Category Archives: personal

Bitter Dogs, Very Bitter Dogs

Rodney Dangerfield, when he was a young comic, did a Borscht Belt-style routine about how hard he had it coming up in his early years in show biz.  He followed two terrible precision dancers, a horrible singer, and, while he did his act, the final act on the bill, a group of rabies infested performing dogs, heckled him mercilessly.  Very bitter dogs, bitter dogs, kicking around show biz for years.   In a mocking bitter tone:  “Lassie didn’t get where she is on her talent, you know… Rin Tin Tin… heh heh heh…”

Nothing funny about spoken comedy delivered without jazz trio timing.  Its deadpan, hairpin turns of voice and face that get the laugh, not humorous concepts on paper, which may or may not bring a smile.  I don’t mention those bitter dogs for yuks, they’re an illustration.  I had a good howl over a friend’s assessment of a certain deli-owner (“too bitter”) back when we were trying to sell beef bi-products to bodegas and delis in the Bronx.

My partner came back to the car carrying the case of beef sticks, smiling but also shaking his head to show me it was no sale.  “Nah, he immediately recognized the product, and said he’d sold hundreds of them, that it was a great product, he made good money with it.  But the old distributor never came back, left him high and dry, and he was too bitter to try the product again.  He was actually a very nice guy, and he was on the fence, but I couldn’t convince him, he was just too bitter.”

 And when he said “bitter” I laughed, and it’s still funny to me twenty-five years later, just not so gleefully.   At my mature age I know the taste a bitter person actually gets in the back of the throat.  Back then it was still just a hilarious abstraction to think of someone as bitter.  

I’m thinking of all the things I have to feel gratitude about, and I take stock of them periodically.  Today I’m thankful for my general calmness under fire and my patience, especially with young people.  And also for my general physical and creative robustness.

In a busy animation workshop my attention is sometimes called for by three kids at once, while at least one other is running wild.  I have to convey instantly to two that I’m sorry they’ll have to wait, attend quickly to the other and get back to them.  Often, by the time I do, the problem will already be worked out, another kid calling me from across the room to come help them with something else.  The workshop is running at about 80% efficiency now, which is amazing if you consider that it’s an after-school session, Thursday, at the end of a long week of school.

I get home from the session after a meditative subway ride, fire up the macBook and see what the young editor has put together during the session.  This is the first time I am seeing much of the animation.   The editing is about 90% done before I first see the material they’ve shot that day and there is very rarely any call to censor anything they’ve shot.  The bulk of the inputting of frames and editing and titling the animation is done by one of three fifth graders, which is amazing, if you think about it.  

Lately I’ve also been able to get an improvised soundtrack done by the kids each week, featuring their percussion and voices.  Nearer by two or three big steps to working out how to get really good soundtracks than I was only two or three weeks ago.  

Once the week’s sound and the picture are mixed and adjusted and I’ve sufficiently tweaked the final result, I will pump my fist, turn and give a high five to my shadowy, imaginary partner.  “We did it!” I’ll say, and laugh, to see how mischievously it is all going exactly according to my long-shot, hard to describe plan.  

“We vugging did it, man!” the imaginary partner will shout, proffering a fist for a heartfelt fist bump.  And I’ll give a good bash, and pump my fist again.

The Entrepreneurial Spirit (and the Dead Guy)

Some people wake up excited about the challenges that lie ahead of them each day, I am told.   Opening their eyes on another day of infinite possibility they use their precious time wisely and keep their eye on the bottom line.  This line can be measured in money coming in, return on investment.  If they have an online business they are launching, the metrics for success are at their fingertips and can be quickly taken in with the morning coffee and a healthy breakfast, after an hour at cardio and a hot shower.  They remain focused and undistracted while they work, and then they play hard.

I have some of that single-minded entrepreneurial spirit, and always have.   This may not be the best example of it, but about 30 years ago I still had dreams of being Picasso.  That these dreams were largely my grandmother’s had not started bothering me yet.  Back then I thought it only a matter of time before I could draw on the linen table cloth of a fancy restaurant by way of treating a table full of my friends to a sumptuous meal.   The owner and chef would beam from ear to ear as I did this, the staff also looking on, elbowing each other playfully as I drew.

After buying some art supplies from Pearl Paint, still packaged back then in rough brown paper bags, I walked up through SoHo where an image outside a gallery caught my eye.  I went in and saw an exhibit of the art of a persecuted Laotian mountain people called the H’mong.  Some H’mong, a small South Chinese ethnic group, had long ago settled in Laos where they became valuable and loyal allies of the United States in our secret war against Communism in Laos, a neighbor of Viet Nam.  When the U.S. withdrew from Viet Nam the Pathet Lao had a bloody score to settle with the H’mong, many of whom were killed, thousands herded into “re-education” camps in Laos and thousands more fleeing to squalid refugee camps in Thailand.   Most of my family had disappeared under similar ruthless circumstances in muddy Eastern Europe in the freezing winter of 1942, so there was a personal connection, and a visceral one.

There was one image in particular that stopped me in my tracks, transfixed me.  A H’mong boy, naked and skeletal, lying on his side, regarded the camera with the stoic expression of one who had never known hope.  The light in the photograph was stunning, the doomed boy was rendered like a sculpture.   Photograph means “drawing with light” and that’s what this was, a three dimensional space rendered palpably on a flat surface.  

Without taking my eyes off it I quickly drew the boy in black ink on the brown bag.   The drawing was only a few pen strokes, but it caught the pose and the boy and a thick stab of ink made a convincingly deep shadow under his pitiful body.   I took a small dab of white gouache out of the tube and smeared the light over the boy’s skull, rib cage and legs.  The image jumped off the bag.  I later made a two color silkscreen of it, with my name brushed Picasso-like beneath it, along with the date, some time in 1980 or 81.  

At the time I thought, somehow, that this was a huge step in my evolution as an artist, the ability to react vividly and instantly to a visceral experience.  One friend I showed the silkscreen to, a plainspoken young man decades from his terrible uphill fight with a rare and particularly vicious form of cancer, said “what’s with you and the dead guy?”   I couldn’t explain it then.  It seemed to me it required something like the hip Louis Armstrong’s answer to the square who asked him what jazz was.  “If you’ve got to ask, Daddy, you ain’t never gonna know.”

Dream

I had taken my mother to see some kind of play in the Bronx.  It was after the play and we were in a large old fashioned looking, and down at the heels, pizza parlor.  It seemed to be about 2 a.m.  We’d been there for what seemed like hours when I suggested we get the D train to a place where we could get a cab.  My mother, dead now going on three years, nonchalantly dismissed the idiotic idea and told me to call a car service, that she could afford it.

Later, Mayor Bloomberg, not a person I admire in any way, was holding a news conference to announce that a rat that had been at large in City Hall, black and very cute, with foxlike ears, had been found.  The rat was wandering calmly on the table between Bloomberg’s hands, and Bloomberg petted it as he spoke.  “It all depends on how you handle a rat,” he told the camera.  “If you’re gentle with them they are very nice, this little fellow is very silky.”   I reached my hand into the frame and petted first the black fox-like rat and then the more common grey rat with the scary tail.  Both were indeed silky and practically purred under my touch.

What We Take For Granted

Quite a few things, it turns out.  A president who is clearly intelligent, thoughtful, articulate and seemingly caring must be granted certain allowances for what might be called moral or political failures.  For example, if a cleric in Yemen speaks out against Al Queda, risking his own life, and then meets with his adversaries to debate, and is accidentally killed along with the terrorists by a US drone, the cleric is collateral damage, you know?  The president’s spokesman today called the targeted killing by drone program “legal, ethical and wise.”  

If we like the president we can say “bad shit happens in war.”    Or we can all agree that collateral damage is terrible.   The last thing we’d do is call for the return of the Nobel Peace Prize he received for not being a torture-endorsing, pre-emptive war waging faith-based cowboy.  On the other hand, if we dislike the president we can say just about anything, there are a hundred things that spring to mind.

I know, I know.  The world is complex so let’s just agree that it’s OK to disagree and that we also must hunt down and kill our enemies wherever we find them, by any means necessary.  And while killing them other people will be killed and that killing also produces consequences.  OK, OK.  

How, for example, does it benefit anyone if I once more observe that Thomas Jefferson, the Author of Liberty and one of our most revered idealist presidents, a man who inherited a fortune and died deep in debt because of his love for imported luxury, was tormented as he neared death that his debts prevented him from freeing hundreds of human beings he owned?   After all, it was Mr. Jefferson who so famously stated the self-evident truth that all men are created equal.  Why carp over the fate of a few hundred he held as property in perpetuity, or their descendants, some of whom, it turned out, were his own flesh and blood?   I carp, I carp, I carp.  Carpe diem, better that than this fish mouthed carping of mine.  

Why this envious need to attack true greatness?   Sure, Jefferson had many slaves.  Sure, he went bankrupt because virtually everything on his inherited estate was imported from Europe and he had expensive tastes.   Sure, it must be admitted, almost two hundred years after his death, he did own a beautiful slave named Sally, the half-sister of his beloved wife who died young, and he had at least three children with her over a period of many years.   Why this envious need to attack true greatness?  

I don’t know, I take it for granted.  Like the fact that the rich will get richer.  Thus it has always been and thus it will ever be.  Why this foam on my lips when I read that Bank of America paid nothing to the U.S. treasury in 2010 and received an almost two billion dollar “tax rebate” that year?  What can I do about this?  Why do I take the word of an avowed Socialist on this issue when everyone knows Socialism is a short step away from Communism, a proven evil?  These people hate our freedom.  Do I hate our freedom?  

What we take for granted, I suppose, is that this is a rational world where things are done for thoughtful and sincerely debated reasons, reasons that lead to the greater common good.   If a drone is sent to kill someone thousands of miles away, or down the block, for that matter, there is a good reason for it, most likely.  It’s better than putting the lives of our young men and women at risk by placing them in war zones, right?  If Bank of America, or General Electric, pays no tax on billions in profit it is because they are creating jobs, or some equally compelling good reason.  What next, disputing the right of their executives to be paid millions of dollars a year? Just because Thomas Jefferson had a long sexual affair with a woman he owned, and treated their children kindly as preferred house slaves, that doesn’t mean he believed any the less the self-evident truth that is a beacon to the world and a keystone of human liberty and democracy.

For my part, clearly, I spend part of almost every day tormented about things I am helpless to influence.  The things I can influence for the good often remain uninfluenced as I fret about other things, as I am fretting now.  I tap the keys, glance at the screen, correct typos and other mistakes.  I reshape the sentences until they become clear and strong enough to stand on their own spindly legs.   If I march the proper sentences into a good paragraph it feels like a job well-done.   This too is an illusion.  No matter how well I put them together, make them flow one into the next, create a stream of thought and feeling a reader can paddle in, there is no job done without pay, only a hobby horse giddyapped on by a willfully blind man letting opportunity in the real world fly past him.  

I wonder if the young Thomas Jefferson, who most biographers note made a daily practice of whipping his riding horses bloody, the only outward show in his life that this thoughtful, soft-spoken patrician was not the complete master of his passions, whipped his hobby horse as a lad.  Practice makes perfect, one notes, as I rattle on here.  I suspect he may have.  Not that I judge him, mind you.  I probably would have done the same, if I’d been him.

The only alternative to this life of sour contemplation is a life of action.  After all, am I not the fellow who showed a nine year-old how to operate garageband and left her, with no further instruction, with a seven year-old to spontaneously create a music track?  And did they not, with only slight post-production help from this same adult, come up with a very neat little exuberantly improvised soundtrack within a few minutes?  

Yes, yes, I know it’s like writing that is truly nothing until monetized, but still, it should not be taken for granted.  After all, not everyone is trying to be the change they’d like to see in the world.  What we take for granted is the right to take a bow.  It is not time for any bows yet, nor is there any stage nor anyone to curtsy modestly before as the cheers descend.

The Purpose Driven Life

As I start thinking about what I will say on a frigid Monday morning near a man-sized pit outside the benighted little town where my father and his brother, my recently deceased Uncle Paul, grew up, and where my father’s skeleton sleeps the long sleep in the frozen ground, I am distracted by a book I just looked at.  It is about the deep inner purpose, outside of the naked profit motive, that drives every successful business, according to the upbeat marketing creep who wrote the book, a consultant for McDonald’s and Proctor and Gamble, two exemplars of this purpose driven business culture.  I’m going to go downstairs and fetch it for a few quotes, but first, a few distracted words about my uncle, my aunt, my cousin and the fucking rabbi.

After my father’s death I found among his papers a cc of a letter he sent to the First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill.   It was a remarkable piece of work and I have it somewhere.  In it was reflected my father’s great intelligence, his ability to tell a story and craft a very persuasive letter.   It was an appeal to be allowed to continue paying a discounted $350 annual out of state membership dues rate instead of the proposed rate of several thousand dollars.  

My father and my uncle, who had not lived in the town since graduating from Peekskill High in 1941 and ’43, respectively, continued to pay dues to the synagogue they had attended as children.  After all, my father pointed out in his letter, they felt loyalty to the place they helped their father mop and care for.  

He no doubt wanted to mention it was the place where they did menial jobs as children, assisting their father, who was paid a pauper’s wage as caretaker.  And that it was the place their religious mother donated money that probably should have been spent on clothes and food.  The family was poor.  Their father was so poorly paid as caretaker for the synagogue that the family received Relief, the shameful precursor to Welfare.  The boys helped him work there sometimes.  When they were young men they paid a few hundred dollars annually in dues for more than fifty years each.  My father’s letter was asking for an exception to the new rule that every member, whether in state or not, had to pay the full dues.

“I realize the impact on the congregation’s finances and ability to carry on its work if its many out of state members did not contribute the full dues.  I spoke to Lisa, who informs me that my brother and I are the only two such members.  In light of this, I respectfully submit that the harm to the congregation would be minimal and request that we be granted a waiver, and be allowed to continue paying the $350 annually.  It should also be noted that we have faithfully paid annual dues since the mid-1940s.”  

My father’s first cousin, Eli, long gone now, was less diplomatic, more inclined to turn purple and react with his fists.  A few years before my father’s letter he’d reacted to the news his dues were being raised by picking up the phone and barking.   “You can put a fucking dog in my hole,” he roared at the woman at the synagogue, “I’ve been paying dues for 60 years, out of respect, for a place I haven’t set foot in in decades.  I’m not paying one fucking dollar more, and you can tell the rabbi to go fuck himself too!”

Eli received a letter of apology and an assurance that the 85 year old’s dues would not be raised.   Two years later he died and was buried in the plot he’d probably paid tens of thousands of dollars to reserve for himself, next to his beloved wife Helen who left us early.

In my mother’s papers I found letters from my uncle, after my father’s death, assuring her that the Peekskill dues had been frozen at $350, in spite of new dunning letters.  My mother paid every bill she ever got on time, and must have called or emailed my uncle when she got the bill every year.  For her part, she always indicated a desire to be cremated, the stone was already over the double grave where her husband’s mortal remains were already eternally resting, she didn’t like religion, had no connection to the shul, or need for it, yet paid anyway, $1,750 for the last five years of her life.   In the end they forbade us to inter her ashes in the grave she’d paid and paid for.  She truly doesn’t care, I’m sure.

After my uncle’s stroke my cousin and I found correspondence in a file folder regarding the promise that the dues to the congregation would be kept at a preferential $350, in spite of the fact that members actually using the facilities paid many times that.  My uncle wrote a patient letter annually and was granted the exemption each time.  

When I called to tell the rabbi that my uncle had had a stroke, the rabbi sounded genuinely concerned.  He seemed like a compassionate guy in those couple of conversations.  He called my uncle once, which I found touching and which my uncle appreciated.

My uncle died early Thursday morning after a two week hospital stay that could not save him.  Later that day my cousin called the compassionate rabbi to arrange the funeral.  The rabbi asked my cousin if he’d mind if they made the hole a bit deeper and buried some old prayer books?  Jewish law apparently requires this odd practice, and my cousin said it would be fine.  They spoke about my uncle and his wishes for the funeral arrangements.  Then the rabbi mentioned that the congregation had a strict policy about burial arrangements and that members who were not up to date on their dues could not be buried.  There was the matter of the $350 unpaid on the most recent invoice.

“Please tell me you’re shitting me,” I said to my cousin.  He assured me that he wasn’t.  “Please tell me you barked ‘you can put a fucking dog in my father’s hole’!”  He hadn’t.  He, like me, seeks to avoid confrontation, and though he was disgusted, as most people would be, he did not make an issue or argue, he just made arrangements to pay the $350.

I am walking the difficult path of trying to remain mild and gentle in all circumstances.  You’d be surprised how many loved ones throw this kind of vow in your face, if you ever raise your voice, if you express exasperation, or anger, or, say, the desire to give this religious quack a quick short shove into the open grave.  Their mockery makes it no easier to become truly nonviolent, but ahimsa is difficult in any circumstance, living in a violent, angry often irrational world.

In my mind, as I think of the quick remarks I’ll say for my uncle  mainly to comfort my aunt at the grave, in that freezing cemetery where most of the rest of our family is already interred, I’m searching for the perfectly turned phrase to deliver, looking directly and mildly at the hypocrite rabbi as I do, to bring sudden color to his face and an abrupt, involuntary absence of breath, like he’d been punched in the solar plexus.

Tragedy and Comedy

Mel Brooks, of all people, gives the best definition of these terms.  It is concise and full of great insight, a frank and brutal snapshot of our lives here.  Tragedy is when I break my fingernail, comedy is when you fall into a manhole and die.

I haven’t been sleeping well, it will no doubt sadden you to learn.  It isn’t that my sleep is fitful, or that I have insomnia, I just don’t get to bed at a reasonable hour and set my alarm, lately, five hours from when I finally get to bed.  To do otherwise risks switching night and day, sleeping all day and fussing at night until the dark rooms here are flooded with a sickening light and I retreat to my dark sleeping coffin.  I’d rather not go that far, though I am, without question a night person.

After several days of this short sleep I hit the wall yesterday.  By 11:00 pm I felt like I was moving underwater.  At midnight I took a dose of a new sleep product called Zzzquil, just to be sure I didn’t start getting energetic and alert at 1:00, as often happens no matter how tired I am all day.  By 1:00 I was in bed, groggy, drowsy, sleepy, sleeping.  Alarm set for 10:30 to have a nice catch up on sleep session before conducting the animation workshop with a new group this afternoon.

At 1:47 there was a sudden commotion near my head, my cellphone rattling and cackling.  It was my cousin Jon, my only living first cousin.  I knew at once that his father had just passed away.  My broken fingernail, being woken from a sound sleep at an hour I’d normally be awake, ironic and all that.  But there was nothing very comical about my poor uncle falling slowly into a manhole and dying, after two weeks unresponsive in the hospital.  Nor was my cousin laughing.

Ahimsa– the e-book

I write this to remind myself to create an e-book, illustrated by myself and children I’ve yet to meet, stressing the importance of Ahimsa, a practice of peace and gentleness I am trying to perfect without great knowledge or any religious framework.  This book will help me stay focused on Ahimsa– non-harm.

Do not cause suffering, if you have any say in the matter.  If you can’t help, don’t hurt.  If you hate something, don’t do it to anyone else.  Be calm, focused and peaceful when you oppose something.

Suffering is a contagious symptom that feeds on and devours itself along with hope and mercy.  The doctor who would treat it must remain calm, focused and peaceful, because it spreads easily and requires quiet skill to properly diagnose and treat.  

If I can’t help, I don’t hurt.  Practice that for two hours on Thursdays as you and your little colleagues draw, cut, photograph, edit, title, strategize, choreograph, clap, stomp and sing.

Don’t say “you suck,” although it takes almost no breath to say it.  Use your breath to laugh or sing, much better uses for it.  Only, don’t laugh or sing at someone else’s misery, no matter how funny or well-deserved that misery may seem to you at the time.  You would hate it if someone did it to you.

My Father’s Heartfelt Story

My father, a critical man who criticized himself most of all, lamented that my sister and I never sought his advice.  I wonder what he’d make of how deeply one story he told me shaped my life.

It was the story of the starving wolf and the well-fed dog who met on the road.   The dog, after expressing his concern, told the wolf he had plenty of food at home and they trotted off.   The wolf noticed fur rubbed away at the back of the dog’s neck and asked “do you have a skin disease?” 

“Oh, no,” laughed the dog, “that must be from my collar.”  The wolf slowed down, asked what the collar was.  The dog explained, then told him it was used for the leash, which he also explained.  The wolf stopped, thanked the dog, and trotted off in the opposite direction, as I did.

Fittingly Abstract

The dream dreamed that it was not a dream, unperformed task piled upon undone task til they are all-surrounding, heavy as a bag of wet quilts.  In the old days we wrote these on ribbons many miles long, in long hand, while trains rattled and tramp steamers tramped, people embarked, grim yet hopeful.  

Our mothers were alive back then, given the gifts of long lives, gifts they many times fretted over and complained about.   But when the lights went down, and the orchestra throbbed to life as the stage lights came on, their hearts always soared, giddily gulping air as the vault of the sky opened.

“I can’t hear a melody without someone singing it,” my mother, a lifelong lover of the Opera, confessed one day when I’d been unable to completely hide my dismay that she hadn’t recognized Stardust when I played it on the guitar.  I learned to conceal my dismay out of love, and trying to protect her in some small way.  But sometimes dismay can’t be hidden completely.

“Until I hear the singer start to sing, I really can’t tell what the song is from just an instrumental melody,” she explained.   

I was shocked to learn this (though relieved it was no reflection on my guitar playing), because she sang tunefully.  I’d learned the melody of Mairsy Doats from her renditions in the car, probably Swingin’ on a Star too.   She would join in to sing “I’m An Old Cowhand” til the end of her life, whenever I struck it up on the ukulele.  We sang it for her at her memorial at my father’s grave on that hot summer day in 2011.

My father, also a fair singer, also with poor control of his emotions sometimes, and a tendency to snap, would eventually snap at her from the drivers’ seat with a carping comment and she’d clam up.  My sister and I would continue our battles in the back seat and there’d be a heavy, brutal silence in the car, or the radio would blare news.

Funny, to think how well they both sang, that they always both claimed to have no musical ability.  My father was always self-mocking, self-excoriating, really, when it came to his voice, but had impeccable taste in music and an ear for truly great tunes.  He loved Sam Cooke and Bill Kenney and other soulful singers, and he’d deliver his four or five note riff of each selected killer melody with style, off the beat and perfectly in tune.  He loved the crooners, the hip ones.  I wasn’t surprised to find out after he died that he’d loved Bobby Darin’s singing too.

“I’ll never hear Joe sing again,” my mother cried one night over the phone, when the final chemo was done and it was only a matter of time now before a twenty-three year run of relative good luck with the cancer finally came to a bad end.  Joe came by after I told him that, and we looked through some songbooks.   Picked out any we thought my mother would particularly like, or that otherwise struck us as beautiful.

September Song, Stardust, Are You Lonesome Tonight?  We played through them and a dozen more, Joe reading from the computer monitor as I followed on guitar, reading chord charts penciled into small books.   Put some reverb on us, panned us slightly to get a nice stereo separation, it sounded pretty good.  Then I added a second guitar and, on a few, a little keyboard pad.  Joe was backed by a spare trio, or sometimes a guitar duo.

I brought the CD to Florida, played it over crappy little computer speakers for my mother who was sitting on the couch, off to the side.  She sat through it quietly, smiled a few times, but without great excitement, then smiled again when I asked what she thought.  She said “eh….” and apologized for the disappointment I was feeling, thanked me for the attempt, told me she really appreciated it and how sweet it was of us to try, and all that.  

It don’t remember if it occurred to me to tell her right then to listen to it through her iPod headphones, I’m sure I probably did have her listen to it at least once that way before I left Florida.  I left the tunes on her iPod when I went back to New York.  I spoke to her thirty or more times in the next month with no further mention of the songs.

“Oh, the most amazing thing happened to me before, this afternoon,” she began enthusing in that Bronx way of her’s, many weeks later, “I just heard the most beautiful music on my iPod, I don’t even know how it happened, how it got there.  I was lying on my bed, I put the iPod on and suddenly there was Joe singing!” and she began to kvell, as they say.  

Joe has a great voice and my mother always loved when he’d sing opera to her.   She probably hadn’t heard him singing popular music before and she went on about how beautiful his voice was.

“What did you think of his backing band?” I asked her, when she was done.  She was perfectly happy with them, who were they?

“Me,” I said, casually, told her I was so glad she enjoyed it, reminded her of her first reaction, told her about stereo and the fine sound quality of a properly mixed digital recording through headphones, and we went on to speak of everything else.

 One of the great memories of my musical life.

Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow

Years ago I had a single blind date with a sighted woman who worked in publishing.  I’m pretty sure it was she who gave me an advance copy of a book called “Do What You Love– the Money Will Follow”.  I remember it had a white cover.   I told someone about it recently and commented that I still have it on my shelf, unread more than 20 years later.  I don’t see it anywhere as I scan the shelves now, but it’s possibly fallen into a crevice and been covered with fur along with my missing pocket book of jazz standards and innumerable other items.

I read a few pages and put it aside in disgust back then, like many things.  Like a middle class life, for example.  How that happened is worth a word:  I found I wasn’t cut out to compete for the love of wealthy people in the art world.  Displaying drawings and paintings in libraries, as my father suggested I try, was not the same as being a fantastically paid meteor in the art world firmament– I retreated into a kind of autism for a few months as I came to realize neither of these options was viable.

To my surprise, I found that I really enjoyed working with third graders.  I was hired as a teacher in a series of horrible situations.  Being a NYC public school teacher in poor neighborhoods was a bit like being a death camp guard in World War Two who loved Jewish and Gypsy humor.   I was as helpless as the children against the meat grinder that was at work on them, that was paying my salary and health insurance and giving me ten paid weeks off every summer. 

I worked full-time at four or five different NYC public schools.  Choosing which was the worst would be hard, and I’ve already used “meat grinder” and “death camp” and those pretty much cover the gamut.  I assume at least one of the principals I worked for was motivated by something other than lust for the virtually unlimited exercise of arbitrary will.  Assuming that, I can explain at least some of their distaste for their popular young male teacher as animated by a concern for the children.  

That was not the case with the last one, the principal whose clumsily sexualized tango proved deadly for any belated daydream I might have had for a middle class life.  Minnie Frego was probably insane, but was I any better?   In response to a series of escalating, mad provocations, as the new, mad principal zeroed in on me as the leader of the school I worked at for almost three years, I finally snapped.

“You’re not paying attention,” she told me tartly, as I tried to ignore the sickening demonstration of meat grinding she was conducting with my class for my benefit.  She had just crossed out the work of a bored child who was working on workbook problem number five when she was still working her methodical way through number three with the rest of the class.  She’d firmly told that child to fold his hands over his book and follow instructions.  I was trying to do the same at my desk, but it was burning me.  I was glancing at my required lesson plans when she called across the room to me.

“I’m doing this for your benefit,” she told me, as the eyes of every eight and nine year old Harlemite in the room turned to me.   It was like looking into the eyes of twenty-five smart young animals in the slaughterhouse chute.   I could not let them down, did not stop to think.  By way of response my arm swept everything off my desk on to the floor.  Then I folded my hands on my empty desk.

The rest, as they say, is history.