The Best American Poetry

Squibs 514-531 [by Alan Ziegler]

514: Song lyricist was my dream career: Fill a dozen or so pages with drafts, send them off to my dependent collaborator (with a sweet voice, ear for melody, and recording contract), and live on royalties as I consume experiences for my next set of lyrics. The dream came true—except for the contract and royalties.

515: I was madly in love with the 60s singer-songwriters, playing their albums on repeat (pre-digitally on a turntable) and seeing them at The Gaslight, Fat Black Pussycat, Bitter End, Gerdes Folk City, Club 47, Central Park summer concerts, Palisades Amusement Park, Newport Folk Festival: Phil Ochs, Laura Nyro, Eric Andersen, Buffy St. Marie, Bonnie Raitt, Tim Hardin, Tom Paxton, Fred Neil, Paul Siebel, Patrick Sky, Richard and Mimi Farina, Leonard Cohen, Tim Buckley, Steve Noonan, Janis Ian, and of course Bob Dylan. (Though I was never enamored of "Blowing in the Wind," which Peter Yarrow introduced on a live Peter, Paul & Mary recording with a Rabbinical "This song asks nine questions.” What motivated him to count the questions? Years later I asked him and he tousled my hair and said, “Oh you!”)

516: I took to the guitar at an early age. Here I am pretending to be a lap-guitar-cowboy (prepared for an unruly-crowd).  

I toured local backyards as one of the first Elvis impersonators, right down to the cowlick.

517: When I was 15, I spent some of my Bar Mitzvah money on a $50 Harmony Sovereign guitar at the recently-opened branch of Sam Ash in Hempstead. Here's Paul Ash after closing the deal.

On the way home, my mother said, “Is this going to collect dust in the closet?” I took the bait and signed up for lessons from Al Wansor, who had an eponymous store in Lynbrook. At the first lesson, Al “taught” me to play “Love Me Tender”—single notes, no chords. I wanted to strum like Bob Gibson and fingerpick like Mississippi John Hurt. I didn't return so I never got to know that Al Wansor had toured with bands and did session work on albums. I did enjoy playing the notes to “Love Me Tender,” and eventually realized the repetition was starting to train my ear to recognize note differentials, training that was never completed because I gave up on Al Wansor.

518: I played the Harmony Sovereign at dozens of gigs, wrote songs on it, and filled cassettes labelled "noodling" and "messing." Everyone who picked it up admired its action and tone. Several years later, Jimmy Page would compose Led Zeppelin songs on a Harmony Sovereign (here on display at the Met Museum), and even played it on the recording of “Stairway to Heaven".  

Also, Pete Townshend had one.

But first I had one.

519: I would pretend I wrote songs I admired, and sing them in imagined settings. I also fantasized going to go to my left on a fast break for the Knicks, which was never going to happen, but having my lyrics sung at the Gaslight was remotely possible (and did happen).

Fred Neil’s “Just a Little Bit of Rain,” comprises only 13 discrete lines, including:

                        And if you look back
                        Try to forget all the bad times
                        Lonely blue and sad times
                        And just a little bit of rain
                        And just a little bit of rain

I heard myself adding:

                        And if you look back
                        Try to forget the last words
                        Those hastily caste words
                        And just a little bit of rain
                        And just a little bit of rain

I felt like I had just gone to my left on a fast break.

520: Robert Middleman was my folkie friend throughout high school (and beyond). Somehow, we summoned the gumption to play hoot night at Gerdes Folk City (the original location, positively on Fourth Street), where on Monday nights anyone could do a song or two. The emcee sized us up and put us on first. As the sparse audience scattered politeness for Tom Paxton's "The Last Thing on My Mind," the emcee said, "Well, that's a hootenanny for you," which we took to mean, "We got that one out of the way." We were followed by a kid about our age who knew what he was doing. He was Gram Parsons, later of the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers (who would OD at 26). Another performer was a cowboy-type with the refrain, "I proceeded to take 3 or 4 steps backwards and give her a dropkick right in the crotch." Everyone (including me) laughed at the line, which showed up a few years later on Jerry Jeff Walker's Driftin' Way of Life album. By then, I didn't laugh.

521: In the spring of my first year at Union College, my roommate from Carmel Valley said, "One of your folksinger friends was killed near my house." He said it with a combination of hometown pride and college banter. It took me a couple of days to find out it was one of my heroes, Richard Fariña, who had left a party for his wife (and collaborator) Mimi's 21st birthday to take a ride on the back of a motorcycle.

I mourned by singing "Children of Darkness" to Mimi:

                Now is the time for your loving, dear
                And the time for your company
                Now when the light of reason fails
                And fires burn on the sea....

                For I am a wild and a lonely child
                And the son of an angry land;
                And now with the high wars raging
                I would offer you my hand

I wasn't wild, I wasn't particularly lonely, and I wasn't a child, but I certainly felt the need to imagine Mimi's company.

522: Though not as momentous an occasion as Ezra Pound showing up at William Carlos Williams' room at Penn, I first met Carl Rosenstock when he appeared at my dorm room to check out the Harmony Sovereign he'd been hearing about, marking the beginning of a long songwriting/performing friendship. Usually one of us would write a first draft and the other might offer suggestions. Eventually we added Cliff Safane (a true musician who played piano, sax, and bass clarinet) and called ourselves "The 42nd Street Shuttle," which came to be known around campus as simply "The Shuttle." We were regulars at the North End, a makeshift campus cafe, where performers included Phil Robinson (later to build the Field of Dreams), and afterwards we might have beers at the Rathskeller with Jeffrey DeMunn (currently with 119 acting credits on IMDB), who blew us away with his Krapp's Last Tape at the campus theater in the Nott Memorial.

We also played frequently on Rob Friedman's Folk Fest radio show on WRPI (which went on for decades). And we somehow got on the stage at Caffe Lena in Saratoga, with Cliff playing bass clarinet (probably a first for a folk club). At the end of the set, Lena declared, "Well, that's the new music!" which we took to mean, "We got that one out of the way." Set list:

523: Some lies are so unnecessary (and ultimately disprovable) that they could hardly be worth the ephemeral pleasure they might bring. This lie still confounds me: A production company was making a documentary on Union College. The producer called and said he'd heard that "The Shuttle" was the folk group on campus, and could we record one of our songs for the soundtrack? (Maybe someone would see it and offer us a contract.) Weeks after we did the recording, a classmate mentioned he had seen a preview. "Are we in it?" we asked. "Yeah," he said. "The Shuttle, right in the opening."

We weren't in it.

524: I couldn't sing. I could finger-pick passably (thanks to someone showing me the secret of double thumbing), and my Harmony Sovereign sweetened my strumming. But I couldn't run a sequence of single notes, a minimal skill set for a lead guitarist. Carl liked—needed—having me around, so I was in the Shuttle lineup, home or away, and the lead lines were keyboarded or blown by Cliff. 

One of my lyrics came out, wholly formed, in my notebook, triggered by my memories of playing the snare drum in the elementary school walking band.

Carl added a lovely melody, and since there were so few lyrics, Cliff had plenty of time to stretch out. One performance, I felt the music in a way I hadn't before, and improvised a very brief solo. The show was recorded, and when my solo came up on the tape, Cliff looked at me, smiled, and said, "You had a musical idea."

The next day, a friend ran up to me on campus, held my shoulders, said, "'Proud of your brand new shoes'—beautiful!" and ran off.

525: I met a student named Paul Harris when I was being rushed by both Jewish fraternities. Paul asked me if Eric Andersen was any good. "He's great, why?" His friend Harvey Brooks, a bass player, had asked Paul to join him accompanying Andersen at a concert. They hit it off so well musically that Eric Andersen did something perhaps unprecedented: He rerecorded his current album, 'Bout Changes 'N' Things, this time with Paul and Harvey.

Paul went on to an  illustrious career with hundreds of credits as accompanist and arranger: The Doors, Nick Drake, B.B. King, Ian and Sylvia, John Sebastian, and so so many more, including a stint as part of Stephen Stills' group "Manassas."

One day Paul excitedly gave me a reel-to-reel of Richie Havens' forthcoming first album, Mixed Bag. We went to the campus library, and I listened to the whole album through headphones in one of the cushioned chairs on the mezzanine, tingling with the excitement of a career being launched. "What did you think?" Paul asked, and I told him I loved it except for "Sandy," which sounded more cocktail lounge than folk club. Paul seemed crushed. "I thought that was some of my best playing," he said, and I listened again and realized that Paul was transcending musical borders, and I should try to keep up.

Paul's most stunning early achievement was arranging and conducting Tom Rush's Circle Game album, utilizing compositional approaches he'd picked up from Edgar Curtis, a Union professor. When I ran into Paul backstage at the Newport Folk Festival, we got into a conversation about the merits of the two Jewish fraternities at Union. Tom Rush sidled up and said, "So, what are we talking about?" I tried to change the subject but Paul continued with Phi Ep vs. Phi Sigma.

After graduating, Paul toured with, among others, Judy Collins. By then we had lost touch, so when I saw that Collins was performing in Troy, I tried to reach Paul at the hotel. Someone else came to the phone and said, "My name is Michael Sahl, I'm filling in for Paul." He promised to give Paul my best. Decades later I was introduced to Michael Sahl at the graduation of his son Ben, my student and friend. I said, "It's a pleasure to finally meet you. Wa talked on the phone."

525: Carl and I  took a bus to New York to audition for Vanguard Records. Not only didn't we get a deal, but someone stole my borrowed guitar from the waiting room. (Fortunately, it wasn't the Harmony Sovereign.) And we auditioned for an A&R man at April Blackwood. His name was Tony, and he told us that our songs needed hooks. He was sympathetic to our artistic impulses and said he had been on the performing side of the business. Then, the pre-Dawn Tony Orlando belted out "Bless you / bless every breath that you take."

526:  The summer of 1969 I was living with my girlfriend in Riverside, California, working as a newspaper reporter (infiltrating the White Citizens Council, writing about street corner preachers and a women's liberation group) while occasionally sending  lyrics to Carl, who was passing the basket in Greenwich Village coffee shops.

My girlfriend moved back East on a pre-determined date to start at a new college. As much as I thought I was prepared for the split, after she left for the airport I felt like the world around me had gone empty. I grabbed my notebook and wrote exactly what happened.

            The empty suitcase slowly fills
            You take the candle off the windowsill
            The dresser's empty now
            You look around
            Make sure there's nothing you left behind

            You take the ticket that I bought
            For the bus ride to the airport
            Baggage on the sidewalk
            We just sit and talk
            And the driver starts his engine going
            You're going

                        The driver moves to close the door
                        He says we can't wait anymore
                        Caught by surprise
                        No time for goodbyes
                        I walk away after you turn the corner
                        You're going

            We knew at the start that it would end
            And we knew just exactly when
            You'd go back east I'd stay west
            It's just what places
            It's just what places
            It's just what places
            Have to offer
            To offer

Months later, back in New York, I caught one of Carl's sets. I sat in the corner, alone, paying close attention to the wizard guitarist sitting on my old stool. A young woman with bright red hair yelled, “Do the one about the candle!” (I later found out she was the daughter of a famous folk musician.) 

“You know the poet I’ve been talking about, who wrote the lyrics to that song? He’s here tonight.” Carl pointed towards me, and all eyes turned my way. “But he’s so innocuous looking," said the young woman with bright red hair.

I couldn't have felt more flattered.

527: I was writing poetry and editing a literary magazine, but I got down to the Village occasionally. Carl was part of a flock of folksingers, who would play a set or two, then head for drinks at the Kettle Of Fish (above the Gaslight). When the Kettle was full, it was over to Googie’s on Sullivan Street. When the bars closed, the migration might head a few blocks down to Chinatown. Among the crew, the one I thought most likely to make it was Patrick Chamberlain, a singer-songwriter-raconteur born in East Texas and raised in rural Pennsylvania. He greeted me at one of his concerts with “The gentleman from the press has arrived.”

Back row from left to right: Carl Rosenstock, Pat Chamberlain, and an innocuous lyricist (drawing by singer-songwriter-poet Rich Levine).

And then, tragedy. As I heard it, Pat was on the phone with an ex-girlfriend, threatening to blow his brains out if she didn’t come over. She didn’t come over. I played the cassette I recorded of his recent concert. Pat introduced a song with, “They say you need three things to make it in this business: experience, exposure and an ex old lady so you have some kind of experience to write songs.” Lyrics included “it gets in my veins I can hear her refrains / I hope that she is just fine.”

The memorial service was at Calvary Church. I overhead Paul Siebel say to Steve Goodman, “If it’s all the same to Pat, let’s not do this to each other.” Goodman replied, “It really kicked that shit out of me.” Siebel looked around and said, “He sure threw a good party.”

528: I had some money, so when Erik Frandsen (who once sang “Meet the Mets” at the Gaslight) told me about a Gibson J-45 at Matt Umanov’s shop, I went for a look.

As I was testing out the guitar, intimidated by all the pros in the room, I started strumming major 7th chords. Someone pointed to a sign that read, "No major 7th chords without a note from your mother,” and I switched to double-thumb fingerpicking and plunked down $350. I still have the guitar.

 

529: For a few years I wrote songs with former Shuttle-mate Cliff Safane, more pop than folk. They were performed by an up-and-coming singer (who didn't come up).

We Lost a Little Something

530: Back in the late 60s, a magazine identified Tim Buckley, Jackson Browne, and Steve Noonan as the Orange County Three. Noonan's career didn't take off like the others, but his first album never strayed from my rotation.

531: Fast forward to 2014.

 

 

Squibs 506-513: My Father's Records [by Alan Ziegler]

for David Lehman

506: My father's 78s were housed in a look-don't-touch cabinet.

He bought most of his records at the Commodore Music Shop, managed by Jack Crystal (lower right), Billy's father. If my father happened to be there on March 14, 1953, he might have seen Billy Crystal in the shop for the first time on his 5th birthday.

Each acquisition required a round-trip subway from East New York to East 42nd St., plus browsing, sampling in a listening cubicle, choosing, doubting, finally possessing a sphere of vinyl, silent in the hand until prodded (literally) to reincarnate the act of creation, at will.

But I didn't fully appreciate my father's commitment to his collection until after he died when I discovered a meticulously handwritten index in a spiral notebook with handmade tabs.

BY ARTIST

    BY MOOD

BY TITLE 

507: A couple of titles summoned memories of my father's favorite radio shows.

508: You see, my father had a milk route when I was young.

While he was making his rounds in the middle of the night, I'd make-believe a ballroom, perhaps festooned with candy canes, serving milk and cookies at the bar, my father conducting an orchestra of baseball players and zoo animals, using his baton to summon milkmen from all over the world for the matinee. 

509: Writing students: Make believe ballroom milkman's matinee. Go!

510: The case of 78s made the move with us from Brooklyn to Lynbrook (a short drive from Long Beach, where the Crystal family lived). My father gradually stopped playing the records, and the case wound up as a reliquary in my sister's bedroom. Since my father's death in 2001, the records have been stored in my sister's and brother-in-law's basement, where I recently spent some time on the floor with them. 

Some of the sleeves crumbled to the touch...

...not surprising since it had been at least 65 years since Jack Crystal gently shelved them.

511: My father rekindled his music connection when he and my mother started making brief trips to Las Vegas (which he continued to do after she died). He especially liked the lounges, which often featured top acts like Louis Prima and Keely Smith featuring Sam Butera.

After Prima died, Keely and Butera brought their lounge act to the Desert Inn, and my father took me to see them. We laughed when Sam said, "Keely and I have something in common. We both got fucked by Louis Prima." My father and I were on musical common ground as he basked in my enjoyment. 


512: I wish I could tell him about a just-discovered connection with Keely Smith.

In January 1959, My father's mother took my sister and me to Alan Freed's Rock and Roll show. We collected a bunch of autographs, including Charlie Gracie, whom we approached in a coffee shop.I can still picture him eating by himself, appreciating the attention.

We also got signatures from Jackie Wilson and one of the Moonglows, but, at the time, the prize was getting autographs from Buddy Knox, Jimmy Bowen, and both Rhythm Orchids. 

Buddy Knox continued to record as a solo artist, while Jimmy Bowen—who is still with us at 85—focussed on producing for the likes of Glen Campbell, Reba McEntire, and Dino, Desi & Billy.

He also produced—and married—Keely Smith!

While my sister and I were meeting Jimmy Bowen in 1959, Keely was on her way to winning a Grammy with Louis Prima for "That Old Black Magic." Nine years later, Keely Smith's husband Jimmy Bowen won the record-of the-year Grammy for producing Sinatra's "Strangers in the Night" (loved by my father and me). 

513: During my early days as a poet and poetry teacher, I wasn't sure if my father fully understood or appreciated what I was doing with my life. Did he worry that I was turning away from my clear path as a journalist? We didn't talk of such things, but he found a way to tell me: "I bought a record and can't wait to play it for you!"

My father and I were on common ground as I basked in his enjoyment.

 

Squibs 503-505 [by Alan Ziegler]

503: Remembering Murray the K 

1960s and 70s Radio disc jockey, real name Murray Kaufman; dubbed the fifth Beatle by either George, Ringo, or himself; played love songs for couples in cars watching the submarine races (for a long time I didn't get the joke); profiled by Tom Wolfe ("the first big hysterical disc jockey"); called his show The Swinging Soiree; don't mess with his ubiquitous straw hat (one man tried, once); invented the eponymous language Meusurray (which is Murray in Meusurray); bowled with the Ronettes;

presided over all-star rock shows at the Brooklyn Fox Theater;

and signed a random press release:

504: So much depends on a key and Bisquick

Two downtrodden friends on the 104 bus. “They got me a place. I'm on my way to pick up my key.” Key: a half-ounce melding of the metaphorical and the literal. I worry the keys in my pocket like amulets, conjuring long-forgotten doors. "After I get my key come over and I'll make my biscuits. Get me Bisquick. None of that Jiffy. You gotta get me Bisquick."  Now I'm on Nantucket, sun setting, the key to my rental bike somewhere in the sand, no place to stay, running to catch the last ferry. Backdoor opens: "Get me Bisquick!"

505:

The greatest advertisement for color TV was black-and-white TV. 

Squibs 499-502 [by Alan Ziegler]

499: In 1967, Leonard Cohen asked Judy Collins, “Why haven’t you ever written any of your own songs?" which, she said, "felt like he gave me permission to write.” She went home and wrote “Since You Asked” in 20 minutes, and 55 years later the words, the music, and that voice evoke the end of Ikiru...


.... melding with Yeats:

                                      But O that I were young again
                                      And held her in my arms!

...bearing me back graciously into the past:



500: The pizzaiolo has one hand on the oven door handle. In his head are four silent timers with no numbers.

501: My offense is lacking but I am a terrific defensive bowler. 

502: Aspirational (remaining so) entry in notebook from early teaching days.

Squib 498, after Frank O'Hara [by Alan Ziegler]

It is 5:43 p.m. in New York a Saturday
one day before my birthday, yes
and the Manhattanville Viaduct with her face on it.

and I am sweating a lot by now (because it's August)
and thinking of Barney Josephson, pushing 80, 
leaving his apartment in an early 80s snowstorm
to host at the Cookery and a young neighbor says 
"Mr. Josephson, you shouldn't go out there"
"I have to, she will get in from Roosevelt Island"


and indeed she does and so do I amidst a smattering of devotees
Mr. Josephson dapper in a suit
he could have worn introducing Lady Day at Cafe Society
tells of his concerned young neighbor and up she bounds
impish smile launching into "My Castle's Rocking"
("I'm laying it on the line for protection")
and Gerald Cook and everyone and I breathe deeply

Squibs 488-497: The Bar Mitzvah Boy and the Photographer [by Alan Ziegler ]

488: THE BOOK

The great narrative and portrait photographer Paul Aniess died on May 13, 1970. There was a large decrease in the number of professional photographs taken on Long Island the morning of his funeral, as 100 cars driven by Paul’s colleagues joined the procession in Queens. Paul Aniess produced hundreds of photo books—each a day-in-the life gem—but not one was reviewed or placed in a bookstore or library, for each was a limited edition of one. I am the possessor—and subject—of an Aniess book, which, after 62 years, shows few signs of age despite countless viewings.




489: START AT THE END

Early Saturday October 8,1960, Mr. Aniess arrived—wearing a black suit, white shirt, black tie—and turned our house into a studio. He unzipped his black bag, revealing a portable backdrop, two Nikon cameras, lights, batteries, and rolls and rolls of Kodak film. Since he wouldn’t be returning to the house, Mr. Aniess shot the closing picture first. I would later learn that movies are often shot out of sequence, which can be a challenge for actors. I think I nailed it. 

490: PAUL ANIESS, AS TOLD BY HIS SON KEVIN

A couple of years ago I became curious about Paul Aniess, but he had virtually no digital trail. I did find a Kevin Aniess in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and emailed asking if he was related to Paul. Kevin's response was stunningly moving and expansive. Here it is, lightly edited:

Yes, he was my dad and photography was his life. He first became a photographer in the Air Force during WW2, however he never talked about it. It wasn’t until years later we found large aerial pictures of Paris as well as pictures of stacks of dead bodies, which appeared to be from Germany. [note: stock footage, not by Aniess]

After the war he got married to my mom. They opened up a studio in the Bronx and sometime in the early 1950’s moved into a Levitt house in Wantagh where our living room was converted into a photography studio. Then in the 1960’s they built a custom home at Merrick Ave in East Meadow. We lived on the top floor, and the bottom floor was a large studio, sales area, darkroom, and a finishing room. He spent every night in the darkroom printing pictures the old fashioned way.

Mine and my older brother’s Bar Mitzvahs were both held in our house. All of the furniture was removed and a caterer came in with tables, etc. I always wanted a big Bar Mitzvah at one of those fancy catering halls but I think my dad wanted it just the opposite since he was there every weekend. I guess being thrifty was also high on the list as we never had much money but remember never doing without anything. We were the first of all my friends to buy a Magnavox color TV when I was 13. I remember the remote control was attached with a long cord and you continuously had to kick the TV because the color would suddenly change to B&W. That was the same TV we watched the JFK Assasination, the Moon Landing, and of course the 1969 Mets.

During those years he photographed hundreds of weddings and Bar Mitzvahs. He rarely was home on the weekends at night. As a young teenager I attended many of those holding the auxiliary light. I was thrilled as we were usually seated for dinner with the band (I don’t think DJ’s existed then) and if lucky the groom or his father would give me a dollar or two. I also remember every weekend big shiny limos pulling in front of our house as those days most brides, grooms, the wedding party, as well as Bar Mitzvah boys would come and take portrait pictures between the morning ceremony and the nighttime party. On Sunday mornings tons of young girls came to our house dressed like brides who I later learned were confirmation girls. My dad's specialty was portraits of young kids and babies and they smiled when he would act like he was turning his nose and then squeak it.

I also remember all the local politicians of both parties as well as some B-List celebrities came to our house for publicity pictures. Our neighbor facing our back yard was the Bonanno Family, of Mafia fame. They had all their pictures taken by my dad and unusually insisted on buying their proofs by cash. Maybe 20 years ago I did a Google search of my dad’s name and a listing popped up for a book of the life of Bill Bonanno that credited my dad as taking one of the pictures.


Chucky (Charles) was my best friend for a while. He was the only adopted child of the Bonannos. They escaped a rival Mafia gang in the middle of the night and I never got to say so long. We heard the house was riddled with bullet holes inside after they left. When the book Honor Thy Father came out we learned how bodyguards slept on the floor next to the parents' bed. From our little deck we used to watch groups of men sitting around the pool smoking big cigars. We never knew who they were. One day the swimming pool was covered in wood and what we were told was they were afraid one of the kids would drown. Never did find out the real reason. Also read in a book later written by Bill Bonanno how he had an affair with the young lady who rented a room in the house right next to us with the dental office. She also escaped in the middle of the night.

When not doing affairs my dad was mainly a portrait photographer. He was an officer of the Long Island Professional Photographers Association and won tons of ribbons at their conventions. One was for a self portrait of a huge Great Dane with its paws on my dad’s shoulders giving him a kiss because he had a dog treat in his mouth.

I remember the Dog’s name was Nevr-Dull of Jonah. The owner was George Basch, who owned the Nevr-Dull cleaner company.

Basch lived down the block from us and we considered him rich. For several years he would drive a new Cadillac and after a couple of years my dad would buy his used car and we would drive around looking rich. My dad’s license plate was 19-PA. The PA was for Paul Aniess. I remember when I was little we were riding along the Parkway and I had to pee real bad. My dad stopped on the side of the road and a cop pulled behind us with his lights flashing. He asked what was going on. My dad explained and then the cop looked at the car and the low license plate. He must have thought my dad was a big shot and walked away apologizing like crazy.

Another ribbon was awarded for a full length picture of a beautiful girl that my dad mounted on a widow shade, which was sent to her husband in Vietnam so it could be rolled up before the Sergeant came in the barracks. I remember she wanted it to be nude but my mom had none of that; I think she wound up wearing a full bathing suit. This was the 1960’s. [Update: When I got your latest email I searched my closet and found a memory book about my dad that I hadn’t seen in at least 45 years. It included the window shade girl. I remembered her wearing a bathing suit but the pic shows it was a sun dress which I guess was sexy at the time.]

My dad was never sick a day in his life but at a photographers convention at the Concord Hotel in 1970 he had a heart attack. A few months later he decided to get an aortic valve transplant, which we were told was not real risky. He died the next day. It was quite a shock and I was only 15. His funeral took place in Queens and I recall that almost every photographer on Long Island attended and the car procession was maybe 100 cars long.

Several months later my mom had a tag sale where many of those same photographers came and bought all his equipment. Somewhere around that time I went in the attic and there were envelopes with the proofs from hundreds of weddings and Bar Mitzvahs. They only had names and no addresses and I went through phone books to try to match them up. Then I hand-wrote many postcards to say we had their proofs and I would sell them. If I remember it was $25.00 for all the proofs. Possibly you received one but I don’t remember. Maybe 10 or 20 people responded to my mailing.

I think about my dad almost every day. You are the only person who has contacted me in maybe 50 years so it is nice to know someone else remembers him. I would be honored if you wrote about him.

491: MORNING SHOOT

Mr. Aniess guided us through a series of poses, establishing the "becoming a man" narrative.

Today I pretend to become a man so I pretend to shave. No blade.

Today I pretend to become a man so I pretend to drink whiskey. With the cap on the bottle.

Posing four people of different sizes on steps requires precise positioning.

We were not a hand-holding family—I didn't notice this detail until recently.

Shari Lewis's Lamb Chop: I didn't remember we had you. Now I miss you.

Like Fay Wray reacting to a nonexistent (yet) King Kong. I think I nailed it.


When shooting an old-fashioned double-exposure, make sure there are no objects in the middle.

 

492: PRE-CEREMONY

Because no photography would be allowed during the service, once again I posed out-of-sequence.

For more about Rabbi Saperstein and the lead-up to my Bar Mitzvah, see: Bar Mitzvah Blues.

 A mensch.

All I remember from my Bar Mitzvah Hebrew is the blessing over wine.

Not a clue.

493: THE SERVICE 

I was pleasantly shocked when these turned up in the album. Not easy to be stealthy with a big camera.

After the service, I overheard Rabbi Saperstein tell my father that he had been worried about me. My crest started to fall until the Rabbi went on to explain that because three boys were involved (instead of the usual two), he had to utilize all three Torahs, and he had entrusted me to carry the extra-heavy one.

494: RECEPTION 

Yes, I remember, they used to call me Al, and I was the kid with the drum. I played the snare drum in the marching band (I can still tap out cadence #2 with my fingers), but this was my first time playing a whole drum set. Based on the crowd's reaction, I nailed it.

 

Today I pretend to be a man, so I pretend to smoke. 

No need to pretend. 

In the back on the right is my father's uncle from Chicago, whom I hadn't met before and never saw again. I know who he is due to his resemblance to my grandfather, a career criminal (specializing in safe-cracking), who had died several years earlier:

For a lot more about my father's relationship with his father, see Observation Deck. For my grandfather's rap sheet, see Grandfather resume.

Faces.


My parents poker game. (See Poker Faces)

 

The dais. Everyone has a story. Here are a few snippets:

Richard Jacobs (upper left): Walk-to-school friend and political ally. Senior year, we brokered a deal to co-chair Class Night. 

Jacobs was a fine athlete. When we set up a makeshift wrestling ring in Abby Terris's (lower right) backyard, I tried fighting him once, then opted to be the announcer, improvising witty (I hoped) commentary. In the mid-70s, my mentor David Ignatow introduced me to his open-secret lover, Virginia Terris—poet, scholar, and Abby's mother! She said, "I used to watch you in the backyard. What a clever boy." Robert Middleman (lower left) and I did the folk music scene throughout high school and beyond, playing guitars together, scooping up folk albums as soon as they hit the Sam Goody racks, hitching to Boston and Cape Cod, and even playing a Hoot night at Gerde's Folk City. We are Facebook friends, and mourn the mounting deaths of our folk heroes while celebrating the ones who endure. 

Conga line, close to reaching dominoes territory.

 

My father giving me an assist.

My mother's father saying the Hamotzi blessing, which is, essentially "God gave you this bread and all He asks is that you wash your hands before eating it." Click here for my fantasy of my grandfather hanging out with Max Jacob and Picasso Grandfather in Paris

 

495: A TALE OF TWO CLASSMATES

Another Aniess setup: Paul Guyer distracts me while Bobby Humphrey administers a hot foot. Two friends whose paths diverged to opposite ends of the psyche. 

In fifth grade, Bobby Humphrey presented me with a silver mesh "friendship ring." I liked wearing it. One day, I noticed Bobby didn't have his on. He said he lost it and would buy a replacement. He never did. By senior year, we presumed Bobby was gay. He was the only boy working on the costume committee for the Class Night skit, and he lent me a blue shirt because Richard Jacobs and I were  cops. Bobby died in July 1968, apparently of an overdose. Five years later, while clearing out my childhood closet in Lynbrook, I found a manila envelope on which my mother had written "Bobby's shirt. To return."

Paul Guyer—known as The Brain—called me meathead a decade before All in the Family.

One Sunday I was at Paul's house and he invited me to go to the beach with his family. Paul's mother asked him to "pack the book review." I didn't know what that meant, and I was puzzled when I saw it was a whole section of The New York Times. I could imagine someone reading a review of a book, but an entire publication with nothing but book reviews? And to bring that to the beach?! Paul and I remained friends and co-founded a fraternity when the cool fraternity turned down all of our friends. Paul was valedictorian, and I visited him at Harvard, but we gradually lost touch. Six years later, I was working the decollating machine on the night-shift for the Consolidated Computer Company (while writing during the day) and was taking the 3 a.m. train to Lynbrook when I ran into Paul, who was returning to his parents' house after attending an academic conference. My hands and clothes were ink-stained; Paul was wearing a three-piece suit. He said he was doing his dissertation on "Kants Aesthetics," which I heard as one word and asked if he was learning physiology. Paul held back a laugh as he explained he was studying Immanuel Kant, probably wondering how I had failed so miserably to live up to my potential.

The writing thing worked out for me, and the Kant thing worked out for Paul.

But the world thing didn't work out for my brief best-friend Bobby.

 

496: ARTIFACTS

497: POSTSCRIPT 

On May 4, 1970, I am walking on campus, dazed, having just heard the news. “What’s wrong?” a classmate says. “They just killed four of us at Kent State,” I reply. A few days later, we huddle around a fuzzy television screen and listen to Walter Cronkite narrate the memorial service. In the background, amidst the static, I can make out the mellifluous intoning of, “All they were saying was give….peace….a ….chance.” It is the cadence I tried so hard to emulate nine years earlier. “I know him,” I say with pride. “You know Cronkite?” “No, the Rabbi.”

Squibs 486-487: Charles Simic [by Alan Ziegler]

486: Charles Simic Was Generous to Children
On Memorial Day 1979, my ten-year-old nephew, Craig Luchen, was kicking around a soccer ball in his backyard during a family gathering. Craig was ahead of the curve in his soccer devotion (long before "soccer moms"), and had yet to meld with the piano, so we didn't have a whole lot to talk about. A sudden chill caused someone to say Brrrr," and I blurted out "All at once the whole tree is trembling / And there is no sign of the wind." Craig paused mid-dribble and pronounced, "Charles Simic!" then resumed his pursuit of an imaginary net. He later explained that a poet had visited his school. Now we had something to talk about. For a school assignment to illustrate a poem, Craig picked Simic's "Watermelons."

I particularly liked the tongue. I had a color photocopy made (big deal then) and mailed it to Simic (no email then). A week later, I received this post card:

I was especially touched by "My kids loved it too and were sort of proud of their Pop" (Simic did indeed respond to my book in detail.) This was the postcard Craig received:

Decades later, Craig remembers the "loon-music." And I remember that Craig was sort of proud of his Uncle.

Uncle and Nephew

487: Charles Simic Drives a Soft Bargain

In 1995, a few Columbia undergraduates wanted to invite Charles Simic to campus, particularly to talk about prose poems (for which he had won the Pulitzer Prize a few years earlier, engendering squawks from lineophiles). We had a minuscule budget. I suggested they write to him anyway and point out that we do not have access to Columbia's endowment. Simic said yes, on two conditions: We pay for his bus fare from New Hampshire, and we buy him a hamburger at the West End. We did not make a counteroffer.

Simic was warm, friendly and funny. When the students asked him about the prose poem backlash, he said, "My experience is that no matter what you do, someone is going to say something stupid about it. No matter what. There are many literary people out there who don't believe in the existence of prose poems....[My book] was the final nail in poetry’s coffin. American Civilization is doomed when shit like this wins prizes, they said. I must admit I loved it. It's always a pleasure when you can upset defenders of some imaginary virtue."

There was one more negotiation before we relocated to the West End. The students wanted to take some pictures with him, and he agreed on the condition they take one with students stepping on him. They obliged. When I reminded him twenty years later, he replied, "That’s very funny. I remember it now."

Squib 485 [by Alan Ziegler]

Baseball Portfolio #1: The Story is in the White Space

 

Squibs 480-484 [by Alan Ziegler]

480:I strive to arrange my life like a European meal, concluding with my salad days.

481: By all means bring a knife to a gun fight in addition to your gun.

482: I see someone I used to know across the street. As I approach, I realize it is not my old friend. Undaunted, I say, “Hey, Stanley, great to see you! How’s Veronica and life on the rodeo circuit?”  The stranger stares blankly, then a glint of recognition. “Christopher,” (not my name) he says, “I still feel bad about that night, and how is Gloria and life at the clinic?” We talk until we are all caught up and part ways.

483: Paul Langston was once called upon to inquire, in response to a phone message, “Who in the Sam Hill is Sam Hill?”

484: Steve Allen interrupted himself while chatting with guests on his radio show to observe that the coffee he continued to sip was now lukewarm, and he would have sent it back had it been served that way. I feel similarly about my body.

Squib 479 [by Alan Ziegler]

For Roger Angell (1921-2022), Part Two.

Part One

In the subway heading to The New Yorker for an editing session with Roger Angell, I fantasize hovering near the receptionist’s desk as a line of supplicants with manila envelopes are each declined entry (“I just want to make sure he gets the references”). They watch their precious cargo being tossed into a huge bin marked Slush, and stare as I approach, no envelope in tow. The mere mention of my name gets me a smile and a wave-through. “Who is that, did you catch his name?” one whispers, and I turn and say, “Keep at it. I was once slush, too.”
When I arrive, no supplicants, no Slush bin, but I do get a smile and a wave-through. At first glance, Roger Angell reminds me of Fred Clark, the original Harry Morton on the Burns and Allen show.

“We were talking about you at dinner last night,” he says. "Hariette Surovell was over, and she spoke highly of you. [I had met Hariette 15 years earlier, in Kurt Vonnegut’s workshop at City College. On the first day of class, Kurt recounted a dinner conversation from the previous night and turned to Hariette for confirmation: “You were there.”]

Roger shows me a copy of my manuscript with edits, including several new commas. Before I can garner the guts to resist, he adds, “These are Mr. Shawn’s commas. You don’t want them, do you?” This could be the beginning of a beautiful editorial friendship.

We move on to Roger’s markings. As we resolve each edit, he crosses out a notation in the margin.

I've been working on an essay categorizing feedback comments (reactive, descriptive, prescriptive, and collaborative). As an example of collaborative feedback I'm using a New Yorker edit: “Not every word in a published piece has necessarily been written by the name in the byline. New Yorker editor Harold Ross wrote ‘bucks’ for John Cheever during his editing of ‘The Enormous Radio.’ In the story, a diamond is found after a party; a character says, 'Sell it, we can use a few dollars.' Ross replaced dollars with bucks, which Cheever found ‘absolutely perfect. Brilliant.’” So I am inwardly giddy to see high whistles have become clanking chains, and zips turned to cuts. And my “Ghost Story” will forever be known as:

Here's a fine example of an addition-through-subtraction edit:


Throughout the session, my downward peripheral vision is drawn to a substantial collaborative edit at the end of the story.


This won't be as easy as Mr. Shawn's commas. I'm not sure if I get it. But I accept the change, hopeful I will share John Cheever's appraisal: "absolutely perfect. Brilliant." [Eventually, I come to read it as, "My ghost re-merges with ghostly traffic—his work here done."] 

I leave the New Yorker and float to Times Square, a whisper amid the talk of the town. I wind up at Lee's Art Shop and treat myself to a leather portfolio [which I still use].

The process isn't over. 

The sentence in question:


I picture—as a New Yorker cartoon—a huddle of writers and editors trying to make sense of a coffee cup's open window revealing a now-cold night: Barthelme and Beattie almost come to blows as Mr. Shawn keeps muttering about commas. 

I am touched by the care Roger Angell is taking with my story, and his use of prescriptive feedback: "I wish you'd tone it down." I love seeing his self-edit:


The modest solution is, "He stares at the cold coffee."

There's one more wrinkle. When I receive the author's proof I become fixated on "project hand-shadow ghouls onto the wall." Onto or on to? On to or onto? becomes as agonizing as the eye exam question "this way, or is it better this way?" I finally decide that on to better captures the act of projecting, rather than placing. I call and leave a message asking for the change. 

Early publication morning, I run toward the newsstand on Broadway. I stop, suddenly terrified that my story was cut at the last minute by Mr. Shawn ("I warned you about those commas!"). But it's in there! My story in The New Yorker. Yes. I glance through till jolted by:

I will realize that onto is the right choice, but not before several hours of self-haunting. Traffic, no doubt.

Squib 478 [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 for 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 474-477 [by Alan Ziegler]

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

475: 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.

476 (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.

477: 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.