Senate floor next week. Moreover, SOPA and PIPA are just indicators of a much broader problem. We are already seeing big media calling us names. In many jurisdictions around the world, we're seeing the development of legislation that prioritizes overly-broad copyright enforcement laws, laws promoted by power players, over the preservation of individual civil liberties. We want the Internet to be free and open, everywhere, for everyone.Aren’t SOPA/PIPA as they stand not even really a threat to Wikipedia? Won't the DNS provisions be removed?SOPA and PIPA are still alive, and they’re still a threat to the free and open web, which means they are a threat to Wikipedia. For example, in its current form, SOPA would require U.S. sites to take on the heavy burden of actively policing third-party links for infringing content. And even with the DNS provisions removed, the bill would give the U.S. government extraordinary, ambiguous, and loosely-defined powers to take control over content and information on the free web. Taking one bad provision out doesn't make the bills okay, and regardless, Internet experts agree they won't even be effective in their main goal: halting copyright infringement. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a really great post about some of the more dangerous SOPA and PIPA provisions.What can users outside of the U.S. do to support this effort?Readers who don't live in the United States can contact their local State Department, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or similar branch of government. Tell them that you oppose the draft U.S. SOPA and PIPA legislation, and all similar legislation. SOPA and PIPA will have a global effect - websites outside of the U.S. would be impacted by legislation that hurts the free and open web. And, other jurisdictions are grappling with similar issues, and may choose paths similar to SOPA and PIPA.Is it still possible to access Wikipedia in any way?The Wikipedia community, as part of their request to the Wikimedia Foundation to carry out this protest, asked us to ensure that we make English Wikipedia accessible in some way during an emergency. The English Wikipedia will be accessible on mobile devices and smart phones. You can also view Wikipedia normally by completely disabling JavaScript in your browser, as explained on this Technical FAQ page.I keep hearing that this is a fight between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Is that true?No. Some people are characterizing it that way, probably in an effort to imply all the participants are motivated by commercial self-interest. But you can know it's not that simple, because Wikipedia has no financial self-interest here: we are not trying to monetize your eyeballs or sell you products. We are protesting to raise awareness about SOPA and PIPA solely because we think they will hurt the Internet, and your ability to access information. We are doing this for you.In carrying out this protest, is Wikipedia abandoning neutrality?We hope you continue to trust Wikipedia to be a neutral informational resource. We are staging this blackout because, although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, its existence actually is not. For over a decade, Wikipedians have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopedia in human history. Wikipedia's existence depends on a free, open and uncensored Internet. We are shutting Wikipedia down for you, our readers. We support your right to freedom of thought and freedom of expression. We think everyone should have access to educational material on a wide range of subjects, even if they can’t pay for it. We believe people should be able to share information without impediment. We believe that new proposed laws like SOPA and PIPA (and other similar laws under discussion inside and outside the United States) don’t advance the interests of the general public. That's why we're doing this.This is their message, but I agree with it.Fight the powers that be.Both the House and Senate was regarded by most of the country as complete sell-outs to the special interests of wealth

HIPPIE BEACH BUMS by Peter Nolan Smith

2012-01-15T07:01:00.000-08:00

The night breeze off the Pacific wreathed the coastal towns north of San Diego with a thin mist. The airy moisture clung to the flowers and fruit trees of Encinitas. The June sun seared through the overcast by late morning and the evaporation off the flowers created an intoxicating bouquet of scents unknown to the Eastern Seaboard.

Every morning after AK practiced on his friend’s piano till the sun burnt of the fog, then the two of us walked on a trodden path through acres of flower fields. The farmer was a young man with long hair. He was cool with us using the path as long as we didn’t pluck any of his hidden reefer crop.

We crossed the Pacific Coast Highway and headed to the parking lot atop the bluff. A steep trail zigzagged down the cliff to the beach. The sloping strand was shared by surfers, hippies, seagulls, and seals.

At first AK and I were thrashed by the huge waves, but a month of bodysurfing each days for hours had strengthened our arms and legs. We were tanned and my hair was bleached with blonde streaks. California was seducing us with its charm.

“What you think about staying here?” The wind wafted off the sea and I held out my arms like wings.

“We can’t crash at Dotty’s pad forever.” His friend’s bungalow had two small bedrooms.

“I know that.” I was sleeping on the porch. Encinitas got cold at night. “I was talking about California.”

“You mean not go back to Boston?” The New Yorker started a teaching job in the fall and a faithful girlfriend was waiting for him on the South Shore.

“It’s not like I have a job like you.” Recruiters from the banks and corporations had sneered at my sin laude diploma and regarded my stammer as a disability. I had only gone on the interviews to please my mother.

“But Boston is your home.” AK had left Long Island at the age of 18.

“I’ll always be from Boston no matter what.” Even last year’s Red Sox collapse hadn’t weakened my New England roots, but I wanted to see the world and said, “I like it here.”

“What’s there not to like.” AK admired our surroundings, as if he were the first white man to see this beach. “But we need to make some money

“I know.” My vacation stake was down to $200.

“That means a job.” AK stretched his body, as Dotty had taught him. She was into yoga.

“I know.” I had driven taxi back in Boston. They had to have cabs here. “If something came up, I’d stay.”

“Let’s see what happens.” He dropped his towel and assumed a racing stance with his hands on his knees. “What about another swim?”

“Sounds good.” Neither of us were ready to hit the road and we raced into the ocean for another session with the waves.

Later that afternoon AK plucked a familiar tune on the kalimba, while I was writing in my journal.

“I know that song.”

“Number 1 in America.” He rocked on his hips to ROCK THE BOAT. “C’mon, dance.”

“Not now?” I was trying to complete a poem about seeing the Rockies from the Great Plains.

“Let’s see what you wrote.” AK snatched away my journal and after reading a few lines, he said, “The key to writing is putting the seat of your trousers on the seat of the chair.”

“Who said that?”

“I think Graham Greene.” AK had a degree in English.

“I know who he is.” I had read THE POWER AND THE GLORY and OUR MAN IN HAVANA. Graham Greene was a great writer.

“My poems are nothing.” They didn’t even rhyme.

“Then keep at it.” AK played piano two hours in the morning and two at night. “Maybe one day your books will be next to his.”

“I doubt it.” Graham Greene’s name began with G and mine started with an S, but I lay on my stomach and scratched words describing the gleam of snow on faraway mountains.

High tide at the beach ran to the cliffs. AK and I climbed to the top of the bluff. A long-haired hippie in a flowered sarong was playing a flute. He came here every sunset. This time he nodded to AK.

“He any good?” I asked once we were out of earshot.

“Not bad, but he’s no Herbie Mann.”

“MEMPHIS UNDERGROUND.” I loved that swinging album with Larry Corryll on guitar, but I preferred the breathless pacing of Jeremy Stieg on HOWLING FOR JUDY.

We bought wine and vegetables for dinner and discussed jazz walking through the flower fields. I had argued for buying some meat, but Dorothy was a strict vegetarian. As her guests AK and I respected her wishes and we had eaten nothing but rice, vegetables, and beans for weeks.

My farting was terrible.

We entered her bungalow with the eastern sky turning to night. Dotty sat at the kitchen table sketching an apple by candlelight. Incense was burning next to the sink. The scent was jasmine. Its flower were collected after dark. AK looked over her shoulder.

“A still life.” Dotty was working as the breakfast waitress at an organic restaurant on the PCH and attending private art classes in La Holla. Her teacher was well-known for his seascapes and drinking. The slight brunette scheduled her classes for noon. By that time the artist had recovered from his hang-over.

“Is it any good?” All artists sought approval.

A glance at her journal confirmed that she had captured the rot on the apple with a stroke of a pencil.

“I wished that my poetry was as good as your drawing.”

“I’ve got a long way to go.” She put down her sketch book and helped us unload the groceries. “Victor’s coming this weekend.”

Her boyfriend had studied dance at the same college as AK and Dotty. He was working at a small movie studio as a choreographer. Every night Dotty lit candles in front of his photo on the wall and I swore that her lips moved, as she stared at his picture a semi-naked young man in a toga. The mousy brunette was very much in love.

“You want us to leave?” AK didn’t want to stand in the way of romance.

“No, Victor is looking forward to having a good time with all of us.” Dotty cooed with anticipation and fingered the ancient Byzantine gold chain around her neck. The brunette tried to act like she was broke, but her ethnic dresses were new and none of her shoes had holes in the soles. Her trust fund worth millions according to AK.

“I could make myself scarce.” I was freeloading on AK’s connection.

“No, he wants to meet you.” Dotty opened the bottle of red.

“Me?” Dotty had said maybe ten words to me in two weeks.

“I told him about your fight in the Haight, making love to lesbians in Big Sur, and your ex-girlfriend Jackie.” Dotty smiled with a sly shyness. “You didn’t think I was listening, did you?”

“To be truthful, no.” I had a tendency to tell long stories after a few drinks.

“I said you were a poet. He likes poetry. Maybe you can read him something of yours.”

“Sure.” I glanced at AK in panic.

“I like LUCKY’S RIDE.” It was an ode to broken hearts and country music.

“I’ll work on it a little.” I hadn’t read a poem aloud since high school and for the next three days on the beach I recited the poem until my stammer was gone.

“Listen to this.” I stood over AK. He was reading John Steinbeck’s CANNERY ROW.

“No way.” AK had heard the poem hundreds of times and clapped his hands over his ears. “I hear that fucking poem in my sleep. This isn’t an oral application to grad school. Demosthenes practiced his oration with pebbles in his mouth. Go recite your poem to the waves.”

AK turned his back to me.

“Thanks for the good advice.”

I walked down the beach for an hour and then back. The twenty lines were stuck in my head forever.

When I returned to our blanket, AK was sitting with the scrawny hippie from the bluff. Fragile sunglasses rested on his long nose, as he played guitar with a sturdy blonde banging at a tambourine. AK accompanied them on his African thumb piano.

I would have felt out of place in this musical menage a trois, if I hadn’t been staring at the blonde’s breasts. She wasn’t wearing a top. They stopped playing and AK introduced Rockford and Carol.

“Hi.” Carol wasn’t wearing a top. Her stubby nipples were erect from the wind.

“You seem interested in Carol.” Rockford looked up from his guitar.

“She reminds me of someone. I can’t think of who.” It wasn’t Jayne Mansfield, but Brigitte Bardot was close.

“I just seen a face I can’t remember the place.” Rockford segued into another Beatles song. It was the dreaded HEY JUDE.

“Watch out. He hates the Beatles.” AK warned the thin hippie.

“How can anyone hate the Beatles?” Rockford was visibly hurt by my rejection of his idols.

“It’s a long story.” And I told them about an 7th Grade girl spurning my love, because I didn’t look like any of the Beatles. “BEATLES 65 was the last record I bought.”

“She was right.” Carol lay on the sand. “You don’t look like any of the Beatles.”

“You want to go for a swim?”

Carol nodded yes and I helped the blonde to her feet. Rockford winked at me, as if to say Carol was free. I shrugged to reply that it didn’t matter and followed Carol to the edge of the sea. The shore break was a vicious maze of undertows.

“Is the water always this cold?” She dipped her toe into the spreading fan of a dying wave.

“Humboldt Current.” Geography was my best subject in grammar school and I drew its path in the sky. “Past Japan, Kamchatka, the Bering Sea down the West Coast to here. This coast knows nothing, but cold.”

“I’m from North Dakota. That’s cold.” Carol accepted the finality of the Pacific Ocean and plunged into the sea. She was a good swimmer and I swam after her to where several surfers bopped on their short boards. They greeted her by name. She had been on this beach for two years.

Twenty minutes later AK and Rockford swam out to us. The waves formed tubes of foam. The surfers cut across the face with ease. We rode them straight to the beach.

As a child on the South Shore of Boston my parents had packed the station wagon for a venture to the beach. Wollaston, Nantasket, and Horseneck beaches were nothing like Encinitas.

Exhausted after a half-hour the four of us dragged our bodies from the sea like shipwrecked sailors. Carol dried off, as AK, Rockford, and I smoked a joint of Acapulco Gold and laid back on the sand. I stared at the sky and remembered that I had forgotten about Viet-Nam, Watergate, and much more that was happening in America, for on the beach below Encinitas the world was simply sea, sun, skin, and sand.

The sunset signaled time to leave the beach.

Carol pulled on a macrame top. Her nipples were flattened under the tight net. Rockford pointed to the rising tide.

“We better go. Newcomers get caught against the cliffs all the time.” The solemnity of his voice indicated that not everyone survived the sneaky sea.

“We wouldn’t want that.” AK collected his things and we headed for the cliff path.

A minute later we were reached the bluff and surveyed the ocean with eyes of adoration.

“A fine day.” Rockford stared into the sun, as if it were his creation. “You should come to our house. We can play music and I have some serious LSD. Where better than here?”

The sky prismed red above the rim of the Pacific and Rockford pointed out a low bungalow surrounded by jasmine trees.

“Any time you want.” Rockford hooked his arm with Carol. “Later, brothers.”

AK watched the two enter the house.

“What you thinking?” I had to ask.

“That I wouldn’t mind not leaving here.” AK was in love with where we were at this moment.

“Me too.” We left the bluff with the sunset at our back. Tomorrow was six hours away from today and today was right where it was supposed to be in late June 1974.

California.

Bye Bye Barbara

2012-01-14T20:19:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I received an email informing me of Ms. Carolina's demise. I went to the water temple in Sri Racha to pray for my good friend Barbara's safe passage. We had seen the world together. My three year-old son and I bought some fish to release into the sea for good luck. They swam away to a pier to where the monk lured them back to captivity for a repeat performance. As we walked back to the motorcycle, my son is asking why I'm crying. I told him a new star was in the sky. Fenway lifted his head and pointed to a twinkle. "Yes, that's the one. It's called Barbara.""Su-ay." He whispered in my ear."Yes." For 'su-ay means beautiful in thai. I choked back the tears for a few seconds. A man is not supposed to cry in front of his son. Fenway wrapped his arms around my neck and wiped away the tears. "Barbara still here." His finger picked the same star in the heaven."Yes, she is." I gave him a kiss and we rode home.The same star will appear tonight and every night throughout eternity.It has a new name.

Writing Tip 101A - Women Writer's Know Their Shit

2012-01-12T05:48:00.000-08:00

The key to writing is putting the seat of your trousers to the seat of the chair - Mary Heaton Vorse, American journalist, labor activist, and novelistI wrongly attributed this quote to another author. A man.Graham Greene to be exact.I was wrong.It wasn't the first time and it won't be the last, but I'll trying to be better.Even women can't expect more than that.Wrong again.

10 Years In Gitmo

2012-01-12T02:43:00.000-08:00

The September 11 attacks on America changed the rules of warfare for the United States. The nation craved revenge and the first taste was served in Afghanistan with the defeat of the Taliban. Hundreds of prisoners were transferred from the theater of war to the US Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. These detainees were subjected to the incarceration without any rights to a trial or legal counsel. The Bush administration claimed that these inmates were the worst of the worst and the American public accepted this situation, despite its questionable benefit to the war effort.Torture, abuse, suicide, and murder at the prison shamed America all over the world.Even worse was happening in the CIA retention cells across the world.Both GW Bush and Barack Obama have attempted to close the prison. No one wants them stateside, so the last 171 detainees are stuck in limbo ten years after their capture. The cost per year for each prisoner is $800,000.Convicts in America run the State around $40,000 per year, but there are over two million of those.And the Gitmo prisoners would last in general population about a day.Like Philip Nolan in A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY, the Gitmo prisoners have nowhere to go. Certainly not until after the election.

Goodbye Old Tooth

2012-01-12T01:48:00.000-08:00

West 4th Street's basketball court on 6th Avenue attracted the best talent in the five boroughs in the late 70s. Passers-by clung to the chain link fence, as the players ran the short distance between the steel backboards. Most streetballers were devoted to offensive, but I was welcomed into games, because of my defense. My teammates depended on my stopping the big man and no one ever dunked on me.One afternoon in 1978 a young baller from the Bronx kept driving to the hoop. I refused to give way to the hole. The contact between us belonged more on a football field than 'The Cage'. I hooked his arm, bumped his shoulders, and slapped his shooting elbow. Each foul was accompanied by an apology. "If you were sorry, you wouldn't do this shit. You're nothing, but a fucking hack." The muscular guard lifted his hands for the hand. His dribble blazed from left to right. He wanted points."You may be right, but you're not scoring in the paint this game." I was a hack. Scoring was secondary to neutralizing my opponent. My team needed only three points from me to win a game. My adversary shifted to his right. My left hand tipped the ball from his dribble. Our guard dashed to the opposite end of the court. It was an easy basket."Defense versus offensive. It's all part of the game." I should have kept my mouth shut. Ragging another player only brought out their best or worst.My opponent backed to the hoop. His team cleared out the zone. This was a one-on-one play for the win only this time he wasn't looking for a score. His left elbow winged over my shoulder and contacted with my mouth. Blood spurted from a gash inside my cheek. He wheeled and made a one-handed lay-up. It was a dirty play made dirtier by his trying to hurt me.Both teams had to separate us from going to blows.Everyone suggested that I go home. The other player was a known gang member. Guns were easy to find in Washington Square Park. I accepted their advice and walked to my apartment in the East Village thinking about revenge. It was not a healthy thought and I avoided the Cage in favor of the basketball court in Tompkins Square Park. No one fought there. It was a three-minute walk from my front door. My nickname was 'The Butcher'.I moved to Paris in the early 80s to work the door at several nightclubs. Fights were rare. The food was exceptional, especially the bread. One afternoon I bit into a thick-crusted baguette. A tooth on my lower left jaw cracked into shards. No doubt the molar had been damaged by the guard's elbow. A dentist explained that many people broke teeth on a baguette and the two choice were extraction or a root canal with a cap. I opted for the latter. Only hillbillies and the British didn't care about gaps in their teeth.The gold crown stayed in place, until it came loose during a meal in Kensington with a female painter. She laughed hearing that I had swallowed the cap and said, "It'll show up in the next day or so."She was right and I felt the crown passing out of my body. I rescued it from the toilet and the dentist in Paris reset the cap on my tooth.Another nine years passed before this tooth resumed its troubled existence. I noticed a small blister after getting a # 2 buzz-cut in a Fulham barber shop. My friend, Sam Royalle, suggested a quick visit to the dentist. His sound advice was rejected since my flight to Thailand was leaving Heathrow that evening and I figured that the tooth was safe until I arrived in Bangkok.I was wrong.The blister infected my jar and the left side of my face was swollen by the painful abscess. The customs official grimaced looking at my face. I must have resembled Frankenstein with the skinhead and distorted face, but he stamped my passport with a month's visa. I directed the taxi driver to a dentist on Soi Duplei near the Malaysia Hotel. She had cleaned my teeth a year ago. Once more there were two options; extraction or see the results of an antibiotic injection and treatment. My teeth weren't white, but food was easy to eat with a full set of chompers. Every trip to Thailand included a visit to the dentist on Soi Duplei. My teeth remained intact, despite the increasing frequency of losing a tooth dreams. The various interpretations such as my diminishing looks and strength, my hitting 50, the fear of becoming an old fool One gay friend suggested these dreams were a sign of sexual repression."You've been straight too long."I remained a reformed straight to the present, but my dentist on Soi Duplei had bad news for me this week."The tooth has to come out. It has cracked in two." Her business has expanded to three floors and the equipment is state of the art. "What are the other choices?""This time only one choice.""Extraction." The other options had been eliminated over the years and I agreed to have the tooth pulled this morning.The entire procedure took thirty minutes.Afterward my dentist explained the new set of options."The gum is too damaged for an implant. A bridge requires putting caps on the teeth on either side of the gap. A denture is easy and cheap and there is always the do nothing option." She further informed me that the gums needed 2-3 months to heal before the next step."Can I have the old tooth." It had been with me over fifty years. "Sure." My dentist made a face and dropped the shattered tooth into a plastic tube. It was no longer part of me like the hair on the barber's floor, but the old molar deserved a better fate than a waste bin. The silver and gold in the crown had to be worth a good bottle of wine from a gold shop on 47th Street. I put the tube in my pocket and left the dentist. My tooth was going home, unless I lost the tube on the way and with me that possibility was always an option.photo is from the balajo in paris1985

TOO LATE FOR THE HAIGHT by Peter Nolan Smith

2012-01-11T23:04:00.000-08:00

The bus from Sacramento crossed the Bay Bridge in light traffic. Most everyone in the Bay Area had off Memorial Day. The uniformed driver took the first exit to the Transbay Terminal and parked in the depot. I grabbed my bag from the storage compartment underneath the bus and entered the station.

Holiday passengers were forming queues for destinations north, south, and east. They were mostly military and college students. Commuters had stayed home for the day.

I walked onto Beale Street into the intense noontime sun. The temperature was much cooler than the Central Valley and I set my canvas travel on a wooden bench to pull a light leather jacket.

"Man, you looking for a place to crash?" a scraggly long hair in dirty denim and a soiled paisley jacket asked, while scratching a sore on his neck.

"No, I'm good." I had been warned about rip-offs by overly friendly hippies and slung my bag over my left shoulder. The muscles and joints of my right were bruised from the security guards in Reno tossing me from a casino.

"Clean and your own bed. You give what you can afford. My name's Omo. Stands for On My Own. We're a cool commune. Lots of chicks too. You into chicks?" Omo followed me at a safe distance.

"Leave me alone." I glared back at him with the promise of a punch.

"Suit yourself. You don't know what you'll be missing." Omo stuck his hands into the jacket and turned back to the station.

The Summer of Love had ended seven years ago.

Now junkies and speed thieves preyed on unsuspecting hippies following the acid trail of 1967. The wide-eyed faithful were easy marks for the vultures haunting the bus station and I crossed the street headed toward Mission Street with the slender spire of the Transamerica Building rising to the north.

Six days ago I had left Boston in a drive-away station wagon bound for Lodi, California. The owner was relieved to have his Ford Torino delivered without mishap. My friend AK had headed south on I-5. I was going to meet him in Encinitas sometime next week. Buses and trolleys traversed the peninsula to the ocean. I intended to cover the short distance by foot. I wasn't in a hurry.

Lunch at a small Mexican diner consisted of enchiladas, rice, and beans. The waitress kept coming with extra tortillas. I paid with a twenty-dollar bill and tipped the young counter girl a dollar on a $2 check. She deserved more.

"Mucho gracias." She smiled with gleaming white teeth.

"Da nada." Jack Keroauc had picked grapes in a migrant camp and fallen in with a girl who probably was related to this one. I could see why.

I veered off Mission at Haight and strolled on the south side of the street to avoid the sun. The Fillmore West had been shut for two years. Quicksilver, Moby Grape, and the Jefferson Airplane had abandoned this city for the country. Empty houses bore fire scars and the hard-faced gangs lingered on the stoops of boarded-up apartment buildings. Heroin and speed had ripped the heart out of Haight-Ashbury. No one was wearing flowers in their hair this year with good reason.

"Yo, man, it's me, Omo." The hippie from the bus station shouted from the grassy slope Buena Vista Park corner. A very thin teenage girl in a filmy dress was holding his hand. She wasn't wearing any underwear. Omo and the girl jumped onto the sidewalk. "Yo, man, this is Floral. She's one of the girls at the commune. She likes young guys like you, don't you, Floral?"

"You have nice eyes." Floral spoke with a dead voice. The pale-skinned redhead was about 15. She sported shooting tracks on the inside of her stick arms. My sister was her age.

"Thanks." I kept walking at a steady pace, having noticed another long-haried junkie on the opposite side of the street. He was watching the three of us with too much interest to be a passer-by. This was a set-up.

"Yo, man, where you going? We live around the corner. Let's go up there and chill." Omo wasn't giving up on me. Opportunities at the bus station were slim on Memorial Day. His voice was on edge. He needed a score. I was it.

"Yeah, man, come with us and we can all get it on." Smack had hit America hard in the early 70s and Floral was one of its many casualties. She pulled on my arm with the strength of a blood-weak vampire. "I'll do anything."

"She really means anything." Omo lifted her dress to the waist. The gap between her legs was wide than a hand. "Anything is Floral's specialty."

"Thanks for the offer, but I got places to go." I shrugged off her weak grasp and broadened my gait.

"$20 will get you an hour of heaven." Omo wasn't giving up so easy.

"So you're her pimp?" I hadn't been with a woman for a long time, but I had never paid for sex.

"That's an uncool word." Omo smirked with unwavering perseverance. "I'm her coach. What about it? You can do a lot of anything in an hour."

"No." I was at the end of my patience and pushed him hard.

"Sorry, to bug you, man. I didn't realize you were queer." Omo shouted in a loud voice and gave me the finger. He was a sore loser.

"Fuck you too." I muttered under my breath to avoid any escalation of this encounter.

Two years ago the hippie scene had been on its last legs. A few head shops lurked in a state of decay along the famed strip, but the long-hairs were outnumbered by openly gay men in plaid shirt, tight jeans, and work boots. They had brothers in New York and Boston. These men openly stared at my crotch and commented lewdly, as if they were sailors on leave. Judging for the shortness of their hair, several might have been stationed on Treasure Island with the Pacific Fleet.

San Francisco had belonged to the Beats in the 1950s. The hippies had inherited the city in the 60s. This decade was owned by men in love with men, even if that love lasted a few minutes. I kept walking west.

I reached Golden Gate Park with Kezar Stadium on my left. I strolled through the empty parking lot. The gates were locked with chains. The 1974 football season was a long way away from the end of May.

Almost a hundred thousand young people flocked to San Francisco in the Spring of 1967. The gathering of the tribes lasted one long summer. The Haight was not big enough to handle that many people at one time and the fall saw an exodus of those disenchanted with the chaos, but it was still a beautiful day.

Mexican families were burning meat on barbecues and a dozen baseball games between Latino squads were in progress on a well-trodden field. A few hippies were tossing frisbees on the edge of the lawn. Marijuana wafted on a cool breeze scented with salt. The ocean was getting close.

Few pedestrians strolled on the paths past Stow Lake. Collarless dogs ran in packs through the underbrush. A wilderness survived at the edge of the city. It was not safe and I was being followed by three men and a woman. Two of them were Omo and Floral. This meeting was not a coincidence.

A fist-sized rock lay in the dirt. I bent over, as if to tie my shoe. The four of them were too far away to notice that I was wearing boots. The rock was smooth in my hand. I stood up and continued in the same direction. There was no place to run.

The confrontation came the other side of a small lake. Omo and Floral stood in my path and the other two approached from behind. I didn't put down my bag. The young girl stood in back of Omo. She was pushing him forward. The other two were a Latino in a leather vest with a bandana around his head and the long-hair from the Haight. A scar bisected his face. It had not come from a duel. He was the first one to speak. Scar had nothing good to say."

"Man, heard you didn't want Floral." Scar spoke slow, as if he wanted me to hear every word.

"I wasn't in the mood."

"That's too bad, because that would have been easy for everyone." Scar whipped out a knife. The blade was four inches long. The Latino balled his fists. Omo smiled with anticipation and Floral said, "Do it. Do it."

They were a team. It was four-on-one on paper. None of them had seen the rock in my hand.

"Give us the bag and your money." The greasy-haired hippie flourished the knife with a shaking hand. He was jonesing big time.

I slipped the bag off my left shoulder and held it out. The four of them seemed pleased with my surrender and Scar reached out with his left hand. Desperation left a big opening and I swung my fist in a wide loop to open-palm his skull with the rock in my hand. I hadn't pulled my punch and Scar dropped the knife. His body hit the ground at the same time. I picked up the knife and turned to Omo.

"Are we done?" I slipped the rock inside my jacket pocket. It had served its purpose.

"Yeah, man, we're cool." Omo lifted his hands in submission. The Latino robber backed away several feet.

"Then have a nice day." I pocketed the knife and kicked the fallen thief in the ribs twice. It was not for show.

I walked away from my disappointed attackers looking over my shoulder several times until I reached the South Drive. Cars sped along the park road. I was safe again.

"Hey, you."

Floral ran up to me.

"Can I go with you?" She was out of breath.

"Where you from?" I didn't expect her to tell the truth. She was a runaway.

"Kansas, same as Dorothy. Where you going?" She bit her lip, hoping I might say Hollywood.

"Nowhere special." In her state Floral couldn't make it much farther than Route 1 before going to the village of Cold Turkey. I pulled $10 out of my pocket. She didn't deserved it, but today was the day after my birthday. "This get you straight."

"A little." She snatched the bill like a banana-hungry monkey in a cage. "Another ten and we can go into the bushes."

"Thanks, Floral, but I really have to be going." There was no telling what she was carrying and I wasn't going to find out. "You take care of yourself."

"I'm tougher than I look." Her smile was missing a tooth. Life was tough on the street.

"I'm sure you are." I was on my summer vacation and Floral wasn't the type of girl to save in a single day.

I left her on the roadside and ten minutes later crossed the Great Highway to stand on a sloping strand of sand. The sun was three hours from setting in the west. The cold from the ocean chilled my flesh. No one was swimming in the surf. I took the rock and knife from my jacket and threw them into a wave. Neither appeared from the surge.

I turned around to San Francisco.

Cars were heading north and south on the coastal road. I walked to the curb and stuck out my thumb. A Tempest convertible stopped within two minutes. The marine on holiday was headed to Daly City. I jumped in the car. Ten minutes later we left the city by the bay and sadly it felt good leaving, but only until the wind swept through my hair.

The hippie was dead.

The road lived on forever.

TO THE DOOR by Peter Nolan Smith

2012-01-11T21:34:00.000-08:00

I-5 ran south out of Sacramento. The day was getting hot in the Central Valley and AK cranked up the Torino's AC. I turned around several times to be disappointed that Carol wasn't in the backseat. A whisper of her rose attar fragrance clung to the car. She and her Joni Mitchell tape were on a bus to Mendocino, but the nursing student was not gone.

"Think it will work out with her boyfriend?" AK had liked Carol from the start. She smelled good.

"He's a doctor. The dream husband for every mothers' daughter." I was playing hardball with his hopes. Her girlfriend had left me for someone else a year ago.

Carol was no Jackie.

The blonde was easy to like, even if she thought me a fool after my fiasco in Reno. I rubbed my shoulder, trying to remember, if I had fallen down last night. "I met him once. Sorry to say, but he was cool. Besides you already have a girlfriend."

"On the other side of the country." They had been lovers since college. Annie wanted kids. AK was pursuing a musical career in funk. The New Yorker wasn't close to being black, except when he played the electric piano.

"Meaning?" With my eyes closed I heard a young Herbie Hancock.

"That three thousand miles is a long way from home." He was driving the station wagon a little over 55. The California Highway Patrol had a long history of busting anyone not fitting their notion of a good American whether they be an Okie, a Mexican, a hobo or a hippie like AK and me. He started singing BORN TO BE WILD by Steppenwolf.

"Looking for adventure and whatever comes our way."

I joined him on the chorus. The song was an anthem for the road ever since it was featured in EASY RIDER. AK laughed at my effort.

"What's wrong?" I had a good idea what was so funny.

"Just that you sounded like Tony Bennett."

The comparison was almost a compliment and I segued to I LEFT MY HEART IN SAN FRANCISCO, substituting Carol for heart. Now it was my time to laugh.

"Feeling more human?" AK exited the interstate at Route 12. The fields were rowed with fertile vines weighty with the grapes of 1974. Lodi was wine country.

"Better than this morning." I had woken up along the bank of the Truckee River with no money in my wallet, thinking that I had blown my vacation at a blackjack table in Reno.
"You know not telling me that my money wasn't gone was mean."

"Like I said in Sacramento. It was for your own good." Lodi was laid out in a grid with the railroad determining which side of the tracks was the better part of town. AK held the owner's direction in his left hand.

“Was I that bad?” My hangover answered my question, but AK could fill in the blanks.

“I didn't want to say anything in front of Carol in case she said anything to your old girlfriend. After you lost the day's winning, I gave you another $300 and stashed the rest. You threatened to punch me, if I didn’t. Carole lent you $20 once you blew the three hundred. I paid her back from your money." AK was my good friend. We had lived next to each other in Boston. He didn't have to pull any punches. "After she crashed in the car, but you got ugly."

"How ugly?"

"Make a train take a dirt road ugly." AK flicked up the left turn signal. East Oak Street lay a few blocks to the north. "The security guards tossed you out around midnight and you tried to storm the front door. The bouncers were nice enough not to punch you out, but they did rough you up."

"That explains my shoulder." I hadn't fallen, but been thrown to the ground.

"One more thing." AK looked in the mirror, then turned right. The neighborhood was neat and tidy. " You were yelling that you wanted the police to arrest the casino owners for stealing your birthday.

“Funny?” Humor was a question of delivery.

"More pathetic than funny at the time, but more funny today." AK braked by the curb.

Jake was watering the lawn in pressed khaki trousers and an immaculate white tee-shirt. The white one-story bungalow was topped by a brick-red tiled roof contrasting the soft blue shutters. Two orange trees provided shade and fruit. Everyone else in the neighborhood had cut down theirs.

A buxom blonde in a garden dress was tending to the flowers. His wife was a good-looking woman and Lodi looked like a fine place for an ex-Marine to live.

Jake turned off the hose and waved to us with a smile. Californians loved their automobiles.

"All good things must come to an end." AK shut off the engine and opened the door. The air was thick with warmth. I got out of the car too. It had been a good ride.

"Wasn't expecting you for another day." He walked around the Torino searching for dents or scratches. "Where's Carol?"

"She caught a bus for Mendocino in Sacramento. She wanted us to tell you thanks." Few men forgot Carol.

"If it wasn't for her, I would have never let you two take the car." We existed on other sides of the Generation Gap, even though Jake was ten years younger than my father.

"Nothing personal, but I don't have much use for hippies. What's that lump in your pocket?"

"Quarters."

"From Reno?" There was only one pass over the Sierras. "Have any luck?"

"A little bit of good and the same in bad."

"Ha." The owner of the Torino was pleased by my loss.

I hadn't figured him for mean in Jamaica Plain.

"Jake, leave those two boys alone," his wife snapped with scissors in hand. Her eyes were green and the blonde hair a gift from her genes. "They drove your car all the way cross country. Is it okay?"

He leaned his head into the car. The station wagon smelled brand-new after the deluxe treatment at the car wash.

"Sorry, old habits are hard to kick." The apology was more for his wife's ears than ours. "You made good time."

"I drove 55 most of the way." AK pulled the drive-away company's contract from his wallet. He had rarely pushed the V8 over 70. Carol and I had been the speed demons

"And you?" The forty year-old kicked the tires.

"I opened it up once in Utah." My father examined the tires of his Olds 88 with a shoe. It was something men their age learned from their fathers. I grabbed my bags from the back of the station wagon.

"How fast?" Men from out West understood driving fast. It was Big Country territory.

"121. It might have had ten more miles per hour in it."

"Good man. My personal best was 126," Jake stated with pride. "That 428 pulls its weight."

"
I got out of the car and grabbed my bagIf we had driven 55, I think we'd still be in Colorado." 55 was top speed for a car at the turn of the century.

"It's a stupid law." Jake pulled a pen from his shirt pocket and signed his name on the contract. "Looks like you didn’t hit nothing, so we're good."

"Have any problem from the police?" Jake had better things to do than chase us for a $25 speeding ticker from Iowa.

"None, we were good citizens." I doubted if he smelled the weed on AK. "One small thing."

"How small?" He braced for the bad news.

"A couple of times when we stopped for gas, people thought Carol was Patti Hearst."

"Are they blind? Patti Hearst can't hold a torch to Carol." Jake was in agreement the opinion of every man of our trip. Carol was special.

"You boys care for something to eat?" His wife had forced a truce.

"We're hippies. We love free food." A sandwich would be good. as long as it didn't come from the Hari Krishnas or Salvation Army. Even long-hairs had their limits.

His wife returned to caring for her flowers and Jake took inside the house. The layout of the furniture was sparse and the simple decor was particular to white suburbs throughout America. AK and I felt right at home, if we were living with our parents.

Family photos, medals, and basketball awards were arranged by decades within a tall glass display case. Jake was a handsome groom in his dress whites. His wife was a blonde double for Marilyn Monroe. A young man with short hair held a basketball in his hands.

"Who's the hoopster?" AK asked in earnest. He had been the starting point guard for his high school team on Long Island. Smoking pot had increased his dislike of the authoritarian coach at the cost of playing minutes. On the playgrounds of Boston he drove to the basket with two points on his mind.

"My son, Mark. He was the star forward for the Lodi Flames. 13 points a game and 5 rebounds. I dreamed about him going to college, but he enlisted in the Marines after graduation. I pulled strings to keep him in-country. He wanted to see the Show." Jake's weakening voice forecasted the climax to this story.

"Sorry." I had graduated a year before his son. College students in New England didn't go to the Show.

"I blamed you protestors for his death. That damned Richard Nixon said he was going to bring our troops home in 1968. You didn't protest enough and you cared more about the Vietnamese than your own." Jake touched the glass panel before his son's photo, as if his hand could touch the dead

"We did our best." I had been against the War since 1969. I met Jackie at a demonstration condemning the bombing of Hanoi. We made love the same night. Jake was right. Our chants of 'Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh Ho Chi Minh is going to win' outnumbered our shouts for 'Bring the troops home'.

"I was in the Marines for twenty years. Every marine said that they did their best. I was what was expected." Jake inhaled a deep breath. His exhale whistled a single sibilant note. He was counting to ten. "I was a Marine. My son was a Marine. My grandson will say 'Semper Fi' in his turn."

"He had a son?" Mark was my age. I had never impregnated a woman. He had a life.

"A boy named Jake." The ex-marine shivered with the last silver lining. "Be three this weekend. I was pissed at him for knocking up his girlfriend back then. I'm of a different mind about that now."

"Times change." AK understood that epitaphs are the chorus of reflection.

"That they do." Jake grit his teeth and turned to us. The moment was dammed behind a wall of "Semper Fi. He was a grandfather. I put his hand on my bad shoulder and fought off a grimace. "I hope you hippie boys aren't vegetarians. I cook a mean burger."

"I am an omnivore. As a kid in Maine I ate whale." A clam shack on Portland Harbor sold whale from time to time. "It tasted great."

"Then you're in for a treat."

When I was a boy in Maine, once a week during the short summer my parents packed us into their Ford Station Wagon for a trip to Benson's Grove. The burgers were served with a special relish unknown to the rest of America.

Jake's sauce came close. He opened a bottle of Zinfandel. AK had a glass. I had two. At 22 recovery from a hangover depended on solutions. The burger had saved my life. Jake's wife joined us for the second bottle. AK played his African thumb piano. They were delighted by the magical plinking of flesh on metal resonating in the wooden box.

His wife packed us cold-cut sandwiches and kissed us on the cheek.

Jake's wife must have driven the postman crazy.

"You really going to hitchhike now?" Jake had offered to drive us to I-5.

"I'm going to San Diego." AK had given me his friend's telephone number in Encinitas. I had a pocket filled with quarters.

"I-5 will take you there. What about you?" Jake started the car and gave it the gas. The last tank had been premium.

"I'm thinking about heading over to the coast to take the Pacific Coast Highway south." It felt good to be in the Torino again.

"No way to hitchhike there from here, unless you like the hiking part of hitchhiking." Jake waved to his wife and she blew him a kiss. He wouldn't be gone long. "Better you take a bus into the City. The PCH is right down the end of Golden Gate Park."

Jake gave each of us $20 and another $20 to AK.

"Give that to Carol when you see her. You did a good job."

Jake drove AK to the highway. He got out of the Torino for the last time. I-5 had a lot of traffic heading south. It was a little past noon.

"See you in San Diego." AK took up position a few feet in front of the sign forbidding pedestrian or hitchhikers on the highway.

We waited for him to get a ride. A Cadillac stopped within five minutes. AK threw a power fist in the air and jumped in the big car.

"A good friend?" Jake headed back into town. My bus was in twenty minutes.

"The best." I would be broke without him. Now I was on my own for the next few days. It was a good thing Nevada was in the opposite direction. I knew no one in San Francisco. This was a new world.

TOO LATE FOR THE HAIGHT by Peter Nolan Smith

2012-01-11T00:50:00.000-08:00

The bus from Sacramento crossed the Bay Bridge in light traffic. Most everyone in the Bay Area had off Memorial Day.. The uniformed driver took the first exit to the Transbay Terminal and parked in the depot. I grabbed my bag from the storage compartment underneath the bus and entered the station. The uniformed driver took the first exit to the Transbay Terminal and parked in the depot. I grabbed my bag from the storage compartment underneath the bus and entered the station. Holiday passengers were forming queues for destinations north, south, and east. They were mostly military and college students. Commuters had stayed home for the day.I walked onto Beale Street into the intense noontime sun. The temperature was much cooler than the Central Valley and I set my canvas travel on a wooden bench to pull a light leather jacket. "Man, you looking for a place to crash?" a scraggly long hair in dirty denim and a soiled paisley jacket asked, while scratching a sore on his neck."No, I'm good." I had been warned about rip-offs by overly friendly hippies and slung my bag over my left shoulder. The muscles and joints of my right were bruised from the security guards in Reno tossing me from a casino."Clean and your own bed. You give what you can afford. My name's Omo. Stands for On My Own. We're a cool commune. Lots of chicks too. You into chicks?" Omo followed me at a safe distance."Leave me alone." I glared back at him with the promise of a punch."Suit yourself. You don't know what you'll be missing." Omo stuck his hands into the jacket and turned back to the station. The Summer of Love had ended seven years ago. Now junkies and speed thieves preyed on unsuspecting hippies following the acid trail of 1967. The wide-eyed faithful were easy marks for the vultures haunting the bus station and I crossed the street headed toward Mission Street with the slender spire of the Transamerica Building rising to the north.Six days ago I had left Boston in a drive-away station wagon bound for Lodi, California. The owner was relieved to have his Ford Torino delivered without mishap. My friend AK had headed south on I-5. I was going to meet him in Encinitas sometime next week. Buses and trolleys traversed the peninsula to the ocean. I intended to cover the short distance by foot. I wasn't in a hurry.Lunch at a small Mexican diner consisted of enchiladas, rice, and beans. The waitress kept coming with extra tortillas. I paid with a twenty-dollar bill and tipped the young counter girl a dollar on a $2 check. She deserved more."Mucho gracias." She smiled with gleaming white teeth. "Da nada." Jack Keroauc had picked grapes in a migrant camp and fallen in with a girl who probably was related to this one. I could see why.I veered off Mission at Haight and strolled on the south side of the street to avoid the sun. The Fillmore West had been shut for two years. Quicksilver, Moby Grape, and the Jefferson Airplane had abandoned this city for the country. Empty houses bore fire scars and the hard-faced gangs lingered on the stoops of boarded-up apartment buildings. Heroin and speed had ripped the heart out of Haight-Ashbury. No one was wearing flowers in their hair this year with good reason."Yo, man, it's me, Omo." The hippie from the bus station shouted from the grassy slope Buena Vista Park corner. A very thin teenage girl in a filmy dress was holding his hand. She wasn't wearing any underwear. Omo and the girl jumped onto the sidewalk. "Yo, man, this is Floral. She's one of the girls at the commune. She likes young guys like you, don't you, Floral?""You have nice eyes." Floral spoke with a dead voice. The pale-skinned redhead was about 15. She sported shooting tracks on the inside of her stick arms. My sister was her age. "Thanks." I kept walking at a steady pace, having noticed another long-haried junkie on the opposite side of the street. He was watching the three of us with too much interest to be a passer-by. This was a set-up."Yo, man, where you going? We live around the corner. Let's go up there and chill." Omo wasn't giving up on me. Opportunities at the bus station were slim on Memorial Day. His voice was on edge. He needed a score. I was it."Yeah, man, come with us and we can all get it on." Smack had hit America hard in the early 70s and Floral was one of its many casualties. She pulled on my arm with the strength of a blood-weak vampire. "I'll do anything.""She really means anything." Omo lifted her dress to the waist. The gap between her legs was wide than a hand. "Anything is Floral's specialty.""Thanks for the offer, but I got places to go." I shrugged off her weak grasp and broadened my gait."$20 will get you an hour of heaven." Omo wasn't giving up so easy."So you're her pimp?" I hadn't been with a woman for a long time, but I had never paid for sex. "That's an uncool word." Omo smirked with unwavering perseverance. "I'm her coach. What about it? You can do a lot of anything in an hour.""No." I was at the end of my patience and pushed him hard."Sorry, to bug you, man. I didn't realize you were queer." Omo shouted in a loud voice and gave me the finger. He was a sore loser."Fuck you too." I muttered under my breath to avoid any escalation of this encounter.Two years ago the hippie scene had been on its last legs. A few head shops lurked in a state of decay along the famed strip, but the long-hairs were outnumbered by openly gay men in plaid shirt, tight jeans, and work boots. They had brothers in New York and Boston. These men openly stared at my crotch and commented lewdly, as if they were sailors on leave. Judging for the shortness of their hair, several might have been stationed on Treasure Island with the Pacific Fleet. San Francisco had belonged to the Beats in the 1950s. The hippies had inherited the city in the 60s. This decade was owned by men in love with men, even if that love lasted a few minutes. I kept walking west.I reached Golden Gate Park with Kezar Stadium on my left. I strolled through the empty parking lot. The gates were locked with chains. The 1974 football season was a long way away from the end of May.Almost a hundred thousand young people flocked to San Francisco in the Spring of 1967. The gathering of the tribes lasted one long summer. The Haight was not big enough to handle that many people at one time and the fall saw an exodus of those disenchanted with the chaos, but it was still a beautiful day.Mexican families were burning meat on barbecues and a dozen baseball games between Latino squads were in progress on a well-trodden field. A few hippies were tossing frisbees on the edge of the lawn. Marijuana wafted on a cool breeze scented with salt. The ocean was getting close. Few pedestrians strolled on the paths past Stow Lake. Collarless dogs ran in packs through the underbrush. A wilderness survived at the edge of the city. It was not safe and I was being followed by three men and a woman. Two of them were Omo and Floral. This meeting was not a coincidence.A fist-sized rock lay in the dirt. I bent over, as if to tie my shoe. The four of them were too far away to notice that I was wearing boots. The rock was smooth in my hand. I stood up and continued in the same direction. There was no place to run.The confrontation came the other side of a small lake. Omo and Floral stood in my path and the other two approached from behind. I didn't put down my bag. The young girl stood in back of Omo. She was pushing him forward. The other two were a Latino in a leather vest with a bandana around his head and the long-hair from the Haight. A scar bisected his face. It had not come from a duel. He was the first one to speak. Scar had nothing good to say.""Man, heard you didn't want Floral." Scar spoke slow, as if he wanted me to hear every word. "I wasn't in the mood." "That's too bad, because that would have been easy for everyone." Scar whipped out a knife. The blade was four inches long. The Latino balled his fists. Omo smiled with anticipation and Floral said, "Do it. Do it."They were a team. It was four-on-one on paper. None of them had seen the rock in my hand."Give us the bag and your money." The greasy-haired hippie flourished the knife with a shaking hand. He was jonesing big time.I slipped the bag off my left shoulder and held it out. The four of them seemed pleased with my surrender and Scar reached out with his left hand. Desperation left a big opening and I swung my fist in a wide loop to open-palm his skull with the rock in my hand. I hadn't pulled my punch and Scar dropped the knife. His body hit the ground at the same time. I picked up the knife and turned to Omo."Are we done?" I slipped the rock inside my jacket pocket. It had served its purpose. "Yeah, man, we're cool." Omo lifted his hands in submission. The Latino robber backed away several feet. "Then have a nice day." I pocketed the knife and kicked the fallen thief in the ribs twice. It was not for show.I walked away from my disappointed attackers looking over my shoulder several times until I reached the South Drive. Cars sped along the park road. I was safe again."Hey, you." Floral ran up to me. "Can I go with you?" She was out of breath."Where you from?" I didn't expect her to tell the truth. She was a runaway."Kansas, same as Dorothy. Where you going?" She bit her lip, hoping I might say Hollywood."Nowhere special." In her state Floral couldn't make it much farther than Route 1 before going to the village of Cold Turkey. I pulled $10 out of my pocket. She didn't deserved it, but today was the day after my birthday. "This get you straight.""A little." She snatched the bill like a banana-hungry monkey in a cage. "Another ten and we can go into the bushes.""Thanks, Floral, but I really have to be going." There was no telling what she was carrying and I wasn't going to find out. "You take care of yourself.""I'm tougher than I look." Her smile was missing a tooth. Life was tough on the street."I'm sure you are." I was on my summer vacation and Floral wasn't the type of girl to save in a single day.I left her on the roadside and ten minutes later crossed the Great Highway to stand on a sloping strand of sand. The sun was three hours from setting in the west. The cold from the ocean chilled my flesh. No one was swimming in the surf. I took the rock and knife from my jacket and threw them into a wave. Neither appeared from the surge. I turned around to San Francisco. Cars were heading north and south on the coastal road. I walked to the curb and stuck out my thumb. A Tempest convertible stopped within two minutes. The marine on holiday was headed to Daly City. I jumped in the car. Ten minutes later we left the city by the bay and sadly it felt good leaving, but only until the wind swept through my hair. The hippie was dead.The road lived on forever.

TO THE DOOR by Peter Nolan Smith

2012-01-06T06:59:00.001-08:00

TO THE DOOR by Peter Nolan SmithI-5 ran south out of Sacramento. The day was getting hot in the Central Valley and AK cranked up the Torino's AC. I turned around several times to be disappointed that Carol wasn't in the backseat. A whisper of her rose attar fragrance clung to the car. She and her Joni Mitchell tape were on a bus to Mendocino, but the nursing student was not gone."Think it will work out with her boyfriend?" AK had liked Carol from the start. She smelled good."He's a doctor. The dream husband for every mothers' daughter." I was playing hardball with his hopes. Her girlfriend had left me for someone else a year ago.Carol was no Jackie.The blonde was easy to like, even if she thought me a fool after my fiasco in Reno. I rubbed my shoulder, trying to remember, if I had fallen down last night. "I met him once. Sorry to say, but he was cool. Besides you already have a girlfriend.""On the other side of the country." They had been lovers since college. Annie wanted kids. AK was pursuing a musical career in funk. The New Yorker wasn't close to being black, except when he played the electric piano. "Meaning?" With my eyes closed I heard a young Herbie Hancock."That three thousand miles is a long way from home." He was driving the station wagon a little over 55. The California Highway Patrol had a long history of busting anyone not fitting their notion of a good American whether they be an Okie, a Mexican, a hobo or a hippie like AK and me. He started singing BORN TO BE WILD by Steppenwolf."Looking for adventure and whatever comes our way."I joined him on the chorus. The song was an anthem for the road ever since it was featured in EASY RIDER. AK laughed at my effort."What's wrong?" I had a good idea what was so funny."Just that you sounded like Tony Bennett." The comparison was almost a compliment and I segued to I LEFT MY HEART IN SAN FRANCISCO, substituting Carol for heart. Now it was my time to laugh. "Feeling more human?" AK exited the interstate at Route 12. The fields were rowed with fertile vines weighty with the grapes of 1974. Lodi was wine country."Better than this morning." I had woken up along the bank of the Truckee River with no money in my wallet, thinking that I had blown my vacation at a blackjack table in Reno. "You know not telling me that my money wasn't gone was mean.""Like I said in Sacramento. It was for your own good." Lodi was laid out in a grid with the railroad determining which side of the tracks was the better part of town. AK held the owner's direction in his left hand. “Was I that bad?” My hangover answered my question, but AK could fill in the blanks.“I didn't want to say anything in front of Carol in case she said anything to your old girlfriend. After you lost the day's winning, I gave you another $300 and stashed the rest. You threatened to punch me, if I didn’t. Carole lent you $20 once you blew the three hundred. I paid her back from your money." AK was my good friend. We had lived next to each other in Boston. He didn't have to pull any punches. "After she crashed in the car, but you got ugly." "How ugly?" "Make a train take a dirt road ugly." AK flicked up the left turn signal. East Oak Street lay a few blocks to the north. "The security guards tossed you out around midnight and you tried to storm the front door. The bouncers were nice enough not to punch you out, but they did rough you up." "That explains my shoulder." I hadn't fallen, but been thrown to the ground. "One more thing." AK looked in the mirror, then turned right. The neighborhood was neat and tidy. " You were yelling that you wanted the police to arrest the casino owners for stealing your birthday.“Funny?” Humor was a question of delivery."More pathetic than funny at the time, but more funny today." AK braked by the curb. Jake was watering the lawn in pressed khaki trousers and an immaculate white tee-shirt. The white one-story bungalow was topped by a brick-red tiled roof contrasting the soft blue shutters. Two orange trees provided shade and fruit. Everyone else in the neighborhood had cut down theirs.A buxom blonde in a garden dress was tending to the flowers. His wife was a good-looking woman and Lodi looked like a fine place for an ex-Marine to live.Jake turned off the hose and waved to us with a smile. Californians loved their automobiles."All good things must come to an end." AK shut off the engine and opened the door. The air was thick with warmth. I got out of the car too. It had been a good ride."Wasn't expecting you for another day." He walked around the Torino searching for dents or scratches. "Where's Carol?""She caught a bus for Mendocino in Sacramento. She wanted us to tell you thanks." Few men forgot Carol."If it wasn't for her, I would have never let you two take the car." We existed on other sides of the Generation Gap, even though Jake was ten years younger than my father. "Nothing personal, but I don't have much use for hippies. What's that lump in your pocket?""Quarters.""From Reno?" There was only one pass over the Sierras. "Have any luck?""A little bit of good and the same in bad.""Ha." The owner of the Torino was pleased by my loss. I hadn't figured him for mean in Jamaica Plain."Jake, leave those two boys alone," his wife snapped with scissors in hand. Her eyes were green and the blonde hair a gift from her genes. "They drove your car all the way cross country. Is it okay?"He leaned his head into the car. The station wagon smelled brand-new after the deluxe treatment at the car wash."Sorry, old habits are hard to kick." The apology was more for his wife's ears than ours. "You made good time.""I drove 55 most of the way." AK pulled the drive-away company's contract from his wallet. He had rarely pushed the V8 over 70. Carol and I had been the speed demons"And you?" The forty year-old kicked the tires. "I opened it up once in Utah." My father examined the tires of his Olds 88 with a shoe. It was something men their age learned from their fathers. I grabbed my bags from the back of the station wagon. "How fast?" Men from out West understood driving fast. It was Big Country territory."121. It might have had ten more miles per hour in it.""Good man. My personal best was 126," Jake stated with pride. "That 428 pulls its weight.""I got out of the car and grabbed my bagIf we had driven 55, I think we'd still be in Colorado." 55 was top speed for a car at the turn of the century."It's a stupid law." Jake pulled a pen from his shirt pocket and signed his name on the contract. "Looks like you didn’t hit nothing, so we're good.""Have any problem from the police?" Jake had better things to do than chase us for a $25 speeding ticker from Iowa. "None, we were good citizens." I doubted if he smelled the weed on AK. "One small thing.""How small?" He braced for the bad news."A couple of times when we stopped for gas, people thought Carol was Patti Hearst.""Are they blind? Patti Hearst can't hold a torch to Carol." Jake was in agreement the opinion of every man of our trip. Carol was special."You boys care for something to eat?" His wife had forced a truce."We're hippies. We love free food." A sandwich would be good. as long as it didn't come from the Hari Krishnas or Salvation Army. Even long-hairs had their limits.His wife returned to caring for her flowers and Jake took inside the house. The layout of the furniture was sparse and the simple decor was particular to white suburbs throughout America. AK and I felt right at home, if we were living with our parents.Family photos, medals, and basketball awards were arranged by decades within a tall glass display case. Jake was a handsome groom in his dress whites. His wife was a blonde double for Marilyn Monroe. A young man with short hair held a basketball in his hands. "Who's the hoopster?" AK asked in earnest. He had been the starting point guard for his high school team on Long Island. Smoking pot had increased his dislike of the authoritarian coach at the cost of playing minutes. On the playgrounds of Boston he drove to the basket with two points on his mind."My son, Mark. He was the star forward for the Lodi Flames. 13 points a game and 5 rebounds. I dreamed about him going to college, but he enlisted in the Marines after graduation. I pulled strings to keep him in-country. He wanted to see the Show." Jake's weakening voice forecasted the climax to this story."Sorry." I had graduated a year before his son. College students in New England didn't go to the Show. "I blamed you protestors for his death. That damned Richard Nixon said he was going to bring our troops home in 1968. You didn't protest enough and you cared more about the Vietnamese than your own." Jake touched the glass panel before his son's photo, as if his hand could touch the dead"We did our best." I had been against the War since 1969. I met Jackie at a demonstration condemning the bombing of Hanoi. We made love the same night. Jake was right. Our chants of 'Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh Ho Chi Minh is going to win' outnumbered our shouts for 'Bring the troops home'. "I was in the Marines for twenty years. Every marine said that they did their best. I was what was expected." Jake inhaled a deep breath. His exhale whistled a single sibilant note. He was counting to ten. "I was a Marine. My son was a Marine. My grandson will say 'Semper Fi' in his turn.""He had a son?" Mark was my age. I had never impregnated a woman. He had a life."A boy named Jake." The ex-marine shivered with the last silver lining. "Be three this weekend. I was pissed at him for knocking up his girlfriend back then. I'm of a different mind about that now.""Times change." AK understood that epitaphs are the chorus of reflection."That they do." Jake grit his teeth and turned to us. The moment was dammed behind a wall of "Semper Fi. He was a grandfather. I put his hand on my bad shoulder and fought off a grimace. "I hope you hippie boys aren't vegetarians. I cook a mean burger.""I am an omnivore. As a kid in Maine I ate whale." A clam shack on Portland Harbor sold whale from time to time. "It tasted great.""Then you're in for a treat." When I was a boy in Maine, once a week during the short summer my parents packed us into their Ford Station Wagon for a trip to Benson's Grove. The burgers were served with a special relish unknown to the rest of America. Jake's sauce came close. He opened a bottle of Zinfandel. AK had a glass. I had two. At 22 recovery from a hangover depended on solutions. The burger had saved my life. Jake's wife joined us for the second bottle. AK played his African thumb piano. They were delighted by the magical plinking of flesh on metal resonating in the wooden box. His wife packed us cold-cut sandwiches and kissed us on the cheek.Jake's wife must have driven the postman crazy."You really going to hitchhike now?" Jake had offered to drive us to I-5."I'm going to San Diego." AK had given me his friend's telephone number in Encinitas. I had a pocket filled with quarters. "I-5 will take you there. What about you?" Jake started the car and gave it the gas. The last tank had been premium."I'm thinking about heading over to the coast to take the Pacific Coast Highway south." It felt good to be in the Torino again."No way to hitchhike there from here, unless you like the hiking part of hitchhiking." Jake waved to his wife and she blew him a kiss. He wouldn't be gone long. "Better you take a bus into the City. The PCH is right down the end of Golden Gate Park."Jake gave each of us $20 and another $20 to AK."Give that to Carol when you see her. You did a good job."Jake drove AK to the highway. He got out of the Torino for the last time. I-5 had a lot of traffic heading south. It was a little past noon."See you in San Diego." AK took up position a few feet in front of the sign forbidding pedestrian or hitchhikers on the highway.We waited for him to get a ride. A Cadillac stopped within five minutes. AK threw a power fist in the air and jumped in the big car. "A good friend?" Jake headed back into town. My bus was in twenty minutes."The best." I would be broke without him. Now I was on my own for the next few days. It was a good thing Nevada was in the opposite direction. I knew no one in San Francisco. This was a new world.

LUCKY IN LOVE by Peter Nolan Smith

2012-01-05T09:24:00.000-08:00

The dawn sun rose over the eastern mountains and flooded the Bonneville Salt Flats. The Torino station wagon was parked several miles off the interstate. At that distance even the trucks’ throttling diesels were waffled by the dry wind. I sat up on my sleeping bag. The red sun tinted the salt flats with a pale pink, as it had since the end of the last Ice Age.

“Pink sky in morning, sailors take warning.” The ancient marine weather saying had no bearing this far from the sea. The morning sky was cloudless.

Bonneville was the proving ground for land speed records. Rocket cars and super-charged motorcycles ran a measured mile to the north. Last night I had pushed the Ford Torino to its limit on the pancake smooth highway, which wasn’t even close to Craig Breedlove’s Green Monster hitting a little over 600 mph in 1964, but 121 was fast for me.

I stood and stretched my arms and legs. The cars and trucks on I-80 to the south shimmied on a mirage of water mirrors. If I squinted, my eyes could pick out which was which.

“Having an epiphany?” AK rose up from his sleeping bag with a jack knife in hand. He had crashed out thinking that the dregs of Charles Manson’s Family might murder him for Helter Skelter. The pianist smiled with a deep breath. He was happy to be alive.

“You know what today is?” Spreading my arms I welcomed the day with an open heart.

“Let me guess. You’re a Gemini.”

“And?”

“Today’s your birthday.”

“Absolutely right.” May 29 was my 22nd birthday and California was a two-day ride on the other side of the western horizon. The first music in my head was Spirit’s I GOT A LINE ON YOU. It was very West Coast.

“I have a present for you.” AK pulled out a joint.

“You bastard.” I had smelled weed on the pianist since Cleveland. He had been holding out on me.

“Carol wasn’t cool.” He lit up the joint with a match and passed me the first full toke.

“And I’m not?” My tongue said Mexico.

“You’re a drinker.”

“Okay, you’re forgiven.” I bogarted the reefer, for AK was right. Being half-Irish I liked beer better than marijuana.

The two of us smoked my birthday joint watching the sun expand over the desert in silence. The weed was strong as nature. I looked over my shoulder. Carol had spent the night in the station wagon, having heard too many stories about ax-murderers to camp under the stars. The keys were in my pocket. I didn’t trust my ex-girlfriend’s best friend not to drive off in the middle of the night.

AK and I rolled up our sleeping bags. Both of us were hungry.

“Bacon and eggs at a greasy spoon on me.” AK was a good friend. He read my mind. “As I said today’s your birthday.”

“Till midnight.” I walked over to the station wagon and rapped on the window. Carol rose from the back seat. Her tousled hair lent her a mask of Brigitte Bardot. She unlocked the doors and I threw my sleeping bag into the rear. AK did the same and I sat behind the wheel.

“What time is it?”

“Don’t know. I don’t have a watch, but today is my birthday.” Last year I had been with her friend Jackie in Buffalo. My birthday gift was a bottle of Tequila. We drank shots on the American side of Niagara Falls. Later that day I had played softball against her ex-boyfriend’s team in Delaware Park. I had knocked two balls over the railroad tracks.

“Happy Birthday to you.” Carol sang the entire song. She had a good voice. AK watched her lips love. He was entranced by her blonde beauty. It had something to do with her being a schitzah.

I turned the key in the ignition and looked at the gas gauge. It was hovering over E. The gas crisis of 1974 meant no open gas stations in Salt Lake City. I dropped the shift into Drive.

“What do you think?” AK peered out the window to the west.

“There’s a town with an air force base at the foot of those mountains. Wendover, Nevada. It will have gas.” I had hitched this way west in 1972 and east in 1973. “We’ll get there.”

My mother in Boston must have said a prayer for her second-born son, because the station wagon sputtered into a Phillips 66 station on the outskirts of Wendover and the engine stalled at the pump on vapors. Two fighter jets scorched the morning below the sound barrier. I imagined them on patrol over Vietnam. Asia was on the other side of the world.

“It is my birthday.” I was feeling lucky and gave AK $10 for gas. Carol and I entered the truck stop for a shower and breakfast. The interior mirrored the other fuel stops along I-80, except two steps beyond the entrance was a bank of slot machines. Their lights caught my eye. I had a couple of quarters in my pocket. I turned to Carol.

“Like I said I’m feeling lucky.” I had never played a game of chance in my life.

My great-grandfather disappeared from the face of the Earth to avoid overwhelming debts in the late 1890s. My great-grandmother and her two daughters were forced to take refuge up north with her uncle in Augusta Maine. No one in my family ever explained the causes of his misfortune.

I always chose gambling over a woman, since no one in my family gambled on horses, football, or cards, but a quarter wasn’t going to kill anyone. I dropped the coin into the slot and pulled the arm. The cylinders spun to hit a row of cherries. Quarters cascaded into the pay-out slot. My jackpot paid for a half-tank of premium gas.

“Beginner’s luck.” I stuck the coins and walked with Carol into the showers. They formed a lump in my pocket. Carol went into the women’s room and I stepped into the Mens.

The shower room had no walls. I stripped off my jeans and tee-shirt. A lean man was soaping his penis.

“Hey, hippie boy, where you going?” He was erect.

“San Francisco.” I had seen naked men before, but I lowered my eyes to the tiled floor.

“I’m heading your way.” He looked to be 40. Tattoos sprawled over his rawhide skin.

“I got a car and a girlfriend.” The first was the truth and the second was a pure lie. I soaped my body, as if the water was running out

“Too bad, we could have a good time in Frisco. It’s a wide open city. Try the Castro. It’s for men. Maybe I’ll see you there.” He was taking his time, hoping that I changed my mind.

“Yeah.” I grabbed my clothes and dressed without toweling dry. The summer of Love might be long over, but Sexual Revolution was coursing through America highway by highway. Exiting from the shower room I warned AK of the bushwhacker.

“I can take care of myself.” He had been brought up in New York.

“If you say so.” I sat at the counter and ordered breakfast without a menu. Thirty seconds later AK joined me in the dining room with a red face.

“I never heard anyone talk like that.” AK had gay friends, but was 100% straight.

“Better you than me.” I could fill in the monologue from having read hundreds of porno books in the Combat Zone. My research covered every genre.

Carol exited from her shower with a new dress and wet hair. AK fought to not stare at her. We had been with her for three days and he hadn’t worked up the nerve to put a move on her. We were dropping off the Torino in Lodi tomorrow. Time was running short.

Breakfast for the three of us came to less than $2. The owners of the truck stop gave away the food to insure that the gamblers hit the machines. I walked out with a full stomach and $5 worth of quarters. They were heavy in my pocket.

“Very few people know when to walk away a winner.” AK led the way to the door. The trucker was standing next to the cashier. She laughed, as if he was telling her a dirty joke. It probably had nothing to do with whatever he had said to AK.

Nevada was a lunar landscape compared to the Rockies. The brittle underbrush was scarred from the waterless weather. I-80 followed the trail of the Forty-Niners. The first town up the road was called Oasis. The highway shrunk into a four-laner divided by a double yellow line. Without the road this community would have shriveled to its population in the late 1800s. We drove past the gas stations, restaurants, and stores without braking for a light. Oasis had none.

Outside of town I-80 resumed its thread across Nevada. Dirt roads disappeared into the distance. Two years ago a speed freak in a Super Bee had driven my college friend and me across this wasteland. Today I thought the same thing as then.

“What do you think is out there?”

“Ranches, mines, and dirt.” AK studied the map for enlightenment. “I flew over here a couple of years ago. There’s nothing out there, but more of this.

“That’s what I thought.” I stepped on the gas and the Torino hit 90 with ease. For the first time on this trip we shut the windows and turned on the AC. The temperature was climbing into the 90s. AK’s attempts to find a radio station resulted in static. He lifted his hand over his shoulder. Carol handed him Joni Mitchell’s BLUE. It was our only tape. The title song sounded like a mist rolling off the Pacific into Monterrey Bay. After hearing it for the tenth time in five days I knew the words and the three of us sang backing vocals for Joni. We almost were in tune.

Approaching Wells the highway reverted to the old road and I slowed to 40 mph. Town cops out West were notorious for speed traps. I checked the gas gauge. It was reading half-empty The owner had instructed us to keep it full for better mileage and topping off the tank gave us the distance to make the California State Line in one go. I pulled into the first gas station.

AK wiped the windshield, as Carol talked to the pump attendant. The tall blonde teenager was a younger twin to the boy back in Sterling, Colorado. Carol had spent the good part of an hour in that boy’s car. Neither AK nor I had commented on her deviation from being the faithful girlfriend of the medical intern in Mendocino. The nursing co-ed would start working as soon as she reached her destination. She was still on summer vacation.

Across the street was a long one-story log cabin with a neon sign blinking CASINO. James Bond played baccarat at Monte Carlo. Tuxedos and low-cut evening gowns were required attire for the extras. Two men in jeans exited from Well’s casino. They blinked in the sunlight and shook hands, as if they had spent the night inside playing blackjack.

“I’ll be back in a second.” I stepped away from the car drawn by the magnetism of a movie myth. “Where you going?” AK knew the answer.

“To take a look.” A year ago I had passed through Las Vegas on the way to LA. Our ride warned us on the dangers of gambling. I wanted to see for myself.

A cool breeze blew from the ACs inside the casino decorated in a western motif. I walked through the gauntlet of binging slot machines. My favorite game at a bar was pinball. They only cost a quarter. Deeper into the casino a dozen green-felt tables were spread across the red carpet in two semi-circles. Three men sat at the one farthest from the slots. They smiled with success. Each had a pile of chips before them. A motherly dealer in a cowboy hat shuffled a deck of cards with the speed of a Japanese cook at Benihanas.

“Feel like joining us in some blackjack.” Her voice sounded like she might been the Lone Ranger’s sister.

“It’s a friendly game.” A man in the suit pulled out a chair.

“I’ve never played before.” My mother permitted Solitaire, Spades, and Rummy in her house.

“It’s easy. We’ll help you beat the house. It’s us against them.” The oldest man at the table looked like my uncle and Uncle Jack had paid for college with his poker winnings during the Korean War. The old man explained the rules.

“Figure the down card of the dealer is a ten or face card. If she’s showing a six, then figure she’s holding a sixteen. The house has to take a card on sixteen. If she breaks 21, then you win.”

I gave the dealer twenty dollars and placed a $2 chip on the table. She dealt me two tens. When it came my turn for a card, I held up my hand like the old man had done. The dealer was showing a nine. Her down card was a Jack. I won my first hand and the trio at the table congratulated my luck. They had also won their hands.

21 was a simple game and I had a good head for numbers as would anyone who had started college as a math major.

The next set of cards went in my favor and the next. I was on a roll. Carol and AK stood behind me. They didn’t say a word. Within twenty minutes I was up $100. Carol waggling the keys in her hand. The two of them wanted to be in San Francisco, not a dusty gambling town in the Great Basin.

“Sorry, it’s time to go.” I cashed in my chips and said good-bye to the three men and dealer.

“More beginner’s luck.” I stashed the dollars into my wallet.

“Birthday boy luck too.” AK sat in the back of the Torino.

“Don’t test your luck too much.” Carol had been at her girlfriend’s college dorm the night that I had left after drinking a bottle of tequila. The town police had arrested me five minutes after a high speed chase in a VW. She was well aware of my luck.

“Give me another minute.”

“You’re not going back.” AK was worried that I had been bitten by the bug.

“No, I want to call my mother and let her know I’m okay. Remember it’s my birthday.” I held out a handful of quarters and walked to the nearby phone booth.

Three minutes to Boston cost $1.20. My mother picked up on the first ring. She sang ‘Happy Birthday’ twice and asked if I was having a good time.

“We’re almost in California.” She didn’t need to know about my playing cards. She was a good Catholic and luck was a gift from God. St. Christopher was the patron saint of travelers and I remembered a nun telling me that he was also the patron saint of luck. He must have been very popular on Bingo nights. “I’ll call you from there. Love you and tell Dad I’m fine.”

“We miss you.”

“And I miss you too.”

My father had criticized this trip as an adventure. After university I was supposed to start a real job. None of the banks in Boston wanted to employ a hippie with a stutter. America was in a recession and I had been rejected by the banks in Boston. One of them wanted to employ a long-haired economics major with a stutter.

I returned to the Torino and sat in the passenger seat.

“Everything good?” AK had met my parents. They thought that he was a good friend, but a bad influence for my future.

“We can have birthday cake later.” AK’s parents probably felt the same way about me.

“I’m good with chocolate.” Carol pulled out of the gas station and the attendant waved from the pump. She had broken hearts all across the country.

I hoped the intern in Mendocino was worth it.

The map showed the next town was Elko. It appeared bigger than Wells. Carol didn’t refused my request to test Lady Luck at another casino. I pushed away from the table $220 richer. The starting salary at the banks in Boston was $20 less than that. No one at the casinos cared if i had a stammer.

I repeated this routine in Winnemucca and Lovelock. My thick bankroll didn’t fit in my wallet. I counted it several times in the back seat and told Carol to put on Joni Mitchell.

“She’s good luck.”

“How much you have now?” AK had avoided from the tables. His money stayed in his pocket. It wasn’t his day to shine.

“With the money I left Boston with, almost $2500.” A brand-new GTO costed $5300 out of the showroom.

“Happy birthday.” AK was happy for me. Our trip to the coast could last till the end of the summer.

“Thanks.” I shut my eyes and heard the surf of the Pacific. The water was cold and the sun touched my skin with gold. I was looking forward to being a beach bum.

A road sign was marked RENO 150 MILES.

Night was falling blue behind us, as we pulled into the Biggest Little City in the World.

“You mind, if we stop one last time?”

Carol groaned at the wheel and AK said, “I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“It is, it is.” I handed AK $2000. I had seen gambling movies. No one came out on top. “No matter what I say, don’t give it to me.”

“I’ll hold it.” Carol grabbed the cash and slipped the money into her pocketbook. “I don’t trust either of you, but Joni Mitchell wishes you good luck. One more thing.

“What’s that?”

“If you’re going to play, then play. Never fix a limit.” Carole was a junior at a girl’s college outside Boston. She was studying nursing. Her advice sounded dangerous.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

Reno blazed with neon signs cascading rainbows above the street. These were the brightest lights since Denver. I picked out the Horseshoe Club as my next victim. I liked its 50s facade. Carol gave the Torino to a casino valet. I tipped him a dollar.

“Whatever you do, don’t let this man sell the car.” She warned the skinny valet.

“I’ll try my best.” He must have failed more than once before.

“A half-hour. Not a minute more.” It was my birthday. Joni Mitchell was saying prayers for me. Reno was at my mercy. Carol and AK detoured to an empty lounge, where he sat at a vacant piano. He played her Joni Mitchell and she smiled at him for the first time on the trip.

I rubbed my hands together and approached the blackjack tables like Genghis Khan on a raid.

After fifteen minutes I was up to $900. The balding dealer in the red vest congratulated my play. I placed a $100 worth of chips on the table. My two cards were an ace and a ten. The dealer paid out $150. A leggy redheaded waitress in a skimpy mini-dress asked if I wanted a drink. Her smile gleamed in the eternal neon night of the casino.

“Jack and Coke.”

“I’ll be right back.” She touched my shoulder and gave me a wink. It felt good not coming from a man for a change. I gave her a $5 tip. She asked my name. After I told her it was my birthday, she said, “Maybe if you’re lucky, we can celebrate it together once I get off work.”

“That would be great.”

My name’s Kim.”

I downed the first drink and pulled off a series on wins.

After each hand I counted the money in my head. Kim kept the drinks coming one after the other. She kissed me once on the ears. I lost a few hands and tried to recoup by wagering larger stakes. That strategy failed to curb the luck of the house. AK tried to pull me away from the table.

“I know what I’m doing.”

Those were the last words I remembered that evening.

The next morning bright sunlight seared my eye sockets with acid sunshine.

I was lying on the ground next to a rushing river instead of a penthouse suite. My head was pounding like a drum crashing down a cliff. Pine trees pierced the clear sky. Something hard was digging into my hip. I sat up with difficulty and my hands searched my pockets.

There was not one dollar in any of them and my wallet was gone. All I possessed was the $5 in quarters, which explained my hip problem.

This was not good and I stumbled to the banks of the river to stick head in the water. The cold revived me from the shock of loss for several seconds. The cascade rushing over the tumble of worn boulders had to be the Truckee River.

I pushed back my long hair and stood up straight to check my pockets again.

The result was the same.

For an instant I thought that someone had rolled me.

This was getting worse and I wondered how many Jack and Coke’s I might have drank last night. The razors slashed at my brain shouted more than ten and I shambled to my boots lying in the dirt. I picked them up and stuck my hand to the toes. There was not a penny in the boots.

AK and Carol were sitting on a rock eating sandwiches. She didn’t look very happy. I staggered over to them and asked, “Did I lose everything?”

“Yes.” AK confirmed the worst.

“What about the money I gave Carol.”

“Never heard anyone beg like that. Not even a junkie in the emergency room.”

“Shit.” I was 2700 miles from Boston without a dime to my name. “At least we didn’t sell the car.”

“Yes, but you tried.”

“Idiot.” Last night I had everything. This morning I had nothing, but a hangover. I washed my face in the mountain stream and we drove over the Sierras into California. Carol and AK kept their comments to themselves, as I called myself every name in the book.

At Sacramento Carol left us for a bus to San Francisco.

“It was fun.”

“See you in Boston.” AK had her phone number at college.

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell Jackie anything about last night.” Carol kissed me on the cheek. Her gesture was comforting as was her promise to keep my disaster a secret from my ex-girlfriend not that it would have made much of a difference Jackie was in love with someone else. My luck with women was as bad as it was at blackjack.

AK and I cleaned the Torino at a car crash in Lodi. The station wagon was untouched by the long trip across country. AK took the wheel for the last time and I sat on the other side of the car, wondering how long $5 would last, as I hitchhiked back to Boston.

“Here.” AK handed me a paper bag.

“What’s this.” I opened it and found my wallet with $1200 in it. My next words came from Captain America in EASY RIDER. “So I didn’t blow it.”

“You would have if I gave you this.” He turned the key in the ignition. The V8 purred with power. “I didn’t give it to you this morning, because I thought you would go back to the casino.”

“Thanks.” I was almost in tears.

“I hope you learned your lesson.”

“One, I’m no gambler and two drinking and gambling don’t mix.” $1200 was half of what I had last night, but $1200 was more than I started with this morning and that was that all the luck I needed today.

It was May 30, 1974 and I was one day older than yesterday.