New Year Where

On December 31, 2010 night we were closing the diamond exchange and one of the security guards asked of my New Year's plans. Big Dave's an ex-cop from Brooklyn. My neck of the city. Light black and the 300-pounder knows my hang-out, even though his favorite watering hole is Junior's on Flatbush.

"I'm going to Frank's Lounge, because I don't want to be with any whiteys. They are only trouble on New Year's Eve." Every time I go into a white bar someone starts saying something stupid. If I was deaf, I could ignore these slurs against race, religion, and women. Problem is that I'm only near-sighted.

A trio of white ex-cops were waiting for last-minute pick-ups in the exchange. They worked as couriers for the diamond Jews. Most of these couriers were Italian from Bensonhurst or Howard Beach. The three of them stared at me as if I were a race traitor.

"Only brothers at Frank's and the most beautiful Chinese bartender in the world. Damn, am I in love with that woman." Rosa Lee was a wetback from Mexico. The twenty-three year-old beauty had a good heart. Her boyfriends were losers. She deserved better and I would have been the best, if I were 30 years younger.

The Chinese ain't much higher of the race scale for these guidos. My son and daughter are mixed. Half-Thai/ Half-Farang. Ha-sip ha-sip.

"Ain't no way a white man can get in trouble at a black bar." I never have fought with a black. Not of the basketball courts, streets, or bars. "My Uncle Jack warned me once, fight any white guy you want, but never a black man. He'll come back and stab you to death."

Big Dave said nothing. He was black and easily read the hatred in his fellow officers' eyes. I couldn't have given a shit what they thought. None of them go to Frank's and wherever they're going I'm avoiding and going to be seen avoiding on New Year's Eve or any other night of the year. Race traitors know their place and mine will be Frank's Lounge with Homer, Andy, Tyrone, Roe, Charlee, Harriet, Claudia, Larry LA and the big man himself, Frank. It's my home away from home.

I'll be easy to find too, since I'll be the only man in his 50s wearing a tuxedo.

New Year's Resolutions 2020

Every January 1st millions of Americans vow to better their lives and the world. The Top Ten New Year's resolutions rarely differ from year to year, since most people give up their resolutions within a few days.

For 2020 I made no resolutions.

Not one.

At my age I've failed enough times to accept my habits with aplomb, but here are the perennial Top Ten;

1. Spend More Time with Family and friends
2. Exercise more
3. Lose weight
4. Stop Smoking
5. Enjoy Life
6. Quit Drinking
7. Get Out of Debt
8. Learn Something New
9. Help Others
10. Get Organized

After reading this list I figure I'm not so bad off.

There's some of them I do without the help of a resolution.

Hell, I must have quit drinking a hundred times in 2012 and I got out of debt by cutting up my credit cards in 2008. Two months of stress knocked off 15 pounds and I don't really smoke cigarettes, except when I drink at a bar.

I do feel good about life, especially when I'm with my kids.

Somehow I got to get over to Thailand more often.

The end of January is the next trip.

So don't worry too much about resolutions.

Most of them are unattainable, otherwise you wouldn't have to make them, so life for today.

It's the best resolution of all.

JOURNAL ENTRY - DECEMBER 30, 1978 - EAST VILLAGE

Dallas trumphed over Atlanta and the Steelers bettered the Brocnos to set up the two teams playing in SuperBowl XIII, as the NFL uses Roman numeral to classy up the most profitable Battle of Brawn of 1979.

Alice will return to New York after a long holiday in West Virginia. She telephoned last night with plans for the New Year Celebrations. I've always considered the celebration an amateur's night out and have opted to work at Hurrah, drinking with my friends and fellow punk rockers, as billions around the world welcome 1979, the last year of the 1970s, which started with Nixon and Vietnam and ends with Jimmy Carter as president and cocaine supplanting LSD as drug of choice for the disco crowd.

Morte, Morte, Morte.

DECEMBER 30, 2021 BROOKLYN

The NYU Transplant Unit has demanded that I have my blood tested weekly for drink and drugs. Tomorrow I will be five months straight. The longest sober stretch of my adult life with another six to go before the Surgeons will even consider an operation.

I want to live.

I want to see my children grow.

I want to write.

And I want to teach the young and old about life away from their cellphones.

Morte, Morte, Morte a gin/tonic.

Aegroto dum anima est, spes est ~ Erasamus - As long as there is life there is hope.

JOURNAL ENTRY DECEMBER 22, 1978

After the hurricane swept the island, I set off in a leaking sailboat across the trashed sea and landed on a large island peopled by two warring factions. I and my faceless friends were drafted into a guerrilla troop and were deployed in the forest to ambush an unknown enemy.

I was ordered to scout out a mile from the ambush spot. I hid in a rumblng factory and spied the oncoming attack forces. They were not amateurs and spread out to search the facotry for danger.

I noiselessly killed them one by one and then returned to the ambush location. I informed the officers on their strength. We had hidden three machine guns and a tank. These weapons combined with the element of surprise gave us a victory and after twenty seconds of slaughter our enemy surrendered, begging for mercy.

LATER

Andy was supposed to call me this afternoon, but he never called and after writing for two hours I heaed uptown for holiday shopping. I stopped into the Cornelia Street Cafe and spoke with Grant and Cyrena. Alice and I haven't had sex in months and I fucked the owner's wife in the bathroom. I had cheated on Alice and she had betrayed her husband. Her old man had two girls on the side and Alice was in West Virginia with her father and mother. I bought beer and went to my place at 256 East 10th Street to drink with Willem, who had already starred in a movie, and Joe Han, a Hong Kong filmmaker. They discussed their futures. I said nothing and drank beer, because at this point in my life, I had no future.

Joe Han disappeared back to China. I search film credits for his name. I have never seen it.

Willem has become a giant of cinema.

I remain nothing even more now than ever. There's no telling how much longer I have on the Earth. Two months. A year. Two years. Everything depends on getting a liver transplant. Friends ask if I am scared. Truthfully not at all. Not of pain. Not of death.

I've had a good life and I still have one.

Forever and a day.

JOURNAL ENTRY DECEMBER 27, 1978 - EAST VILLAGE

This morning I had driven Ande's father's car from Brookline to Route 3 onto 128 past the snowfields of the Blue Hills and then headed south to the great metropolis of New York City. Big Blue has a radio station atop its granite bald summit. The view from the tower encompassed Boston from Cape Ann to Nantasket. As a teen I had skied the short trails, but always revel in the dark blue of the Atlantic stretching east into the Atlantic. Boston had once been my hometown. My mother had called this morning and told me to take care of myself. My one goal was to make enough money to pay off their mortgage and then send them to Hawaii. Getting a regular job was the only way to achieve that wish, but 9 to 5s bored me shitless and I stepped on the Cutlass' gas.

Visiting my parents had been comforting as had seeing my brothers, sisters, and aunts and uncles and our next door neighbors, the Menconis for Christmas dinner. I loved my parents. My older brother was with Pattie, who was working for the CIA My sisters Pam and regina seemed happy, and Regina's beau was a good man from Hartford, if there is such a thing. My younger brother Patrick played guitar in the basement, while Michael, obviously wanted to tell everyone his secret. I had warned him that confessing you're gay was one sure way to ruin Christmas and he said, "Maybe this summer."

I felt bad about not having any gifts and even worse getting some. Andy was my only friend at the gathering. Every other friend from grammar and high school and college have vanished into the amnesia of the past. My old girlfriends are ghosts; Linda Imhoff, Hilde Hartnett, Janet Stetson, and Jackie Collins. I'm not sure if I abandoned them or they deserted me.

The Cutlass sped on I-95 through the marshlands of the Neponset River. The highway rose at Sharon onto a plateau all the way to Providence. The Interstate had destroyed miles of neighborhoods, but at least the engineers had banked the pavement and I hit 80 past the empty harbor.

Farther along the State Prison rises atop a high berm. Hundreds of convicts locked to serve sentence for their crimes or someone else's wrong. Snow topped the field of the pine barrens, until I reached New London and the nuclear sub bases of Groton. Within a half hour I crossed the Connecticut River, which I considered the southern boundary of New England.

At Christmas dinner my family asked, "Will you ever return to Boston?"

"I don't think so."

I love New England; Maine and the White Mountains, but I had taught English at South Boston High during the bussing riots. The city of my birth was filled with racists. My old friends called me a 'race traitor. I could fight them all. The day before Christmas I rode the trolley into Park Street. None of the women appealed to me.

I left the city in 1976. I adopted the sums of the East Village as home, even though my first friends had yet to come to New York. My good friend, Andy, was remained in Boston playing funk in an all-black band. Neil had left Staten Island to study Medicine in Dagupan City in the Philippines, Libby had flown to Paris to seek fame and fortune as a fashion model. I had new friends now, but I felt I would desert them at one point.

LATER

I'm trapped in Brooklyn. Covid has surged out of control, yet plenty of unmasked people wander the streets of Clinton Hill, as if they are immune to the virus, but many of my friends have been struck up by this variant despite having been vacced twice.

A road trip would be perfect except there's nowhere I can go, as I will have a series of tests at NYU Hospital to assess the health of my liver.

I've been invited to ski in Tahoe, sun in florida, and fly over to London to reside at Goodenough University. Mostly I want to see my families in Thailand, however Nu says that everything in Shut down in Pattaya and Mem is concerned about leaving the house.

Oh, for the world to be free again.

The Wasteland of TV

When I was a child of the 50s in Maine, Timbukto symbolized the most remote destination on this Earth, although Bob Hope and Bing Crosby never made a 'road movie' to there. One day during geography class my teacher at Pine Grove Primary School in Falmouth Foresides traced her finger across the world map to Africa.

"That's where Timbuktoo is." She pointed to the center of the Dark Continent. "It's on the edge of the Sahara, which is the world's largest desert.

Few of us would ever learn that the name meant 'place covered by small dunes" in Berber.

We were from Maine and the only reasons to leave the Pine Tree State were to sail the seas, war or attend a Red Sox game in Boston.

Until the 20th Century the only method of reaching the remote city was by foot or camel.

Europeans traveled across the wastelands to be the first white man to visit the gold and slave trading post. The British explorer Mungo Park died on his 1805 attempt. A shipwrecked American sailor had been taken there as a slave in 1811. The Paris-based Societe de Geographie offered a 10,000 franc prize to the first non-Muslim to reach the town. Rene Caillie won the prize in 1828, but few adventurers sought to repeat the journey.

For many westerners Timbuktoo existed as a myth, but in 2012 the legendary city has been seized by the Islamist rebel group Ansar Dine, who have introduced 'sharia' into the World Heritage site famed for its ancient mud mosques and last week these fanatics destroyed several structures with picks and axes on the grounds of idolatry and their connections to Sufism, whose sect is an anathema to the fundamentalists.

Within the week the sixteen mausoleums will be dust in the wind and they will only exist as a memory. The West had no response. Mali doesn't exist in the minds of Wall Street, although some of them would love to own one of the mosques. They are priceless.

I've never been to Timbuktoo, but the shrines will survive in my heads as they will in the dust.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

At sixty-nine I know that all glory is fleeting.

At seventy it will have fled for good.

KOSHER CHINESE FOOD by Peter Nolan Smith

After Valentine’s Day business on 47th Street slowed to a halt. The rich were vacationing in St. Barts and Palm Beach. Oil bills taxed normal New Yorkers to the bone and purchasing a diamond was the last thing on most people’s mind in a bad economy during the harshest winter in modern memory.

Hlove the store manager had succumbed to a cold and called in sick. Richie Boy phoned me to come in to open the safe. I was grateful for the day's work.

After setting up the counters and front window, the standard procedure was to plod through the repairs and pick-ups from the setters and polishers.

No one entered the diamond exchange.

At least no one with an honest intention of buying jewelry.

By noon Richie Boy and I were standing around the space heater discussing our lunch plans. We decided Chinese.

"You want anything, Manny?"

"Chinese?"

"Yeah."

"Not for me. I'm on a diet."

"Suit yourself." Manny, my boss and Richie Boy’s father, was unhappy with our obvious idleness.

“I might as well hired two brooms than you heroes.”

“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 after 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 boy 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.”

“Enough already.” The thought of a 2000 year-old virgin corpse disgusted Manny. “But say a little prayer to this Saint Agatha. It can't hurt.

“I’ve forgotten my prayers.” Some stuck with me. The nuns taught religion with the help of a ruler. My hands twitched in memory of the flat wood measuring stick striking my knuckles.

"Sa but my atheism wasn’t something I mentioned at work.

“Pray already. We need money.”

"I'll do my best." I rejected my atheism for ten seconds and begged the intercession of St. Agatha, but stopped before saying how much cash I wanted, because lunch had arrived from the Chinese take-out.

“Great, first I have a religious bullshitter and now I have loafers.”

“A man has to eat.” Richie Boy handed me my order of General Tso’s chicken. He was having the same thing.

“I loved the succulent meat covered with crunchy batter and the sweet tang of the sauce. Neither of us ever questioned 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, whose surface was cluttering with bills, invoices, and folded packets of loose diamonds.

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

“Nothing.”

“Then you get nothing, fat boy.” Richie poked his father’s belly. A good three inches of fat hung over his belt. The eighty year-old 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 put a paper towel under his collar. His tie was Armani.

I ate at my desk with a real fork and spoon. I hated plastic utensils.

Richie spoke on the phone with his wife, mumbling out apologies. He had had a late night last evening.

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

“Only until midnight, then we both went home.” I had no idea what time he got 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 more than Yahweh.

“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.”

“What makes you think a Chinaman is going to serve you cat?” I put down my fork.

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

I examined a piece of fried chicken without figuring out what part of a chicken it came from.

""I have a question for you."

"What?" Manny asked daubing at a post of gravy on his shirt.

“Why do Jews like Chinese food so much?”

“Because it’s cheap.”

“It has nothing to do with the money. Chinese culture and Jewish culture go back thousands of years.”

I popped the crispy morsel in my mouth. It tasted like chicken.

Manny expounded on this theory.

“They know each other since Adam. Marco Polo found Jews in China. They weren’t there for their health. They probably came from one of the lost tribes.”

"Lost tribes? That's almost a good a legend as General Tsao Chicken being cat."

"My father told me ten tribes were deported from Israel by the Assyrians. They were scattered across the earth."

"Jake taught you that?" Richie Boy put down his phone.

"Whatever my father taught me stayed taught same as the nuns." Manny had dropped out of high school at the age of 15 and had started working on Canal Street at the age of 16. “My father said our family was a lost tribe in America."

"But then you were found?"

"No, but we discovered China in Brooklyn, because when I was a kid, there were Chinese restaurants on every corner and every Sunday the Chinese restaurants were crowded with Jewish families and the real reason Jews like Chinese is that they never mixed dairy with meat."

"I thought you said that jake didn't take you out to eat." Richie Boy remembered his family history from its one source.

Manny.

"We never ate at the restaurant. Jake hated giving tips." Manny's father had been a common laborer. He had worked into his nineties as a diamond schlepper for his son. A truck ran him over on Canal Street. Jake survived that and lived another three years with a slight limp. "Like I said we were poor, but sometimes my father would treat us to take-out. We ate on paper plates, which my mother would hide in the trash, so the neighbors wouldn’t know that we were so poor. Like she was fooling anyone.”

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

“Sure, it was cheap and good, plus my brothers and I ate pork, because eating forbidden foods showed we were Americans. At the Chinese restaurant 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. The number two reason that jews eat Chinese is that they 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 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 good thing about the Chinese was that we weren’t Jews to them. 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 finished off 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. There was no one there too. My old man didn’t like waiting for nothing.” Manny made himself another crepe. “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. You.” Manny bit into the pancake loaded with pork and pointed to the door. A man and woman were coming out of the cold.

My prayer to St. Agatha had hit its mark.

“Enough talk. Work.”

“You got it.” I put away my food before Richie Boy could get out of his chair,

I was hungry for money and ‘nimmt geld’ or take money was the first rule of 47th Street. My lunch could wait till later and Chinese food always tastes better with a little money in your pocket.

Even cold.

Journal Entry - December 25, 1977

Dec. 25, Boston.

Yesterday after dancing at the 1270 Kevin and I ate Monte Cristo sandwiches at Ken's Steak House on Boylston Street. The nineteen year-old played bass for the Mumps and like most young people he had with more future and less of a past than me, but we talked freely about punk and modern depravity. Kevin was pleased with his playing, but said, "My bass sucks, but not as bad as my amp."

At dawn I wished him a Merry Christmas and walked over to Copley Square to meet Andy and Therese. The blonde, go-go dancer had just finished working at a Combat Zone after-hours bars. They were headed down to Long Island to see his parents. We sat on his Firebird smoking a joint. I had gone out with Therese's younger sister, who lived with the rest of their clan in a chaotic family commune in Brookline. I hadn't seen Hilde in months.

The rising sun brightly lit the Boston Public library and the morning was unseasonably warm for late December.

My friend put out the joint and got inside his car. Therese lit a cigarette and asked, "What do you think about andy and I getting married?"

You won't like what I have to say."

"Why?" The ex-go go dancer dropped the cigarette and crushed it under a stiletto heel.

"One, I don't approve of your living with your family. Your mother and step-father are crazy and will interfere with your life."

"Like they did with my sister and you?"

"Hilde and I were different." Neither Joe nor her mother Kate said anything about us, probably knowing I had no future with a high school senior. "And secondly I don't think Andy is responsible enough for marriage."

Therese looked at Andy and raised a finger to wait another minute. He started the engine. She turned to me and pouted, as she said, "I can make him happy."

"That is true. You have my blessing."

She got in the Firebird and they drove away to the Mass Pike.

My family was waiting for me in the Blue Hills and I went to the trolley station, knowing that there was no evil in the pursuit of happiness, even if fearing disaster, but that was me and I was the king of disasters. Even on Christmas Day.

My First Film

My grandmother lived in an old farmhouse in Westbrook Maine.

She had served with the Royal Canadian Medical Expedition in the great war. My grandfather had been a doctor for the allies. Mementoes of their meeting in 1916 were scattered throughout the house.

Zeppelin debris was stashed in the desk drawers. Helmets, bayonets, and uniformed hung into the upstairs closet. A mural of a French landscape decorated in their bed room.

I never met my grandfather, a surgeon, who had died a year before my birth.

After two years' exposure to the horrors of war grandmother hated violence, but in 1960 my grandmother pulled me into the living room.

"What did I do wrong?" My older brother was out on the lawn playing with matches.

"Nothing, but I want you to watch this film." She turned on the TV. It was 3 on a Saturday afternoon in Westbrook. The men are the mill were working overtime. Boys were meant to be out of the house. "What is it?" I sat on the couch.

"THE SEVEN SAMURAI," she explained the story about seven Japanese protecting a peasant village from outlaws.

"That sounds like THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN." I had seen the cowboy movie at the Cornwall Drive-In with my family. I loved Steve McQueen.

"Hollywood got the story from Japan." My grandmother sat down, as the opening credits appeared in Japanese.

"Japan?" Our one-time enemy only made transistor radios.

"Watch."

Horses rumbled across the screen through a small village. Wars were fought between samurais. I could read the subtitles.

"What are samurais?"

"These are ronin, knights without a king. They owe nothing to anyone other than honor. Watch."

I obeyed her command and my older brother came into the living room.

"Watch," my grandmother pointed to the sofa.

For the next three hours we were transported from a Maine paper mill town to rural Japan and I understood that the Japs were people just like anyone and that meant that everyone was like everyone. It was a great lesson for a young boy and even today. To View SHICHININ NO SAMURAI, please go to the following URL http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTU4NjAzNTIw.html

A Lengthy Hiatus

I was born in 1952. The numbers add up to a Prime of 17 sandwiched between 13 and 19 and is the sum of four consecutive primes; 3, 5, 7, 9. Any other four prime would add up to a number divisible by 2 and thereby not prime.

For the most part 17 is considered a number of love, although the Latins regarded 17 as an unlucky number. One anagram of the Roman numeral XVII is VIXI, which in Latin translates as "I have lived", with the implication "My life is over" or "I'm dead".

This summer on August 1 I ran to the toilet into which I spewed a copious treacle of black blood.

I reckoned I vomited about a quart, a definite sign that something was seriously amiss within my body.

I took a taxi to NYU Langone on 1st Avenue. The ER said with a sense of urgency that I need to stay in the hospital for a four or five days of observation.

"I thought so."

I had brought CLAUDIUS GOD by Robert Graves.

The doctors had their way with me, but I survived the episode with the staunching of the weeping lesion within my stomach.

The test and treatment of the past four months had exhausted my body and soul. My movement is minimal and I am hit by bouts of listless limbo. I actually feel good. Not great, but and am ready to write again. Shit I have nothing else to do.

17 come my way again.

Simple Math

Simple Math is a strictly mathematical viewpoint.

What Makes 100%?

What does it mean to give MORE than 100%?

Ever wonder about those people who say they are giving more than 100%?

We have all been to those meetings where someone wants you to give over 100%.

How about achieving 103%?

What makes up 100% in life?

Here’s a little mathematical formula that might help you answer these questions:

If the letters A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

as represented as number:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26.

Then:

H-A-R-D-W-O-R-K

8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98%

and

K-N-O-W-L-E-D-G-E 11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96%

But,

A-T-T-I-T-U-D-E 1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100%

And,

B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T 2+21+12+12+19+8+9+20 = 103%

AND, look how far ass kissing will take you.

A-S-S-K-I-S-S-I-N-G

1+19+19+11+9+19+19+9+ 14+7 = 118%

So, one can conclude with mathematical certainty that while Hard work and Knowledge will get you close, and Attitude will get you there, but it’s the Bullshit and Ass Kissing that will put you over the top. “REMEMBER SOME PEOPLE ARE ALIVE SIMPLY BECAUSE IT IS ILLEGAL TO SHOOT THEM.”

This wisdowm was emailed from Big Al Harlow of Pattaya fame.

At best he's tough as nails.

Linear Algebra 101

Back in the 1960s most New Englanders' were loss at sea when asked to count beyond ten on their fingers. Multiplication and long division flummoxed college students. Calculus was the Black Plague, but I loved the intercourse between numbers and in 1966 I was awarded a scholarship to Xaverian Brothers High School on strength of my test score.

My father was an electrical engineer had been told by the Priests that they suspected that I might have cheated on the exam in which I scored an A+. Upon hearing my historical discourse on Ptolemy calculations, Archimedes' method of exhaustion, and Newton's errors on Gravity as well my problems with Einstein's Theory of Relativity my father was astounded by my knowledge, especially since I suffered from what was much later diagnosed as dyslexia.

"Why do you think Einstein was wrong?"

"Einstein calculated the speed of light as 186,000 MPS or miles per seconds. Do you drive 55 on the Expressway? No, so there is no speed limit. Not for your Oldsmobile or Light."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing, other than my love of Math."

Poetry was Math. This magic recreated time and shifted through a billion formalae seeking an ultimate truth.

E=MC squared equal 2.

That autumn I was placed in Xaverian's advanced Math program.

My grades hovered around B. My parents considered me an under-achiever. I strived to prove them wrong without success, yet I won a Math half-scholarship to a college based on my belief in Time, which saved me from tragic addition and subtraction of Vietnam.

Math as a major in college was a big mistake, since at night I drove taxi to finance my studies. I missed my 9am Multivariable Calculus class with regularity, however I aced my final and advanced to study Linear Algebra under Rene Marcus, a famed genius of telemetry, whom the Pentagon paid big money for his skill to mentally calculate missile attacks on Russia without a slide ruler.

NPR manufactured the first calculator in 1967. None existed in the marketplace until 1974, which then was sold by NPR for $170. Only the rich could afford that price.

On the first day of class I sat at my desk with a thin book for Linear Algebra, a pencil, and paper notebook. The text on flat differential geometry obtusely explaining the electromagnetic symmetries of space-time was as dense as Osmium. I read it in a day with Pene's daughter and invited her to the Phoenix Bar. As we played pinball, she asked,"Do you understand the importance of Linear Algebra."

"Only that it supports the Universe existence with lines, planes and rotations through complex functions."

"And you disagree?"

"I am not smart enough to argue its importance.

Rene's daughter had heard my beliefs on Time. She believed in Einstein's Theory of Relativity, while I argued that time wasn't not constrained by rules and I reiterated, "There are no speed limits on an empty highway."

"That means nothing."

"And nothing means much in Math and in life."

She laughed and said, "You are a fool."

"You are right about that."

That Fall I attended only four classes.

Four, which was two times two, the second prime number.

In December I arrived at the final and Professor Marcus pulled me to the side. The rest of the class stared at me as a stranger and the professor said, "You shouldn't be here. You might be my daughter's friend."

"Just friends."

"Either way that will not influence my grading you."

"I wouldn't expect anything else."

"You haven't been in class more than three times."

"Actually four times."

"Three or four. What the difference?"

"Three is a prime number."

"And what is the important of numbers."

"Numbers will never betray the ignorance, but will trap anyone else by their honesty."

"Do you really think you can pass this test?"

"Truthfully I suspect no is the right answer."

"Then what are you trying to achieve?"

"The impossible. Give me a test paper and let me place my hand on the textbook for ten seconds." I understood the value of a hand on a book.

"And this will help?" Mathematicians only believed in numbers.

"It can't hurt."

The professor held out the book. My hand touched the cover. My palm read nothing. I was fucked. If I failed this course, I might end up in Vietnam. I took the test. My score was 45. The whorls on my flesh were very sensitive. Rene was amazed by my idiot-savantism.

"I thought you'd get nothing right."

"I still failed."

"Yes, but if you drop out from Math, I'll give you a D+"

"It's a deal."I accepted his offer and dealt with my parents' disappointment.

"What will you study now?" asked my father.

"I don't know."

"Can't you plan for the future?"

"Not now."

"You fail next time and you'll end up in Vietnam."

"I know." The War was a meat grinder and I was no John Wayne. My new major was economics. I graduated sine laude or without praise in 1974. Nixon had pulled out most of our troops. I was safe and that summer I drove cross-country with my good friend AK to celebrate the end of my education.

It was a great trip and I haven't opened a math book since 1972, although I have learned that western man had no concept of zero until well until the end of the Middle Ages, while the Mayans always had zero or Pohp for their 20-based numeral system.

Presently I don't use my fingers for long math, but if you think you're smart just remember the words of Phil Pastoret.

"If you think dogs can't count, try putting three dog biscuits in your pocket and then giving Fido only two of them."

Arf Arf Arf equals three.

And three is a prime number

Bad Math 101

Americans are not very good in Math.

According to OECD 15 year-old US students are ranked # 37th in the world behind Hungary, Israel, Norway.

1 + 1 = 2 is a difficult concept to the Land of the Free.

And forget about 3-D grafts.

Dunce caps for most of the class.

And students favorite answer for Math is 'huh'.

Curves are equally troubling for students in square states like Kansas and Colorado, although educators are hoping for improvements thanks to the legalization of marijuana.

Everyone selling pot is good with Math.

Batman is always a good substitute for numbers or equations.

But no help for expanding equations.

But smudges are always applicable to answers on chaos.

Nothingness is even better, because in the end who cares if 1 + 1 = 2.

Not Jackie Gleason.

Brooklyn Tony ON MATH

Brooklyn Tony returns from school and says he got an F in arithmetic.

"Why?" asks the father.

The teacher asked ' How much is 2 x 3,' I said "6,'" replies TONY.

"But that's right!" says his dad.

"Yeah, but then she asked me ' How much is 3 x 2?'"

"What's the fucking difference ?" asks the father.

"That's what I said!"

Pearl Harbor Day Forever

"December 7th will live forever as a day of infamy." President Roosevelt predicted before Congress in his declaration of war on Japan.

Infamy in Thai is cheu sia and last year I asked several Thais about Pearl Harbor. My question stumped them all and I repeated the question to several British friends, "What does December 7th mean to you?"

"Is it your birthday?"

Roosevelt's Day of Infamy has been losing its power to the more modern 9/11.

Even 9/11 meant little to Thais.

"9/11 New 7/11?" The corporation had announced a price increase on over 500 products.

"No. Not new 9/11." I didn't bother to explain about kreung-bins crashing into the World Trade Towers or Japanese planes sinking the US Fleet. It was all so long ago and so much has happened in the meanwhile like the Red Shirt rebellion and Britney Spears getting divorced from K-Fed.

Pearl Harbor Day was not my birthday, but it was for my younger brother Michael and it always felt funny celebrating December 7th with a cake and candles. My baby brother Michael didn't care. "Makes it easy for people to remember my birthday."

12/7 will always be Michael Charlie Day for me.

Tora-Tora-Tora.

My mother loved that movie too.

BIG FOOT by Peter Nolan Smith

In 1977 I moved out of my SRO room in Greenwich Village to the East Village with my hillbilly girlfriend. The third-floor walk-up on East 10th Street had a bathtub in the kitchen and a water closet off the living room. I carved Alice's name on the wooden window sill. We lasted until 1979. The lack of privacy was not to blame for our break-up.

Alice rented a bigger place on Avenue A and I kept the apartment, working at various nightclubs the next ten years. It was easy money and drinks were free.

I rode a 1964 Triumph Tiger and 1970 Yamaha 650 XS. My mechanic was Dmitri from the East 6th Street Bike Shop. The Russian emigre introduced me to Tim, who owned a bar south of the Holland Tunnel. The Californian had a Ducati and Norton. Our bikes were the loves of our lives, for neither of us had girlfriends.

Tim and I traded nights cooking dinner for each other, after which we would play gin rummy. He was a better cook and I was lucky at cards as long as the play didn’t involved money. Dmitri joked that we were man and wife. It was only funny the first time that the mechanic said it.

When Tim mentioned to a neighbor living farther into Alphabet City that I had been brought up outside of Portland, Maine the middle-aged woman extended an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner at their tenement building and I showed up on time with flowers at their building between Avenues B and C.

It was a cold night and a huddle of vagrant junkie warmed themselves around a trash an fire. The north side of the street was dominated by a row of abandoned buildings and rats lurked in the shadows. I checked the block for trouble and pressed the buzzer.

A scrawny Puerto Rican opened the door and pointed to a narrow set of stairs.

"Top floor." His voice was dusty with dope.

I climbed the steps past offices and bedrooms. The decor was late-20th Century suburbia, as if this one family had failed to heed the call for White Flight in the 60s.

Jane and Carmine were older than the rest of their guests; an ironworker from Montana, an anti-Zionist writer, a female cop from the shooting range, a marine historian from the Natural History Museum, Tim, and me.

Their two kids were high school age.

Neither the tall boy nor the skinny girl looked much like Jane, who could have passed for a Mormon diesel dyke at the Cubby Hole in the West Village in her calico dress, but they didn't bear much resemblance to their bald cigar-chomping father.

Carmine wasn't a pretty sight in his tobacco-stained tee-shirt and baggy jeans and judging from the thickness of his glasses I doubted that the thick-bellied ex-merchant marine saw any reason to shave his scruffy beard.

"So this is my fellow Mainiac." Jane hugged me, as if we had been separated at birth, and handed me a full glass of red wine. It was a pricey Barolo. "Where are you from?"

"Falmouth Foresides." My town was across the harbor from Portland’s Eastern Promenade.

"That’s almost like coming from Massachusetts." Jane elbowed Tim in the ribs. "I'm from Columbia Falls in Aroostock County, which is the last place God created before his rest."

"Way Down East." I had never been there. The nearest city was Ellsworth, the gateway to Bar Harbor. "Only Lubec is farther Down East."

"You do know Maine."

"Then you know Maine has the ugliest women in New England." Carmine stashed his unlit cigar in the top pocket of his shirt. He sucked on his teeth and the upper deck came loose from the gums. His physical warranty had lapsed on several parts of his body.

"Thank you." Jane seemed inured to this remark. “And there isn't anyone Down East uglier than you."

"But they try." Carmine smiled without his upper teeth. He could never be a Christmas Santa, but that grin showed a streak of humanity more deeply-seeded than his hard facade.

"The key to triumph is in the first syllable," I said without hesitation.

"It’s not everyone who can quote a Salada tea bag, you sit next to me.”

During the dinner of turkey, yams, pea, creamed onions, turnips, squash, and more wine Jane recounted her history.

"After graduating from University of Maine I had moved to New York to become a beatnik." She looked to the head of the table. "Instead I met Carmine at a poetry reading."

"It was Ginsberg’s queer lover reciting MARRIAGE 'O God, and the wedding! All her family and her friends and only a handful of mine all scroungy and bearded 
just wait to get at the drinks and food."

I applauded his memory.

"Sounds almost like this dinner." Carmine carved the bird with a vengeance. The inner cavity was stuffed with raison, nuts, and garlic.

"Now you see why I married him." Jane beamed at the first generation Sicilian. The two opposites were very much in love, but the cigar-chomping plumber regarded Jane's friends as weirdos and growled, "I feel like I’m serving turkey at a Bowery shelter."

"Shut up, old man. This is Thanksgiving, not Pearl Harbor Day."

"I know what day it is."

"My younger brother was born on December 7." The juicy turkey smelled of over the river and through the woods, even though the only trees in the East Village were shivering in Tompkins Square Park

"In 1941?" He was looking for the right answer.

"No, 1960." I could only give him the truth.

"You want white meat or dark?"

"Both."

"What do you know about Pearl Harbor?" Carmine loaded my plate with meat and passed it down the table.

"Just that none of our carriers were sunk there?" I had minored in history at university. "And we were lucky that the Japanese hadn't carry out a third attack."

"They couldn't, because the returning planes would have had to land at night and no one knew how to do that.”" Carmine showed his knowledge of that Day of Infamy, then finished serving the rest of his guests, after which we ate to our hearts' content. I pushed away from the table and undid my belt. The third helping had been overkill.

Waiting for desserts we discussed the 1948 Israeli-Arab War with his friend Ira. The slouched contrarian believed that the Zionist State shouldn't exist until the arrival of the Messiah. If anyone knew weirdos, it was Carmine.

For post-dinner entertainment Carmine put on THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY followed by EL TOPO. We lounged around the cool glow of the holiday TV in turkey comas.

Carmine mumbled stories about the East Village from the 50s interspersed with racial epitaphs. The marine historian's girlfriend called him racist.

Rick defended his pseudo-uncle. Racism was a serious accusation.

"Carmine is an equal hater of everyone." Tim knew that Carmine supported a number of blacks and Puerto Ricans. His bad mouth was a shock to squares. Their disapproval gave him great pleasure.

"That's right. I don't have a good word to say about anyone.

Carmine lifted from his chair and motioned for me to follow him into his den. The ground-floor room smelled of old cigars and dirty feet. War books covered the walls. I picked out THE ENEMY AT THE GATE.

"What do you know about Stalingrad?" He was testing me.

"Just that in 1944 DeGaulle came to the ruined city and said to a Free French journalist, "Stalingrad, they are great people." The journalist replied with a nod, "Yes, the Russians.”" DeGaulle corrected him by saying, "Not the Russians. The Germans, because they got this far."

"Where you read that?"

“I think John Tolland’s book on Hitler.”

"You’re not as stupid as you look, scumbag."

After that dinner Carmine and I saw each other from time to time, trading war history books. I gave him GUNS OF AUGUST and he let me borrow ENEMY AT THE GATES.

The East Village native had learned pipe-fitting in the Merchant Marines. Plumbers from the five boroughs sought his advice. Carmine had pull with City Hall. The connections were a gift from his father. The old man had been a bookie.

Tim met a lovely jeweler from the Upper West Side. He moved out of the neighborhood. I was on my own. Dmitri called it a trial separation, but I knew the split was for keeps.

Tim was in love and I inherited his role as surrogate nephew for Jane, although at holiday time he resumed # 1 position at the table. He was family more than me.

She had me drive her to dog shows. They raised Neapolitans and grand mastiffs. Carmine and I dined at a small Italian restaurant on 1st Avenue. The two of us drank red wine and ate pasta, arguing over Lee's second invasion of the North versus the relief of Vicksburg or the British surrender at Singapore. One night he looked around the dining room and asked in a low voice, "Can you hold your sand?"

"I know when to keep my mouth shut." I had been arrested for working at an illegal after-hour club. The precinct cops had been on the take. I had said nothing to Internal Affairs.

"Good, then I have a proposition for you."

He lowered his head and mumbled like the FBI might have wiretapped the restaurant. His scheme didn't sound risky and I agreed to help him in a venture. We kept Aunt Jane and Tim out of the loop

Every month I dropped over to his cluttered office and handed him an envelope. He never counted the money.

Around that time I stopped the nightclubs and worked as a diamond salesman on 47th Street. Uncle Carmine bought jewelry with his extra earnings. He became a fixture in my life along with his wife.

Jane had tickets to the opera and Rangers game.

"I got another proposition for you," Carmine mentioned the next autumn. We were heading out to the cheap Italian restaurant on 1st Avenue. "Jane needs someone to go with her to the hockey games and opera."

"Ranger games?" I was pure Boston, but also loved the slash of steel blades on ice.

"They're good seats." Carmine played with the end of his cigar. It hadn’t been lit once. "But if you want to go to the hockey games, then you got to go to the opera, because I ain’t going to neither."

"Opera?" I hadn't ever seen any opera.

"Yes, opera. You can be the old lady’s walker." He laughed to himself, as we left the house.

"The Lower East Side ain't no Palm Beach." 11th Street between B and C had no palm trees.

"Don’t I know that."

I wasn't too sure of this accommodation until I saw that the Rangers were playing the Bruins at home. Jane was adamant about Carmine's deal. "One hockey game. One opera."

"I don’t know." Fat people sang forever.

"Bruins-Rangers at Madison Square Garden and Pavarotti at Lincoln Center. It won't be so bad."

"Which comes first?"

"The opera." She was too smart to play it the other way around. "And I want you to wear a jacket and tie. I'll pay the taxi. You have ten seconds."

"I'll go." I loved the Bruins that much.

I picked up Aunt Jane on East 11th Street and Avenue D. I was wearing a dark-blue pinstriped suit from Jaeger. Aunt Jane was in a flowing gown and a battered mink, which her husband called 'dog'. We exited from the building.

The dealers on the street said about us. Aunt Jane's husband had taught them better. Uncle Carmine had laws unwritten by courts.

A taxi took us far uptown. The crowd before Lincoln Center was excited like it was a Who concert. I searched the crowd for a pretty face. The women were wrinkled as turtles and Aunt Jane at 55 was the youngest in our section.

The seats were good and made myself comfortable. Aunt Jane elbowed me with the power of a defenseman’s forecheck. "No, snorting or sighing. This is something special and I wanted it to be for you as much as me."

I had never heard of Pavarotti, but when the curtain raised, the audience wildly shouted his name. The big man appeared in the first act. His strong voice was on the money. Aunt Jane was crying, because it was so beautiful. I didn't look at my watch once and when the first act ended, Aunt Jane asked, "Now that wasn't so bad, was it?"

"No, how more acts are there?" The first had lasted about 40 minutes.

"Three, but each gets shorter."

"Three." Heaven would become purgatory somewhere in the second and hell during the third.

"Don't worry, let’s get some champagne."

"Champagne?"

"Yes, you didn't think I'd let you stay sober that long, did you?"

"You know what I like." And the rest of the evening passed pleasantly with each intermission celebrated at the bar. Pavarotti received a standing ovation for about ten minutes. I shouted like he had scored a hat trick.

Carmine lent me his station wagon to visit my mother during her last days. Jane lit candles at the local church for her passing. It was good having about family in your life, especially since mine was distant.

Tim and his wife had a baby, then another. Jane called herself their grand-aunt. Carmine thought that his wife was a kook, but wanted to buy her a pearl necklace for Christmas. I found one of South Sea pearls. It wasn't cheap.

"How much you make on me?" He was eating his cigar.

"50%." The real number was 10%

"Thanks, scumbag." Carmine meant nothing by calling me 'scumbag'. He called people who he didn't like a lot worse. We had a profitable run of scores. Only a few of them skated across the line. We never got in trouble. It was a good sideline to my day job.

I thought that the old man would live forever, except in the mid-90s he started complaining about a stomach ache. He refused every entreaty to submit to a doctor’s examination. I supplied stomach medicine with fake scripts. The pills helped a little bit, but not much, because Carmine had something worse than a stomach ache. Neither of us said what.

In 2000 I left for my annual trip to Asia and Carmine said, "You take care."

He handed me a small envelope. It felt like money.

"What’s this?"

"You have a good time in Bangkok for me. I was there in the 50s. It was a good time then and it's probably a good time now."

"Why don’t you come with me?"

"And leave all this.” He waved his hand in the air. “I already been everywhere. Just don't go crazy, scumbag."

Two months later I received a phone call at room 302 at the Malaysia Hotel.

It was Aunt Jane.

"Carmine’s dead."

"Dead, you want me to come back?" I was only a little shocked by the news.

"No, he’d want you to have a good time, but we're burying on October 12th.

"Columbus Day."

"He wasn’t Italian.”

“Carmine's father came from Sicily."

"Not Carmine, Columbus. Carmine always said he was a Jew from Genoa."

“Everyone comes from somewhere.” Aunt Jane actually was a Jewish orphan from Russia. A doctor in Maine had taken her brother and her for his own.

"We’re planting him in the blueberry patch above Schoonic Bay. I'd like you to be there. He liked the view from the hill."

"I’ll be there." I scheduled my return for late-September. The flight stopped in LA. I continued on to New York. My subleasee, a Swedish male nurse, had cleaned the place before leaving. Everything seemed to be in order.

I dropped my bags on the floor and walked two blocks over to Jane’s compound. Carmine had bought two buildings and a vacant lot for $15,000 back in the early 70s. The property was now worth millions.

Jane gave me a big hug and said, "Carmine wanted you to have some books.”

The best were 1st editions of TRUE GRIT, NAKED LUNCH, and THE ENEMY AT THE GATE.

"You're going to help drive up to Maine?" Jane sat down heavily. She was not in the best of health.

"Wouldn’t miss it." This trip would be a home-coming for both of us complete with lobsters and a funeral. She opened the closet in Carmine’s office and held out a ceramic urn.

'The old man." Two identical urns were in the closet.

“And the other two?”

"Those are the dogs. Carmine wanted to be buried with them."

No markings were written on the urns to distinguish them from each other. Jane saw my eyes and said, "No, I don't know which ones are which."

"Never said you didn't." Jane was almost as near-sighted as me.

We went to dinner at the Italian restaurant and she outlined the funeral arrangements.

Burial was planned for atop a blueberry hill. Family consisted of Jane, her son and daughter. The latter two were not on speaking terms.

Tim, Steve the iron worker, Carmine’s workmates, and Ira the anti-Zionist would present a strange gathering for Schoonic Point any time of the year, but Jane said, "We'll be welcome. It's off-season."

Two days before Columbus Day our convoy took off from the East Village under overcast skies. The rain held off throughout the journey.

We stopped in Brunswick for lobster rolls at the Chamberlain Inn. Tim and Steve were enthralled with the Maine delicacy. It meant more to Jane and me.

Maine was home and every mile was more like heaven. Pine trees lining US 1 broke open on long coves linked to the sea. The foliage was a little past prime, but the crisp air was champagne from Canada.

Jane had picked Ellsworth for our stay. The hotel was on the strip leading to Bar Harbor. The road had seen hundreds of thousand customers this summer. The rooms had yet to stop vibrating from the vacationers' comings and goings.

"Nothing is open in Schoonic Point this time of year."

She distributed room keys. This trip was on Carmine. We had a great lobster at the bridge leading to Bar Harbor. The pound was closing after this weekend. The lobsters were soft-shelled and delectable. We agreed that Carmine had made the right choice about being buried in Maine. Anything was better than some hole in Queens.

Upon re-entering Ellsworth, Jane said, "I checked out the bars for you and Steve."

"What about me?" Tim was married with a kid.

"You’re a good boy." Jane turned to us. Steve was divorced and I was perennially single. "There’s one that's a fern bar and the other that is always in the police reports. I'm not letting you drive, but here's a twenty for the taxi."

We said our good-nights and headed to the fern bar. It was good for a single drink. The same taxi took us to the bad boy bar. The driver told us to watch out for the girls.

"They like strangers."

Steve and I stood outside. Loud rock music blasted under neon lights. We had drunk beers on more than one occasion and he knew my tastes as well as Maine's reputation for the ugliest girls in the USA.

"You can have all the skinny ugly ones and I'll have all the fat cute ones."

"It's a deal."

He opened the door and then shut it.

"What about the Big Foots?"

A she-man grabbed him before he could explain his comment. The two women dragged is inside the bar and was immediately set upon by a large woman. Steve was dancing to Deep Purple with a 200 pound-plus human version of a moose in heat. She wore size 14 boots. The men at the bar appeared relieved to drink without any female interference.

We were new meat.

Steve shouted one word. I couldn’t hear him, but I knew the word was 'help'. The faces on the men at the bar said that we were on our own. They were wrong. We were with the Big Feet.

We stayed three beers too many and were driven back to the hotel in a van loaded with four seriously masculine women in flannel shirts. Steve was groping one of them and whispered, "I'm checking to make sure they don’t have any dildos."

"Dildos?" Steve’s date asked with a smile. She wasn't just trying to scare us.

The Big Foot women were talking dirty. Sex was a Sumo wrestling event. I told them that we couldn't do anything and they said, "Date rape."

Their station wagon braked before our rooms. Hands unbuttoned my shirt. Steve was dragged out of the car. We were doomed, until Jane appeared in a celestial nightgown.

"Leave those two men alone. They're with me."

"Gigolos," they muttered, reluctantly letting go of us. Jane stood her ground until they left the room and then asked with a smile, “You boys have fun.”

"Yeah." We were glad to have escaped Big Feet’s grasp.

"I'm sure Carmine would appreciate it, now go to bed. We have a busy day tomorrow."

She was right. We buried Carmine without a priest on a blueberry hill overlooking Schoonic Bay. The sun came out as we lowered the urns into the earth. Jane cried and her children hugged her. They almost seemed like a family.

The post-funeral lunch was in a small restaurant and two of the waitresses were from last night’s Big Foot tribe. Work clothes tamed their savage side and they made no sign of recognizing us. We gave them a good tip.

Jane couldn't help but tell Tim about last night's scene and he was happy to tell everyone in the East Village that Steve and I had mated with moose.

Jane knew the truth, but said, "It's funnier the way he tells it and Carmine would like that ending too."

I had to agree with Aunt Jane, for Carmine was the kind of Uncle only a Big-Footed woman could love and Jane loved him forever. After all she was from the Great State of Maine.

The Elegance of the Wampanoags

The Wampanoags were not the savages.

The people of the dawn were near extinction from a bacterial infection carried the settlers and wars with the Micmacs and Pequots.

Despite these calamities the natives living near the Plymouth supposedly helped the Pilgrims celebrated a good harvest in 1621.

The event is poorly documented by the colonists, but the legend lives in the minds of Americans as a cherished moment of peace between the Old America and the New.

Within forty years the Wampanoags would suffer through the King Philip War.

Only 400 survived the fighting.

They sought refuge on Martha's Vinyard.

Today the Wampanoags number almost 2000.

I know one.

Big Ralph.

6-8.

A big man.

Wampanoag and proud of it.

Happy to be alive.

And me too, because I'm half-Irish.

Happy Turkey Day.

One and all.

Times Square Redux

Since the onset of Covid in March 2020 New York had been cut off from the rest of the world and also the USA. Americans were scared by the reports of crime and foreigners were banned from flying to JFK, however in the last months the restrictions have been downgraded to allow vaccinated international travelers to enter the States.

On a Friday in November 2021 my godson Edward Brial arrived at JFK airport en route to visit his girlfriend studying at Cornell. He was traveling to Ithaca by bus and we met at the Port Authority once the most wicked bus terminals in America. I was surprised by the sheer volume of people coming to New York and going to destinations near and far. Times were changing, although I preferred the void of last winter, when the city belonged to us again. That desolation had never been destined to last long.

We had time to kill and I suggested a beer.

“You’re not bothered by my drinking.”

“Not at all. It’s been over a hundred days since my last drink and I’m quits.” I haven’t had the least urge to reclaim by life as a hard drinker. My life depended on this strict regime and I was happy just to be with Edward, who has called me the Brown Ranger in his youth. We chose the Beer Authority. Ed had a draft and I ordered a cranberry juice. He had just been in Glasgow attending the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference.

“There was a lot of hope, but the corporations have no interest in stopping their rape of the planet.”

“Sadly the vast majority of people reject any action that would result in the end of cars and potato chips. The entire capitalist system has been ruined by the shifting of industry to Asia. We have no factories. No industry and no control over the production of everything other than more pollution with the advent of AI robotics. Everyone wants to think they are not the problem and that type of thinking is a barrier to a real solution. World population 2050. 500 million.”

Edward rejected my view. His foundation worked on reshaping agriculture for poor farmers in India. He hoped to avoid the impending doomand I changed to subject to my impending appointment to be the writer-in-residence at London's Goodenough University for the Head Chancellor, my good friend Alice Walpole. His departure was scheduled for 6pm and we walked over to the bus station. I was surprised to see an advertising poster for XXX films and books at the stairs leading down to the entrance of the A Train. Edward took a photo and I explained how in 1989 Mayor Guiliani had closed most of these shops to allow Disney and various other family-flavored franchises to replace the streets of sin. "Successive mayors attempted to clean up 42nd Street, but the Mafia-owned establishments relied on the Free Speech Amendment to protect their wicked fiefdom. Finally in 1995 Rudy Giuliani enacted in radical adult zoning laws and the Deuce's magnificent wickedness ended the following year with the closure of every XXX theaters and porno shops. I happened to be walking on West 42nd Street on that rainy day in 1987. Aficionados of perversity cried on the sidewalk, as the moving crews loaded their salacious merchandise onto trucks. Urban planners had rented spaces to major retailers and restaurants, including Disney. The disgruntled XXX patrons stood outside in tears chanting, "Fuck Mickey Mouse." When I finished, we passed the subterranean 300 Video Center, where time resisted the will of an evil Mayor. "We still have someplace to go. We wicked." I bid Edward adieu at the station and walked him to the gate for his upstate bus. It was the right thing to do. And while I have stop drinking 100%, I might participate in some wickedness in the months to come. As the Spanish director Luis Bunuel once said, “There is no pleasure without sin.” Nothing like his film BELLE DU JOUR with Catherine Denevue.

The Ghosts Of Time Square

Throughout 70s and 80s the Times Square thrived as a haven for XXX theaters, go-go girls, pimps, whore houses, rent boys, hustlers, thieves, dealers, and lowlifes on the make.

Police and city authorities declared the area as DMZ for crime and sex and the 1977 debut of Show World across 42nd Street from the Port Authority Bus Terminal was the high-water mark for Times Square's Era of Errors.

Successive mayors attempted to clean up 42nd Street, but the Mafia-owned establishments relied on the Free Speech Amendment to protect their wicked fiefdom. Finally in 1995 Rudy Giuliani enacted in radical adult zoning laws and the Deuce's magnificent wickedness ended the following year with the closure of every XXX theaters and porno shops.

I happened to be walking on West 42nd Street on that rainy day in 1987.

Aficionados of perversity cried on the sidewalk, as the moving crews loaded their salacious merchandise onto trucks. Urban planners had rented spaces to major retailers and restaurants, including Disney. The disgrountled XXX patrons stood outside in tears chanting, "Fuck Mickey Mouse."

Later that evening a friend of mine lamented the disappearance of Times Square.

"NYC has been thrown into a blender and homogenized into a bland and boring urban pastiche. This city once had character and disparate neighborhoods. Now it's just numbingly the same wherever you go. I was driving around the city yesterday and occurred to me that downtown-uptown, west-east, it all looked the same now. Same store fronts, same hideous developer apartment buildings, same gourmet coffee, same gentrifications, same same shame."

My friend wasn't speaking about egg creams and luncheonettes, although those hallowed institutions have been replaced by Starbucks and Burger King.

While Times Square's wickedness disappeared like the Wicked Witch of the West melting in the WIZARD OF OZ, we still retain our memories.

Divine Wickedness.

ps Fuck Guiliani.

THE END OF TOMORROW By Peter Nolan Smith - Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

The November sun flashed off a West Village window and the wavering reflection stalked the Christopher Street pier to a lone youth tuning a battered guitar. His skin pallor rivaled the paleness of the rising moon and no suburban mall stocked his ripped black leather jacket, torn T-shirt, or battered engineer boots, but the blonde leather boy broke into a sly smile, as the sapphire shimmer transformed the twenty year-old into a fallen angel regaining his halo.

Nearly every mother and father in America would have ordered their children to avoid this aberration of the Nation's Bicentennial Spirit. Most teenagers were born to obey their parents' command, but a few were destined to answer the divine temptation, especially once the guitarist slashed the steel strings of his Les Paul.

Picking out chords Johnny Darling repeated the song in his head, then shut his eyes to envision a small stage. The overhead lighting enveloped a drummer, bassist, and keyboard player. A teenage Lolita rasped words of love and no tomorrows in imitation of the Velvet Underground's Nico. The imagined feedback of Marshall Amps buzzed in his ears and the audience almost materialized within his eyelids.

"Hey, man."

A young boy's voice shattered Johnny's trance.

This time of night only gay bashers and leather freaks frequented the derelict docks. None of them were dangerous, but the guitarist waited for the last chords to fade before slipping his hand inside his jacket for his knife before turning to address the intruder.

It was Frankie.

The Puerto Rican teenager in a distressed leather jacket was two inches shorter than Johnny and his slanted eyes hinted the taint of Chinese blood and Times Square johns found Frankie Domingo pretty, despite the scars crisscrossing his seventeen year-old body.

"Thanks for letting me finish?"

"I been waiting thirty minutes."

A gust of wind blew a shank of greased hair across Frankie's face.

"That a new song?"

"Just three chords strung together." Johnny thumbed his calloused fingertips.

"Doesn't get more basic than that." Frankie rattled off a drum roll with frayed sticks. "I snagged these from Jerry Nolan at Max's Kansas City last night."

"How were the Heartbreakers?" Johnny had skipped last night's show to entertain a customer.

"Great and they got paid $100 each." Frankie hunched his shoulders against a frigid gust and added, "When we gonna have a band again?"

“Now I have my guitar back, we can audition for the other members."

Frankie stepped from side to side. A cold damp seeped through his sneakers' paper-thin soles and he stammered, "Johnny, you have ten dollars?"

"I gave the pawnshop my last fifty." Johnny slapped his guitar.

"Damn, I wish we could get out of here." Frankie moaned like a runaway in need of a dime to phone home.

"To go where?"

"What about Florida?" Frankie glanced south, as if the Sunshine State lay beyond the New Jersey docks. "How far away is it? Five hours?"

"More like twenty four by car."

"What about by plane?" The young Puerto Rican's teeth chattered at a 10/10 beat.

"Where are we getting the money for two plane tickets?"

"We could hijack a plane. Tell them to give us a million dollars like in DOG DAY AFTERNOON?" Frankie had seen that movie five times on 42nd Street and pumped his fist in the air.

"Attica, Attica."

"Aren't you forgetting how the cops shot Pacino's friend in the head?"

"Movies aren't real."

"DOG DAY AFTERNOON was based on a real bank robbery."

"It was?"

"Yeah."

"Your parents live in Florida. If you called them, they might wire you money to come home."

"Sure, we catch a bus now and tomorrow night we be eating my Mom's homemade apple pie."

"I love apple pie." Frankie licked his lips.

"Only two problems." Johnny gestured toward Manhattan.

"Don't say what I think you're going to say."

"Firstly Ratzo Rizzo died on the bus to Florida in MIDNIGHT COWBOY and number two I'm not leaving this behind."

"Fuck this city?" Frankie chucked the battered drumsticks into the Hudson. "All I have here are hustles, an empty stomach, waking with the smell of old man's hands on my skin, and you don't have it much better."

Johnny stuck the guitar into its case and walked toward the elevated highway.

Frankie trailed behind him.

"I ran away from Florida for the same reason you want to run away from New York." Johnny stopped on the curb of West Street and turned to Frankie. "Me and you will make it here as rock stars."

"But not tonight." Frankie kicked an empty beer can into the gutter.

"No, not tonight." Johnny couldn't lie to Frankie. "Tomorrow Max's will serve a turkey feast for us punk orphans."

"And what about tonight?" Frankie could handle anything as long as he was with Johnny.

"Tonight we go to work." The uptown light on West Street changed to green and suburb-bound cars accelerated to match the synchronized signals.

"53rd and 3rd?" Frankie had had his fill of the sissies at those piano bars.

"No, we're not competing with midnight cowboys tonight."

"The docks?"

Across the street men prowled the sidewalks in search of nameless sex. A few lurked between the trucks parked underneath the elevated highway. How they were celebrating the night before Thanksgiving was no mystery.

"They never pay, because they get whatever they want for free."

"So it's Times Square?" Frankie sighed with resignation.

"The Strip is all about luck."

"With luck being heads I win, tails you lose and never give a sucker a break."

"That's the game there and everywhere. How I look?" Johnny slung the case’s strap over his shoulder and pulled up the collar of his torn leather jacket.

"Like a prince." Frankie blew on his numb hands.

"Where anyone from Jerome Avenue see a prince?"

"My grandmother read me fairy tales. They really have princes and princesses?"

"Real as you and me, except they were born in a palace." A chill air scrapped over Johnny's right lung like a boat striking a reef.

"You meet one?" Frankie was oblivious to his friend's discomfort.

"Not this side of the silver screen." Johnny fought off the rasp, figuring his 'jones' was knocking on the door. "Princes and princesses are like any suckers. We meet one and what we do?"

"We take them for everything." Frankie snapped his fingers.

"And leave them begging for more." The ache faded from Johnny's chest and he draped his arm over the younger boy. "Just one more thing."

"I know what you’re going to say. For me not to trust anyone."

"Rule # 1 in New York." Times Square killed people who broke that rule and he turned to Frankie. "That means me too."

"I’m a big boy." Frankie’s childhood had revealed the worst of what the New York had to offer the young.

"Then let’s head uptown." Johnny dashed onto West Street. "Watch out, Johnny."

Two taxis swerved to avoid hitting the guitarist.

"For what? I'll live forever," Johnny shouted from the other side of the street, because believing in anything other than his immortality would have been a sacrilege, at least until he reached twenty-one and that birthday was more than a year away and a year was an eternity when you were only twenty.

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NOVEMBER 10, 1978 - JOURNAL ENTRY - EAST VILLAGE

Alice's show at Club 57 was a su

Alice's show at Club 57 was a success thanks to Tom Scully and his bony evil girlfriend, as the first performers their high school drama shows with the same lack of talent, but accompanied by twisted reworkings of old dramatic ghost. None of the troupe, not even Alice has asked me to perform, even though I have scores of badly-written poems in my journals. Susan considered me a 'drunken bully'.

The audience applauded the singers and I sat at the bar with Alex, a recent Polish Emigre and co-manager of the club and the bartender. Josef looked at the stage and laughed, "America is the best. Freedom like this you do not get in Poland."

I downed two bourbons before the second act. They hit me hard on an empty stomach. I had no money and hadn't eaten anything all day. I leaned into the bar and glimmered into a time warp away from the present, the fags and punks, who proudly see themselves as the true culture of America. I agree with them. I hate the suburbs. I barely noticed the second act. Alice glowered at me. She hates my drinking. At least I don't pass out everywhere like a hillbilly Girl Scout. Not that it matters to me as long as she gets home safe.

The second act must have good. People were requesting an encore. Despite our rejection of Capitalism and Church and all our hometown beliefs, everyone in Club 57 dreams to be a star and a STAR in big letters performing before thousands.

I needed air. A holocaust was brewing in my head. I staggered through the crowd, remembering the date.

November 10.

Forty years ago the Nazis persecuted the German Jews, as the police watched the carnage by the stormtroopers.

Kristellnacht or Crystal Night.

"Never again." could happen anywhere in the world against the Jews or any race or tribe. No one at Club 57 cared about the past other than those they were trying to escape and they rejected any history, unless it the study of theater or movies. Lance Loud from the Mumps stood at the door. I love this band. He grabbed me and said, "Isn't her great?"

He meant my friend Klaus who was signing an aria.

"Yes, he's more than great."

Outside I sat on the steps and at the end of the show watched the happy crowd stream from the basement club to other bars around the East Village. I had no one and lit a joint to enter the void alone. Explorers always relish desolation, even sexual adventurers.

LATER

Never again. The Jews reject any forgiveness of the Germans, but drive Mercedes-Benz, while persecute the Palestinians thousand of years after their living in the Levant. The Nazis are old men in their sixties, having failed their mission seek to create a new generation of followers through the skinheads, KKK, and right-wing fanatics.