So I was sixteen and graduated high school a year early (I could hardly believe they let me do that - all I needed was to take two English classes that last year), and as I'd done miserably on the SAT and was rejected by all the colleges I applied to, I found that program in Bogota at the last minute and in early June, 1974 I found myself on an airplane heading to South America. In the program I lived with the family of one of the school admins. Her husband was a banker and they had three kids; a daughter my age who was still in high school, another girl a couple years younger, and a ten-year old son who became my favorite person on the continent. He was the main person who taught me Spanish as we spent a lot of time kicking a soccer ball back and forth in the street in front of their house.
I was a pretty lonely brat down there. The other American students were three years older, already pros at drinking and driving, and only a couple of them would have anything to do with me. At the same time, I was morbidly shy (nowadays they call it "social anxiety") and didn't really know how to make friends or even eye contact. The program was small and half the teachers were from the same family - two sisters and a brother (mirroring my host family) who were all amazingly brilliant - The oldest taught history, culture and language, the youngest taught literature and the middle (the man) taught politics and current events. They were ardent feminists, socialists and activists as well as fantastic teachers, all of them by far the best professors I would ever have. I loved all their classes and could never over-state the influence they all had on me.
Outside of class I spent a great deal of time alone in my room reading. I turned 17 in the fall and also started smoking cigarettes, the first in a series of bad choices in self-medication. I smoked Imperiales, which were seven cents a pack, out the window of my bedroom while I devoured authors by the dozen. That year I read through the complete works of several American writers - Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Saroyan, Dos Passos, Brautigan and others - as well as launching on Latin America ones - reading Garcia Marquez in the city where he'd lived for my literature class and embarking on several others as well. I subsisted on saltines and these great little loaves of fresh french bread, a penny apiece from a bakery down the street.
Life with the family was hard for me. Dinners were pretty bad, usually some bad meat with beets and rice, while the father bullied his children and wife, not to mention the servant, Ludmilla, a dirt-poor peasant girl who literally slept in the broom closet. She worked sixteen hours a day and did everything for that family - her corn tortillas were incredible, made from scratch every morning - and was grateful to be treated like a dog. The father was an anti-role model for me, a little man who worked six days a week, then invited the same friend over every Saturday night, when they would stay up all night long, drinking bottle after bottle of aguardiente, getting louder and louder in their idiotic conversation while blasting terrible bolero music from the antique stereo system. It was always the second sleepless night in a row for me, because every Friday night some neighbor down the block would have an all-night party of their own, blasting cumbia so loudly that the bass-line (the most boring, repetitive grrr ...) shook every house on the block until six in the morning. (It's one of life's little ironies that now, more than 40 years later, the music I love the most is modern electronic "digital" cumbia coming out of Argentina and elsewhere on the continents, centered around the label ZZK Records.)
The mother of the family was a sweetheart, a really good person, generous and kind, and the young son was also a darling. The daughters, though, were not my friends. Their lives were not terrific. They had school all day, then worked every evening at home embroidering shirts. The older one was quite ugly and the younger one, though not pretty, certainly acted like a princess. There was no running hot water in their house - a middle-class life in Bogota in the seventies was very much like a dirt poor family's in Appalachia. To take a shower, one had to heat up a huge put of water on the stove, then stand in the shower and ladle it over your head. I hardly ever bathed while I lived with them and I'm sure I smelled awful. I was a lousy house guest in other ways as well. I didn't talk much, except with the boy (who was treated by the family like a little god, in that very macho culture), and locked myself away in my bedroom a lot of the time.
Early in 1975 I moved out of the house into an apartment in the center of the city, rooming with my friend D_, a "nice Jewish girl" from New York. We had both had enough of the family living by then, and were thrilled to have hot running water and our own kitchen to do our own cooking, and no servants. Neither of us ever adapted to the concept of common household slavery. We lived together, fairly happily, for the next six months or so. During this period I also did some interesting traveling. With my other school friend, R_, I went on an eastern voyage, through Bucaramanga, Barrancabermejo (I loved those names) and Cucuta, into Venezuela. We also went to Merida and Medellin, and made the long jungle railroad voyage up to the Caribbean coast, to Cartagena and Santa Marta, the original homeland of cumbia music. He was a great companion and avid reader. I remember him reading Dostoevsky's 'The Idiot' on one of those trips, putting it down every page or two to tell me it was the best thing anyone had ever written.
On one of the school outings, R_ and I wandered away from the bunch and hiked up a mountain, but got lost and couldn't find the trail back down again, so we followed a stream down, figuring that gravity would show us the way. It did, as we waded through the water and hopped down waterfall after waterfall. We also swallowed some, which made us incredibly sick from parasites. By the time we made it back to the group, we were both in the grip of terrible fevers and stomach seizures. I was burning up and delirious and didn't think I would even survive the long bus ride home from the campo. Somehow I ended up back in the bed in the family's house and I have only vague memories of the curandero they had come over, a gypsy-like woman who burned incense and rubbed my belly with oils while she chanted and shouted weird noises. There were no doctors called or antibiotics prescribed, but when I woke up in the morning, I felt terrific. I'm not much of a believer in anything, but some people do seem to know their shit, and this woman had to be one of those!
A notable event. I came home for the Christmas holidays and went to work helping my bookstore boss, Carolyn, do inventory at her new job at a small local college bookstore. We were up all night, counting everything in the store and listening to the radio. This was the night I first heard Bob Marley's "Stir It Up", introducing me to reggae music that I spent the next decades fairly devoted to. I had a similar experience once with my best friend from junior and high school, D_, one day when we went to downtown Philadelphia by train on on of our many such excursions, and we stopped in a record store (he was a music fanatic and becoming a great guitar player at that time). The store was playing the album 'Caravanserai' by Santana - the other major music influence that stopped me in my tracks. I've been all about the afro-cuban percussion ever since.
I digress, which is intentional. I can only do this memoir stuff through stream of consciousness, just sitting here and typing and wherever it goes. I meant to talk about something else just now, but I have to mention two things about high school - working and running. I believe I mentioned that home life was pretty stressful in those days. My older brothers had gone off to college, and my parents were going through a rough patch in their marriage. It seems my father was serially having affairs with students and my mother was working for a hateful boss who treated her poorly. Family dinners were tense and awful. I took up long distance running, joining the cross country and track teams, mainly to stay away from the home. For a couple of years there I was running up to eight miles in the morning before school, and twelve miles after school, before heading to my job (which kept me away until late) at the college bookstore. Carolyn, my boss, was the adult who treated me the best in those days. I worked as a stock boy, shipping and receiving, pricing and shelving, and dreamed of becoming a UPS driver, because they seemed to be the most beloved yet independent people in the world. Who doesn't love their UPS guy? Carolyn was an unhappily married thirty-something who could not have children because of health issues. I adored her. She was a little Italian-American brunette who "cussed like a sailor" and had a million opinions. I thought of her as being my favorite aunt.
I also wanted to become a baseball statistician. In those days, that was not a thing. I belong to the same generation that went on to produce Bill James and Moneyball and all of that. I once wrote to the major league office asking how one could become an official baseball statistician and they told me to go to college and major in math. I didn't end up doing that right away, although in the end, computer science was not that far off! But I spent hours as a youth playing a statistical baseball game called All-Star Baseball (all my brothers were into it as well), which consisted of paper disks formatted to reproduce each player's stats. The circles were divided into little sections representing singles, doubles, triples, homeruns, strikeouts, walks etc based on the actual percentages from the players' careers. You'd make teams and lineups, and for each hitter you'd put his disk on a spinner and spin until the arrow stopped (like wheel of fortune) pointing at a section on the disk which determined the outcome of that turn. We kept detailed records of teams and games and manually calculated the stats to see if they truly corresponded to the disk representations.
I also invented a card game once, on a solo train trip I took to stay with my grandparents in New York City. In those days you could put a 9 year old on a train by himself, as a matter of course. The card game was called 'Election', and it consisted of 4 candidates (A, B, C, and D) to whom I would deal out 4 cards at a time. I would add up the cards and write down the totals in the candidates' columns. Periodically, every tenth round or so, I would add up the sub-total to see who was winning. The game would go on for forty or fifty rounds, and whoever won, won. I must have generated hundreds of games over the next years. It was pretty good training for my future as a cashier.
Nerd boy indeed. I didn't end up majoring in math, as I said, but Latin American history, in one of those twisty kinds of things that life ends up making of us. I had a history teacher in high school (Mr. Holt) who inspired me to want to do that, plus my Colombian teachers (Helena, Gabriel and Amalia) triply inspired me even more. But the way I ended up combining these things came straight out of biology. My first love, who introduced me to sex and broke my heart at the age of 14, was a Mexican-American girl. I had grown up with this girl, and had always thought of her as the most beautiful, the smartest, the fastest, just the best at everything. She was the root of my interest in all things Spanish to begin with, and over time that led me to South America, to Latin music, to the greatest literature (IMHO) of the twentieth century, and so on. A twisty kind of thing. In high school I had done a pretty extensive project on the history of Peru. I wanted to learn Spanish. I also wanted to run away from home and happened across the Bogota program while looking for anything that would let me do a freshmen year abroad. It was the only one.
But it was only a three semester program, including one exclusively devoted to intensive language learning. I knew no Spanish when I went there, but I had spoken Italian fluently, and within a couple of months I was getting around in Spanish pretty easily. I had to continue my education, though, and that presented a dilemma. Where was there a decent Latin American studies program in the US? I found three: Rutgers University, the University of Texas in Austin, and George Washington University in D.C.. I was accepted by all three. In retrospect, I should have gone to Austin. It was by far the best program, but I was a snob about Texas, so I went to GWU instead. It was a mistake. The program was essentially intended for people who wanted to work for the State Department or the C.I.A.. I ended up dropping out of college after my one year there. But it was a fateful year.
I lived in the transfer-student dorm, sharing a tiny two room place with five other guys. One of my roommates was a little dead-head from New Jersey whose goal in life was to get high all the time and open a bagel shop somewhere. He's probably a millionaire by now. He introduced me to drugs - my gateway to marijuana was actually through LSD and mescaline, thanks to him. My other roommate was a clean-cut midwesterner who favored red speedos, musical comedy, and probably at that time had no idea he was gay. My closest friend that year was a sensitive, bright guy who was very much into poetry and very much into finding out that he was (at the time) experiencing homosexual tendencies. He came on to me by reading me Alan Ginsberg and letting me know he was infatuated with me. He also had a girlfriend, back in New Jersey, to whom he wrote long, loving letters, apparently all about me. When she came down one weekend to visit him, the three of us went out drinking (Irish Coffees were my thing at the time), and she and I played footsie under the table while he didn't seem to notice. I ended up marrying that girl a couple of years later.
Gina was like a steroid to me, full of life and energy, exciting, interesting, very very smart and active. She was still in high school when we met and went off to college to become a union organizer. Later in life she became a very successful labor lawyer. She was radical, feminist as hell, and to me the sexiest woman I'd ever known. I loved her outrageous boldness. She was absolutely fearless. In one letter she wrote me that she'd been "raised to be a cunt". She came from a poor Catholic family, the youngest of six girls who shared a bedroom while the boy in the family (the oldest and only boy) got his own room. Her father had been an x-ray technician since the invention of x-rays, and was passionate about playing the organ at his local church. Her mother was a devoted wife and mother and perhaps the worst cook I ever met, but a loving woman who did her best. When I visited, Gina and I would (scandalously) sleep together in a single bed and overhear her mother saying "okay, Joe, do your business!". That was how she ended up with so many kids.
Over the next two years, Gina and I alternated weekends visiting. I would take the train up to New York, where she would meet me and drive me back to wherever she was living. For a time she was a live-in nanny to a rich family who lived in a house made famous by being the home of a famous cereal commercial ("Mikes likes it!"). On the other weekends, she would drive down in her little yellow VW bug to stay with me in D.C.. By that time I had an apartment at 17th and R (at the time a borderline ghetto neighborhood, now one of the toniest in the city). Over the next several years I shared apartments in that building with my brother Erik (twice), my friend Bruce, a few other roommates, and eventually Gina when we were married. I was also once mugged at knife-point in the elevator of that building by two little kids with very scary looking knives, one rainy day when I let them into the building.
By then I was smoking pot pretty much every day. It was another attempt at self-medication for depression and social anxiety, another poor choice. I was still smoking a pack a day of cigarettes and drinking at least six cups of coffee. I was working at Sidney Kramer Books and Gina also got a job at Kramerbooks. She had graduated from college but did not yet have a job with a union. We decided to organize our own, among the Kramer books employees. We had good reason to. Kramer had four stores and a warehouse and pretty lousy working conditions, not just the lack of heat in the basement or the warehouse, but they'd also failed to pay their health insurance premiums, so when one of our fellow workers needed medical attention he couldn't get it. There were other grievances as well, so we set about organizing, enlisting the retail workers union local. We ended up a mere one vote short (some workers are stupidly loyal to their bosses, a common frustration among organizers everywhere), but it got us both fired. Gina got a job with AFSCME so it was okay for her, and I ended up getting a job with the Olson book chain. Kramer hated me after that, with reason, and that led to some minor repercussions a few years later on.
Our marriage did not go well. Once we were living together, the excitement was not the same as the long-distance weekends had been. I was a dull, lazy anti-social, extremely depressed pothead and Gina wanted to get out in the world and do things and have fun. She started working late, going out of town and staying away. Once I was pretty sure she'd been cheating on me and I wrote about it in my diary and she read it and became furious, denying it, but it was true. I moved out, just left her one day without warning, the day before my 22nd birthday. It was a mean and cowardly thing to do. I forgot my bicycle, though, and when I went back to get it she had changed the locks, and was home and wouldn't let me in, and called the cops on me. We were pretty angry at each other, and it was over. Later she showed up at my work and threw a radio at me.
You try to remember the good things but it seems the bad ones have more resonance. When we moved her down to D.C. we decided to strap her mattress on the top of her VW, and we nearly flew off the Delaware bridge as the wind lifted the car off the road. She tried to teach me to drive but I freaked out. I couldn't do it, and didn't learn until many years later, at twenty-seven. We once went to Vermont on winter, where one of her sisters was living with a bartender, and we slept on a waterbed there and nearly froze to death. I was a stranger to her family. Some of them terrified me. One of her sisters was married to a brutal bully, who would make his wife lick the bottom of his shoes when he was mad at her, which was all the time. They lived "down the shore" and listened to police scanner radio at high volume on the front porch. Another sister was popping out babies and just kept them sedated with TV and popcorn while she was screwing her husband's best friend. Another was addicted to heroin and lousy boyfriends and had a teenage daughter whose future did not look so bright at the time. Gina had crawled out of the mud whereas I was a privileged jewy upper-middle-class red-diaper baby. Different worlds entirely.
"Slow and steady our love does grow. I sure do love you, my escargot" - she sent me that on a card once. I could never forget it. We did love each other those first few years, and I even loved a couple of those sisters. We were both passionately political, raised and radicalized in the context of Vietnam and civil rights and Nixon and feminism. I had come from a left wing family, and Gina loved that. She especially loved my mother (they remain friends to this day), and my great-aunt Sophie (my mother's mother's sister) who was a radical feminist labor organizer with the International Workers of the World from the 1920's onward. My mother's mother was also a powerful influence in my life; Bertha Russell, nee Branislawa Zanger, an immigrant who came through Ellis Island in the first decade of the 20th century. She was a New York City high school history teacher, an intellectual and serious woman who was also a doting grandmother (we called her Bama) when the occasions arrived. Apparently she was better at that than she had been at being a mother, according to my mother. My grandfather was in the publishing business - as a youth he had been a student of Thorstein Veblen and a devoted followed of Leon Trotsky. He remained a committed communist his entire life, dying at the age of 90 shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. His life was an entire encapsulated cycle of that history, beginning with the Russian Revolution and ending with its ending. He was a short, round old man with a bald head, a white goatee and a twinkle in his eye. He was not always fat and rich, but was when I knew him, living in luxurious apartments in Brooklyn Heights, W. 64th St, and eventually E 81st on the upper east side, listening to classical music, publishing seditious historical tracts, and pontificating on leftover leftist dogma. When I was a child he called me 'Rostropovich' - after the famous Russian musician. One of my favorite memories is of holding his hand as we marched down some Manhattan street in one protest or another - I believe we were on our way to see Martin Luther King, Jr that day.
My parents were very much involved in radical causes. We marched on Washington like an annual occasion, attended be-ins and protests in Philadelphia and New York, both anti-war and pro-civil-rights. As a young teen I manned booths outside of super markets in support of the Farmworkers Union of Cesar Chavez, urging suburban shoppers to boycott grapes. My parents helped found and support a grassroots organization called The People's Fund, a radical alternative to charities like the United Way, and joined a food co-op. We had posters on our fridge wishing that the air force would have to hold a bake sale to fund their bombers while our schools had all the money they needed. I read Paul Goodman's "Growing Up Absurd" and Saul Alinsky's "Reveille for Radicals" and had that poster of Che Guevara in my dorm at George Washington University. Above all, I despised LBJ and Richard Nixon for their wanton bombing of innocent civilians in Vietnam. One of the reasons I went off to South America at that time was to a) get the hell out of America and b) get prepared to become draft dodger when my turn came up. Luckily for me they discontinued the draft the year before mine. My older brothers had been fortunate to draw very high numbers, and would have qualified for student deferments anyway, as I would have also, but I hated my country. It was an evil place, and I felt it especially keenly as we grew up in a solidly Republican and quite racist area.
Our neighborhood was clearly red-lined. Black people were only allowed to live on one block of one street, the one directly behind ours. For the most part, they could only get jobs locally as cooks, gardeners, cleaning ladies or janitors. Although both of my parents were atheists (as were my mother's parents) we were essentially identified as Jews anyway, and were almost the only ones around. A couple of actually Jewish families lived a mile or so away, but we were it in the neighborhood. Ethnicity was a huge thing among white people in my childhood. It actually seemed to matter if your heritage was Irish or Polish or German or Italian. British heritage ruled of course. Civil rights seemed a world away from that place. We experienced it most keenly in high school sports, where our high school's main rival was one with a much higher African-American population (Kobe Bryant went there), and they kicked our ass in everything all the time. It was not pretty, the things that were said and screamed at those "sporting" events. I especially heard it at my track meets. As a long-distance runner, I competed mainly against other white kids but I was present for the sprints and jumps as well.
I did have a couple of cousins who drew very low numbers in the draft. Their father (my father's older brother) was a professional pilot who had been in the Air Force in World War Two, so they both enlisted in the Air Force and became pilots themselves. They were the only people in my family, that I know of, who served in Vietnam. Those years were so intense. Even now, with the Trump people shouting "lock her up" and the "rise of the alt-right" it seems to me that the intensity is nowhere near what it was in the late sixties and early seventies. In those days, hard-hats were spitting on hippies and Black Panther leaders were being framed and out-right murdered by the federal government, especially by the FBI with operation COINTELPRO. An entire generation of black leaders were literally wiped out. We may be facing a generation like that soon, if Trump's fascist tendencies light a real fire among the racists in this country, and the left and people of color are forced to fight back. I hope not. I hope that common sense will somehow prevail, but I would never put too much faith in that. History is a shit-fest of popular delusions and the madness of crowds.
Monday, January 16, 2017
Saturday, January 14, 2017
Sunday the 15th
It was a mantra of mine that "saturday's child works hard for a living" and a point of pride in that I always took every job I had seriously and worked hard always, even when the job was ridiculous. Probably my worst job was a one-week temp job in the National Press Building in Washington D.C. when I had just dropped out of college (after my second year, which I did at George Washington University)in 1976. To get to this job I had to walk through Thomas Circle every morning. At the time this circle has populated by dozens of African-American prostitutes, who would all lazily proposition me as I passed by ("wanna date?"). Then I would arrive at the Press Building and take the elevator up a few floors and go down the hall to a tiny, narrow office where I sat on a stool with an open ledger book. I felt very much like Bob Cratchett from Dickens' A Christmas Carol story. My job was to transfer the data from large stacks of paper into these ledger books, line by line and point by point. The papers were surveys returned from menswear retailers and described the recent sales of a clothing item popular at the tine (this was at the height of disco) called "leisure suits". The point of the job was business analytics from data, remarkably similar to the work I currently do, only now it's called "big data" and we have "machine learning" tools to do the analysis. Ah, simpler times! We could easily see that sales of leisure suits had increased dramatically that year from the year before, and we didn't have to invest millions of dollars in "cloud infrastructure" to do it.
I had a similar temp job when I later moved to San Francisco, in 1982. This was in the offices of the telephone company (then known as Pacific Bell) and my job was to highlight, in different color highlighters, the phone calls made from certain numbers in the office, on the monthly paper bills the office received. All of this is trivial today. Any manager can readily get the data of his employees' calls (how many, how long, how much) from a simple, canned database search, but this job kept me employed for several days, and even had the side benefit of introducing me to a guy who took me to a party where I met a girl I even got to have sex with (right there in the bathroom of that party that night), a very unusual occurrence in my life story. The girl's husband was in jail for larceny and her baby daughter was downstairs with her mother and did I mention this girl was 19? Quite a catch, that one. Luckily I did not catch anything from her.
Shortly before I moved to San Francisco I had a very vivid dream about a magnificent bookstore. I was working there and loving it. It was three stories tall with wide sweeping marble staircases between each floor and jammed with books like a truly great bookstore. One reason I moved to San Francisco was this dream, and also because they had a lot of bookstores, and my brother Erik lived there at the time and when I'd visited him a few years earlier I'd fallen in love with the city. I was more than ready to leave D.C., a city I never even liked but lived in for six years, first for college and then working in bookstores, smoking a lot of dope and ruining a perfectly impossible marriage. In San Francisco I had some trouble finding a job in any of those bookstores. One of them, called Green Apple Books, did hire me on a Friday, but when I showed up for work on a Monday the owner told me he had fired the manager who had hired me, and so I didn't have a job. That was disappointing. It was a marvelous little bookstore out in the avenues. I was dead set against applying for jobs in chain stores like Waldenbooks, B. Dalton or Brentano's (where are they now?) but finally broke down and went into Brentano's, and what do you know? It was physically exactly the bookstore in my dream, marble staircases and all. Unfortunately they were on the verge of bankruptcy, were "on hold" with every major publisher and distributor and so the shelves held hardly any books. They hired me anyway, since they had an opening for a shipping and receiving clerk. It was stupefying. They had no inventory, so there was nothing to ship, and nothing to receive. I saw down there in the basement listening to reggae on the radio and watching one very unusual fellow employee methodically lay out row upon row of crackers, on which he carefully placed one sardine after another, then proceeded to eat them in an orderly manner. This guy soon became one of the best friends I ever had, and he was engaged to be married to the store manager, who at that time was on holiday hiking the Himalayas. I only worked there for one month, but out of it came two crucially important relationships in my life.
I thought I knew everything about bookstores. I'd worked at one while in high school, the bookstore at the college where my father taught, and then for six years in D.C., in the Kramer books and Olson books organizations. I was damn good at it, a heck of a cashier, stock boy, receiving clerk, inventory management specialist, but I was still a kid, only 24 when I moved to San Francisco and ended up working in a series of crazy bookstores - first at Brentano's, then something called the Bonanza Inn Bookshop, and then finally Books, Inc flagship store on Powell St near Union Square. I worked there for nearly 8 years, the last 5 as the store manager. This was all I really wanted to do with my life, aside from writing. There were no personal computers in those days, or hardly any, and certainly no internet or anything like that. Bookstores was where the information was, the new information, the up-to-date changing information. It was where the culture was, where the interesting people were, where the intellectual action was. Academia was too abstract. Bookstores, especially decent ones in the heart of bustling metropolitan cities like San Francisco, that was near to the wild heart of the world, and I wanted to be right there. I wanted to know what everyone was thinking about, what they were talking about, what the trends were, what the future held. I was an autodidact from a very early age, a voracious reader from the age of 8 or 9 on. I read almost all the time as a youth in my parents' house, and everything I could get my hands on. It was helpful and inspiring that my mother was a librarian, and her father had been a New York City publisher. Books were in my blood, especially history, politics, anthropology, and science fiction. From my time in Colombia I became a devotee of Latin American literature, and to this day my favorite writers are from South America - Clarice Lispector, Roberto Arlt, Roberto Bolano, Cesar Aira, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar among them. In science fiction I was always interested in the idea writers - Philip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem, the Brothers Strugatsky, and I loved anything that smacked of the absurd like Lewis Carroll, Glen Baxter, Gary Larson. All of these influences strongly formed my own notions of fiction, and in my early years in San Francisco I spent hours writing novels in longhand in blank books. I wrote more than 30 novels in three years, from 1982 to 1985, of which only a few turned out to be worth anything in the long run. I must have written a few million words, out of which I saved a few thousand. Survivors from that time were later re-written entirely, like Fixture, the Part Time People, Fissure Monroe, and Cashier World. I wrote so much and so ferociously that I had a huge callous on my right index finger which took decades to dissipate. It's nearly all gone now.
I worked with so many interesting people in bookstores. Even though the work paid almost nothing and I lived paycheck to paycheck for nearly 20 years, the world was alive and pulsating and fascinating. I will relate some bookstore work stories some time in here, but for now I only want to mention that even now, and it's been nearly 25 years since I last worked in a bookstore, I still work in them in my dreams, and I never dream of working in a boring drab office on a computer, which is what my job-reality has been all this time since I said goodbye to my bookstore dream, went back to college in my thirties to get an engineering degree, and switched to computer programming instead.
When I write about my bookstore years, I will talk about things like typing away on an ancient manual typewriter while wearing gloves and a winter coat and wool hat in the unheated basement of Sidney Kramer Books, a few blocks from the White House, where I worked with a huge, dominant, imperious lesbian known as the "queen of the basement", and the very tall and theatrical male queen who went off to join the Navy so he could become a dentist while surrounded by 600 men on an aircraft carrier and the hillbilly shipping clerk who had smuggled his drop-dead gorgeous bride out of Russian-controlled Checkoslovakia in the trunk of the limousine he was driving at the time, and the rebellious, feminist actress who married a Filipino guerrilla fighter, and the local drug dealer and part-time seducer of innocent young boys. The store was managed by a diva speed freak and featured such interesting dramas as the stock clerks caught fucking in the customer bathroom during store hours, and the floor manager who had memorized every art-house movie that played in the Inner Circle theatre down the street so he could always have a concise and believable description to offer his wife on those several evenings a week he supposedly went to the movies but was really screwing around in an endless procession of one night stands.
It seemed that every bookstore I worked in was stocked with remarkable characters, many of whom I grew to love and still do to this day, even though I have not seen or heard from most of them in years. The same can hardly be said for my decades in Silicon Valley high tech. I can count fewer than a dozen true friends from these years, and almost all of them from one single startup job. They are just, as a whole, not my kind of people. Bookstore people were and I miss them.
I had a similar temp job when I later moved to San Francisco, in 1982. This was in the offices of the telephone company (then known as Pacific Bell) and my job was to highlight, in different color highlighters, the phone calls made from certain numbers in the office, on the monthly paper bills the office received. All of this is trivial today. Any manager can readily get the data of his employees' calls (how many, how long, how much) from a simple, canned database search, but this job kept me employed for several days, and even had the side benefit of introducing me to a guy who took me to a party where I met a girl I even got to have sex with (right there in the bathroom of that party that night), a very unusual occurrence in my life story. The girl's husband was in jail for larceny and her baby daughter was downstairs with her mother and did I mention this girl was 19? Quite a catch, that one. Luckily I did not catch anything from her.
Shortly before I moved to San Francisco I had a very vivid dream about a magnificent bookstore. I was working there and loving it. It was three stories tall with wide sweeping marble staircases between each floor and jammed with books like a truly great bookstore. One reason I moved to San Francisco was this dream, and also because they had a lot of bookstores, and my brother Erik lived there at the time and when I'd visited him a few years earlier I'd fallen in love with the city. I was more than ready to leave D.C., a city I never even liked but lived in for six years, first for college and then working in bookstores, smoking a lot of dope and ruining a perfectly impossible marriage. In San Francisco I had some trouble finding a job in any of those bookstores. One of them, called Green Apple Books, did hire me on a Friday, but when I showed up for work on a Monday the owner told me he had fired the manager who had hired me, and so I didn't have a job. That was disappointing. It was a marvelous little bookstore out in the avenues. I was dead set against applying for jobs in chain stores like Waldenbooks, B. Dalton or Brentano's (where are they now?) but finally broke down and went into Brentano's, and what do you know? It was physically exactly the bookstore in my dream, marble staircases and all. Unfortunately they were on the verge of bankruptcy, were "on hold" with every major publisher and distributor and so the shelves held hardly any books. They hired me anyway, since they had an opening for a shipping and receiving clerk. It was stupefying. They had no inventory, so there was nothing to ship, and nothing to receive. I saw down there in the basement listening to reggae on the radio and watching one very unusual fellow employee methodically lay out row upon row of crackers, on which he carefully placed one sardine after another, then proceeded to eat them in an orderly manner. This guy soon became one of the best friends I ever had, and he was engaged to be married to the store manager, who at that time was on holiday hiking the Himalayas. I only worked there for one month, but out of it came two crucially important relationships in my life.
I thought I knew everything about bookstores. I'd worked at one while in high school, the bookstore at the college where my father taught, and then for six years in D.C., in the Kramer books and Olson books organizations. I was damn good at it, a heck of a cashier, stock boy, receiving clerk, inventory management specialist, but I was still a kid, only 24 when I moved to San Francisco and ended up working in a series of crazy bookstores - first at Brentano's, then something called the Bonanza Inn Bookshop, and then finally Books, Inc flagship store on Powell St near Union Square. I worked there for nearly 8 years, the last 5 as the store manager. This was all I really wanted to do with my life, aside from writing. There were no personal computers in those days, or hardly any, and certainly no internet or anything like that. Bookstores was where the information was, the new information, the up-to-date changing information. It was where the culture was, where the interesting people were, where the intellectual action was. Academia was too abstract. Bookstores, especially decent ones in the heart of bustling metropolitan cities like San Francisco, that was near to the wild heart of the world, and I wanted to be right there. I wanted to know what everyone was thinking about, what they were talking about, what the trends were, what the future held. I was an autodidact from a very early age, a voracious reader from the age of 8 or 9 on. I read almost all the time as a youth in my parents' house, and everything I could get my hands on. It was helpful and inspiring that my mother was a librarian, and her father had been a New York City publisher. Books were in my blood, especially history, politics, anthropology, and science fiction. From my time in Colombia I became a devotee of Latin American literature, and to this day my favorite writers are from South America - Clarice Lispector, Roberto Arlt, Roberto Bolano, Cesar Aira, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar among them. In science fiction I was always interested in the idea writers - Philip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem, the Brothers Strugatsky, and I loved anything that smacked of the absurd like Lewis Carroll, Glen Baxter, Gary Larson. All of these influences strongly formed my own notions of fiction, and in my early years in San Francisco I spent hours writing novels in longhand in blank books. I wrote more than 30 novels in three years, from 1982 to 1985, of which only a few turned out to be worth anything in the long run. I must have written a few million words, out of which I saved a few thousand. Survivors from that time were later re-written entirely, like Fixture, the Part Time People, Fissure Monroe, and Cashier World. I wrote so much and so ferociously that I had a huge callous on my right index finger which took decades to dissipate. It's nearly all gone now.
I worked with so many interesting people in bookstores. Even though the work paid almost nothing and I lived paycheck to paycheck for nearly 20 years, the world was alive and pulsating and fascinating. I will relate some bookstore work stories some time in here, but for now I only want to mention that even now, and it's been nearly 25 years since I last worked in a bookstore, I still work in them in my dreams, and I never dream of working in a boring drab office on a computer, which is what my job-reality has been all this time since I said goodbye to my bookstore dream, went back to college in my thirties to get an engineering degree, and switched to computer programming instead.
When I write about my bookstore years, I will talk about things like typing away on an ancient manual typewriter while wearing gloves and a winter coat and wool hat in the unheated basement of Sidney Kramer Books, a few blocks from the White House, where I worked with a huge, dominant, imperious lesbian known as the "queen of the basement", and the very tall and theatrical male queen who went off to join the Navy so he could become a dentist while surrounded by 600 men on an aircraft carrier and the hillbilly shipping clerk who had smuggled his drop-dead gorgeous bride out of Russian-controlled Checkoslovakia in the trunk of the limousine he was driving at the time, and the rebellious, feminist actress who married a Filipino guerrilla fighter, and the local drug dealer and part-time seducer of innocent young boys. The store was managed by a diva speed freak and featured such interesting dramas as the stock clerks caught fucking in the customer bathroom during store hours, and the floor manager who had memorized every art-house movie that played in the Inner Circle theatre down the street so he could always have a concise and believable description to offer his wife on those several evenings a week he supposedly went to the movies but was really screwing around in an endless procession of one night stands.
It seemed that every bookstore I worked in was stocked with remarkable characters, many of whom I grew to love and still do to this day, even though I have not seen or heard from most of them in years. The same can hardly be said for my decades in Silicon Valley high tech. I can count fewer than a dozen true friends from these years, and almost all of them from one single startup job. They are just, as a whole, not my kind of people. Bookstore people were and I miss them.
Saturday the 14th
As far as I can remember, and it's true I don't remember all that well, I never had a bad thing happen on a Friday the 13th, until yesterday. Yesterday I was going about my business, eating my lunch in the cafeteria at work, when my phone rang and it was the doctor I'd seen earlier in the week. She had removed a cyst from my back and now she was letting me know that the biopsy returned an unexpected result. Metatastic Melanoma. So I have cancer.
My first impulse was to anoint the chair I was sitting on "the high chair of doom". My regular high chair at the soup counter was occupied by the head of the department, who was sitting there (in my regular chair, I'll remind you) arguing with someone about something. I could tell by the tone of their voices. So I was sitting in a different chair, the first time I'd ever sat in that chair, and I can tell you right now, I am never sitting in that chair again.
My second impulse was an avalanche of associations suddenly flooding my mind - my friend who'd died of the same thing just last year and how brave she'd been, and how open to her family and friends. And then my brother's wife, who'd died of a different stage four thing two years ago, and how sad it was, and how she suffered and how she was a wonderful person and mother who left behind two children only just then verging on adolescence. And then my mother, who only this past year was taken off her last treatment for her blood cancer and was expected to die within weeks but instead she kept feeling better and better and still is. And then my uncle, my father's brother, who died at age 59, the age I am now, of colon cancer, and how everyone said he was too young, and how I've been talking for a while now about how this year (2017) I am going to be 60, and I don't care if people say 60 is the new 40, because 60 is still 60 and it's kind of old.
And then I thought about how I was always in a hurry to grow up, and how I always had an image of my mind that I was going to be a pretty cool old geezer, with a striking profile and wrinkles of experience to show for it. I am already the person I wanted to be, for the most part - nobody ever reaches their ideal self, do they, but I feel pretty close. I've done creative work that I'm happy with and proud of, mainly fiction, a few songs here and there, and some amusing illustrations for my books. I was fortunate to meet, exactly 17 years ago this weekend, my perfect partner and together we've been fortunate to have and raise a wonderful child, who is now 15 years old. And how as an older dad I always knew I'd be lucky to see him into his 30's but now I'm only hoping to see him every day for as long as I can.
So the thoughts piled on and of course they can't stop, and I never wanted to write a memoir but I do have some things that I'd like to get down, so if it's a memoir then okay. I don't know what those things are, but here I'll find out. Several years ago when my son John was a little boy, I had a particularly poignant dream. I was on the front patio of our little home in La Honda, but I was a ghost and I knew I was a ghost, and John was a grown man and he was sitting in the spot I love to sit in, where the sun hits first thing in the morning in the summer, and he had a little baby on his lap and they both were very happy and relaxed and he could see me. He knew I was there even though I was a ghost, and he looked up at me (in the direction where I was, coming in from the side driveway gate) and held up the child to introduce me and I woke up in tears but tears of joy, even though I knew that it meant I would never live to see my son become a father. And being his father is by far the best thing that ever happened in my life.
17 years ago today I drove down the coast in my black Chevy S-10 pickup truck to the San Gregorio Store. The woman I had met online and had been corresponding with called me from there and invited me down to meet in person. I was listening to a football game on the way down, it was the divisional playoff weekend and the New York Giants were demolishing the Minnesota Vikings (the final score was something like 42-0 I think) and as I pulled into Stage Road and looked at the people hanging out there I saw only one woman, and my heart leaped but my brain said, "that can't be her, she's too good looking" and anyway, she was petting a black lab and I knew she didn't have a dog. Turned out to be someone else's dog. We walked down to the beach at San Gregorio and talked and talked, is how I remember it (her version is likely very different from mine) and she came home with me to meet my own dogs (including my own black lab, Arastradero, who was at that very moment developing the cancer that would kill her only a few months later). Betsy moved in with me only a few days later, and only about six weeks later I cut short a trip to the Anza Borrego desert with my parents because I couldn't wait any longer to ask her to marry me.
I was also thinking about memoirs and the stories we tell ourselves that make up our selves, truly, and I don't want to just keep repeating the same old ones and refining them to a fine polish until they shine, for example about what a small child I was - only 60 pounds at age 12 and still only 120 pounds at age 36 - and how I was terrorized in the 7th grade by a local bully named Nick ("Fucking") Filipone, who broke both my thumbs by bending them back until they broke against the brick wall outside the Radnor Junior High School gym, and how in an email about my high school's 40th reunion I recently learned that he was already dead and it made me happy to know that. Terrible, right? But it did. And there may be a few people on this Earth who would be happy to find out they had outlived me, but there can't be many of those - an employee or two from when I was the manager of a mediocre bookstore in downtown San Francisco in the 80's perhaps, and maybe a couple of other stray associations here and there but for the most part I've been an emotionally low-impact person on the people I've known outside of my few close friends and family.
Events in life stand out like punctuation marks and you could make a list of them, a chronological set of moments with many gaps in between, just the story board bullet point items. My earliest memory (looking up into a very high closet in the house we were just moving into in Bryn Mawr), and my next earliest memory (finding our big black cat, Matthew, dead under the front porch of our house in Rosemont, very early one weekend morning before anyone else was awake. I don't know how I knew he was there - probably heard him crying as he'd just been hit by a car and crawled in there, and I crawled in after him). Or you could chart it out like biorhythms, the highs and lows of a life connected by trending lines, as if it all made sense like a visualization of sound waves, and there is the song of your life, with dynamics and meter, a musical score for an orchestra of millions filtered through the ears of one.
I remember estimating once that as a cashier I had said "thank you" to approximately four million people.
So next up is treatments and (hopefully) buying some time through discomfort and pain, but worth it. It will have to be worth it. I lived through 13 years as a zombie when I was under the influence of chronic fatigue syndrome, which caused my body to go into a sort of hibernation, and every minute of every day was a struggle to just push through it and I did, from the age of 26 to the age of 39, when another ailment (ulcerative colitis) led to being treated with Prednisone for the greater part of a year, which seems to have kicked the hell out of my beserker immune system, and the CFS symptoms went into remission, where they have mostly remained in the 20 years since, only surfacing under stress or when I get a cold or other illness. I bought time then without any treatments, since there were none and I had no health insurance for most of those years anyway.
And who would have thought I would end up as a computer programmer anyway, or even with a good job with good insurance and survivor benefits, when all I wanted to do was run a decent little bookstore and I never cared about money beyond having enough to survive. Back then, in my twenties and thirties, it never occurred to me I would own a house, or have more than a couple thousand dollars in the bank, but those things snuck up on me and I'm happy to have something to leave to my family. Hell, in my twenties and thirties I didn't think I'd have a family! I had married at 20, divorced at 22, and then saw another 5-year relationship go down the drain while I was sick with CFS. Then I was completely alone for more than 7 years before I had a brief series of lousy and short-lived relationships before I met Betsy in early 2000, and everything changed completely for me on that day, Saturday the 14th, exactly 17 years ago today.
On the other hand, what are we except the stories we tell ourselves, the same anecdotes we repeat over and over and would tell if we were still around to do so? Like the story of the time I let a tiny old woman read my palm in a square in downtown Bogota, I was going to give her some money anyway so why not let her have her fun, but she merely glanced at my palm then suddenly shouted a cry of alarm and ran away as fast as she could muster. Two years later I misled my girlfriend and myself down the wrong street just a few blocks from there where we were surrounded by 2 men and 2 boys with very long knives they held to our throats and our backs while they took all the money we had on us, but spared our passports. Was that fortunate that they spared our passports? Because with them we left Colombia for Ecuador and Peru and then returned the same way, and in each country we encountered other near-mortal threats in the most harrowing and terrifying trip of my life. Such as the time they pulled us off the bus in the middle of the night near Pasto, just me and her, a nubile nineteen year old at the time, to be stranded and surrounded by at least a dozen peasant soldier boys in the most remote location, were it not for the bus driver who bribed the soldiers to let us through, a driver who made a tidy profit from saving our meager little lives when we paid him back on returning to Bogota. And in the middle of that trip, sitting on the train in Cusco bound for Bolivia when soldiers invaded the station and began shooting the workers who had just decided to go out on strike. Or when the banker at the border of Ecuador gave us red pens to counter-sign our traveler's checks and then tore them up because we had originally signed them in blue. Or at the central bank in Bogota, where I had agreed to change a fifty dollar bill for the hotel manager only to find a machine gun suddenly at my head and the next three hours locked in interrogation because the bill of course was counterfeit, while my girlfriend was stuck out there in the bank lobby not knowing a word of Spanish or where they had taken me or if they were going to bring me back. Or the last night we were there when I decided to buy cocaine and we walked through the Carrera Septima giggling like mad with four soldiers on every corner of every block all the way back. That was pretty smart, eh?
I had lived in Bogota for a year or so previously. I left my family when I was a child of only16 and went off to college down there through an exchange program called CEUCA, sponsored by Antioch University. It was a freshman-year abroad kind of thing for me, but all my compatriots were juniors. Will I now be leaving my child when he is only 16? I hope not, but I was ready to be done with my parents at that time. They were miserable in their marriage in those days (though as of this moment, at ages 90 and 87, they've been together for nearly 68 years!), and I was suicidal and depressed throughout junior high and high school, really ever since we returned from our family's one-year in Bologna, Italy, where my father was on sabbatical writing a book, and my mother was employing her newly earned library science degree working at Johns Hopkins University there. I loved Italy and Bologna. I was 10 years old at the time and a happy little guy. I shared a room with my brother Peter and we were never closer. I made a great friend named Giorgio Fabbri and we wandered up and down practically every street in that portico'd old city. When we returned to the tony Philadelphia suburbs, it felt like being buried alive, and it didn't help that almost every one of my childhood friends decided to un-friend me, and the girls were getting precocious and I was so far behind in that.
First 11 years, pretty happy. Next 30 years, not at all. The 19 years since have been the best of my life so it's pretty much a draw at this point if you added it all up that way. I've got no complaints. On the one hand there are many things I would change about myself and my life and on the other hand I would change nothing at all because look at where it got me!
Melanoma and a history of sunburns, pale bird that I am. One time my lifelong friend Bruce Reed and I went canoeing in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. It was a great trip, for a while. I was probably 14 and he 16 around that time, because he drove the family's VW van. At one point we had to wade through a narrow section and when we emerged from the water we were covered in leeches. Unfortunately I'd been wearing shorts with no covering or sunscreen and on the way back developed such an extreme sunburn that I was bed-ridden for several days after, in shock and great pain. Was that my definitive melanoma moment? Because I've had lots of other sunburns. I spent all my summers as a youth (until leaving home at 16) in the hot summer sun in nothing but a bathing suit and never any sunscreen. We would sit out at the pool at the college playing Hearts for hours on end, running off occasionally to grab some small and sour green apples from the nearby trees, or running down the hill to the creek to build makeshift dams out of pebbles and rocks - with Bruce and Peter and Anita and Conrad and others I barely remember.
Or maybe I do remember more than I think.
My first impulse was to anoint the chair I was sitting on "the high chair of doom". My regular high chair at the soup counter was occupied by the head of the department, who was sitting there (in my regular chair, I'll remind you) arguing with someone about something. I could tell by the tone of their voices. So I was sitting in a different chair, the first time I'd ever sat in that chair, and I can tell you right now, I am never sitting in that chair again.
My second impulse was an avalanche of associations suddenly flooding my mind - my friend who'd died of the same thing just last year and how brave she'd been, and how open to her family and friends. And then my brother's wife, who'd died of a different stage four thing two years ago, and how sad it was, and how she suffered and how she was a wonderful person and mother who left behind two children only just then verging on adolescence. And then my mother, who only this past year was taken off her last treatment for her blood cancer and was expected to die within weeks but instead she kept feeling better and better and still is. And then my uncle, my father's brother, who died at age 59, the age I am now, of colon cancer, and how everyone said he was too young, and how I've been talking for a while now about how this year (2017) I am going to be 60, and I don't care if people say 60 is the new 40, because 60 is still 60 and it's kind of old.
And then I thought about how I was always in a hurry to grow up, and how I always had an image of my mind that I was going to be a pretty cool old geezer, with a striking profile and wrinkles of experience to show for it. I am already the person I wanted to be, for the most part - nobody ever reaches their ideal self, do they, but I feel pretty close. I've done creative work that I'm happy with and proud of, mainly fiction, a few songs here and there, and some amusing illustrations for my books. I was fortunate to meet, exactly 17 years ago this weekend, my perfect partner and together we've been fortunate to have and raise a wonderful child, who is now 15 years old. And how as an older dad I always knew I'd be lucky to see him into his 30's but now I'm only hoping to see him every day for as long as I can.
So the thoughts piled on and of course they can't stop, and I never wanted to write a memoir but I do have some things that I'd like to get down, so if it's a memoir then okay. I don't know what those things are, but here I'll find out. Several years ago when my son John was a little boy, I had a particularly poignant dream. I was on the front patio of our little home in La Honda, but I was a ghost and I knew I was a ghost, and John was a grown man and he was sitting in the spot I love to sit in, where the sun hits first thing in the morning in the summer, and he had a little baby on his lap and they both were very happy and relaxed and he could see me. He knew I was there even though I was a ghost, and he looked up at me (in the direction where I was, coming in from the side driveway gate) and held up the child to introduce me and I woke up in tears but tears of joy, even though I knew that it meant I would never live to see my son become a father. And being his father is by far the best thing that ever happened in my life.
17 years ago today I drove down the coast in my black Chevy S-10 pickup truck to the San Gregorio Store. The woman I had met online and had been corresponding with called me from there and invited me down to meet in person. I was listening to a football game on the way down, it was the divisional playoff weekend and the New York Giants were demolishing the Minnesota Vikings (the final score was something like 42-0 I think) and as I pulled into Stage Road and looked at the people hanging out there I saw only one woman, and my heart leaped but my brain said, "that can't be her, she's too good looking" and anyway, she was petting a black lab and I knew she didn't have a dog. Turned out to be someone else's dog. We walked down to the beach at San Gregorio and talked and talked, is how I remember it (her version is likely very different from mine) and she came home with me to meet my own dogs (including my own black lab, Arastradero, who was at that very moment developing the cancer that would kill her only a few months later). Betsy moved in with me only a few days later, and only about six weeks later I cut short a trip to the Anza Borrego desert with my parents because I couldn't wait any longer to ask her to marry me.
I was also thinking about memoirs and the stories we tell ourselves that make up our selves, truly, and I don't want to just keep repeating the same old ones and refining them to a fine polish until they shine, for example about what a small child I was - only 60 pounds at age 12 and still only 120 pounds at age 36 - and how I was terrorized in the 7th grade by a local bully named Nick ("Fucking") Filipone, who broke both my thumbs by bending them back until they broke against the brick wall outside the Radnor Junior High School gym, and how in an email about my high school's 40th reunion I recently learned that he was already dead and it made me happy to know that. Terrible, right? But it did. And there may be a few people on this Earth who would be happy to find out they had outlived me, but there can't be many of those - an employee or two from when I was the manager of a mediocre bookstore in downtown San Francisco in the 80's perhaps, and maybe a couple of other stray associations here and there but for the most part I've been an emotionally low-impact person on the people I've known outside of my few close friends and family.
Events in life stand out like punctuation marks and you could make a list of them, a chronological set of moments with many gaps in between, just the story board bullet point items. My earliest memory (looking up into a very high closet in the house we were just moving into in Bryn Mawr), and my next earliest memory (finding our big black cat, Matthew, dead under the front porch of our house in Rosemont, very early one weekend morning before anyone else was awake. I don't know how I knew he was there - probably heard him crying as he'd just been hit by a car and crawled in there, and I crawled in after him). Or you could chart it out like biorhythms, the highs and lows of a life connected by trending lines, as if it all made sense like a visualization of sound waves, and there is the song of your life, with dynamics and meter, a musical score for an orchestra of millions filtered through the ears of one.
I remember estimating once that as a cashier I had said "thank you" to approximately four million people.
So next up is treatments and (hopefully) buying some time through discomfort and pain, but worth it. It will have to be worth it. I lived through 13 years as a zombie when I was under the influence of chronic fatigue syndrome, which caused my body to go into a sort of hibernation, and every minute of every day was a struggle to just push through it and I did, from the age of 26 to the age of 39, when another ailment (ulcerative colitis) led to being treated with Prednisone for the greater part of a year, which seems to have kicked the hell out of my beserker immune system, and the CFS symptoms went into remission, where they have mostly remained in the 20 years since, only surfacing under stress or when I get a cold or other illness. I bought time then without any treatments, since there were none and I had no health insurance for most of those years anyway.
And who would have thought I would end up as a computer programmer anyway, or even with a good job with good insurance and survivor benefits, when all I wanted to do was run a decent little bookstore and I never cared about money beyond having enough to survive. Back then, in my twenties and thirties, it never occurred to me I would own a house, or have more than a couple thousand dollars in the bank, but those things snuck up on me and I'm happy to have something to leave to my family. Hell, in my twenties and thirties I didn't think I'd have a family! I had married at 20, divorced at 22, and then saw another 5-year relationship go down the drain while I was sick with CFS. Then I was completely alone for more than 7 years before I had a brief series of lousy and short-lived relationships before I met Betsy in early 2000, and everything changed completely for me on that day, Saturday the 14th, exactly 17 years ago today.
On the other hand, what are we except the stories we tell ourselves, the same anecdotes we repeat over and over and would tell if we were still around to do so? Like the story of the time I let a tiny old woman read my palm in a square in downtown Bogota, I was going to give her some money anyway so why not let her have her fun, but she merely glanced at my palm then suddenly shouted a cry of alarm and ran away as fast as she could muster. Two years later I misled my girlfriend and myself down the wrong street just a few blocks from there where we were surrounded by 2 men and 2 boys with very long knives they held to our throats and our backs while they took all the money we had on us, but spared our passports. Was that fortunate that they spared our passports? Because with them we left Colombia for Ecuador and Peru and then returned the same way, and in each country we encountered other near-mortal threats in the most harrowing and terrifying trip of my life. Such as the time they pulled us off the bus in the middle of the night near Pasto, just me and her, a nubile nineteen year old at the time, to be stranded and surrounded by at least a dozen peasant soldier boys in the most remote location, were it not for the bus driver who bribed the soldiers to let us through, a driver who made a tidy profit from saving our meager little lives when we paid him back on returning to Bogota. And in the middle of that trip, sitting on the train in Cusco bound for Bolivia when soldiers invaded the station and began shooting the workers who had just decided to go out on strike. Or when the banker at the border of Ecuador gave us red pens to counter-sign our traveler's checks and then tore them up because we had originally signed them in blue. Or at the central bank in Bogota, where I had agreed to change a fifty dollar bill for the hotel manager only to find a machine gun suddenly at my head and the next three hours locked in interrogation because the bill of course was counterfeit, while my girlfriend was stuck out there in the bank lobby not knowing a word of Spanish or where they had taken me or if they were going to bring me back. Or the last night we were there when I decided to buy cocaine and we walked through the Carrera Septima giggling like mad with four soldiers on every corner of every block all the way back. That was pretty smart, eh?
I had lived in Bogota for a year or so previously. I left my family when I was a child of only16 and went off to college down there through an exchange program called CEUCA, sponsored by Antioch University. It was a freshman-year abroad kind of thing for me, but all my compatriots were juniors. Will I now be leaving my child when he is only 16? I hope not, but I was ready to be done with my parents at that time. They were miserable in their marriage in those days (though as of this moment, at ages 90 and 87, they've been together for nearly 68 years!), and I was suicidal and depressed throughout junior high and high school, really ever since we returned from our family's one-year in Bologna, Italy, where my father was on sabbatical writing a book, and my mother was employing her newly earned library science degree working at Johns Hopkins University there. I loved Italy and Bologna. I was 10 years old at the time and a happy little guy. I shared a room with my brother Peter and we were never closer. I made a great friend named Giorgio Fabbri and we wandered up and down practically every street in that portico'd old city. When we returned to the tony Philadelphia suburbs, it felt like being buried alive, and it didn't help that almost every one of my childhood friends decided to un-friend me, and the girls were getting precocious and I was so far behind in that.
First 11 years, pretty happy. Next 30 years, not at all. The 19 years since have been the best of my life so it's pretty much a draw at this point if you added it all up that way. I've got no complaints. On the one hand there are many things I would change about myself and my life and on the other hand I would change nothing at all because look at where it got me!
Melanoma and a history of sunburns, pale bird that I am. One time my lifelong friend Bruce Reed and I went canoeing in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. It was a great trip, for a while. I was probably 14 and he 16 around that time, because he drove the family's VW van. At one point we had to wade through a narrow section and when we emerged from the water we were covered in leeches. Unfortunately I'd been wearing shorts with no covering or sunscreen and on the way back developed such an extreme sunburn that I was bed-ridden for several days after, in shock and great pain. Was that my definitive melanoma moment? Because I've had lots of other sunburns. I spent all my summers as a youth (until leaving home at 16) in the hot summer sun in nothing but a bathing suit and never any sunscreen. We would sit out at the pool at the college playing Hearts for hours on end, running off occasionally to grab some small and sour green apples from the nearby trees, or running down the hill to the creek to build makeshift dams out of pebbles and rocks - with Bruce and Peter and Anita and Conrad and others I barely remember.
Or maybe I do remember more than I think.
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