The Best American Poetry

Squib 378 [by Alan Ziegler]

For Roger Angell (1921-2022)

Long ago, on the off-chance I might run into the Devil at the Crossroads,

                                                        Robert Johnson's Crossroads

                                                                    Mine


I prepared a modest negotiation list (not worth trading my soul for, but perhaps Mephisto would settle my soles:

                                                1) Appear on WBAI
                                                2) teach at Columbia University
                                                3) publish in The Village Voice
                                                4) publish in the Paris Review
                                                5) publish in The New Yorker.

By 1986 I had yet to crack the toughest nut, The New Yorker (of course, The New Yorker). I sent off an un-agented story, like buying a lottery ticket for the cost of roundtrip stamps. One afternoon, I slowly opened the mailbox, ever-hoping to find my SASE feather-light, sans story. Once again, not again. Upstairs, I clicked my blinking answering machine.

Download Answering machine 1986

Squibs 374-377 [by Alan Ziegler]

374: I’ve been on my last legs since the day I was born.

375: You should have at least one radio that gets tuned by fingers turning a dial so you can experience the pleasure of flying through a static storm (keep the volume up), miraculously encountering a muffled sound, and calibrating a precise landing—the pleasure of earned clarity. Take off into the unknown (beyond your usual pre-sets): spend time with polkas, foreign languages, troubled souls, repugnant politics, raps and rhapsodies. All without the push of a button. Imagine driving deep in the night during the 1940’s, out of signal reach in any one of 18 states from Maine to North Carolina or six Canadian provinces, working the dial until you synchronize with the 50,000 watts of “WWVA, Wheeling West Virginia” and you know you won’t be alone for many miles and hours.

376 (excerpted from The Cameo Awards): Best Performance by a Man Sitting Alone in a Café comes down to two classic performances. Runner up is Sam Berry in his best—and only known—role, as the “gas station attendant” (though he does no attending) in Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas. Berry observes Harry Dean Stanton passed out and says, “What the hell?” Trying to rouse Stanton he adds, “Hey!” (which suggests he had an under-five contract). The movie goes nowhere if Berry doesn't convince the audience that he would call a doctor, if only to clear the path to the beer in the refrigerator.The clear-cut winner, however, is the legendary Feather Man from the Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson (aka Po & Storm) video for Robert Palmer’s “Big Log.” Feather Man has no lines but oh those imperious eyes broadcasting contempt after he brushes away the unwelcome feather. Is it Feather Man who crushes the fallen feather or does the white shoe belong to Robert Palmer (ending the chase for Led Zeppelin’s Feather in the Wind)? A case could be made for either but my money is on Feather Man, who may still be sipping that beer without savor.

377: You should have a watch or clock that requires winding. Let it run down occasionally and experience the miracle of time travel: Set it slowly, backwards, and remember what transpired. Set it forward, slowly, and invent your future. Wind it next to your ear, savoring each click. Do not ever overwind. You will be sad and lose your ability to control time.

Squib 473, for David Lehman [by Alan Ziegler]

Plus
Equals

Tom Meschery—Rerun from 2015 [by Alan Ziegler]

With Steph Curry swishing three-pointers into the bucket by the bucket, I was reminded of this piece from 2015, in which Tom Meschery said, "I can’t stop writing little haikus about Steph Curry," and thought it might be time for a rerun because more people should know about Meschery. If you don't have time for the whole piece, scroll down to his poem "Working Man." It's a stunner.

    Bio Note #1: Tom Meschery was born in Manchuria and spent five childhood years in a Japanese internment camp. He received an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers Workshop, where his teachers included Mark Strand, Marvin Bell, and Helen Chasin. After Iowa, Tom ran a bookstore, taught for Poets in the Schools, and did physical labor before receiving his teaching credentials. He joined the faculty of Reno High School, where he taught Advanced Placement English and creative writing for 25 years; he also taught at Sierra College. Tom is the author of several books of poetry, including Nothing We Lose Can Be Replaced, Some Men, and Sweat: New and Selected Poems About Sports; he has also published the nonfiction Caught in the Pivot. In 2001 he was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.

    Bio Note #2: Tom Meschery was born in Manchuria and spent five childhood years in a Japanese internment camp. He was an All-American basketball player in high school and college, and an NBA All Star. He played ten years, mostly for The Warriors (first in Philadelphia and then in San Francisco) and later for the Seattle Supersonics, appearing in two NBA Finals. His #31 has been retired by Saint Mary’s College (where his career rebounding record stood for 48 years), as has his #14 by the Warriors. Tom coached the Carolina Cougars and was the assistant coach for the Portland Trailblazers. In 2003 he was inducted into the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame.

    I’ve been fascinated by Tom Meschery since I heard about a former NBA star, whose name was often prefixed with “hard-nosed,” turning from personal fouls to personal poems. I started a list of “athletes who write poetry” for use with reluctant students when I toured high schools. Not long after my father died in 2001, I was moved and impressed by Tom’s poem “Working Man," in which he addresses his late father (more about this later). Over the years, I have read the poem to several of my Columbia classes, and one day a student said: “He was my high school English teacher!” Interesting.

    Recently, I talked to Tom (while he was recovering from his second shoulder replacement surgery); this piece is based on that conversation and other sources (see note on bottom).

 Manchuria to the NBA

    Thomas Nicholas Meschery was born Tomislav Nikolayevich Mescheryakov. His father was a hereditary officer in Admiral Kolchak’s Army. His mother was the daughter of Vladimir Nicholayavich, who participated in Kornilov’s failed coup against Kerensky: “My grandpa was put under arrest in the Winter Palace. Together with Nicholas II.” Tom’s mother was related to the poet Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy (second cousin to Leo).

    Tom’s parents met, in exile, in Manchuria, and Tom was born in 1938. In 1939, Tom’s father went ahead to San Francisco; his mother was to follow with Tom and his sister when they obtained the necessary papers. They were awaiting voyage on December 7, 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The Mescheryakovs were placed in a Tokyo-area internment camp for women and children, where “there was no suffering” and they were fed well. Towards the end of the war, the guards gave them the rejects from intercepted Red Cross packages (lots of spam).

    They finally made it to San Francisco. In “A Small Embrace,” Tom writes in his mother’s voice addressing him; the poem ends:

                                    a voice kept yelling over the loudspeaker: citizens to the left,
                                    stateless to the right. A band was playing something cheerful.
                                    You pointed to the wrong father. I to the wrong husband.

    Tom’s weak English was mitigated by his size and athletic prowess. He became a star basketball player at Lowell High School, where he developed his game in a modest facility that was “full of shadows” with a corduroy floor and wood backboards.

                                                 

                                                       [from] Lowell High

                                    Our coach, who was as old as the building,
                                    Taunted and inspired us, swore and cajoled us,
                                    He taught us to play without frills.
                                    We became red brick and corduroy
                                    And learned to see through shadows.

Tom went on to be a two-time All-American at St. Mary’s College, and was drafted in the first round by the Philadelphia Warriors. On March 2, 1962, in a game played in Hershey Pennsylvania, Wilt Chamberlain and Tom combined for 116 points in a 169-147 victory over the Knicks. Wilt scored 100. The game was not televised, but Tom wrote a poem about it.

                                                    [from] The 100 Point Game

                                    That night through the fourth quarter
                                    in that mad scramble for history
                                    we all passed the ball the full length
                                    of the court to Wilt, straight and high
                                    into the dark around the rafters

    Tom played for 10 seasons, averaging 12.7 points and 8.6 rebounds. His stat line in Game 7 of the Eastern Division finals is particularly impressive: 48 minutes, 32 points, 11 rebounds, 2 assists, and only 3 personal fouls.

The NBA to Iowa

    Tom's first collection, Over the Rim, was published while he was an active player, and the cartoon on the back of his 1970-71 playing card is captioned “Tom is a writer of poetry.”  

   But, Tom says, his reading had been confined to earlier Russian and British and classic American verse, and the poems in Over the Rim were “ordinary” and “didn’t test limits or push parameters.” This began to change at a poker game. "Mark Strand was teaching at the University of Washington while I was playing for the Sonics, and I met him at a poker game run by a couple of professors.” Strand invited Tom to sit in on his class when the team was in town, and he got his “first exposure to contemporary American poetry.”

    Meschery and Strand became good friends and, while Tom was coaching Carolina, the two met for dinner when the Cougars were in town to play the Nets. Tom complained about his coaching job (he titled a poem "Why I Was a Terrible Coach"), and Strand advised, “Well, if you hate it that much get the hell out of there.” He told Tom he’d write a recommendation for Iowa. In Tom’s subsequent book about his coaching year, Caught in the Pivot, he writes, “Mark told us about the number of poets who are frustrated jocks. Here I am a jock who’s a frustrated poet.”

    Tom was accepted and quit his job. He and his then-wife (the novelist Joanne Meschery) packed up with their three small children and moved to Iowa, where he had “two great years. I just loved it. From then on I just couldn’t stop writing poetry.” But the transition wasn’t easy. “For the first six months I was pretty timid, I sneaked around and sat in the back of the workshops. I felt very unsure of myself.” The turning point came when he studied with Helen Chasin. “She was the first one who really said, ‘You’re not too bad you can do this, don’t hesitate to talk.’” Tom “became more confident, experimental, she gave me a bunch of poets to read and said imitate.” Classmate Michael Waters remembers, “Tom was without pretensions, itself remarkable in the Workshop, and generous with his praise."

The Mad Russian and the Sweet and Generous Man

     As a basketball player, Tom Meschery was known as the Mad Russian. One game, Tom tried to stay out of trouble by swearing in Russian, but eventually a referee called him for a technical based on his “intonation.” Tom’s on-court anger often went beyond words. He told an interviewer, “If I was elbowed I elbowed twice.” Former teammate Al Attles says, “His eyes would start rolling around in his head if somebody did something to him on the floor and he’d lose it …”

                                                 In the Moment

                                    The whistle blows
                                    and I am caught
                                    between curbing my anger
                                    or hitting the player
                                    who just fouled me.
                                    Oh, what the hell, I say.

    But the hostility remained on the court. During Tom’s rookie year, Tom Heinsohn of the Celtics bloodied his eye with a right cross. After the game, they ran into each other in the tavern below Boston Garden, drank some beers, and wound up talking about painting: “[Heinsohn] said he painted in the Wyeth School.” Tom wasn’t always the smartest fighter. While playing for Golden State, he tried to punch his former teammate and close friend Chamberlain (then with the Lakers). Tom recalls, “It was cartoonish. I couldn’t reach him— he was holding my head.”

                                                [from] Tom Heinsohn

                                    Today I write poems and admire the back-light
                                    in Wyeth’s painting of the yellow dog sunning himself
                                    in the window and think that the violence
                                    we made together was the work of artists

    Iowa classmate Michael Ryan says about Tom, “His heart and spirit and sheer gusto were as big as he was. And that's saying something. What a sweet and generous man.” When Kyle Smith—now the head coach of the Columbia University Lions—was an assistant at Saint Mary’s, he got to know Tom first through his presence that “loomed in the folklore of the alums as his jersey hung in the rafters. He was known as the ‘Mad Russian.’ Once I met the man, I do not think there could have been a more inappropriate nickname.  Far from Mad, Tom Meschery is a prince of a human being who once physically touched people on the court who touched the hearts of his students and loved ones. I am sure the Christian Brothers who educated him at Saint Mary's would be so proud to see someone who has embodied the Lasallian spirit of the school motto ‘enter to learn, leave to serve.’”

     The modern game is much calmer, due in part to every moment being televised and players protecting huge salaries. 

                                                After Meditating

                                                (for Phil Jackson)

                                    I return to your book, Sacred Hoops
                                    and I think, perhaps you’ve discovered
                                    the secret to the modern game,
                                    the centered-self each player can achieve
                                    with right-breathing, as if the soul
                                    were a tight muscle in need of stretching.

                                    Team mantras, spiritual championships.
                                   

                                    If only I’d known
                                    I didn’t have to throw that elbow
                                    at LaRusso or stalk Chet Walker
                                    to his locker room, spoiling for a fight,
                                    or take a swing at Wilt,
                                    while my breathless teammates
                                    feared for my life.
                                    All I had to do was breathe
                                    my way out of anger.
                                    Lungs instead of fists.

    Writing workshops are non-contact endeavors (physically), but Tom recalls that at Iowa “a fight erupted in our kitchen” between a concrete poet and a traditional poet during a poker party. “Raymond Carver broke the fight up.” Michael Waters said it was the only time he saw Tom angry: “Tom had placed a huge glass bowl filled with scoops of Baskin-Robbins ice cream—all their flavors—on his dining room table, and the ice cream slowly melted into a deep rainbow sludge while folks stood around outside, calming down, wondering if the party would continue. I always remember that ice cream when I think of Tom.”   

The Court to the Desk

    After Iowa, Tom tried coaching again, this time as the assistant to Portland’s player-coach Lenny Wilkins, a former teammate (#18, below). Bill Walton (#32) was also on the team. At the time, the FBI was searching for Patty Hearst—the kidnapped heiress who helped rob a bank—and Bill Walton had been questioned by the FBI (there was no connection). Michael Waters recalls that Tom would “invite me to games, let me stay with him in his hotel room, and beg me not to make jokes about Patty Hearst hiding in his bathroom.”

    When Wilkins lost his coaching job, Tom left the game. He had a “hard transition from professional sports. Ran a bookstore for three years, painted houses, rock work.” To pick up a little extra money, Tom “got hooked up with the poets in the schools—a week gig here and there, elementary, middle, high school, take over an English class. I just loved it. I really liked high school kids. They were on the verge of being mature, at the same time they were still wonderfully naïve, full of piss and vinegar.”

    Tom earned his teaching credentials at the University of Nevada, and, while waiting for a teaching position, he spent six months coaching in Africa, where he had made previous trips for the USIA during his playing days.

                                             Republic of the Congo

                                    Entering the airport, the soldier
                                    guarding the passport booth
                                    can’t be more than fifteen years old.
                                    He’s holding a rifle at port arms
                                    a cigarette dangling from his lips.
                                    Above him, a banner in red print reads:
                                    A Bas Les Americains! Down with Americans!
                                    "Don’t worry,” the Embassy man says,
                                    “They don’t mean basketball players.”

    Given Tom’s subsequent success as a teacher, one might expect him to have developed a love for coaching, but his competitive fire had no outlet on the bench, especially when his players didn’t approach the game with the same intensity he had. “The blindness that I have felt so often when I become enraged was beginning to cloud my eyes,” he wrote in Caught in the Pivot. Before one game, he “tried something different. I walked into the locker room and told the players to discuss the game among themselves and to come out when they were ready to play.” This didn’t turn into a transformational moment when all the swearing and cajoling take hold. Instead, “They came out all right and we got bombed…”

    Teaching high school English provided Tom with an “intensity of experience” without the warfare. He has said, “In basketball you always have to be on. I think that's also true as a teacher. Every day is like a new game. The game starts at 8 in the morning and the final buzzer rings at 2:10.”

     Tom was known for his tough exams and generosity of spirit. “It was the advice for life, beyond English, that was by far the greatest gift Tom gave me,” posted one student on Rate My Teachers, and another wrote, “I like all the poems we read, he's really flexible too he puts his big leg up on his desk while he's standing it’s cool.”

    Now retired, Tom says, “I miss them terribly.” He kept seating charts and is “pondering putting together a project to find out what happened to 20 or 30 kids.”

Tom and His Father

                                                 [from] Reasons to Teach

                                     …And my father, old immigrant,
                                    believer in misery, could not believe
                                    they did pay good money for a game, for work
                                    you didn’t hate and come home weak from drudgery.
                                    “Sport.” The word flew from his mouth like spit.

    Tom and his father had a strained relationship and, after Tom was drafted in the first round by the Warriors, “he just said to me, ‘What kind of work is this for a man?’” His father died while Tom was serving a stint in the Army and he didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. “That always stayed with me. I always carried my father around in me, so I wasn’t surprised that when I started to write about myself as a basketball player that it translated very quickly into a poem about my father.”

                                                Working Man

                                    I admit sleeping in late at the Hilton,
                                    ordering room service, handing out
                                    big tips while your kind of men
                                    were opening their lunch buckets.
                                    You would have scolded me:
                                    "Что это за работа для человека?"
                                    “What kind of work is this for a man?"
                                    Old immigrant, I admit all of this
                                    too late. You died before I could explain
                                    sportswriters call me a journeyman.
                                    They write I roll up my sleeves
                                    and go to work. They use words
                                    like hammer and muscle to describe me.
                                    For three straight years on the job
                                    my nose collapsed. My knees ached
                                    and I could never talk myself out of less
                                    than two injuries at a time. Father,
                                    you would have been proud of me:
                                    I labored in the company of large men.

    An earlier version of the poem ends with “I labored in the company of tall men,” but Tom changed it because “When you think of Chamberlain and Moses Malone, they weren’t just tall they were really large,” as was his father.

    Tom didn’t let his father impede his basketball career, and he gives him credit for instilling in him a love of poetry. “In my childhood I learned many verses by heart. My father liked the old poetry which had to be beautiful, with rhythm and rhyme. He did not accept either Mayakovski or Esenin. For us, the Russians, poetry is a part of our soul. My father, a huge and strong soldier, recited verses for me and there were tears in his eyes.”

    There’s no way of knowing if Tom’s father would have come to appreciate his son laboring in the company of large men, but Tom is certain he’d be impressed with Tom’s induction into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. “He'd be pleased with his son.”

Tom Now

    Tom lives in Sacramento with his wife, the painter Melanie Marchant Meschery, and he maintains a blog called Meschery's Musings on Sports, Literature and Life. He is also writing fiction, including a series of young adult novels about basketball. Tom had “kind of drifted away” from basketball when he was “teaching hard,” but has reconnected with the sport due to the combination of having more time in retirement and the welcome from Warriors owners Joe Lacob and Peter Guber. The team won the NBA championship last Spring, and Tom rode in the Victory parade ("I can’t stop writing little haikus about Steph Curry").

    Tom has also rekindled his friendship with Robert Hass (former U.S. Poet Laureate), who was an undergraduate classmate at Saint Mary’s. The two recently read together at their alma mater. According to one account, “Throughout the evening, the respect the two men felt for each other was evident.” Hass told “a story about a memorable college soiree where Meschery was seen hanging out of an upper-floor window in Dante Hall reciting” Rimbaud.

    Hass has written about Tom’s poetry: “My only regret is that William Carlos Williams isn’t alive to read it or for me to read it to him. One of the things he wanted was a poetry like a clean jab, straight through, all force and grace…” 

     For an image that would have delighted WCW, let’s go back to "The 100 Point Game." Tom, Wilt, and their co-workers are headed home, when Tom sees a fellow working man at the end of his shift.

                                    Later, on the bus driving back to Philly
                                    I watched a farmer in a horse and buggy
                                    trotting through dark Amish countryside
                                    following the brief light of his lantern home.

Note: Most of the material in this piece comes from my conversation with Tom Meschery. Other sources include: Russian language Sport-Express (translated into English), Bob Lemke blog, NBA.com, SFGate, Nevada Writers Hall of Fame, Saint Mary's College. Nothing We Lose Can Be Replaced, Some Men, and Sweat: New and Selected Poems About Sports were published by Black Rock Press.

    Bio Note #2: Tom Meschery was born in Manchuria and spent five childhood years in a Japanese internment camp. He was an All-American basketball player in high school and college, and an NBA All Star. He played ten years, mostly for The Warriors (first in Philadelphia and then in San Francisco) and later for the Seattle Supersonics, appearing in two NBA Finals. His #31 has been retired by Saint Mary’s College (where his career rebounding record stood for 48 years), as has his #14 by the Warriors. Tom coached the Carolina Cougars and was the assistant coach for the Portland Trailblazers. In 2003 he was inducted into the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame.

    I’ve been fascinated by Tom Meschery since I heard about a former NBA star, whose name was often prefixed with “hard-nosed,” turning from personal fouls to personal poems. I started a list of “athletes who write poetry” for use with reluctant students when I toured high schools. Not long after my father died in 2001, I was moved and impressed by Tom’s poem “Working Man," in which he addresses his late father (more about this later). Over the years, I have read the poem to several of my Columbia classes, and one day a student said: “He was my high school English teacher!” Interesting.

    Recently, I talked to Tom (while he was recovering from his second shoulder replacement surgery); this piece is based on that conversation and other sources (see note on bottom).

 Manchuria to the NBA

    Thomas Nicholas Meschery was born Tomislav Nikolayevich Mescheryakov. His father was a hereditary officer in Admiral Kolchak’s Army. His mother was the daughter of Vladimir Nicholayavich, who participated in Kornilov’s failed coup against Kerensky: “My grandpa was put under arrest in the Winter Palace. Together with Nicholas II.” Tom’s mother was related to the poet Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy (second cousin to Leo).

    Tom’s parents met, in exile, in Manchuria, and Tom was born in 1938. In 1939, Tom’s father went ahead to San Francisco; his mother was to follow with Tom and his sister when they obtained the necessary papers. They were awaiting voyage on December 7, 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The Mescheryakovs were placed in a Tokyo-area internment camp for women and children, where “there was no suffering” and they were fed well. Towards the end of the war, the guards gave them the rejects from intercepted Red Cross packages (lots of spam).

    They finally made it to San Francisco. In “A Small Embrace,” Tom writes in his mother’s voice addressing him; the poem ends:

                                    a voice kept yelling over the loudspeaker: citizens to the left,
                                    stateless to the right. A band was playing something cheerful.
                                    You pointed to the wrong father. I to the wrong husband.

    Tom’s weak English was mitigated by his size and athletic prowess. He became a star basketball player at Lowell High School, where he developed his game in a modest facility that was “full of shadows” with a corduroy floor and wood backboards.

                                                 

                                                       [from] Lowell High

                                    Our coach, who was as old as the building,
                                    Taunted and inspired us, swore and cajoled us,
                                    He taught us to play without frills.
                                    We became red brick and corduroy
                                    And learned to see through shadows.

Tom went on to be a two-time All-American at St. Mary’s College, and was drafted in the first round by the Philadelphia Warriors. On March 2, 1962, in a game played in Hershey Pennsylvania, Wilt Chamberlain and Tom combined for 116 points in a 169-147 victory over the Knicks. Wilt scored 100. The game was not televised, but Tom wrote a poem about it.

                                                    [from] The 100 Point Game

                                    That night through the fourth quarter
                                    in that mad scramble for history
                                    we all passed the ball the full length
                                    of the court to Wilt, straight and high
                                    into the dark around the rafters

    Tom played for 10 seasons, averaging 12.7 points and 8.6 rebounds. His stat line in Game 7 of the Eastern Division finals is particularly impressive: 48 minutes, 32 points, 11 rebounds, 2 assists, and only 3 personal fouls.

The NBA to Iowa

    Tom's first collection, Over the Rim, was published while he was an active player, and the cartoon on the back of his 1970-71 playing card is captioned “Tom is a writer of poetry.”  

   But, Tom says, his reading had been confined to earlier Russian and British and classic American verse, and the poems in Over the Rim were “ordinary” and “didn’t test limits or push parameters.” This began to change at a poker game. "Mark Strand was teaching at the University of Washington while I was playing for the Sonics, and I met him at a poker game run by a couple of professors.” Strand invited Tom to sit in on his class when the team was in town, and he got his “first exposure to contemporary American poetry.”

    Meschery and Strand became good friends and, while Tom was coaching Carolina, the two met for dinner when the Cougars were in town to play the Nets. Tom complained about his coaching job (he titled a poem "Why I Was a Terrible Coach"), and Strand advised, “Well, if you hate it that much get the hell out of there.” He told Tom he’d write a recommendation for Iowa. In Tom’s subsequent book about his coaching year, Caught in the Pivot, he writes, “Mark told us about the number of poets who are frustrated jocks. Here I am a jock who’s a frustrated poet.”

    Tom was accepted and quit his job. He and his then-wife (the novelist Joanne Meschery) packed up with their three small children and moved to Iowa, where he had “two great years. I just loved it. From then on I just couldn’t stop writing poetry.” But the transition wasn’t easy. “For the first six months I was pretty timid, I sneaked around and sat in the back of the workshops. I felt very unsure of myself.” The turning point came when he studied with Helen Chasin. “She was the first one who really said, ‘You’re not too bad you can do this, don’t hesitate to talk.’” Tom “became more confident, experimental, she gave me a bunch of poets to read and said imitate.” Classmate Michael Waters remembers, “Tom was without pretensions, itself remarkable in the Workshop, and generous with his praise."

The Mad Russian and the Sweet and Generous Man

     As a basketball player, Tom Meschery was known as the Mad Russian. One game, Tom tried to stay out of trouble by swearing in Russian, but eventually a referee called him for a technical based on his “intonation.” Tom’s on-court anger often went beyond words. He told an interviewer, “If I was elbowed I elbowed twice.” Former teammate Al Attles says, “His eyes would start rolling around in his head if somebody did something to him on the floor and he’d lose it …”

                                                 In the Moment

                                    The whistle blows
                                    and I am caught
                                    between curbing my anger
                                    or hitting the player
                                    who just fouled me.
                                    Oh, what the hell, I say.

    But the hostility remained on the court. During Tom’s rookie year, Tom Heinsohn of the Celtics bloodied his eye with a right cross. After the game, they ran into each other in the tavern below Boston Garden, drank some beers, and wound up talking about painting: “[Heinsohn] said he painted in the Wyeth School.” Tom wasn’t always the smartest fighter. While playing for Golden State, he tried to punch his former teammate and close friend Chamberlain (then with the Lakers). Tom recalls, “It was cartoonish. I couldn’t reach him— he was holding my head.”

                                                [from] Tom Heinsohn

                                    Today I write poems and admire the back-light
                                    in Wyeth’s painting of the yellow dog sunning himself
                                    in the window and think that the violence
                                    we made together was the work of artists

    Iowa classmate Michael Ryan says about Tom, “His heart and spirit and sheer gusto were as big as he was. And that's saying something. What a sweet and generous man.” When Kyle Smith—now the head coach of the Columbia University Lions—was an assistant at Saint Mary’s, he got to know Tom first through his presence that “loomed in the folklore of the alums as his jersey hung in the rafters. He was known as the ‘Mad Russian.’ Once I met the man, I do not think there could have been a more inappropriate nickname.  Far from Mad, Tom Meschery is a prince of a human being who once physically touched people on the court who touched the hearts of his students and loved ones. I am sure the Christian Brothers who educated him at Saint Mary's would be so proud to see someone who has embodied the Lasallian spirit of the school motto ‘enter to learn, leave to serve.’”

     The modern game is much calmer, due in part to every moment being televised and players protecting huge salaries. 

                                                After Meditating

                                                (for Phil Jackson)

                                    I return to your book, Sacred Hoops
                                    and I think, perhaps you’ve discovered
                                    the secret to the modern game,
                                    the centered-self each player can achieve
                                    with right-breathing, as if the soul
                                    were a tight muscle in need of stretching.

                                    Team mantras, spiritual championships.
                                   

                                    If only I’d known
                                    I didn’t have to throw that elbow
                                    at LaRusso or stalk Chet Walker
                                    to his locker room, spoiling for a fight,
                                    or take a swing at Wilt,
                                    while my breathless teammates
                                    feared for my life.
                                    All I had to do was breathe
                                    my way out of anger.
                                    Lungs instead of fists.

    Writing workshops are non-contact endeavors (physically), but Tom recalls that at Iowa “a fight erupted in our kitchen” between a concrete poet and a traditional poet during a poker party. “Raymond Carver broke the fight up.” Michael Waters said it was the only time he saw Tom angry: “Tom had placed a huge glass bowl filled with scoops of Baskin-Robbins ice cream—all their flavors—on his dining room table, and the ice cream slowly melted into a deep rainbow sludge while folks stood around outside, calming down, wondering if the party would continue. I always remember that ice cream when I think of Tom.”   

The Court to the Desk

    After Iowa, Tom tried coaching again, this time as the assistant to Portland’s player-coach Lenny Wilkins, a former teammate (#18, below). Bill Walton (#32) was also on the team. At the time, the FBI was searching for Patty Hearst—the kidnapped heiress who helped rob a bank—and Bill Walton had been questioned by the FBI (there was no connection). Michael Waters recalls that Tom would “invite me to games, let me stay with him in his hotel room, and beg me not to make jokes about Patty Hearst hiding in his bathroom.”

    When Wilkins lost his coaching job, Tom left the game. He had a “hard transition from professional sports. Ran a bookstore for three years, painted houses, rock work.” To pick up a little extra money, Tom “got hooked up with the poets in the schools—a week gig here and there, elementary, middle, high school, take over an English class. I just loved it. I really liked high school kids. They were on the verge of being mature, at the same time they were still wonderfully naïve, full of piss and vinegar.”

    Tom earned his teaching credentials at the University of Nevada, and, while waiting for a teaching position, he spent six months coaching in Africa, where he had made previous trips for the USIA during his playing days.

                                             Republic of the Congo

                                    Entering the airport, the soldier
                                    guarding the passport booth
                                    can’t be more than fifteen years old.
                                    He’s holding a rifle at port arms
                                    a cigarette dangling from his lips.
                                    Above him, a banner in red print reads:
                                    A Bas Les Americains! Down with Americans!
                                    "Don’t worry,” the Embassy man says,
                                    “They don’t mean basketball players.”

    Given Tom’s subsequent success as a teacher, one might expect him to have developed a love for coaching, but his competitive fire had no outlet on the bench, especially when his players didn’t approach the game with the same intensity he had. “The blindness that I have felt so often when I become enraged was beginning to cloud my eyes,” he wrote in Caught in the Pivot. Before one game, he “tried something different. I walked into the locker room and told the players to discuss the game among themselves and to come out when they were ready to play.” This didn’t turn into a transformational moment when all the swearing and cajoling take hold. Instead, “They came out all right and we got bombed…”

    Teaching high school English provided Tom with an “intensity of experience” without the warfare. He has said, “In basketball you always have to be on. I think that's also true as a teacher. Every day is like a new game. The game starts at 8 in the morning and the final buzzer rings at 2:10.”

     Tom was known for his tough exams and generosity of spirit. “It was the advice for life, beyond English, that was by far the greatest gift Tom gave me,” posted one student on Rate My Teachers, and another wrote, “I like all the poems we read, he's really flexible too he puts his big leg up on his desk while he's standing it’s cool.”

    Now retired, Tom says, “I miss them terribly.” He kept seating charts and is “pondering putting together a project to find out what happened to 20 or 30 kids.”

Tom and His Father

                                                 [from] Reasons to Teach

                                     …And my father, old immigrant,
                                    believer in misery, could not believe
                                    they did pay good money for a game, for work
                                    you didn’t hate and come home weak from drudgery.
                                    “Sport.” The word flew from his mouth like spit.

    Tom and his father had a strained relationship and, after Tom was drafted in the first round by the Warriors, “he just said to me, ‘What kind of work is this for a man?’” His father died while Tom was serving a stint in the Army and he didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. “That always stayed with me. I always carried my father around in me, so I wasn’t surprised that when I started to write about myself as a basketball player that it translated very quickly into a poem about my father.”

                                                Working Man

                                    I admit sleeping in late at the Hilton,
                                    ordering room service, handing out
                                    big tips while your kind of men
                                    were opening their lunch buckets.
                                    You would have scolded me:
                                    "Что это за работа для человека?"
                                    “What kind of work is this for a man?"
                                    Old immigrant, I admit all of this
                                    too late. You died before I could explain
                                    sportswriters call me a journeyman.
                                    They write I roll up my sleeves
                                    and go to work. They use words
                                    like hammer and muscle to describe me.
                                    For three straight years on the job
                                    my nose collapsed. My knees ached
                                    and I could never talk myself out of less
                                    than two injuries at a time. Father,
                                    you would have been proud of me:
                                    I labored in the company of large men.

    An earlier version of the poem ends with “I labored in the company of tall men,” but Tom changed it because “When you think of Chamberlain and Moses Malone, they weren’t just tall they were really large,” as was his father.

    Tom didn’t let his father impede his basketball career, and he gives him credit for instilling in him a love of poetry. “In my childhood I learned many verses by heart. My father liked the old poetry which had to be beautiful, with rhythm and rhyme. He did not accept either Mayakovski or Esenin. For us, the Russians, poetry is a part of our soul. My father, a huge and strong soldier, recited verses for me and there were tears in his eyes.”

    There’s no way of knowing if Tom’s father would have come to appreciate his son laboring in the company of large men, but Tom is certain he’d be impressed with Tom’s induction into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. “He'd be pleased with his son.”

Tom Now

    Tom lives in Sacramento with his wife, the painter Melanie Marchant Meschery, and he maintains a blog called Meschery's Musings on Sports, Literature and Life. He is also writing fiction, including a series of young adult novels about basketball. Tom had “kind of drifted away” from basketball when he was “teaching hard,” but has reconnected with the sport due to the combination of having more time in retirement and the welcome from Warriors owners Joe Lacob and Peter Guber. The team won the NBA championship last Spring, and Tom rode in the Victory parade ("I can’t stop writing little haikus about Steph Curry").

    Tom has also rekindled his friendship with Robert Hass (former U.S. Poet Laureate), who was an undergraduate classmate at Saint Mary’s. The two recently read together at their alma mater. According to one account, “Throughout the evening, the respect the two men felt for each other was evident.” Hass told “a story about a memorable college soiree where Meschery was seen hanging out of an upper-floor window in Dante Hall reciting” Rimbaud.

    Hass has written about Tom’s poetry: “My only regret is that William Carlos Williams isn’t alive to read it or for me to read it to him. One of the things he wanted was a poetry like a clean jab, straight through, all force and grace…” 

     For an image that would have delighted WCW, let’s go back to "The 100 Point Game." Tom, Wilt, and their co-workers are headed home, when Tom sees a fellow working man at the end of his shift.

                                    Later, on the bus driving back to Philly
                                    I watched a farmer in a horse and buggy
                                    trotting through dark Amish countryside
                                    following the brief light of his lantern home.

Note: Most of the material in this piece comes from my conversation with Tom Meschery. Other sources include: Russian language Sport-Express (translated into English), Bob Lemke blog, NBA.com, SFGate, Nevada Writers Hall of Fame, Saint Mary's College. Nothing We Lose Can Be Replaced, Some Men, and Sweat: New and Selected Poems About Sports were published by Black Rock Press.

Squibs 464-472 [by Alan Ziegler]

464: Found Writing Prompt:

465: I can’t operate a phone in a dream. I misdial on buttons too small, can’t retrieve messages, am unable to phone home to tell my dead parents I’ll be late. And, I can never get a taxi in a dream, no matter how far I walk or where I turn. Call for an Uber? Double Nightmare.

466: In the ‘80s, I could wave my arm on West End Avenue at 8:10 and make the 9 p.m. Shuttle to D.C. One night, pressing it at 8:20: a cab slows down, the driver sees my suitcase and speeds off. I mime taking down his number. He screeches to a halt and backs up. “You gonna report me?” I shake my head and he drives off, once again without me.

467: “So, what brought you here?” the cab driver in Binghamton asks on the way to the airport. “I gave a talk at the college.” “You gotta be really smart to do that.” “Not really,” I say, modestly. He frowns. “I’m not smart enough to do that.”

468: Long before Uber and Lyft there is 777-7777 for all your car service needs. Commercials inundate the airwaves, pronouncing each 7 again and again. We call 777-7777 to get a car for my mother-in-law, Esther. Before she’ll get in, Esther asks the driver: “777-7777?” I turn away, slightly embarrassed. The driver responds, “666-6666!” A neighbor gets into 666-6666, and a few minutes later 777-7777 comes up the hill.

469: “Like taking candy from a baby,” meet “Like taking a gun from Peter Lorre.”

470: “Stand up sit down fight fight fight,” goes the cheer. But if you sit down after you stand up you may not get a chance to fight fight fight.

471: Old West dreaded announcement: The Pony Express will now be running on Local trails.

472: Found Writing Prompt:

Squibs 457-463 [by Alan Ziegler]

457:

458: Louvre Pyramid aglow, flat on my belly angling the camera with my wallet, my cheek to the ground to peek through the viewfinder. A tug on my feet—must be security I’m always doing something wrong in Paris, fingers wagging at me. But it’s just a young guy laughing with his friends. “Vous rude!” I blurt, and he says Frenchly, “It is a joke.” I reply, “Do you want to hear a joke? ‘A Frenchman pulled my leg.’ That’s a joke.”

459: Live it up now. Live it down later.

460: The elevator door opened. I didn't get in because it was occupied by a baby in a stroller and her mother. I waved and smiled behind my mask. The baby—about a year—stared back expressionless. As the door was closing she grinned and waved. It occurred to me that no child born in the last year has likely experienced a complete stranger smiling at them. I stood alone in the hallway, as if on a deserted platform having just missed a train.

461: I never think about you sexually. Except when I masturbate.

 

462:

463: Party at Gary Giddens’ apartment. I ask a young critic with an academic appointment how he would define bebop. The critic starts to answer then realizes that the jazz musicians surrounding us have gone silent. "I'm not going to answer that in this room."

Squib 456: Tales of the Sixties; The Hippies [by Alan Ziegler]

(Excerpted from The Incomplete, an unpublished novel based on real events.)

         The Common College student arts organization, Wastelanders, had a budgetary crisis. We’d had a great run of poetry readings, art shows, and folk concerts, and now, with the school year coming to an end, our advisor told us we had a problem: We hadn’t spent a dime of our $4,000 budget. Actually, we didn’t know we had a budget. We just asked people to do stuff and they did stuff. “Use it or lose it,” the advisor explained. “Do you really want the school to give the money to ROTC?”   

         A couple of weeks later, after catching the Mothers of Invention at the Fillmore East, we came across a troupe of hippies acting out anti-war scenarios on Sixth Street and First Avenue. They sang, they danced, they coaxed pedestrians to join them. I asked the leader if they ever did colleges. He introduced himself as “Maury Prankster, the Bill Graham of the streets,” and went into a sales pitch: “This is a real theater company. Three of us auditioned for Hair. We can’t do it for less than $400, man.”

         “Add a zero to that and we can talk some business,” I replied.

         And that’s how it came to be that a bus decorated with anthropomorphic trees and flowers eased through the Common College gate and released a swarm of hair, beads, flowered shirts, and overalls. Officially named the Clan-Destiny Theater Society, they came to be known around campus by their generic name, The Hippies.

         Maury Prankster was in his early thirties, older than the others, with a receding hairline that he made up for with long sideburns and a handlebar moustache. Maury opened the show at Common by announcing, “The counterculture means more than letting your hair grow, dressing flamboyantly, and smoking marijuana, although that’s a good start. There’s an art to culture, and art must be cultivated. Watch our garden grow.”

          The performance included skits extolling communal life and the joys of farming, songs from Hair (revealing why none of them got cast), and an audience participation segment during which students were invited to come on stage and have their heads massaged or the tattoo of their choice painted in the location of their choice. Meanwhile, cast members infiltrated the audience until the little theater was a whirligig of pantomime, dancing, massaging, and painting.

         In the final skit, a young woman named Marigold played “The Child of the Future,” flitting from one evil situation to another, making each one right via a magic wand adorned with flowers. At the end, Marigold announced, “Alice isn’t in wonderland — wonderland is in Alice. In all of us. If we let it out, we’ll turn this world into a land of wonder.”

         The troupe planned on sleeping in their bus but first there’d be a party at our apartment, which they offered to cater with a picnic basket of grass, hash, acid, and assorted pills. I explained to them that because I was politically hot, anything they wanted to take had to be ingested before coming over.

         Back at the apartment, Juno, the only black member of the troupe, sat alone at the kitchen table, wearing a yellow T-shirt and blue jean overalls. His brown eyes seemed to float several inches above his head and I wondered about his view. He poured salt onto the table, then swept the salt into his left hand, which he lifted near his face. Transfixed, he shifted the salt from hand to hand, then smiled at me. I smiled back and nodded a lack of disapproval.

         “Hear the waves?” he asked.

         “The what?”

         “The waves. Listen.” Juno’s voice wouldn’t have nudged a lie detector needle, but I couldn’t hear anything. “The waves....whoosh....waves.”  He made a cresting motion with his left arm, finishing with a trickle of fingers.

         Then I heard a car pass by. “Ah. The cars sound like waves.”

         “Not sound like, they are waves. Simile imprisons; metaphor liberates. ‘I know not seems,’ said the Dane.”

         “Yes, you are at the beach.”

         Juno smiled his approval. “Sand. Salt is sand. I was sifting it through my hands like sand — it was sand — then I was at the beach sifting sand as the waves whooshed in the background. Are you with me at the beach or are you watching me at the beach?”

         “When you’re at the beach do you sift the sand and it becomes a salt shaker and the waves become traffic?”

         “You wound me with your version of reality,” he said softly, his eyes retreating. “I am wherever I want to be. Can you say that? All my life I have been places I didn’t want to be, and now I can go to the beach. To the mountains. How can I get up to the roof?”

         I gave him directions and went into the living room, where one of the hippies leaned back, arms embracing the air, and announced, “Oh God it’s beautiful! I can trace the blood right from my heart and down my arm, feel it make a U-turn in my finger and go up to my eyes, where it makes everything beautiful.” I suggested he join Juno at the top of the mountain and pointed the way.  Another hippie dipped her finger into an almost dry Sau-Sea shrimp cocktail jar and scooped up the last residue of sauce. She licked her finger and said, “I can taste them. Tiny, whole, delicious shrimp. Yum!”

         “And I can feel their pain,” Marigold said and curled into a fetal position.

         One of the Common Politicos took a slug of beer and howled “Bullshit,” startling Marigold, who began to weep and ran out of the room. “Bummer childhood,” someone explained. “Loud noises. Flashbacks.”

          “You people are keeping us all back. Grow the fuck up."

         “Don’t lay your bum trip on us, man,” a hippie said. He was cut off by a shush-wave from Maury, who was writing and sketching furiously into a tattered, grade school composition book. “Look at this cover,” he said. “This uncredited masterpiece of Op Art.” He pointed to the Common Politico and said, “He’s not on a bum trip. It’s just not our trip.”

         “I’m going to trip the hell out of here,” the Politico said and stalked out.

         Maury continued sketching, finishing with a page-high exclamation point. A well-built hippie billed in the theater program as Don O’Vandylan watched over his shoulder. “What is it, Maury?”

         Maury started talking excitedly. “I want us to do a really far out light show. We can use it for our gigs and hook up with rock groups. Maybe we can apprentice a couple of people with Joshua at the Fillmore. We’ll have to raise some bucks for equipment. I’ll call Zappa when we get back, see if he’ll do a benefit.”

         As Maury spoke, Don-O paced the room then stopped abruptly and said, “Hey man, that won’t be necessary. I know how we can do a great light show for free.”

         “Yeah?  Talk to me, Don-O,” Maury said with the cynicism of a schoolteacher certain that after the kid speaks he’ll have to set him straight.

         “It’s the most spectacular light show I’ve ever seen. Majestic, mammoth.”

         “For free?" 

         “That’s the best thing about it, man. Why use artificial shit when the best fucking organic light show is free for everyone? Sunrise and sunset. When was the last time you really checked them out. Two shows a day, no matter where we are.”

         Maury grabbed Don-O by the collar and pushed him against the wall. “Hey, Don-O, you wanna sing a couple of choruses of ‘The Best Things in Life are Free’?  No no no! Not free, not by a long shot. We’re cultural revolutionaries paving the way for after the politicos have done their job. But they haven’t done their job yet. Peace and love are fine, but don’t think for a minute that the world runs on them. You want to sit around stoned and watch the sun rise and set, I can dig it, but we work. If you try to live off the land without working it, you eat dirt and pebbles.”

         Don-O put his hands up in an I-surrender pose, then embraced Maury and kissed him on the lips.

         Eventually a few hippies went back to the bus but most fell asleep all over the apartment. Maury and I sipped wine. “I like the way you cut through Don-O’s bullshit.”

         “To some of these people, our bus is a magic traveling machine. For me it’s insurance and bank payments and a dirty nose when I look under the hood."

         “You’re more down-to-earth than the others. Isn’t it frustrating when they’re in the clouds?”

         “Sure, but I love them. Even Don-O, what a pisser. When I met him he was playing football for Rutgers. He picked a fight with me in a bar and I beat the shit out of him, then turned him on and two days later he shows up at the church with a duffel bag and he out-hippies all of us. I love the costumes, the games, the group improvisation. It’s a cool fantasy.”

         “You don’t take all this as real?”

         “Don’t talk to me about real, not unless you want to hear the bullshit rap I give to college students. We’re a theater company. Only difference is we live our parts.”

         “Isn’t that hypocritical, or can’t I use that word either?”

         “Listen, man, I fucking believe in our show. I feel much less hypocritical than when I was a social worker. What a lousy role that was, in a production that would have been a farce if it wasn’t such a tragedy. Everyone’s in a show: advertising executives with cocktail matinees, or college politicos with choreographed marches. My next part is going to be as an auto mechanic. A little repair shop will be my theater, with wrenches and hydraulic lifts for props. I’m lucky to have a bunch of actors who surprise and delight me. We’re exploring new ways to live, that’s what art is all about. And you can’t get realer than art.”

         “What about the people like Juno, who think this is who they are and this is how it’ll be forever?”

         “Sometimes,” Maury said, waving his arm around the room, “sometimes I’m jealous as hell of them.”

Squib 455: Tales of the Sixties; The People’s Brigade [by Alan Ziegler]

(Excerpted from The Incomplete, an unpublished novel based on real events.)

         Students received academic credit for living communally at The House in the woods of northern Vermont at the end of the Sixties. Schoolwork included marathon discussions ranging from the minutiae of daily life (dishwashing responsibilities, cleaning up after the House dogs) to the great questions of the day (evolution or revolution, Stones or Beatles for dinner music). A former House member named Susan asked to be on the agenda. Susan had joined the People’s Brigade, a revolutionary collective based in Boston, and wanted to know if her comrades could stay for a couple of days on their way to an action in Buffalo.

          “This is going to be another Stones vs. Beatles,” I whispered to my girlfriend Debra, whom I was visiting, and sure enough the Artsy folks were opposed (“Militants take over and they don’t listen”) while the Politicos were in favor (“We’re living this cushy life while the war rages and blacks are oppressed”). The Politicos outlasted the Artsys, who considered it a victory that the discussion took less time than deciding against mandatory dishwashing shifts.

         Susan told us that she’d fallen in love with a guy in the Brigade named Rick, but the group decided that monogamy was counterrevolutionary. The solution was for each of them to fuck three other people in the Brigade.

         “You slept with three strangers because a group told you to?” Debra blurted out.

         “Hey, they’re not strangers. We’re a collective. We do lots of stuff together.”

         Debra’s roommate Cynthia lit a joint, and Susan reached over and took a drag, held it in for ten seconds with her head tilted back, then eased the smoke through her slightly opened lips. She lifted one leg to rest her head on her knee. I imagined myself as one of the revolutionary monogamy-busters. Susan and Cynthia left to camp out in the Small Room downstairs so they could talk all night. Debra said, “At last we’ll have some time alone. Until the invasion.”

         On Friday morning the People’s Brigade pulled up in a van and a Volkswagen: ten of them, all with short hair — including the women — wearing denim and backpacks. One of the students said, “Hey, you guys look like a little army.”

         “Damn-fucking-right,” replied one of the guests.

         Susan greeted her comrades with hugs, but I couldn’t tell from her body language which one was Rick. They moved into the Big Room, and within minutes posted a sign on the door: “If this door is closed, please do not disturb under any circumstances. If it’s open, join us! Thank you for your cooperation.”  An Artsy muttered, “Already they’re taking over.”

         The guiding force of the Brigade was Kevin. After lunch he called a Brigade meeting in the Big Room, with the door open. “We’re here for war games, and it’s going to get uncomfortable,” Kevin proclaimed as he paced in front of the group. “But it’s gonna serve you well in Buffalo when this isn’t a game. Do you know that it’s against the law there to call a cop a ‘pig’?  Imagine what happens when you try to make bacon out of one.” Several House members slinked out.

         “Now I want to know: How many of you in the Brigade are prepared to die if it comes to that? Let me hear you one at a time: ‘I-am-prepared-to-die!’”

         One by one, they boomed, “I am prepared to die.”

         I didn’t want to go to Vietnam partly because I didn’t want to die.

         “Good. We’ve progressed a lot, not like those lame, whiny declarations we heard a few months ago. Now the next step. I’m not saying we’re there yet, but we’ve got to start dealing with it.” He took a deep breath, making eye contact with each of his colleagues as he exhaled.  “I...am...prepared...to......kill, if necessary. Let me hear everyone say it: ‘I-am-prepared-to-kill.’”

         Nervous looks and indistinct mutters.

         “I can see we have a lot of work to do. You trivialize revolution if you don’t confront this. Let’s say it one at a time, even if you don’t mean it. Say it enough times and you will mean it.”

         Many of the declarations were barely audible. One woman started strong but tailed off. “I can’t say it, I can’t. My parents are pacifists, my brother got beaten in Mississippi, it’s against everything I was brought up on.”

         She trailed off into sobs, which were obliterated by Kevin screaming, “Your pacifist parents didn’t put the world straight.” His voice softened, “All right, we’ve made some progress, that was a good start, another step on the long march. Now let’s talk tactics.” He asked all visitors to leave.

         Late that night, after Debra fell asleep, I went into the kitchen for a snack. There for the taking twenty-four hours a day were canisters of potato chips, prodigious jars of peanut butter, chunks of cheese, baskets of fruits and vegetables, and dozens of eggs. I considered a major omelet but opted for a platter of peanut-buttered potato chips. Someone had left the peanut butter out, so it spread smoothly onto the chips.

         I’d crunched through half a dozen when I heard a commotion from out back, starting with a faraway muffle and taking shape as it got closer. Two people arguing. A male and a female. None of my business.

         A slapping sound and the female shouted, “You son of a bitch, I thought we were finished. What’d you do that for?” Another slap. Susan—it was Susan’s voice. Some schmuck was hitting her. Was it her ex-monogamous lover Rick in a fit of bourgeois rage?  I sprang up and opened the back door. I could see two shadowy figures about thirty yards away, squaring off. A fist landed flush on a face, and I sprinted toward them. It was Susan landing the punches. I stopped short and they turned to me, startled.

         The guy with her was Kevin, who stepped toward me and said, “Listen, brother, thanks for caring, but it’s all right.”

         “He’s right, thanks, it’s fine,” Susan added. Her tremulous voice carried just enough weight to convince me to leave them alone. As I reached the door I turned back to see them arm-in-arm.

         Back in the kitchen I picked at the remaining chips, and a few minutes later Susan came in alone. “Oh, I’m glad you’re still here. I was just getting some ice.” Her left cheek and eye were bruised and swollen, and her lip was puffy. I had never seen a woman look like that except after assault scenes in movies. But Susan was smiling. “I feel so great, wow, I could never understand why boys fight, but it really is a high.”

         “That must have been some ideological disagreement,” I fished.

         “Oh no! You see we’ve been doing this war game stuff and we’ve got this problem. The boys know all about fighting, but we girls think we can’t fight. Today we were taking turns hitting each other, and I had trouble hitting back so Kevin said he’d work with me. He hit me a few times but I still couldn’t hit him back, not really. I was afraid of being hurt but Kevin explained you’ll get hurt either way and you can turn your pain into anger. That’s what oppressed people have to do, turn pain into anger and hit someone even if you’re not mad at that particular person. I made that motherfucker wince.”

         Pain for the cause. It reminded me of my first high school basketball game. At a crucial point, I took a vicious charge. I could barely hear the coach say, “That shows some heart.” I was one proud young man.

         On Saturday morning, Susan got a call that Rick was in jail. He’d been busted for shoplifting thermal underwear from a sporting goods store, and for resisting arrest. Susan scrambled to raise the $150 bail from students, explaining that Rick was a political prisoner because he needed the supplies for the Buffalo action. But when Kevin found out, he exploded. “Rick is chickenshit!”

         “How can you say that?” Susan replied, shocked. “He’s in jail, a hero of the revolution.”

         “Bullshit. We can’t afford to get him busted in Buffalo if he’s out on bail here. He’s too chickenshit to go to Buffalo and too chickenshit to tell me he’s too chickenshit to go to Buffalo. So he got himself arrested. Even he’s not stupid enough to shoplift before an action.”

         “You take that back,” Susan shouted, as if responding to a playground insult.

         “I’m beginning to think that you’re chickenshit, too,” Kevin sneered.

         Susan’s eyes inflated as she hauled off and punched Kevin in the jaw. Kevin was about to hit back but instead he relaxed his fist and kneaded his jaw. He smiled. “Who needs chickenshits like Rick, when we’ve got you.” Susan’s features scrambled for position into a recognizable expression, with flashes of grimace, smile, and rage. “Susan, not everyone is cut out for this stuff. Rick is a good guy, and he’ll be effective back on the picket line, supporting people like us.”

         They decided to let Rick stay in jail. Perhaps they’d pick him up on the way home.

         Early Sunday morning, we were awakened by someone knocking on doors yelling, “The Brigade is leaving with our food! Emergency meeting, hurry!” A dozen sleepy-eyed students were in the Life Room with Kevin, while the other Brigadiers waited outside. “How can you call yourselves the People’s Brigade?” an Artsy yelled.

         “It’s the people’s food. We just liberated our share,” Kevin replied calmly.

         “What about us, we’re not the people?” the Artsy challenged.

         “This place is paid for by your parents, who legally steal. We’re reclaiming what is ours. Don’t worry, your parents will buy you more food.”

         “Right on,” said one of the Politicos. “I’m just disappointed that you didn’t respect us enough to ask.”

         “Good criticism, brother,” Kevin said.

         The students, afraid of being branded counterrevolutionary, reached a consensus to ask the Brigade to return half the food, and to censure them for not asking first. Kevin agreed. As some of the food was being returned, an Artsy said, “Don’t take a needle or a thread from the people.” 

         Kevin looked at him quizzically. “That’s Mao, you asshole,” the Artsy explained.

Squibs 453-454: For Robert Hershon [by Alan Ziegler]

453: I was required to observe Bob Hershon teaching junior high school students for a Teachers & Writers program I was running. It felt strange, since Bob was one of my heroes as a poet and editor. We hatched a scheme. Before class started, I sat at a desk in the back of the room. Bob walked in and started his spiel, doing a double and triple take in my direction. He started and stopped a couple more times. “Alan, what are you doing here?”

         “I’m observing you. It’s in your contract.”

         “But you’re supposed to be here next week.”

         “Come on, Bob, you don’t want to do this in front of the students, Just carry on.”

         “No, let’s do this.”

         “Bob, you know perfectly well that the only time you are fully prepared for class is when you know I’m coming. I want to see how you really teach.”

         “You’re right, Alan, let’s not do this in front of the kids.”

         Bob stormed out and I followed. In the hallway we threw books against lockers, argued, and finished with two resounding claps. We mussed up our hair, untucked our shirts, and returned to the classroom, where I took my seat and Bob resumed as if nothing happened. The assignment: “Report objectively what you just saw.”

         One student concluded with, “Then he went into the hallway with a man who also claimed to be a poet and there was lots of noise.”

 

454: I have celebrated this poem with dozens of my classes:

 Poster
         by Robert Hershon

            in 1961 my apartment at north beach
            had split-rattan blinds and kandinsky
            posters scotch-taped to the walls
            and a table made from a door
            and a brick-and-boards bookcase
            and a mattress on the floor and almost everything was painted
            flat black except for the little yellow
            desk I bought from good will
            and I wrote my first poems sitting there
            watching cars wiggle down lombard street
            with dick partee lying on the couch
            behind me reading the chronicle
            and rehearsing on his invisible alto
            hey man, am i bothering you
            no dick, that’s okay, it’s 1983 now
            play some more

         “Poster” is a hundred-word textbook on how details can convey location and character, and how punctuation-free enjambment can induce the reader to “wiggle down” the page like rafting on a gentle rapid then cascade 22-years in 10 words with two commas to break the fall. What grabs me most about this poem is how it captures time. For many years I would say something like this to my students:

         “In 1983 in Brooklyn, a well-known poet named Bob Hershon wrote himself back to 1961, when he was starting out as a poet 3,000 miles away (where Dick Partee continues to play a real alto in North Beach jazz clubs). Through poetry, we just joined Bob simultaneously in his 1961 and 1983 pasts. Bob, it’s 2002 now, write some more."

         Bob wrote many more. In the Fall of 2007, I told Bob how much I loved the poem and asked for any information so I could show off to my class. He responded:

        "I'm delighted to know that you use that poem. Your timing is uncanny: It was fifty years ago today that I moved to San Francisco. Some background? I had a little cold water flat on Telegraph Hill (still cheap in those days, $75 a month, but before your students get too envious, tell them I had also been making $75 a week as a newspaper reporter) and I had just recently started writing what sort of looked like poems to me.  Dick Partee was a sax and flute player who had recently broken up with his girlfriend and was staying with me. He'd lie around on the couch, a few feet from where I was trying to write, reading the Chronicle and humming sax parts.  He stayed quite a while, but he moved on after I got involved with the woman he'd just broken up with. Ah, what was her name? Dick is still in SF and we're still in touch. Sadly, dental problems forced him to give up his horn some years ago. How's that?  And how are you?  Weller than well, I hope.”

         Dick Partee died on May 10, 2009. We lost Bob Hershon on March 20. I’m admiring a Kandinsky poster scotch-taped to a wall, listening to what I imagine--because I could find no recordings--Dick Partee sounded like in his prime, and joining in a massive public hug for Bob Hershon. 

Squibs 446-452 [by Alan Ziegler]

 

446: Cabondating: Determining when a movie or TV show was recorded by the fare on the taxi door.

 

447: Some places my poems visited in the 70s and 80s: Ironwood, Mulberry, Granite, Syncline, Stepping Stone.

 

448: Erin is playing Molly Bloom in Ulysses adapted for dance and music. She tells me there’s physicality between Molly and Blazes but nothing I’ll find upsetting. She comes home excited after the dress rehearsal: “The New York Times was there.” A picture runs with the review: Erin is on her knees in bed with Blazes, wearing a negligee riding up her thigh, as is Blazes’ hand. The critic calls her “luscious and devilish,” and adds, “The two lie so alone together in bed with Molly’s sensuous cry of readiness echoing in the audience’s ears.” I snap. “You didn't tell me it would be like this!” What really haunts me is what might have happened during, or after, all those rehearsals. I rip the page out of the newspaper and throw it limply in her direction. As I slam the door on my way out to nowhere, I hear her stricken plea, “What did I do wrong?” I steel myself to be professional when I go to the performance. I'm accompanied by our friend Helen, a dance teacher who has performed in, directed, and attended hundreds of productions. I sit tensely as, offstage, Molly emits her “sensuous cry of readiness.” I fight to keep my eyes open when Molly and Blazes slide under the covers. During the curtain call I turn to Helen for vindication. She laughs and says, “Oh, that’s nothing.”

 

449: Some places my poems visited in the 70s and 80s: Star Web Paper, Skywriting, Sun, Penumbra.

 

450: We gave it plenty of time but didn’t put enough leaves in the pot so now we are weak and bitter.

 

451: I dream my mother is alive, reading a romance novel in her living room chair after doing the dishes. I tell her she is dead, and she reminds me I have to learn how to relax.I dream my father is dead, and I try to convince him he is alive sitting at the kitchen table watching the tiny television because he no longer watches the big TV in the living room unless other people are with him. But he is stubborn as usual, and tells me I am wrong. Awake, I imagine they pass each other along the hallway and exchange ditto marks with their fingers, but I have not been able to dream this.

 

452: Some places my poems visited in the 70s and 80s: Pequod, Kayak, Small Pond, Ark River, Three Rivers.

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!!