The Best American Poetry

Sacha Baron Cohen Double-Bill Rerun [by Alan Ziegler]

Sacha Baron Cohen can currently be seen as Borat in Borat: Cultural Learnings of America..." and as Abbie Hoffman in The Trial of the Chicago 7, so I am rerunning my encounter with Baron Cohen (in his Ali G guise) and my visit with Abbie Hoffman (shortly after Chicago, before the trial).

MY WORKSHOP WITH ALI G

Prologue (December 2002)

Feet-fatigued in Paris Christmas week, Erin and I decide to take our rest in a movie theater. Our choices are the new James Bond and something called Ali G Indahouse.  We are told that Ali G is a character who does put-on interviews with unsuspecting celebrities for BBC and is hilarious. Unfortunately, the showing is sold-out, so we see Bond. I sleep blissfully through the special effects.

The Seduction (January 2004)

    I get a voicemail from Jenny Hunter, who says she is with “a British-based television company called Somerford Brooke, working on a series called The Making of Modern America.” For a segment on creative writing they are looking for a “distinguished teacher in his fifties” (the first clue), and she has heard, “You are the man!”

    I may not be the man, but I do indeed fit that bill: I am in my fifties, chair of Columbia’s MFA Writing Program, and author of books on creative writing that have sold fairly well. I call back and say I’ll do it. 

Weaving the Web (February 2004)

    The idea is for me to teach a mock workshop in a Writing Program classroom. I am to recruit an “older” (second clue) student, who will join the production company’s “presenter” (British for host), whom Jenny describes as “a young, hip-hop kind of guy” (third clue). When I mention that I love British television, Jenny grills me a bit aggressively on which shows I watch. She seems relieved when I mention Monty Python and Benny Hill—shows that people in their fifties tend to watch (fourth clue).

    On a subsequent call, Jenny asks for biographical details about the student I have selected, and I mention that she has worked in the film business and will not be fazed by the cameras. A couple of days later Jenny emails to say, “I hate to do this, but I think we’ll be better off to do a one-on-one session with just you and our presenter. I'm a bit concerned that we'll run long if we include another person. Sorry for the change of heart. I just think it makes more sense to keep the setting as intimate as possible” (fifth clue).

    Next, we discuss the curriculum. “I've heard of some beginner exercises like ‘describe the room.’ Do you happen to have any exercises like this one that you use, and if so, could you describe them for me?”

    The first couple of exercises I propose are too complicated; Jenny prefers something “very simple, as basic as possible.” We settle on one of my favorites, “Who Would March In Your Parade”: Visualize looking out your window and seeing a parade go by. But instead of Thanksgiving or the Rose Bowl, it is “Your Day.” People, objects, places, foods, and words that are meaningful to you march by. Write what you see marching in your parade. What is the band playing?”

    The shoot is scheduled for February 11. On February 10, Jenny has another change of heart: “We don't want to bother you with retakes because of audio mishaps, so there’s a chance we may take the interview off campus. We want to avoid as many distractions as possible. We're thinking of booking a nearby location, perhaps a hotel room (sixth clue).

    The next morning I am told that I should take a cab (at their expense) to the Wales Hotel on the East Side (confirmation of the sixth clue). I jokingly tell a friend, “If I don’t return, make sure that Law & Order does a good job ripping it from the headlines.”

    On the way over, I imagine opening my Writer as Teacher seminar that evening with: “You have to be prepared to teach any extreme; I once did a writing class with 150 college students in an auditorium, and today I taught a workshop with a single hip-hop British broadcaster in a hotel room with cameras rolling.”

Tightening the Web

    I get to the Wales Hotel right on time, make my way to the Madison Room, and find myself alone. Just as I start to think that Briscoe and Green might be needed after all, my cell phone rings. Jenny is calling from California to say that due to union lunch rules, they are running late, and I should take a walk and come back in an hour. They will pay for my lunch, and still get me back in time for class. Jenny is insistent that I shouldn’t  hang out in the room (seventh clue).

    When I return, I am met in the lobby by a field producer, who says we can save time by “taking care of business” now. He hands me two hundred-dollar bills ($150 for my fee, and the rest for expenses) and asks me to sign a standard release. I scan through and notice a sentence promising not to sue if I am made to look foolish (eighth clue). I say, “Well, I’d be rich if I could sue every time I looked foolish.” The producer seems a bit concerned, so I assure him, “Don’t worry, I won’t ruin your segment by looking foolish.” He doesn’t have a copy of the release for me (ninth clue).

    The producer escorts me back to the makeshift studio, which is impressively equipped. Somerford Brooke might be a fly-by-night company (I couldn’t find any trace of them), but they are flying first class. We have to wait a bit more because the presenter “went for a walk” (tenth clue). I am led to a chair, where an assistant applies light make-up and tethers me to a microphone.

The Presenter

He enters with a flourish, decked out in a gold jumpsuit, adorned with enough bling to accessorize an entourage. His first word to me, accompanied by a fist-bump, is “Respect!” I feel like I have seen him before.

The Workshop

    I start the session by asking the presenter to write a couple of his impressions of New York City. He hunches over a pad and writes quickly. My adrenalin kicks in—this could be fun. But when I read his piece, I recognize the words verbatim from a popular song. I point this out, and he insists that he did exactly what I asked: “I wrote that.” We get into a discussion of what constitutes “writing,” and I remember where I might have seen the presenter before: on the movie poster in Paris.

 

    I doubt my memory because the odds against this seem so enormous, and who am I to warrant such attention? I plow ahead with the “Parade” exercise. “Imagine there’s a parade outside the window,” I start, and he bolts out of his chair and strides to the window overlooking Madison Avenue. “There’s no parade out there!” he announces. I try to explain the concept of "the mind's eye," but he is fixated on the indisputable fact that there is no parade in his honor marching down Madison Avenue .

    I am aware that the cameras are rolling and any reaction I have can be edited to make me look "foolish" if indeed this isthe guy from the movie. And, if it's not, they'll think I'm a paranoid professor who has become unhinged. I risk calling for a timeout to talk to the producer. He leans over before I can get out of the chair, and explains in a whisper—while the presenter continues searching out the window—that they had high hopes for this guy but might have made a mistake in hiring him, but maybe he’s just nervous and it will get better, so please continue. 

   I decide the only viable plan is to teach the best workshop I can under the circumstances. We resume, and the presenter has a question for me: “How many letters of the alphabet should a writer use?”

    I toss my plan out the window, right onto the unseen parade, and reply firmly: “Six. At first. You start with six, go to seven, then work your way up and eventually you are using the whole alphabet.”

    He then asks, “Why the letter Q is in the alphabet?” and I reply, “Actually, you’ll be reading about this soon, but we had a meeting and decided to take the letter Q out of the alphabet.”

    “Why are you pissing on my questions?” he says, looking seriously annoyed.

    Soon it’s over. The producer tells me there’s a “waiting cab” and hustles me down the stairs.

    “Now that you have the footage," I say, “are you going to tell me what just happened?”

    The producer sticks to his story, jammering on about how they had done market research and hired this guy thinking he could draw a young audience, but it was a big mistake. He shoos me into the waiting cab. As we pull out, the driver says, “You must be pretty important. They said you're needed at Columbia University. Usually I don’t wait for a fare, but he was such a nice guy.”

    I call Jenny and leave a message on her voicemail: “Either that was Ali G or the dumbest guy on earth.”

    My phone rings shortly after, and I hope for elaboration and reassurance from my new friend Jenny, but it’s my real friend, asking if she needs to call in Briscoe and Green.

The Aftermath

    I don’t say anything to my class about my afternoon as the man. When I get home I look up Ali G. Yes, that’s the guy, and he’s brought his show to HBO—American television—where six episodes have already run. I am a jumble of anger and humiliation, concerned about my image in the academic and literary worlds.

    The first episode airs in July with Sam Donaldson getting hoodwinked by Sacha Baron Cohen (the brilliant actor behind Ali G and others). No me. And no me week after week, as Pat Buchanan, Christine Todd Whitman, Gore Vidal, and Andy Rooney fall prey. 

    The closest they get to a segment like mine is a songwriting lesson (in the guise of Borat) with country-music veteran Porter Wagoner. Borat asks, “Please Mr. Wagoner can you teach me how to write country song.”

    “I’ll tell you some tips,” Mr. Wagoner replies sweetly. He stays nice throughout the segment; the humor comes from Borat. Now that’s how to play it.

    For the first several weeks, I am relieved when I don’t appear. Then I start half-hoping I will, and, when the six-episode series is over, I am damn pissed that I didn’t make the cut. They could have billed it as “Ali G meets his match," and done a follow-up segment with him actually visiting my class at Columbia. Sacha Baron Cohen and I could have become friends.     

The Epilogue

    In July, I write to Jenny: “I would like to chat with you. Can we talk directly or should I go through HBO? Also, could you let me know the disposition of the segment we taped.”

    The man gets no response.

 

MY VISIT WITH ABBIE HOFFMAN

Note: Abbie Hoffman established himself as a mischievous dissident with a flair for the theatrical by such acts as tossing money (some of it fake) onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and leading an attempt to levitate the Pentagon. He was one of the Chicago Seven, whose convictions for crossing state lines with the intent to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention were overturned. A couple of weeks after the Convention, I interviewed Abbie for my college radio station.  

            I don’t expect Abbie Hoffman to have a listed telephone number, but he does.

            “You want me to talk into a mike? Shit, I’m so fucking exhausted. They want me in Chicago; the FBI’s after me. All right, come over Monday and if I’m here, groovy, but I might be goin’ to Prague, so call first.”

            By Monday, Abbie’s number is unlisted, so I head to the address in the phone book on St. Marks Place. I press the button marked “A. Hoffman” and am buzzed in. From the door at the end of the hall a confusion of curly hair sticks out. “Yeah, who is it?”

            “I’m here for the interview.” Abbie Hoffman’s gaunt face looks pained as he waves me in to his apartment. He explains that he has a deadline on his book in three hours and really has no time now.

            I tell him I took the bus down from Schenectady (true) and walked from Port Authority (not true, but it seems to strengthen my case), and he says all right, we’ll talk for a while. The apartment is cluttered with books and records; LBJ smiles from a dart board, with a dart sticking out of a Presidential nostril. Abbie’s wife, Anita, emerges briefly and reminds him about the deadline. Abbie shrugs, and Anita doesn’t look happy.

            We begin talking about the origin of the Yippies, and at first his voice cruises in a monotone. It started after the march on the Pentagon in 1967, when Abbie, Paul Krassner, Jerry Rubin, and Ed Sanders realized that the next big thing to shoot for would be the Democratic Convention in Chicago. They wanted to create some kind of  “mythical structure, theatrical scenarios” that would bring protestors to Chicago, and the trick was to do it without money or organization.

            They realized that the concept of the hippie was a myth created by the mass media “to suppress, to codify, to explain what was happening.” If the mass media could create a myth, why not invent a counter-myth? They threw ideas at each other, changed the “H” to a “Y,” and pretty soon they had a "hallucination” to give to the mass media, who “played right along.”

            Yippie was created with “excitement, tension, drama, but without saying anything at all.” Reporters started asking what the difference was between a hippie and a Yippie when in reality there are no Yippies: “Yippie!” is a slogan (which should be followed by an exclamation point); the group’s name is the Youth International Party. The founders felt that “brothers and sisters in the underground would know it was all a crock of shit” even as the media fell for it. Abbie opened an article for The Realist with “four reasons” for Yippie; the media picked up on the four reasons, which were actually “a bunch of baloney. That’s how I got through college just makin’ up outlines, gettin’ laid, and playing games. That fucking article is a piece of shit.”

            On the second day of the Convention, Abbie was asked how many Yippies were in Chicago. Instead of "saying something like 4,233,” he replied that there were “four Yippies and four more coming on Wednesday,” because "if there are only four Yippies then these guys must be into some pretty heavy shit, and by getting four more they’re doubling their forces.”

            He gets a cigarette and continues to talk while he lights up. The conversation flows more easily. Abbie says his thing is not political analysis. “A Yippie is someone who never asks what’s going on. He’s too busy doing it.” Responding to “criticism or applause is doing someone else’s thing.”  Abbie gives me a one-sentence lecture on communication: “It doesn’t matter if this mike is even turned on. It’s me talking to you.”

            We talk about the violence in Chicago and whether kids were manipulated by the organizers, who knew what was going to happen. “People know where it’s at. You know if you got long hair, it’s a fucking police state. You also know something else. You know what you’re doing is more valid than what the pigs are doing. And that’s why you go to Chicago, to show the world what the fuck’s going on. ‘The whole world is watching, the whole world is watching.’ That was a beautiful thing. I never heard that before Chicago.” 

            We talk about the difference between the New Left and the Yippies. The Yippie thing is not to criticize. “Police are brutal, mass media distorts, America is racist. So what, everybody knows that. The left is a total bore in this country, and besides if they got in power they’d probably cut all our hair off anyway.” Abbie asks about my politics, but before I can answer he points to my Hush Puppies: “I can tell by your shoes you’re for McCarthy, and you wanna hang out with your friends in college.”

            But in Chicago boundaries between groups were blurred. It was “a perfect mess; you couldn’t tell who was who. The human beings take on the machine and in the end the human beings have to win” because "the machine will show its true colors.” He points out that when the police weren’t clubbing heads in Chicago, 100 people got married in the Church of the Free Spirit and Allen Ginsberg gave a sunrise service, but screams make for better radio than “Om.”

            Abbie Hoffman considers himself a revolutionary artist and a hustler. He got a kick out of being called a paranoid schizophrenic and says, “I ain’t paranoid, I know we’re gonna win.” As for defining “winning,” he’ll “figure that out later.”

            While in Chicago, Abbie tried to become friends with his “tails in order to give them a conflict.” He was able to find out Hubert Humphreys’ credit card number, the telephone number of every head cop (he would call them and impersonate other cops, giving them orders), and he says he was the best pool hustler in Chicago. He talks about “getting through” to people, knowing their language”—he opened conversations with cab drivers by talking about Detroit pitcher Denny McClain’s 26th win.

            The last thing Abbie tells me is, “I was always a rebel and I was never afraid to die and I never wanted to do anything for money.”

             After the interview, I walk in my Hush Puppies to Port Authority and catch a bus back to Schenectady, where I hang out with my college friends and tell them all about my visit with Abbie.

Prologue (December 2002)

Feet-fatigued in Paris Christmas week, Erin and I decide to take our rest in a movie theater. Our choices are the new James Bond and something called Ali G Indahouse.  We are told that Ali G is a character who does put-on interviews with unsuspecting celebrities for BBC and is hilarious. Unfortunately, the showing is sold-out, so we see Bond. I sleep blissfully through the special effects.

The Seduction (January 2004)

    I get a voicemail from Jenny Hunter, who says she is with “a British-based television company called Somerford Brooke, working on a series called The Making of Modern America.” For a segment on creative writing they are looking for a “distinguished teacher in his fifties” (the first clue), and she has heard, “You are the man!”

    I may not be the man, but I do indeed fit that bill: I am in my fifties, chair of Columbia’s MFA Writing Program, and author of books on creative writing that have sold fairly well. I call back and say I’ll do it. 

Weaving the Web (February 2004)

    The idea is for me to teach a mock workshop in a Writing Program classroom. I am to recruit an “older” (second clue) student, who will join the production company’s “presenter” (British for host), whom Jenny describes as “a young, hip-hop kind of guy” (third clue). When I mention that I love British television, Jenny grills me a bit aggressively on which shows I watch. She seems relieved when I mention Monty Python and Benny Hill—shows that people in their fifties tend to watch (fourth clue).

    On a subsequent call, Jenny asks for biographical details about the student I have selected, and I mention that she has worked in the film business and will not be fazed by the cameras. A couple of days later Jenny emails to say, “I hate to do this, but I think we’ll be better off to do a one-on-one session with just you and our presenter. I'm a bit concerned that we'll run long if we include another person. Sorry for the change of heart. I just think it makes more sense to keep the setting as intimate as possible” (fifth clue).

    Next, we discuss the curriculum. “I've heard of some beginner exercises like ‘describe the room.’ Do you happen to have any exercises like this one that you use, and if so, could you describe them for me?”

    The first couple of exercises I propose are too complicated; Jenny prefers something “very simple, as basic as possible.” We settle on one of my favorites, “Who Would March In Your Parade”: Visualize looking out your window and seeing a parade go by. But instead of Thanksgiving or the Rose Bowl, it is “Your Day.” People, objects, places, foods, and words that are meaningful to you march by. Write what you see marching in your parade. What is the band playing?”

    The shoot is scheduled for February 11. On February 10, Jenny has another change of heart: “We don't want to bother you with retakes because of audio mishaps, so there’s a chance we may take the interview off campus. We want to avoid as many distractions as possible. We're thinking of booking a nearby location, perhaps a hotel room (sixth clue).

    The next morning I am told that I should take a cab (at their expense) to the Wales Hotel on the East Side (confirmation of the sixth clue). I jokingly tell a friend, “If I don’t return, make sure that Law & Order does a good job ripping it from the headlines.”

    On the way over, I imagine opening my Writer as Teacher seminar that evening with: “You have to be prepared to teach any extreme; I once did a writing class with 150 college students in an auditorium, and today I taught a workshop with a single hip-hop British broadcaster in a hotel room with cameras rolling.”

Tightening the Web

    I get to the Wales Hotel right on time, make my way to the Madison Room, and find myself alone. Just as I start to think that Briscoe and Green might be needed after all, my cell phone rings. Jenny is calling from California to say that due to union lunch rules, they are running late, and I should take a walk and come back in an hour. They will pay for my lunch, and still get me back in time for class. Jenny is insistent that I shouldn’t  hang out in the room (seventh clue).

    When I return, I am met in the lobby by a field producer, who says we can save time by “taking care of business” now. He hands me two hundred-dollar bills ($150 for my fee, and the rest for expenses) and asks me to sign a standard release. I scan through and notice a sentence promising not to sue if I am made to look foolish (eighth clue). I say, “Well, I’d be rich if I could sue every time I looked foolish.” The producer seems a bit concerned, so I assure him, “Don’t worry, I won’t ruin your segment by looking foolish.” He doesn’t have a copy of the release for me (ninth clue).

    The producer escorts me back to the makeshift studio, which is impressively equipped. Somerford Brooke might be a fly-by-night company (I couldn’t find any trace of them), but they are flying first class. We have to wait a bit more because the presenter “went for a walk” (tenth clue). I am led to a chair, where an assistant applies light make-up and tethers me to a microphone.

The Presenter

He enters with a flourish, decked out in a gold jumpsuit, adorned with enough bling to accessorize an entourage. His first word to me, accompanied by a fist-bump, is “Respect!” I feel like I have seen him before.

The Workshop

    I start the session by asking the presenter to write a couple of his impressions of New York City. He hunches over a pad and writes quickly. My adrenalin kicks in—this could be fun. But when I read his piece, I recognize the words verbatim from a popular song. I point this out, and he insists that he did exactly what I asked: “I wrote that.” We get into a discussion of what constitutes “writing,” and I remember where I might have seen the presenter before: on the movie poster in Paris.

 

    I doubt my memory because the odds against this seem so enormous, and who am I to warrant such attention? I plow ahead with the “Parade” exercise. “Imagine there’s a parade outside the window,” I start, and he bolts out of his chair and strides to the window overlooking Madison Avenue. “There’s no parade out there!” he announces. I try to explain the concept of "the mind's eye," but he is fixated on the indisputable fact that there is no parade in his honor marching down Madison Avenue .

    I am aware that the cameras are rolling and any reaction I have can be edited to make me look "foolish" if indeed this isthe guy from the movie. And, if it's not, they'll think I'm a paranoid professor who has become unhinged. I risk calling for a timeout to talk to the producer. He leans over before I can get out of the chair, and explains in a whisper—while the presenter continues searching out the window—that they had high hopes for this guy but might have made a mistake in hiring him, but maybe he’s just nervous and it will get better, so please continue. 

   I decide the only viable plan is to teach the best workshop I can under the circumstances. We resume, and the presenter has a question for me: “How many letters of the alphabet should a writer use?”

    I toss my plan out the window, right onto the unseen parade, and reply firmly: “Six. At first. You start with six, go to seven, then work your way up and eventually you are using the whole alphabet.”

    He then asks, “Why the letter Q is in the alphabet?” and I reply, “Actually, you’ll be reading about this soon, but we had a meeting and decided to take the letter Q out of the alphabet.”

    “Why are you pissing on my questions?” he says, looking seriously annoyed.

    Soon it’s over. The producer tells me there’s a “waiting cab” and hustles me down the stairs.

    “Now that you have the footage," I say, “are you going to tell me what just happened?”

    The producer sticks to his story, jammering on about how they had done market research and hired this guy thinking he could draw a young audience, but it was a big mistake. He shoos me into the waiting cab. As we pull out, the driver says, “You must be pretty important. They said you're needed at Columbia University. Usually I don’t wait for a fare, but he was such a nice guy.”

    I call Jenny and leave a message on her voicemail: “Either that was Ali G or the dumbest guy on earth.”

    My phone rings shortly after, and I hope for elaboration and reassurance from my new friend Jenny, but it’s my real friend, asking if she needs to call in Briscoe and Green.

The Aftermath

    I don’t say anything to my class about my afternoon as the man. When I get home I look up Ali G. Yes, that’s the guy, and he’s brought his show to HBO—American television—where six episodes have already run. I am a jumble of anger and humiliation, concerned about my image in the academic and literary worlds.

    The first episode airs in July with Sam Donaldson getting hoodwinked by Sacha Baron Cohen (the brilliant actor behind Ali G and others). No me. And no me week after week, as Pat Buchanan, Christine Todd Whitman, Gore Vidal, and Andy Rooney fall prey. 

    The closest they get to a segment like mine is a songwriting lesson (in the guise of Borat) with country-music veteran Porter Wagoner. Borat asks, “Please Mr. Wagoner can you teach me how to write country song.”

    “I’ll tell you some tips,” Mr. Wagoner replies sweetly. He stays nice throughout the segment; the humor comes from Borat. Now that’s how to play it.

    For the first several weeks, I am relieved when I don’t appear. Then I start half-hoping I will, and, when the six-episode series is over, I am damn pissed that I didn’t make the cut. They could have billed it as “Ali G meets his match," and done a follow-up segment with him actually visiting my class at Columbia. Sacha Baron Cohen and I could have become friends.     

The Epilogue

    In July, I write to Jenny: “I would like to chat with you. Can we talk directly or should I go through HBO? Also, could you let me know the disposition of the segment we taped.”

    The man gets no response.

 

MY VISIT WITH ABBIE HOFFMAN

Note: Abbie Hoffman established himself as a mischievous dissident with a flair for the theatrical by such acts as tossing money (some of it fake) onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and leading an attempt to levitate the Pentagon. He was one of the Chicago Seven, whose convictions for crossing state lines with the intent to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention were overturned. A couple of weeks after the Convention, I interviewed Abbie for my college radio station.  

            I don’t expect Abbie Hoffman to have a listed telephone number, but he does.

            “You want me to talk into a mike? Shit, I’m so fucking exhausted. They want me in Chicago; the FBI’s after me. All right, come over Monday and if I’m here, groovy, but I might be goin’ to Prague, so call first.”

            By Monday, Abbie’s number is unlisted, so I head to the address in the phone book on St. Marks Place. I press the button marked “A. Hoffman” and am buzzed in. From the door at the end of the hall a confusion of curly hair sticks out. “Yeah, who is it?”

            “I’m here for the interview.” Abbie Hoffman’s gaunt face looks pained as he waves me in to his apartment. He explains that he has a deadline on his book in three hours and really has no time now.

            I tell him I took the bus down from Schenectady (true) and walked from Port Authority (not true, but it seems to strengthen my case), and he says all right, we’ll talk for a while. The apartment is cluttered with books and records; LBJ smiles from a dart board, with a dart sticking out of a Presidential nostril. Abbie’s wife, Anita, emerges briefly and reminds him about the deadline. Abbie shrugs, and Anita doesn’t look happy.

            We begin talking about the origin of the Yippies, and at first his voice cruises in a monotone. It started after the march on the Pentagon in 1967, when Abbie, Paul Krassner, Jerry Rubin, and Ed Sanders realized that the next big thing to shoot for would be the Democratic Convention in Chicago. They wanted to create some kind of  “mythical structure, theatrical scenarios” that would bring protestors to Chicago, and the trick was to do it without money or organization.

            They realized that the concept of the hippie was a myth created by the mass media “to suppress, to codify, to explain what was happening.” If the mass media could create a myth, why not invent a counter-myth? They threw ideas at each other, changed the “H” to a “Y,” and pretty soon they had a "hallucination” to give to the mass media, who “played right along.”

            Yippie was created with “excitement, tension, drama, but without saying anything at all.” Reporters started asking what the difference was between a hippie and a Yippie when in reality there are no Yippies: “Yippie!” is a slogan (which should be followed by an exclamation point); the group’s name is the Youth International Party. The founders felt that “brothers and sisters in the underground would know it was all a crock of shit” even as the media fell for it. Abbie opened an article for The Realist with “four reasons” for Yippie; the media picked up on the four reasons, which were actually “a bunch of baloney. That’s how I got through college just makin’ up outlines, gettin’ laid, and playing games. That fucking article is a piece of shit.”

            On the second day of the Convention, Abbie was asked how many Yippies were in Chicago. Instead of "saying something like 4,233,” he replied that there were “four Yippies and four more coming on Wednesday,” because "if there are only four Yippies then these guys must be into some pretty heavy shit, and by getting four more they’re doubling their forces.”

            He gets a cigarette and continues to talk while he lights up. The conversation flows more easily. Abbie says his thing is not political analysis. “A Yippie is someone who never asks what’s going on. He’s too busy doing it.” Responding to “criticism or applause is doing someone else’s thing.”  Abbie gives me a one-sentence lecture on communication: “It doesn’t matter if this mike is even turned on. It’s me talking to you.”

            We talk about the violence in Chicago and whether kids were manipulated by the organizers, who knew what was going to happen. “People know where it’s at. You know if you got long hair, it’s a fucking police state. You also know something else. You know what you’re doing is more valid than what the pigs are doing. And that’s why you go to Chicago, to show the world what the fuck’s going on. ‘The whole world is watching, the whole world is watching.’ That was a beautiful thing. I never heard that before Chicago.” 

            We talk about the difference between the New Left and the Yippies. The Yippie thing is not to criticize. “Police are brutal, mass media distorts, America is racist. So what, everybody knows that. The left is a total bore in this country, and besides if they got in power they’d probably cut all our hair off anyway.” Abbie asks about my politics, but before I can answer he points to my Hush Puppies: “I can tell by your shoes you’re for McCarthy, and you wanna hang out with your friends in college.”

            But in Chicago boundaries between groups were blurred. It was “a perfect mess; you couldn’t tell who was who. The human beings take on the machine and in the end the human beings have to win” because "the machine will show its true colors.” He points out that when the police weren’t clubbing heads in Chicago, 100 people got married in the Church of the Free Spirit and Allen Ginsberg gave a sunrise service, but screams make for better radio than “Om.”

            Abbie Hoffman considers himself a revolutionary artist and a hustler. He got a kick out of being called a paranoid schizophrenic and says, “I ain’t paranoid, I know we’re gonna win.” As for defining “winning,” he’ll “figure that out later.”

            While in Chicago, Abbie tried to become friends with his “tails in order to give them a conflict.” He was able to find out Hubert Humphreys’ credit card number, the telephone number of every head cop (he would call them and impersonate other cops, giving them orders), and he says he was the best pool hustler in Chicago. He talks about “getting through” to people, knowing their language”—he opened conversations with cab drivers by talking about Detroit pitcher Denny McClain’s 26th win.

            The last thing Abbie tells me is, “I was always a rebel and I was never afraid to die and I never wanted to do anything for money.”

             After the interview, I walk in my Hush Puppies to Port Authority and catch a bus back to Schenectady, where I hang out with my college friends and tell them all about my visit with Abbie.

Squib 445: Envisioning the Web [by Alan Ziegler]

445: The following document was unearthed during the Great Pandemic Dig of 2020, which is still taking place in millions of closets, attics, basements, and garages. In 1983—seven years  before the first web browser and 23 years before Facebook—I submitted this proposal to Teachers & Writers Collaborative.

The development person responded with good questions and comments: “what would be required of the schools and others hooking up with us—in terms of extra equipment, training, expertise, etc.?”; “to take this on would be a quantum leap”; “look at…whatever’s the closest model to this around, if there is anything”; “What is unpredictable about this project? What could come up that we haven’t considered yet?”

Alas, I was out there all alone: Steve Jobs was in California developing the first Mac, Bill Gates in Washington envisioning Windows, and Mark Zuckerberg wouldn’t be born for another year. I put the proposal in a box along with unfinished poems I hoped to return to, someday.

Lally on Winch

Plunging through my closeted archives, I came across copies of The Poetry Project Newsletter. A piece by Michael Lally on Terrence Winch caught my attention. A few hours later in real time (but 43 years in literary time) I came across Winch selecting Lally

At David Lehman's request, here's the Poetry Project piece:

Squibs 423-444: My Activism Lustrum [by Alan Ziegler]

 

423: In the early 60s, protesters march to “ban the bomb”; the bomb is banned (partially) with the 1963 Test Ban Treaty. Protesters march, sit-in, and are beaten in pursuit of equal rights; discrimination is banned (partially) with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. These are baby steps, but we're two-for-two. The antiwar (Vietnam) movement is taking shape as I enter college in 1965; the (partial) winning streak is about to end. 

 

424: My freshman year at Union College, I attend an International Relations Club conference in Washington. I meet campus liberals and campus conservatives; the liberals are more fun. In the hotel lobby a long-haired kid sits at an unattended piano and improvises melodically; I ask if he's with the conference and he says no he's in a rock group called The Left Banke. I hang out with a kid from Afghanistan; he is proud that his country’s flag hangs first outside the State Department. We get a background-only briefing from Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who says we have no plans to stay in Vietnam after we win. I ask him, “What’s to stop the Viet Cong from restarting the war as soon as you declare victory and leave?” The Secretary replies, “We can get back there faster than they can.” 

 

425: Rich Balagur and I start an anti-war coalition at school, beginning with the lowest common belief: end the bombing of North Vietnam; 10% of the college community signs our petition.


President Johnson increases the bombing in response to the "Nervous Nellies"; escalation enters the antiwar argot. People may be dying because of the movement. I search for a silver lining in this cloud of horror, and find it when a local television station tapes an interview with me, which I watch in a dorm lounge. The me on the couch listens to the me on the screen say that even if the Vietnam War has too much momentum for us to end it, the antiwar movement will succeed in the long run: "If it starts happening again, people will say no before it is too late." The student sitting next to the me on the couch says to the me on the screen, “Good point.” I will turn out to be utterly wrong.

 

426: Our movement grows as we march, cajole, educate, and organize. The Committee Against Bombing becomes the Campus Action Committee, with an expanded portfolio including racism and economic oppression. And always I am doing the two-finger typewriter dance (Dylan may have gone electric, but we are still in the era of acoustic typewriters) for the college newspaper. (For more about my piece that was called "a slander of the whole College community," see: dangerous words.) My outlet is doubled when Rich Balagur and I concoct the Paper Highway, along with poet Carl Rosenstock and music critic Cliff Safane.

427: I receive hate mail in the form of marked-up newspaper clippings addressed to Allen Viegler. The first one (not available) is from the Daily News with the headline “Send me Protesters for Christmas,” a quote from a soldier in Vietnam who says he will “feed them to the Viet Cong.” The word protester is crossed out throughout the article, replaced by Viegler.

 

 

428:  Time again for a name-change and paradigm shift. The Campus Action Committee will now be The Community, with even broader concerns: sexism, educational reform, expansion of the arts. We need a participatory spectacle to kick it off, and the freshman beanie is the ideal prop. Beanies are issued to incoming freshmen, who are instructed to wear them outdoors until the football team wins its first game; very few in my class lasted more than two weeks, and succeeding classes even less. But the beanies still exist as a way to identify the underclass (who must eat and live together), and we call for a Beanie Burn to smoke out the class system and shed light on The Community. 

429: A group of high school students are suspended for publishing an underground newspaper called the Free Student. Balagur and I create a leaflet in support: “You have the power of numbers and the moral justification on this…You can’t discuss the issues raised by the Free Student if it isn’t published.” We show up before school starts and hand out the leaflets along with copies of Paper Highway, on the public (we thought) sidewalk. The assistant principal and the principal call in the police. Student journalist Scott Simons is on the scene and writes a piece called The Big Bust: "You with them? [the assistant principal says to me]. Well, I’ll warn you like I warned them. Get off school grounds or get arrested." Alan Ziegler starts asking what law says we have to get off school property. Cop says "The law is go!" The principal doesn’t want us to go. He points his finger at Ziegler and Balagur and says, "I want to proffer charges against these two." Ziegler replies that he wants to proffer charges of assault and battery against the assistant principal. The principal starts yelling, "I want them arrested." And indeed Balagur and I are arrested, driven downtown in a police car, and placed in adjoining cells, where we chant “Om” until we are bailed out with our rent money. Simons' account: Alan comes out first. Cop pulls out paper bag, hands Alan his belt, shoelaces, wallets, and an autographed copy of Alice’s Restaurant.

 

430: We become a big local story. “Principal Supported in Arrest of 2 Men” headlines The Schenectady Gazette, which identifies us by saying, “They told authorities they were students.” In subsequent articles, we learn that authorities say they will consult with the District Attorney to see whether “there is any involvement with pornography per se.” We are said to glorify “the use of language and thoughts reserved for amoral, indecent and morally corrupt individuals…” which would “easily shock the senses of all decent people.” We “contribute nothing of value” and law enforcement will “oppose this evil by all means available to us” to avoid “terrible consequences of the continued exposure…on the minds of our students.” I love the idea that we can be both amoral and morally corrupt.

431: Represented by an ACLU lawyer, we make our first court appearance before Judge Stroebel, who has a preceding proceeding: “George, you are charged with public drunkenness and falling down. How do you plead, guilty or not guilty?” “Guilty, judge.” “Now George, I haven’t seen you here in a while. I thought you had a job. What happened? Now back to the same old thing?” “Judge, my wife left me again. She’s gone. But I want to get my life back again.” “Well, thirty days in the County Farm might at least get you cleaned up again.” County Farm? I imagine Rich and I goaded into violence by a mean warden (think David Landau in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang) and growing old breaking rocks and feeding chickens.

432: I am interviewed, live, on the local T.V. news. After the show, the weather girl says she can’t wait to go home and tell her teenage daughter that she met me. Police cars frequently park across the street from our apartment. As I am crossing a street, I am almost nicked by a car turning the corner; it’s the assistant principal. I ask a professor if he thinks our phone is tapped and he replies, "No need. They've probably bugged your apartment." I get involved in a fender-bender; the cop who arrives at the scene looks at my license and says, "Aren't you in enough trouble?"

433: At the trial, the assistant principal lies and says he never touched me, but the ACLU lawyer won’t let us testify because she wants to keep the case pure for appeal. We are convicted (by the judge), and the Albany Times Union describes me as sitting “poker faced” at the verdict. Our sentence is fifty dollars or five days. I’m tempted to take the five days but I feel a cold coming on. I am doing an independent study on Revolutionary Change in America, and my paper is egregiously late, but the professor says I won’t be penalized because I have been doing "field work."

 

 

434: I read Rollo May in my Humanistic Psychology class and am nervously excited at the reception following his campus lecture. I am trying to get up the courage to approach him with my many questions, when he walks straight to me and says, “So, you’re the radical around here,” and proceeds to pick my brain.

 

435: The snowy New Hampshire backroads of the McCarthy movement lead to the Memphis-motel and Los Angeles-hotel eradications of King and Kennedy, and the system-gone-berserk in Chicago. That long and winding road of hope, despair, and anger ends with Richard Nixon at the White House doorstep. I am asked to cover the antiwar Counter Inauguration for a makeshift network of small radio stations. I record each segment several times, inserting a local angle by attributing the same quote to a student from, say, Trinity College, Cornell, and Dartmouth. (Twenty years later, my broadcasting teammate, Richard Roth, will cover Tiananmen Square for CBS while I am writing and teaching poetry.)

 

436: I take notes as protesters chant “Up the ass of the ruling class” while some fling mud on the fur coats of guests arriving at a reception for Spiro Agnew at the Smithsonian; flee from a club-wielding cop on a horse after the cop decides I am among the mud-throwers; help a well-dressed elderly woman find her companions, and am pleased when they turn out to be on our team; and dance myself dizzy to a deafening rock band under strobe lights in a tent. I crash on a church floor among dozens of visiting dissidents, the air filled with incense and peace lullabies.

 

437: I wake up shuddering. We disarmed Johnson only to see Nixon loaded in his place. I have to talk to someone who can actually do something, and I remember Al Lowenstein. He was a leader of the Dump Johnson movement, and I met him a couple of times when he was running for Congress in my home district. Now he is my representative. I bee-line to his office, where he is hobnobbing with well-dressed constituents. I am wearing blue jeans and a cowboy hat. “Al,” I say, “I'm really bummed out about Nixon; I mean, it  just hit me that he's the fucking president.” Lowenstein takes me aside and assures me that the movement is still alive, now with people like him in Congress. He will be gerrymandered out of office in two years.

 

438: Along the Inauguration parade route—Nixon is not due for a half hour—I spot a figure in a tree. He looks about 16, wearing a baseball cap and T-shirt in the chill. And he has a rifle. I approach carefully, in case it isn't Nixon he is after. “Hey, whatcha doing up there?” I shout, counting on my long hair to entitle me to an answer. “Waiting for Nixon.” “Gonna shoot him?” “Nah, it’s plastic, see?” He taps the rifle against a branch and tosses it easily into the air. “They’ll arrest you. If they don’t shoot you first.” “For what? Playing with a toy? It’s political theater." “The Secret Service can’t tell actor from assassin.” The kid climbs down and takes a bow as I applaud. 

 

439: After Kent State, with classes shut down by a nationwide strike, Union students and faculty coalesce to form an alternative college. A philosophy professor and I teach a course on educational innovation, and I form the 
Committee for Educational Research and Experimentation (I love naming things.) One of my proposals is for an educational commune: the College would provide housing for a group of students next year, and the participants would get a course credit for group living and curricular experimentation. The unit would be a hub for faculty talks, arts projects, and whatever else students can devise given the time and space. The proposal is accepted, but I am  graduating and pass the torch to the next generation. 

 

440: As in high school, bells signal the start and end of classes, and they continue to toll during the strike. We tell the Dean the bells are paternalistic, Pavlovian, and unnecessary. The Dean promises there will be no more bells. Small victory. 

 

441: A friend is kicked out of the campus bookstore for being barefoot, and we decide to take ironic action, a mock cause to break the confrontational tension. Several of us return to the book store and ceremoniously remove our shoes and socks. We unfurl makeshift placards: Up With Freedom, Down With Socks; Free the Toes Ten; Don’t Tread On Me When I Tread Bare. The manager comes over and sprays the area with Right Guard: "more appropriate than tear gas." We all laugh. We’ve had our fun and leave, saying "We'll take this up with the Dean." I don't make the connection when the Dean asks to see me the next day. “We’d like to avoid confrontation and polarization, so we are prepared to offer a compromise: Students will be allowed to enter the bookstore with bare feet on hot days, except on weekends, when alumni visit.” I wait for him to burst out laughing, but he is serious, and a tad nervous. “Deal," I say, and we shake hands. Absurd Victory.

 

 

442: The night before graduation, I sit in one of the folding chairs laid out for the ceremony. A rent-a-cop approaches me warily and asks to see my student I.D. When I show it to him, he apologizes and says he’s been instructed to be on the lookout for subversives. I almost explain to him that if there were to be disruptions they would come from students like me, but I just assure him that no one is going to mess with graduation, and I walk to my off-campus apartment for the last time.

 

443: After the ceremony, my father points to the college president greeting parents and saying goodbye to students. "Does he know who you are? Is he aware that there's an Alan Ziegler here?" "Oh yes," I say, "he knows I've been here."

 

444: The following autumn, I return to campus to see how the experimental house is doing. A friend from last year's committee welcomes me, but most of the other faces are new. After a couple of days, I am thinking about staying for a while, but my friend takes me aside and says, "This is kind of awkward, but at yesterday's meeting they voted that only students should stay here, so you'll have to leave." 

Squib 422: What a Swell Party it Was [by Alan Ziegler]

Any survey of the Top Parties of the 20th Century is bound to include Truman Capote's Black & White Ball ('66), Rothschild's Surrealist Ball ('72), Bianca Jagger's 30th Birthday at Studio 54 ('77), and Malcolm Forbes's 70th Birthday in Morocco ('89). But there was another event, on June 15, 1977, that would clearly have been in this company if not for the absence of one key celebrant. (Like any clickbait list, you will need to scroll to the end to reveal the key absentee.)

As you've no doubt guessed by now, I am referring to:

Founded in 1972 by Harry Greenberg, Binnie Klein, Larry Zirlin, and me, Some magazine/Release Press published 10 issues of the magazine, 15 books, and numerous postcards and broadsides, until 1983, when we decided to follow the dictum quit while you're breaking even. Although the media were barred from our 5th Anniversary party in 1977, several amateurish bootleg images have been making their way through the Shady Web (slightly easier to get to than the Dark Web). Best American Poetry has acquired exclusive rights to these blurry glimpses at literary history. (Best-faith effort has been made to identify subjects; please let me know of any errors.)

 

Pre-book Eileen Myles (then editing dodgems) gazes up at their bright future. Terry Stokes in background (more later). Magnetic bottle-opener went missing en route to the Smithsonian and subsequently spotted in a private collection (but provenance could not be definitively determined).

 

Pre-book poet and critic John Yau. In 1980 we published John's collection The Sleepless Night of Eugene Delacroix (the title piece was reprised in my Short anthology); 50 more books would follow.

During the party, a guest told me she'd just been in the kitchen and had a lovely chat with the building's super. Although I hadn't invited the super, I was delighted he was there. I went into the kitchen to welcome him, and instead found Paul Violi (center) having a lovely chat with another guest. (Oh Paul, I do miss you!). On the right is Nathan Whiting, who had recently published Running: Poems and Drawings. Nathan ran everywhere (including to this party) wearing plain old sneakers, and he would become an eminent ultra-marathoner.

 
On the left, Henry Korn, director of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, who went on to head many cultural organizations and publish several books. On the right, Erika Rothenberg, the first woman art director at McCann-Erickson, before embarking on a stellar career as a multi-media artist of "provocative and satirical work about social and political issues."

Singer-songwriter Steve Lee (nine years later he played at my wedding). He is now a Clinical Psychologist and continues to sing & write.

 
Harry Miller (left) and Jerry Leichtling (right) who were—ever so briefly—noted scholars on the works of Release Press author Mercy Bona. A review of Bona's Sleeping Obsessions speculated that Bona was actually "three men from Brooklyn." This is not true; only two of us lived in Brooklyn. Harry redirected his scholarly prowess from imaginary poets to Buddhist meditation and is a teacher of Dharma study groups. Jerry went on to co-write Peggy Sue Got Married (the movie and the musical) and much more. Center is Harry Greenberg, Some/Release co-editor and one-third of Mercy Bona. (Bona had a thing for penguins.)

On the left would be me (another third of Mercy Bona), with poet John Eskow, who went on to write the movies Air America, The Mask of Zorro, and Pink Cadillac. Also pictured: Paul Violi's shoulder. 

Some/Release editors Binnie Klein and Larry Zirlin (the final third of Mercy Bona). Binnie hosts "A Miniature World" (a music and interview show on WPKN-FM) and published Blows to the Head: How Boxing Changed My Mind. Larry spent many years as a master printer and is now a master birder.

Eminences of the small press scene, from left to right: Charles Haseloff (Penumbra); Mark Weiss (who presided over the heyday of the poetry readings at the West End); perhaps Susan Haseloff; and Suzanne Zavrian (co-editor of Extensions).

We published John Love's (center) poetry collection, The Touch Code. At the New York Book Fair, John introduced me to his friend Philippe Petit, and took me to see Philippe do his street act on Bleecker St. and 6th Ave. First, Philippe had to evict an interloper with a dog act ("a dog act," Phillippe sneered). Phoebe Snow joined the crowd. John lived in a ginormous loft downtown, replete with a full-size badminton court that became the nexus of his ginormously-attended New Years Day parties. He went on to be president of New Vision Communications.

George Faust, original proprietor of The Print Center in Brooklyn (soon joined by Larry Zirlin, and later replaced by Robert Hershon), first located in a cramped space on State Street, where scores of little magazines and small presses were cloned. I saddle-stitched my first book there, even managing occasionally to avoid stapling my fingers.

 
On your left, Terry Stokes (we published his Intimate Apparel); Terry was one of the few of us with a major publisher (Knopf). On the right, Joachim Neugroschel, co-editor of Extensions and translator of more than 200 books. I ran into him on the street once and he asked if I would translate a German detective novel because he was too busy. I said I didn't know German, and he said it didn't matter I should do it anyway. I didn't. I wish I did.

With Harry Greenberg, late in the party it appears.

Here's the reveal: the party fell just short of immortality due to the absence of David Lehman. David was the first person I knew who referred to southern France as the South of France, and actually went there. 

Squibs 419-421 [by Alan Ziegler]

419: I walk the late afternoon streets. A cop enters a coffee shop to get something to-go, leaving his partner outside. The partner paces, lonely, wondering what’s taking so long. The faint moon is lonely in the blue sky, arms-length and 238,000 miles from a passing plane.


A woman in a pink dress walks a dog. The dog is lonely for other dogs and tugs whenever he sees one. This dog’s loneliness cannot be solved by the company of the woman in pink. The woman in pink is lonely. The companionship of the dog helps, but is not enough. A grocer stands behind his cash register, lonely for a customer who used to come in every day and now comes no more. A beggar posted at a subway exit gets lonely between trains. “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” wails from the window of a cheap hotel. The song makes the old man sitting on the steps feel even more lonely for his dead friends. A barber sits in one of his swivel chairs, lonely for the back of a head and a face in the mirror. The sun sets, and in rooms where lights do not go on, lonely people sit in the dark. The moon is covered by a single, lonely cloud; they will soon drift apart.


A couple walk, hand-in-hand; they smile, but underneath they are lonely for parents. I weave among them all, keeping my composure, not letting them know that I know. Not a damn thing I can do for any of us.

420: My watch died of complications.

421: Harry Greenberg and I loved Joe Franklin’s after-midnight talk show on Channel 9 in the 70s and 80s. You might get Tony Curtis, the New Kids on the Block (when they were kids), and a guy hypnotizing a chicken (we suspected it had something to do with his fingers around the chicken’s neck). We especially enjoyed how Joe lavished praise equally on the super-famous and the obscure; everybody was the best and they were all Joe's dear friends. The ultimate Joe-moment came after he mentioned never having met his next guest. When the best-ever-whoever emerged from the curtain, Joe extended his hand and said, “It’s been a long time.” After a beat, Joe recovered and added, “It’s been never.” Several decades later, Joe was fronting Joe Franklin's Comedy Club (nee Memory Lane) restaurant on 45^th Street and Eighth Avenue. Erin and I decided it was the perfect place to take Harry Greenberg for his birthday. While we waited for Harry and his wife, Rose, to arrive, I spotted Joe Franklin making the rounds, while his kinescope image interviewed Fred Astaire on the flat screens above. I knew what I had to do—or regret it forever—and I made a bee-line to Joe. In the middle of dinner, Harry was disappointed at the lack of a Joe-sighting. During dessert, Harry looked up to see Joe approaching him with outstretched hand. Joe said, “It’s been a long time,” and barely a beat later Harry replied, “It’s been never.”

Squibs 416-418 [by Alan Ziegler]

416: I was drowning in memories when my life flashed behind my eyes. Voila: this book.

417: This is about how our miniature dachshund Latte might have saved my eyesight:

    November 2014, I am awakened at 3 a.m. on my knees, stunned, pain ascending, blood. I’ve fallen out of bed. I’ve crashed my head into the corner of the side table. Erin tends to the cut near my eye and declares, “You need stitches.” We make sure Latte’s water dish is full and leave her with the usual “Watch the house.” The emergency room at St. Luke’s is relatively calm. The intern confirms I don’t have a concussion and stitches me up (after first getting permission from a resident). He is about to release me when he glances at my paperwork. “At your age, protocol calls for a CAT-scan in case something got shaken loose. It’s up to you. I’m pretty sure we won’t find anything.”

    The CAT-scan confirms my brain is intact, but a suggestion of a shadow hints at a pituitary tumor. “Only way you can tell for sure is with an MRI,” the intern says. “Don’t lose any sleep over it—they’re almost always benign—but do call your doctor soon.” The prospect of an MRI terrifies me. Take Xanax, a friend advises, but that is another of my fears. Turns out the two work nicely in tandem, especially with the Beatles piped in and Erin holding my foot.

    The MRI confirms what the CAT scan suspected, and my internist refers me to Dr. S. at Langone, a specialist in skull-base tumor surgery who, research reveals, is “world-renowned,” “a pioneer,” and a New York Magazine “Best Doctor” (I always wanted one of those).  Dr. S. and I admire each other’s fountain pens, then he shows Erin and me the image of my brain laid bare, pointing to a white mass. “Is that my pituitary?” I ask. “No,” he says, “that’s the tumor enveloping your pituitary.” He points to where it wraps around my carotid artery, and to the short—but safe, for now—distance between the tumor and my optic chiasm.

    The benign tumor will keep growing slowly, so no need to do the surgery—which has risks—until it almost abuts the optic chiasm. “What about the carotid artery?” I ask, imagining a tiny snake suffocating me at the source. “The carotid adjusts,” Dr. S. explains. Erin and I feel total confidence in Dr. S, and we like him, a gentle spirit harboring great power.

    After several MRI follow-ups over two years (Xanax, Beatles, foot-holding), Dr. S. points to the tumor encroaching on the optic chiasm. “Now we know what it’s trying to do,” he says, and we schedule surgery for September 18, 2017. Two weeks before the surgery, on a blustery Friday evening, we walk with Latte along the West Harlem Pier, where we come across what may be saddest Bingo game ever: a Parks volunteer calling numbers to two players. It is our humanitarian duty to play, and, before long, I forget my pituitary and focus on G-55. BINGO!—give that man a straw hat.

    There will be another surgeon involved, Dr. L., an otolaryngologist specializing in endoscopic transnasal skull base surgery, including “the management of cerebrospinal fluid leaks.” Our visit to Dr. L. is assuring—he smiles easily, keeps up with my banter, and precisely explains how he will create the pathway for Dr. C. by removing part of my septum. He assures me that we have way more septum than we need. (The septum, like the carotid, adjusts.) Oh, and about the possible spinal leakage. If it happens—as it sometimes does—he will be the one to patch it. “We’ve teamed up on far more complex procedures.” (When Erin said earlier to Dr. S., “So this one is easy for you,” he rejected easy: “One must stay humble.”)

   I recommend being the first surgery of the day. The 5:30 a.m. cab ride with Erin from 125th and Riverside, down the FDR—especially on the verge of the autumnal equinox—is lovely. I have not taken any preemptive Xanax, but passing the 59th Street (groovy) Bridge induces a sweet flashback of Beatles and foot-holding as we pass through the United Nations Tunnel.   

    My biggest anticipatory fear has been the possibility I could be rendered unconscious and never wake up (what could that possibly feel like?). Waiting for the wheel chair, I tell Erin I am still in control—we could still leave and get breakfast and come back another time. Instead, I am being wheeled, my life, perhaps for the rest of my life, in the passive voice. I am handed off to an OR nurse and parked outside the OR door. “We’re waiting for the surgeon.” I distract myself by imagining that the last words I will hear, cutting through the dark tunnel as I approach the golden light will be: “On my count…” “No, on my count!” “Why is it always on your count?” “Because I’m always the first to say, On MY count!!” “Damn, now see what you’ve done?!” (Now, I must make it through.)

    The OR nurse notices I am still wearing my wedding ring. I tell her we weren’t able to get it off (after thirty years) and I signed a waiver allowing them to cut it off during surgery if my hand swells. She insists that we remove the ring now: “We wouldn’t want to pause the surgery to cut off your ring.” Then comes a scramble for the right equipment: folks in scrubs being sent off in search of a mini-saw and tiny pliers, followed by several minutes of drilling and pulling, which draws a small crowd, including Dr. S., who smiles when the hallway procedure is successful and the excised gold is whisked away in a jar.

    The surgery starts late and takes longer than expected due to a minor cerebrospinal fluid leak, patched by Dr. Lebowitz with fat from my belly. Erin and my sister get progressively more nervous. Then an aide brings in my severed wedding ring—with no explanation—and they start to panic, until the sublime Dr. S. appears to tell them all’s well, he got it all and my carotid and optic chiasm are unscathed.

    The United Nations has just started their session, leaving the area around the hospital in perpetual gridlock. It takes Erin hours to get home to feed Latte. I remember that exactly 57 years ago, driving on the way home from a ballgame, we passed under the U.N. Tunnel and I was awed by the notion that Castro, Khrushchev, and Eisenhower were above us. Of course I was oblivious to the thousands in surrounding hospital rooms.

    After three days in intensive care, being intensively cared for and monitored by an array of kind and capable nurses and doctors, including 48 hours supine because of the spinal leakage, I am released and reunited with Erin and Latte. Which gets me to how Latte might have saved my eyesight.

    Mine was an “incidental” diagnosis, common in pituitary tumors. If I hadn’t fallen out of bed and banged my head, eventually I would have experienced vision problems, and, if I got diagnosed in time, required even more of Dr. S’s considerable talent. This was the fifth or sixth time I’d fallen out of bed in the last few years. But I never needed a trip to the Emergency Room. I attributed the falls to Latte—nine pounds of horizontaldachshund-length nudging me to the edge, so one false step in a dream and over I’d go. Could Latte have been trying to nudge me to a CAT scan? I know of no evidence of dogs being able to sniff benign pituitary tumors, but I have not fallen out of bed since that night.

418: If I am able to maintain this snail’s pace, I am comforted to know I will never run out of things to write.

Squibs 412-415 [by Alan Ziegler]

412: In the early 60s, Jerry White has a folk music show on WJRZ, New Jersey. One stormy night in 1964, Jerry plays Another Side of Bob Dylan in its entirety before its release. I can barely make out the lyrics through static, but one line sings through: “For every hung-up person in the whole-wide universe.” On Sundays in the summer, Jerry White broadcasts live from the band shell in Palisades Amusement Park (home of the largest salt water swimming pool in the world). A bunch of us go as often as we can, cheering in the car whenever WJRZ runs the commercial for “Dennison’s, a men’s clothier, located near The Flagship, where money talks nobody walks, open 8 a.m. until 5 the next morning.” We keep swearing we’ll go some night at 3 a.m. but we never do.

    Many of the Palisades performers will go on to mainstream fame, such as Judy Collins, John Sebastian, Jose Feliciano (accompanied on stage at Palisades with his seeing-eye dog), and Jesse Colin Young (years later before a Youngbloods concert I will ask him about Jerry White and he will take a step backward with his mouth open and say “Wow”). Others will never transcend the folk scene, like Patrick Sky (whom Jerry White saw getting off the Crazy Mouse with Buffy St. Marie); Mel Lyman (who wailed a hypnotic “Amazing Grace” on his harmonica and went on to head the Lyman Family cult in Boston); and Peter LaFarge (whose “Ballad of Ira Hayes” would be covered by the likes of Johnny Cash and Kinky Friedman).

    On the radio, Jerry White sometimes plays Peter LaFarge’s protest song “Coyote,” sung chant-style with each line ascending into falsetto, which provokes us to end sentences in falsetto, resulting in contagious, spasmodic giggles. Driving to Palisades on a night Peter LaFarge is scheduled to appear, we consider not taking our usual front-and-center table, afraid we’ll start laughing if he sings “Coyote.” But we do take our regular seats, hoping either that LaFarge won’t sing “Coyote” or that we will be able to behave ourselves. He sings “Ira Hayes” and “As Long As the Grass Shall Grow” (which refers to the length of time the white man’s land treaty was supposed to be in effect), finishing to thunderous applause, much of it coming from our relieved table.

    Jerry White invites an encore and Peter asks for a request. Now, if one of us requested “Sing Coyote!” it could be explained as a deviant outburst, leading to peer repudiation. But we all yell “Coyote, Coyote.”

 

413: Unreasonable Facsimiles

 

414: The barber leans against the shoulder of his fifth customer on a Tuesday afternoon. He pretends the contact is a byproduct of maneuvering into the optimal snipping angle, but artistry is not the issue, he is snipping as much air as hair. He is bone weary. The barber promises never to cut another hair if he can somehow get through this day without crumbling to the floor or being berated by a customer looking through the hand-held rearview mirror. He imagines fleeing the shop to some distant shore where his soul could reincarnate. But the barber rallies off the shoulder, rhythm blessedly resumes, and he instinctively clips and snips in all the right places. At the end of the day, the barber sweeps the village of hair into one pile, which he scoops into his arms and carries to his room attached to his shop. He adds today’s harvest to the blanket of hair on his bed, hair that never gets grayer or thinner than the day it was shorn. He sleeps the sleep of a man at one with his life’s work.

 

415: Last minute, best minute.

Squibs 409-411 [by Alan Ziegler]

409: Most Sundays of my father’s final year, I take the 4:05 train to Lynbrook. For a couple of weeks in the spring and fall, the landscape glows, a suburban Hopper, and darkness settles as I go down the station stairway to my father’s car. Often, he is dozing off the effects of his chemotherapy, but today he is outside, leaning against the car door. Teenagers skateboard in and out of the parking area under the tracks, jumping curbs, dodging people. The youngest kid buzzes by my father, who yells, “Be careful!” The kid gives my father the finger. “Let’s get him,” my father commands, and runs after the kid with pre-cancer speed. I hustle behind him, furious at this punk kid. I cut around a railroad pillar and the kid screeches to a halt a few feet from me. My father catches up, winded but pleased. The kid smirks, “What are you going to do?” I grab the kid’s arm and hold on. First he’s scared, then defiant. “You can’t hit me. I’m a kid.” “You watch what I can do if you ever come near my father again.” I let go with a modest shove, and my father and I walk toward the car. I resist looking back, but tune my ears to listen for the sounds of pursuit. I ask my father if he is all right. He starts laughing, “Al, I didn’t really mean to go get him. I just wanted to scare him.” “Well, you might want to be more specific next time,” I respond, savoring the energy and camaraderie in my father’s face. When we get back to the car, the oldest one is waiting for us, cradling his board. He has scraggly blond hair and I read in his face that he is the punk kid’s older brother. Suddenly I am nervous that he will file a complaint with the police and I can kiss my teaching career goodbye. “Sir,” he says to my father, “I want to apologize for my brother. He was out of line. We mean no disrespect.” As he walks off, he gives me a respectful nod with his skateboard.

 

410: Inevitable meet-for-coffee with my ex, at the place we used to linger. The waitress greets “Oh, hi” and I order black. My ex asks for sparkling water and shrugs apologetically at my disappointment. When my cup is almost empty, the waitress extends the pot, raises her eyebrows, and I nod. As she pours, coffee aroma mingles with skin scent. “Are you ready for a coffee now?” she asks my ex. “No, I’ll pass.” After the waitress steps away, I blurt out, “When you meet an ex-lover for coffee, you really should have coffee!” “I can’t. I’m nursing.” Soon my ex will leave. The waitress will finish her shift. And I will wait until closing for one of them to return and refill my life.

 

411: The photograph came in the mail. It shows me walking away from my apartment, taken  from my bedroom window. I have just stepped into the late-afternoon shadow cast by the tall building on the corner. I didn’t know the picture was being taken, but I remember turning briefly to watch the flame dip toward the Hudson and thinking that the sun isn’t leaving us—it is we who are spinning away from the sun. She might have pressed the shutter button a bit too hard, for the photograph is slightly blurry. That’s when she decided to leave. I do not have a photo of her on the same street, but I can imagine her hunched under her backpack, which she’d unpacked two days before. I ache for her that heavy finger on the button, those minutes alone, deciding to leave because I just wasn’t being the way I was when we were together in another city; packing in the dark room, leaving the note “sorry” (that should’ve been my last word), before following my path, now lit by streetlights, crowded with people returning home from the world into which I have disappeared.

 

Social Distancing as Modeled by Baseball Players [by Alan Ziegler]

Before the shutdown of all sports, I was able to enlist major league baseball players to demonstrate good and bad examples of social distancing.

1) This is a good, basic application of six-feet rule.

2) Even Better

3) A little too close.

4) Much better!

5) As often as possible, clean all surfaces.

6. When visiting someone who is safe at home, wear protective gear.

7. Capacity Crowd.

8. If you must touch, use gloves.

9. if someone should succumb, wait for professional help.

10. No comment needed.

Stay safe!!

Squibs 404-408 [by Alan Ziegler]

404: 1993, hundreds of Woolworth's are closing and thousands of generic parakeets will be released on noon of the final day. Scrawny blue and green twelve-dollar birds will scatter in downtown Las Vegas, uptown New York City, and suburban Lynbrook. They will be freed from their group homes, where they sleep leaning on each other like passengers on a midnight train in India. These are not the cream of the exotic bird crop; they are bred for volume, their markup too low to help keep Woolworth's in flight. If you see one in your neighborhood, coax it home with seeds and love. Let it fly freely around the house, offer it food off your plate, teach it the words you’ve longed someone to say to you, and love it like you love the America that once was.

405: I overhear other people’s imaginary voices. Sometimes I do their biddings, which can be confusing when my imaginary voice gets garbled. What’s that you say? No way Jose! If that’s even my real name.

 

406: Long ago in America the Yankees got rained out and my little brother and I saw three Ape movies.

 

407: March 1967 Schenectady. After being up all night my roommate and I drive to Albany to watch the sun rise from a hilltop, but when we get there it has already become early. We have huge sleepy diner breakfasts, imagining what everyone will do all day. Back to Schenectady via winding back roads, my friend driving as I drift off. I awake to a bloody coat, shattered windshield, no pain. My friend moans, holding his stomach, no blood. He reaches out his hand, and I take it. Looking back at me from the rearview mirror is my shredded forehead, a small patch of my skull. A policeman wrestles the door open. Points a flashlight at me and says, “This one looks bad.” A few seconds (my time) later, I am being stitched up, floating serenely. A nurse hands me a phone and says, “Tell your mother you’re all right.” “Hi, mom, how are you?” I say, then remember my line and say “I’m all right.” The next day, with half of my face bandaged like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man,  I remember I have a date—such a crush—to see Eric Andersen in Albany. I call her, explain my situation low-key not to alarm her, and she says, “Does that mean you’re cancelling on me?” My mother comes up to accompany me on the train home to New York. My father and five-year-old brother Philip meet us at the top of an escalator in Grand Central Station. Philip looks scared and my father reassures him, “It’s Alan.” Philip smiles kindly and says, “My brother’s name is Alan, too.”

 

408: Visiting the Liptons on Shelter Island, I turn off the bathroom light at 3 a.m. and realize my mistake after a few paces engulfed in darkness on this moonless night. Somewhere are two bedrooms and a steep set of stairs, perilous even in daylight. Erin sleeps in one bedroom, and Judy and Ed in the other, but my mind’s eye cannot map the room. I crawl inch by inch, hoping that my surroundings will be revealed by headlights from a passing car before I careen down the stairs. Maybe I should fall asleep until first light, but what if I toss and turn and wake up—if I wake up—at the bottom of the stairs? Finally, I find a wall, then a door, slightly ajar. I slither in and listen with all my ears’ might to the sounds of sleep—two discrete rhythms. I back out, and the location of the other room is illuminated by memory. I confidently but cautiously wend my way to our room and climb in safe beside my sleeping wife, eager to tell her of my epic journey.

Squibs 397-403 [by Alan Ziegler]

397: When I was a kid, sometimes I’d look down as I walked and imagine I was flying. Everything on the ground became magnified in its smallness—rivulets of rain water in the gutter became mighty rivers abutting cliffs, grass a golf course, dirt a desert. I thought about this today as I came across the fork in the road, and then saw a half smoked cigarette as a limousine, followed by a lumber yard, and fall foliage in the snow.
Wee wee wee I flew all the way home.

 

398: I have nothing prepared for the 6^th grade Science Fair. In desperation, I copy a diagram of the human brain onto a piece of oak-tag, and add some facts from the encyclopedia, including the similarity between the human brain and the sheep brain. I tell my mother I am going to make a brain out of paper maché, but my brain can’t get my hands to do it. The next day my mother brings home a sheep’s brain she got from the butcher. I display it next to the oak tag, and my table gets lots of attention.

 

399: From my 7^th grade school notebook: “In Science we went over chemical equations and actions for how electricity is produced in a dry cell. I don’t get it at all. I doubt if I’ll ever get it.” Two years later, researching an idea for a science class project, I read that a copper wheel and magnets can turn on a light bulb. I start to get excited about electricity. I buy the material and meticulously follow the instructions, but the bulb stays dark. I have no choice but to turn it in anyway, with a short composition about how it works, knowing it doesn’t. The teacher is fascinated and beckons me to the front of the classroom. I hope for a miracle, and feign shock when nothing happens. The teacher consoles me, says this is what science is all about, and gives me an A, which makes me feel even more ashamed. After teaching creative writing for many years, I come to realize I earned that A.

 

400: Youth in Repose. December 1965, a blind date at a fraternity party rushing me, you were doing a favor by doubling with your friend, who soon disappeared upstairs with my friend. Lights went low, music simmered, liquor flowed, no place for strangers. You stewed. No choice but to go out into the chill night. We talked and laughed and stood close together creating warmth. You worried about your friend. We found them back downstairs, entwined on the couch, youth in repose. The room was free upstairs, but you said no, no, I can’t do that. You wrote me a couple of weeks later, a “thank you for a fun night,” told me about your Christmas visit home, the trimming of the tree, how nice to be with your family. I never answered, not looking for “fun nights.” Twenty years later your unusual last name jumps out of an obit page: a man, would be about your father’s age. I skim down to find your name among the survivors. I am truly sorry.

 

401: College Friday, the doorbell rings in Alicia, surprising me from New York. I think of all the ways my weekend will now be wonderful, but the most-lasting joy will not be the sex, the sharing of new records, the movie downtown, or the huge Chinese meal. It will be the eyes, her eyes when I wake in the middle of the night, large and brown, arms-length away, wide open, eyes in love.

 

402: From our correspondent on the scene. The ventriloquists’ civil war has turned ugly. Outside a club, a man in a midnight blue tuxedo leans over the weeping, smoldering remains of a wooden figure sheathed with tattered pieces of the same blue cloth. Nearby, a man in a white suit lies, limp, a goofy grin spanning his throat, which cackles as the blood gurgles.  

 

403: My mother and I walk to the synagogue to see Grandpa Popowsky. I am four. She explains that it is against the rules for mommies to go near the grandpas at shul, so I will be the messenger. She hands me a piece of paper and nudges me into the large room. Men walk about aimlessly, heads bobbing, making strange sounds. The room is crowded but everyone seems alone. When I play make-believe—vroom vrooming with a toy car—occasionally I look around to make sure the world is where I left it, but my grandfather doesn’t pause, so I tug on his pants. “Avram”—he calls me by my Hebrew name—“is there trouble?” I want to play with the men, and my mother isn’t allowed to pull me away. But I am a good boy and give my grandfather the message. He pats me on the head and resumes his vrooming.

    If I had vroomed with my grandfather, might I have received a message that would speak to me for the rest of my life?

Squib 396 [by Alan Ziegler]

396: The supply room is empty, and no one knows when the next delivery is due. No one can remember the last shipment or who ordered it, only that we were well-stocked for a long time. We call every number in our Contacts and say, “Please bring more.” Some are sympathetic, some blasé, others downright rude. No one says when we can expect supplies. “At least we have each other,” I say to the room, but the others are gone. Just me amidst empty closets, empty chairs next to empty desks.I can barely see in the twilight and turn on a lamp. The bulb gives a final flicker and dies. There is simply no point in looking for another one. The sun, too, runs out. I am left with a night’s supply of darkness. I shall make it last.

Squib 395 [by Alan Ziegler]

395. The voice on the radio is hysterical. We turn it louder until we can’t make out the words, drowning out the phones and sirens. We shut the windows and harmonize in a hymn. Your hands throw scary shadow figures onto the wall. My fist shadows pummel them.

Squibs 388-394 [by Alan Ziegler]

388: In my small writer-in-residence cabin at Interlochen, I live as if I have several rooms, working wherever I wind up: curling up in corners, prone by the fireplace,  perching by the window, or sometimes even at my desk. There are times when I am desperate for a paper clip—a modicum of organization is all I need, but I need it badly and instantaneously, and relocating to locate one is an onerous and potentially work-killing task. But the thing about paper clips is that you stop needing one about as quickly and often as you start to need one, so I tend to toss newly-detached paper clips willy-nilly. I make a cool discovery: Once the cabin is primed, whenever I need a paper clip all I have to do is feel along the floor or table without even taking my eyes off my work. Most first-time visitors will graciously stoop to pick one off the floor only to be rebuffed: “Please put that back where you found it.”

 

389: On my lap is a large manila envelope containing my mother’s x-rays. I picked them up from one doctor, and am taking them for a second opinion. This is the kind of opinion only some people are entitled to. The envelope is open at one end, with an indent in the middle from which protrudes the tip of the x-rays, for smooth removal. Held to light, this film tells a story, in a language foreign to me. We have been told that the story is a sad one. The new translator concurs.

 

390: Are we on the wrong road? Or the right one, but only up to a point that we have passed? Or haven’t we gone far enough? This car speeding past us into our future might know. Or the oncoming lights on cars going back in our time.

 

391: In college, my Sex, Censorship, and Literature class is visited by Dwight Macdonald. He leafs through one of the skin magazines the professor keeps on hand for class consideration and says, “You know who these girls are? They’re hookers, that’s who they are. That’s where they get them.” After class, I show him one of my pieces and he points out that the character I am profiling doesn’t change (a concept I will continue to wrestle with as a writer and teacher). I tell him I’m doing a series on protest movements for the student newspaper, and he says, “I’d like to see them. Send them to me at The New Yorker.” I never do (oh why oh why?). That night, after a few drinks, he asks me to take him to the Vale Cemetery, to search for the grave of Captain Mordecai Myers, who, I learn, was a mayor of Schenectady, and, more importantly, Robert Lowell’s great-great-grandfather (“Poor sheepdog in wolf’s clothing!”). We scamper in and out of cemetery lanes for what increasingly becomes clear is a mission with little chance of success. Still, I thoroughly enjoy playing Peter Lorre to Dwight Macdonald’s Sydney Greenstreet.

 

392: To rehabilitate my runner’s knee, I buy a bottom-of-the-line stationary bike. Its only bell or whistle is a speedometer/pedometer (not even a bell), which brings me memories of the Christmas bicycle I got as a kid (my father carrying one for my sister and one for me off the back of my uncle’s truck). By the time the pedometer reaches 500, the bike squeaks and changes resistance unpredictably. That is all right with me, just like riding on rugged terrain. I set myself distance goals, measuring miles on a map: Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel boarding house in Asheville; Elvis’s Sun Sessions in Memphis; Cisco singing Woody in Oklahoma. The bike gets squeakier and balkier, bothering Erin so much that I can’t ride while she is home. “Get a new bike,” she complains, but I have to finish my journey. I triumphantly cross the Golden Gate bridge and glide to a halt outside the City Lights Bookstore. I don’t think the bike could have made it another mile. I remove the pedometer to keep like a medal, and lovingly deposit the carcass in the garbage heap on the street. I proudly show off my medal to Erin, who asks me how many kilometers there are in a mile. I am somewhere in the desert, with no way out.

 

393: I am staying with Gay and Art on Martha’s Vineyard, late August. I have gotten up the courage to go riding with Gay; my horse is named Sundance, and Gay assures me that he is too old and sweet to gallop off with me hanging on to the rein for dear life. As we trundle through the brush, flies keep bothering Sundance. I shoo them away and in gratitude Sundance seems to be more responsive to my amateurish requests. Gay and her horse lead Sundance and me out onto the empty beach, where the late-afternoon sun glints off Tisbury Great Pond. We can hear the nearby ocean, which Gay grew up calling The Big Waves. A man appears in the distance and waves us over. I’m concerned that we are breaking an ordinance, but Gay doesn’t seem worried as we trot closer. When we are within shouting distance, he says, “I just wanted to make sure you two know how beautiful you look.”

Squibs 381-387 [by Alan Ziegler]

381:
Everyone has stories to tell
Some big, some small—
Know someone long enough and well
You’ll hear them all,
Though details may morph as years swell
And tales grow tall.

382: Hey cowboys, a traveling tip: It’s better to ride off into the sunrise.

 

383: As I sulked, a swan came out of the river. I told her all about you, pointing to where you lay in the sun, eyes closed, pink sweater beside you. I mentioned your eyes and how they matched the grass. The swan started toward you. I told her you wanted to be left alone. She turned and eased back down into the river. Why, she hardly knew you — and understood so quickly it put me to shame.

384: “I’ve forgotten more than you’ll ever know!” I’ll take your word for it: the minuend (the amount you have forgotten) is greater than the subtrahend (what I’ll ever know). But is the minuend of what you still know greater than the subtrahend of what I know now?

386: Elegy for Phil Ochs (original draft written April 9, 1976). I hear the news, awakening from a nap to the radio. “Death of a folksinger,” the announcer says, and I tense waiting to hear which one. It’s you, Phil. I think of the first time I saw you perform, in 1963 at the Newport Folk Festival, how you strummed between songs and I got the feeling new songs were forming even as you performed the old ones. And the time you were sitting near me at a bar on MacDougal Street, talking politics with some people whose names I probably knew: “What we need is an armed army of Trotskyites,” you said, and I quoted you over and over as if you’d said it to me. Then there was your billed farewell performance a few months ago at Folk City. You did a perfunctory set, ending with a few lines of an unfinished song about Sonny Liston, who lost his heavyweight title rematch to Muhammad Ali after what some called a phantom punch: “Sonny, Sonny Sonny, why’d you have to take a dive...” After the song, you asked the bartender for “another vodka and orange juice” (I thought it strange but elegant that you didn’t ask for a screwdriver) and introduced Sammy Walker with, “This is my last night. This is his first night. I hope you don’t bother HIM.” And I was angry; we were your devoted fans, how did we bother you? Today you hung yourself in your sister’s closet; what did she do, other than harbor you through the dark days, which you'd convinced her were ending. Phil, Phil, Phil, why’d you have to take a dive?

385: Elegy for Laura Nyro (original draft written April 9, 1997). Laura, Laura, I say your name over and over as if singing a song for you. I have been listening to your first songs since I heard the news yesterday, the songs you wrote before you (and I) were twenty. I remember in 1967 thinking: Bill must be nuts to make you play the wedding bell blues, I’d love you when you cry and become a California shoe shine boy just to shine your shoes, even if you wound up hurting me (though you never meant to). I’ve been singing along with you all day—how did you know so much so young? Did you know there wouldn’t be much time, and wanted to take your freedom for as long as you be? And now you’ve had to go. As I walk on a Manhattan morning, goodbye Laura.

386: I tell the story counterclockwise, getting younger until “This is where I came in.” I continue. Not much to do now. I tire of being asked, “Who the hell are you?” If this thing ever kicks out of reverse gear, they’ll find out. Yes sir, they are in for some surprise, given what I know now.

387: Dogs spend their entire lives in assisted living.

 

 

Squibs 373-380 [by Alan Ziegler]

373: Would you prefer to:

    a) be a mule

    b) be a pig

    c) be a fish

    d) swing on a star and be better off than you are

    e) none of the above

374: Mr. Plant, my senior year high school history teacher, “confided” in us that the government and our textbooks don’t tell the whole truth, but there’s a book that does, except you can’t find it in a bookstore. He asked us each to bring in $3.00 and he would buy the books for us, but don’t tell anyone because it would take too long to get official permission. A few weeks later, Mr. Plant was absent several days in a row. The principal asked me to come to his office, and keep the meeting confidential (he trusted me because I was editor of the school newspaper). “We have not been able to reach Mr. Plant. There’s a rumor that he collected money from his students for a book.” I confirmed the rumor. “Did you receive the book?” He was relieved to hear that we had not, and told me the book was None Dare Call it Treason, a right-wing polemic adopted by the John Birch Society. The school reimbursed our money and we never saw Mr. Plant again, though one of my classmates swore he spotted him walking on the Long Beach Boardwalk wearing a dress.

 

375: Paused at an intersection on a desolate Northern Michigan road. A blue vintage Corvette whizzes by, the model used in Route 66. I used to dream about being the Todd of a Todd-Buzz Corvette-rambling duo. (Todd went to Yale and will have a lucrative future when his drifting days are done.) Another vintage Corvette, followed by another and another. I count to 16, when the intersection becomes still, ominously bereft of Corvettes.

 

376: I wake in the middle of the night and can’t find my left arm. Not draped over my wife or squished under my chest. I panic for a few groggy seconds. There it is: by my side, but somehow detached. I remember hearing that prisoners in German concentration camps were sometimes forced to sleep in such confined spaces that their whole bodies fell asleep while their minds remained conscious. I muffle a scream into the pillow as I shake my arm awake, breathing rapidly until I can once again embrace my wife.

 

377: On the 1-train, the ragged man blesses me for my dollar. At my stop, the train lurches and I stumble toward the door somehow eluding passengers. With a final harrowing jeté I land upright on the platform. The ragged man yells out, “Good balance, sir! Not bad for an old dude.”

 

378: I am five, in the hospital with a mysterious infection, led into a small auditorium—the audience a sea of white. I stand on stage and realize my pajama bottoms are sagging. I keep them up with one hand, while the audience listens and takes notes. I hear something about my parents “claiming” I am allergic to penicillin. A nurse takes me back to my room and gives me fresh pajamas to change into. While I am naked, a little black girl in a hospital gown walks by. Our unhappy eyes meet, and I feel no shame as she passes the portal that briefly connects our lives. Oh, little girl, I so hope you made it out of there. Oh, old woman, I so hope you are still out here and now know that the sad, naked little boy made it, too.

 

379: I float over what remains of her life as her voice shrivels like smoke born in a faraway explosion, getting weaker as it wisps into a whisper. But still I hear it, I hear what she is saying, her words like birds shot in flight carried off on a stretcher of wind. I drown to the ground, having breathed my first breath without her.

 

380: Assignment: Identify every hat (by manufacturer, model, and retail price) worn in This Gun for Hire (1942, starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake). You may substitute any black and white crime drama made between 1940 and 1955, or, in the interest of fairness, restrict your search to the second screenshot.

 

Squibs 365-372 [by Alan Ziegler]

365: Late 1950s, Lassie barks for help through the darkness. The T.V. picture has gone kaput.  My father says “I’ll teach you to fix it” and removes the back to reveal a landscape of small tubes. He plucks out several and drops them into a paper bag. We drive to the drug store where, hidden in a back corner, is a scientific-looking object the size of a vending machine.

He instructs me how to plug the tubes in—one at a time, matching the slots with the numbers on the tube—and watch as the gauge points red or green. It reminds me of a game on the boardwalk.

He sets aside the only tube that turned the gauge red, and finds its match in the cabinet. Home, he re-plugs all the tubes except for the new one, which he lets me do. Lassie comes home!

 

366: The ancient writer, told he has hours to live, asks his doctor to bring him his books, and he starts paging through them. “Why didn’t you ask for your wife?” “I’ll have eternity with her in heaven. These are going straight to hell.”

 

367: Now, while the time since your death is still counted in weeks, I’ll be walking along and there, just beyond the ability of my eyes to distinguish faces, I’ll see someone who looks like you, and for a few milliseconds my brain will form your face. At first it was a little unnerving, but I’ve come to look forward to and treasure those milliseconds, and I will mourn them when they are gone.

 

368: The houseguest opens the refrigerator, smiles, and says, “Someone brought home baked goods from Entenmann’s.”

 

369: “Garçon, un bock! I write to please myself, just as I order my dinner…” [George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man]. I don’t need the menu, just bring me whatever looks good today.

 

370: My mother’s critique: “Received your article to-day and for a routine write-up, you sure made it into interesting reading.”

 

371: The evil that men do lives long after them, along with automatic renewals.

 

372: The only priest in the remote village announces he will be moving to a faraway parish in a week. A run on Confessions, future absolutions granted; pray now, sin later. Hail Marys peal from every corner, alley, barroom, bedroom. After the priest departs, it is holy sanctioned hell on earth. Except for a pious few, who eventually set off to find the Garden of Eden and scrounge for seeds.

Squibs 355-364 [by Alan Ziegler]

355: Unemployment Office,  92^nd and Broadway, mid-1970s: Laid-off (not fired) workers wait weekly on long lines to affirm they are actively looking for work. No check-in, no check. So many dancers, musicians, and actors on those lines that if you yelled “And five six seven eight….” the opening of A Chorus Line would break out.

 

356: “Over and back,” was my favorite basketball violation. I’d have done it all game if they let me.

 

357: Beauty and Pizza, meet Parlor.

 

358: The following contains one falsity: On Saturday Night Live in 1992, Sinead O’Connor adapted Bob Marley’s “War” to include “child abuse” (repeated), nine years before the Pope formally acknowledged the problem. She tore a picture of the Pope (you won’t see it on the reruns). Two weeks later she was booed off the Madison Square Garden stage at a tribute to Bob Dylan, who came out and scolded the audience.

 

359: 
Second verse same as the first.

Second verse same as the first.

 

360: Sultry spring Saturday in Schenectady, 1970. Local hamburger joint advertises special appearance by Bippo the Clown—all day, bring the kiddies. “Damn everything but the circus!” I shout, and we head on over. An elderly couple is smoking in a booth, a bored teenager stands behind the counter wearing a white paper hat. “We’d like to see the clown.” “The clown went home.” “The clown went home?!” “Yeah, no one came to see him.” And thus the phrase the clown went home enters the lexicon, with a multitude of uses.

 

361: Sometimes my second move only becomes apparent after I make the first move, yet would not have been viable without the first move.

 

362: I still get angry at characters on screen who do something stupid even though I know the words were put on the page by someone like me.

 

363: I improvise on a Santana song in my head, barely aware I am fretting the notes on my forearm. “What song are you playing?” someone asks. “Samba Pa Ti.” "Nice intonation!"

 

364: Assignment: Research and write a 50-word biographical sketch for every extra in The Life of Emile Zola.

(Big) Squib 354: My Visit with Louis Abolafia [by Alan Ziegler]

December 1968

    My grandmother and her sister live in a rent-controlled walk-up on East Fourth Street between First and Second. The Hells Angels are headquartered around the block. Through the school playground across the street, you can see the police station used for Kojak exteriors. Almost directly across the street is the campaign headquarters/studio of Louis Abolafia, an artist who recently lost the Presidency to Richard Nixon by more than 31 million votes (no matter, Abolafia at 27 was far too young to serve).

    When I stop by Abolafia’s tiny storefront, I mention that my grandmother appreciates how he always smiles and waves. “Yes, the old people like me,” Abolafia says, but he is distracted. “I must have been out of my head to not show him that one.” He shakes his flowing hair in disgust and explains that he just showed a potential buyer several of his paintings but forgot one of his favorites. 

    Louis Abolafia: self-proclaimed Renaissance Man, the Patron Saint of Fourth Street, The Caped Crusader for Peace, and the Love Candidate for President. His nearly-nude campaign poster proclaims “What have I got to hide” but reveals a typical politician’s proclivity to conceal at least part of  the truth.

    The New York Times covered his campaign kick-off in May 1967, a marathon Cosmic Love-In at the Village Theater (later the Fillmore East) with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, The Blues Project, and Timothy Leary.

    Abolafia is not new to the media piñata of the 60s. In December 1964 he was arrested for putting up one of his paintings on the balcony of the Metropolitan Museum.

Abolafia’s friendliness with the elders on the block is not the only way he bridges generation gaps. His headquarters also serves as the Runaway Clearing House, where Abolafia acts as an intermediary between runaway kids and their parents.

    Today, Abolafia is hiding much more than on his poster, wearing a plain white turtleneck and brown slacks. He excuses himself to “make some bread,” and resumes sorting out the paintings he showed the buyer, still upset about the one he forgot. The phone rings and he asks me to take a message. I search for the phone amidst the unsold canvases, periodicals (from Life to the East Village Other), and half empty Coke cans. I know I am getting close when I come across a waste paper basket covered with telephone numbers. I add a new name and number and we start our interview.

    I ask about his platform and he makes an Oh-that-again face. As he starts his rote answer (love means “being open hearted”), I mouth I’m sorry and he smiles. The rest of the interview is conversational. His campaign didn’t “make a move financially but did well spiritually,” and he garnered plenty of free publicity because “freakiness is almost as good as money on today’s market.” He did all the big TV shows (Merv Griffin, Johnny Carson) and was written up in magazines all over the world. At a party, Ruth Dayan—wife of  Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan—asked his brother Oscar if he was related to Louis Abolafia.

    Abolafia sees his political action as an attempt to counteract the tendency toward fascism in this country. It is not an ideological conflict but rather a philosophical one of love versus hate. He believes in a grassroots cultural revolution but feels that politicians should play a part. “A politician can voice the view that all men are really the same and brotherhood is beautiful and spread this message around the world.  Cultural missionaries all over the world. Mix, marry, mingle. Break down nationalism. Prevent the spread of communism or any ideology. We’ll be part of an assimilated world. This is the only way you’re going to achieve world union.”

    Notable among Abolafia's skeptics is Li'l Abner cartoonist (and right-winger) Al Capp:

    Lou puts down the effectiveness of the revolutionaries, feeling that the beyond-expectations success of the George Wallace candidacy is evidence that reaction is setting in.

    “Tell me, revolutionary out there, who’s winning? Every time I speak to a revolutionary they say, ‘Oh, we’re winning, we’re getting more people on our side.’ Well, if you cannot find a common bond between man, you’re gonna fight them, and I’m not sure of the intelligence of the hippie-yippie community to take over this country. I can’t see a bunch of ignoramuses running the country.”

    We talk about the violence at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and I mention my recent visit with Abbie Hoffman. “Rebellion is going to cause reaction which is going to cause a lot of bloodshed. I can’t get into violence. I think it’s gotta be done through love or charm or straightening out our Karma, but it can’t be done through violence.”

   Abolafia disagrees with Abbie Hoffman that the people going to Chicago knew there would be violence. “There were conflicting reports on what was going to happen. The L.A. Free Press wrote that they were going to have to give us permits because of all the people that would be going. I was at one of the big rallies and Allen Ginsberg started “Om-ing everybody to death. I pushed him aside on stage and I said, ‘Goddamnit, Ginsberg, stop Om-ing everybody to death and tell them they’re going to have their heads broken in!’ And he said, ‘Abolafia, Abolafia, Abolafia.’ And I said, ‘Ginsberg, shut up!’ This after he had fed me goat’s milk up in the country. But Allen’s all right. He’s a poetic rebel, right? He’s love.”

    [A few months later at the trial of the Chicago Seven—originally the Chicago Eight—Ginsberg described Abolafia as “kind of a Bohemian trickster” who crashed the rally: “He just appeared from nowhere and got up to the microphone and started yelling into it. ‘The police out there are armed and violent. You are walking into a death trap.’ I went over and sat next to him, and grabbed his leg, and started tickling him, and said, “Hare Krishna, Louis.”]

    So, how would Abolafia bring the country together? “I’m gonna do it by starting cultural centers in every part of this country. To bring out every talented kid and hope that these intellectuals and painters and artists will help the society.” His ideal cabinet would have “intellectuals, writers.” They would sit around and draw up offensive policies for “extending America” not defensive “what are you gonna do about communism” policies. “Take all the money from the war and buy out the ghetto problem. We have the greatest weapon in the world, economics, and we can do anything we want with it. We can make beautiful things happen. We have been brought down so much since the Second World War. We’re losing the greatest chess game in the history of the world.”

Postscript:

    This post is based on contemporaneous notes. 

    At the 1967 Cosmic Love-In, you could buy a banana from an artist for 15 cents, and get 3 cents back if you returned the peel. At 2019 Art Basel, the price of a banana went up considerably.

    Louis Abolafia relocated to the West Coast, where he co-created the Exotic Erotic Ball in San Francisco in 1979. He died of a drug overdose in 1995. He was 54. 

    Two people who make cameo appearances are still with us. Louis’s brother, Oscar Abolafia, has had a notable career as a photographer. Here he is at a showing of his work in July 2018.

    And here is Ruth Dayan (who divorced Moshe in 1971) a couple of weeks ago, at the age of 102.