I noticed your comment about Woodstock during the Republican debate. You said, "A few days ago, Senator Clinton tried to spend $1 million on the Woodstock concert museum. Now, my friends, I wasn't there. I'm sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event. I was tied up at the time." Everyone got your reference to being a war prisoner at the Hanoi Hilton, and the remark's reception was boffo. But then, it was your crowd.
I wouldn't dream of denigrating a U.S. vet. There was too much of that in 2004. But you bored the opening, and therefore a few distinctions are necessary.
I once held you in a modicum of respect. I could not believe how you were swiftboated in 2000. Remember? Bush's strategists said your wife was a pill addict. They said you had an illegitimate black child. They said you were emotionally unstable - your term as a prisoner of war had blasted your brain. Remember? You were Max Clelanded up the yin-yang. Possibly the only lasting achievement of the Bush crowd will be this: Never before in our history was it possible to so completely turn virtues into vices and vice-versa. Max Cleland. Swiftboat Veterans. Dan Rather. Yourself. Remember? It is a truely awesome achievement, and, I repeat, possibly the only achievement the last seven years have given us. This country has now attained the Orwellian state of a place where the people believe, leap to believe, that black is white and freedom is slavery. Go look in the book.
But I lost that modicum of respect for you at the 2004 Republican Convention. You stood beside Bush, the man who slandered your wife and yourself, and pledged your support. You wanted so bad to be the next Prexy. You pulled down your pants, placed those pink-tipped fingers on your butt cheeks and said, "Bring me those tube-steaks, boys!" And they did. Look at your poll numbers.
Is there evidence your own party is shafting you, that they have decided you will never be Prexy? Yes, there is. Last Saturday's NY Times had a story in which was described how Fox News had forbidden you to use that moment from the debate in your campaign ads. It was their sponsored debate, so they could forbid it. Then, after "a liberal Web site" noted that Guliani and Romney had not been forbidden to use their own boffo moments in campaign ads (and they were doing so), that you alone were forbidden, Fox News had to forbid your compadres also.
So now I feel free to note a few distinctions. You've been described as a war hero. I believe you were actually a prisoner of war. You were shot down over North Vietnam, in one of the bombing raids that took some millions of lives. Please write back to me with the number of civilians that were killed by culturals and pharmaceuticals at Woodstock. How many visitants at Woodstock killed ordinary people? Cities contain ordinary people. The visitants at Woodstock had a good time. The men in the planes killed, as the cliche goes, women and children. I don't need any education to know which group has cleaner souls.
I wouldn't dream of denigrating a U.S. vet. The Americans who have been doing that for seven years make a lot more money than I do. And I'm not going to fight the Vietnam war all over again. A large part of the tragedy is that so many brave U.S. soldiers had no choice about participating in a soiled, lost cause. I'm glad I escaped. And I'm glad I had the mom I had. I remember mom - a widow- standing in front of the tv during the evening news and saying, "Why are we over there? They've been fighting each other for 1000 years." She turned to me and said, "If they draft you, you should run away to Canada." And Mom was right. Mom had almost no political convictions, as far as I know, but she was a widow, and she was smart enough to know that there was no earthly reason to sacrifice her sons for a cause to benefit nobody but the fat boys. No mother should ever sacrifice her sons to benefit nobody but the fat boys - in any war.
So I'm sorry you were a guest of the Hanoi Hilton. You were a prisoner, a prisoner, I might add, in the mold of Don King. Don King served a term for manslaughter. And when he emerged and rose to fame, someone commented that most men serve time, but King made time serve him. You made time serve you, as unsavory as the comparison might taste. You were once, perhaps, an honorable man and deserved some recompense for your service. But now you've decided that your service is your atm, a device to be drawn upon.
I'll give you a great image of what our country has come to when it comes to the fetishsizing of U.S. military service. In Ken Burn's recent documentary of World War II I was informed of how Daniel Inyoue earned his Medal of Honor. His troop had been penned down by three machine gun nests. Inyoue, alone, went charging up the hill and took out one nest with handgrenades. At this point he had received a bullet in the leg. He then took out the second nest. One of his arms was blown mostly off. He was carried down the hill. But before he was, he took out the third nest. This was Senator Inyoue, the American war hero who had to sit in the halls of Congress and listen to Oliver North, that stinking little blob of flatulated feces, wear a uniform and medals and bray about patriotism.
A country that allowed a scene like that was already seriously sick. And that was twenty years ago.
America no longer knows anything about patriotism or valor or duty or sacrifice. Clothing companies are titled Free Country. Scoundrels can call decorated veterans frauds, and shills can make heros of rich kids who evaded the draft while their peers died for their country.
However, it is nothing new in the ways of humans. Appearance has always been at least as important as reality. I will illustrate an immensely ironic point with an example from personal history. I have had two close friends with military experience - Charles Cummings and Charles Peeples.
Thirty-five years of knowledge of Charles Cummings have taught me, if anything, that if I were his biographer (and I could be) that his web of evasions and falsifications is so complex that any information about him which I did not witness or have testimony to must be regarded with skepticism. Entire chapters of his existence are built with no more solid mortar than his own wind. On a Christmas visit about 1974 Chip pointed to a large house overlooking a yacht club and said his dad had bought it and then been transferred to Massachusetts. Truth or Chip? Would property records prove it?
Chip is a U.S. veteran. I have evidence. One day after we had been living in New Rochelle for more than one year, a letter arrived. The letter came from the Army and congratulated Chip for his promotion to captain. Chip had had nothing to do with the military for more than one year. No service. Naught. He hadn't even had a job since he gave up waiting tables at the Tobacco Company Restaurant in Richmond in 1982. It is less explicable than that voting card mailed to non-citizen Chung-Yung.
Chip had joined ROTC at Richmond in the 70's. I don't know why. He had been sent to New York Military Academy by his parents to get him away from bad companions. Chip has always been fascinated with military history. It remains today one of the few subjects upon which I trust his word. But I never noted any strain of public service in Chip, and so I conjecture Chip joined ROTC for the scholarship. ROTC scholars get paychecks. Now that letter of promotion is inexplicable, but hardly less so is how Chip served out his ROTC obligation. After graduation, Chip should have been obligated to serve four years in the Army.
He didn't. Chip said he elected to live in Nags Head, and since there was no army base in that area, they could only require him to serve one weekend a month or one month a year in the Army. That's what he said. We parted company for a few years in this period, so I have only his word. He said when the restaurant he worked at closed in the winter, he served his annual month stamping papers in the Tidewater area. Then he and his friends would go to Puerto Rico and get on food stamps until the restaurant opened in the Spring. That's what he said.
When we lived in Richmond, he would put on a uniform and leave town on some weekends. Then he would come back and wait tables. That's what I saw. He said he was serving on those weekends, but of course he may have been merely donning the uniform and going somewhere.
It is as mysterious as that missing year for Georgie Bush...which is startling all in itself...after all...in the 20th century is it conceivable that an entire year could be missing from the life of a man who ran for President? Have you ever thought about that? I have tried to impress my students with the mystery of most human lives throughout history, how many famous men had unknown birth years, how many people just drop out of the records. But how on earth, in this age of ultra scrutiny, could a presidential candidate lose a year of his life? This is the sort of meat biographers and historians live on. A scholar discovered how Christopher Marlow died 350 years after the fact by scouring the British Public Records Office. But nobody can find cancelled checks or hotel receipts that document the movements of Georgie?
Oh, I forgot. Dan Rather did find out.
Maybe Georgie Bush and Chip were hanging out together...it's rumored that was Bush's drug period, after all.
So I have no explanation for how Chip got paid for years without serving full-time. But I did see that letter. And if you want to get Chip expostulating, ask him why he didn't serve his term in the military. Chip, like Georgie, certainly got his mileage out the enigma of his service. When Chip applied to work at Citibank, he wiped out his ten previous years of work history. He told them he'd been in the army. That's what he said.
Now Charles Peeples was a different story. I believe there has always been an unacknowledged strain of Victorianism in Peeples. He believes in duty and honor and venerates the ceremonies that honor those qualities. Also, he has always been willing to work to get dollars, and he wants them. So I believe he joined ROTC because he wanted the paycheck, and because it somehow appealed to his sense of honor. And I remember when he received his scholarship. He was surprised. The Army in return for its money was demanding four years of military service, he said, not two. He had expected two. There was a furrow of perturbation between his brows.
That moment in our dorm room with his mutter and his downcast head has furnished me thirty years of chuckles, and yet there is something archetypally Peeplesian about the moment and the aftermath. Returning to my attribution of Victorianism, it was the moment when the sahib heard the Sepoys were revolting. It was the confused and disappointed citizen who yet fulfills his unpleasant duty. Because he did, of course. He always did. He went to Germany. He slept in a jeep in the wintertime. He ordered privates around, and sometimes they obeyed him. He even (and my stomach sinks to think about this) once was responsible for determining what caused the death of a G.I. He even reupped for two more years at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, which is no human's idea of a paradise. He did his duty.
He served six years of daily duty. And yet he and Chip were both Captains in the U.S. Army at the same time.
This is a life of huge ironies. Who could ever imagine that it would be Charles Peeples who would be John Kerry, and it would be Chip Cummings who would be Georgie Bush?
And that at last is bringing me back to my point. Anyone in America today who talks about war hero or valor or duty or patriotism is full of shit. Image is always as good as reality in today's America and usually better. In reference, see Rudy Giuliani. As for you, Mr. McCain, don't say anything bad about people who didn't kill innocent people. Some Americans are very aware of what you were doing in that time period.
Harvey and me
What kind of child it is who ever loses a sense of the world's coincidences, anomalies, paradoxes and untied strings? Of course, New York nourishes these more than most locales. Many years I sat on a bench beside an old man outside Fort Tryon Park. It may have been in 1986. He said he had locked himself out and had left a note for his wife. Noting my accent, he asked where I was from. I said Virginia. A strange smile came over his face. He said, "Not by chance...Blackstone?"
The old man had been sent to Fort Pickett, built outside Blackstone in WWII. When the feds took the land to build Pickett, some farmers had flaws in their land deeds, so they received nothing. It was a bonanza for Blackstonians. Every home owner built apartments within their homes for soldiers' families. My bedroom, at 606 Bruswick Avenue, had a sink installed for some such family. My granddad Clay turned equipment sheds on his nursing home property into apartments. My uncle Charles recalled that "they were a goldmine!" The G.I.s, from all over the eastern U.S., christened my hometown with a new name - Tombstone. I had long said that the rural areas of America were brought into the 20th century by two things - television and World War II. The influence of the war was in introducing people like Blackstonians to people like the old man.
The old man didn't tell me any of that. He told me that he and the other G.I.s went to dances with the Blackstone women. I have often wondered if he danced with my mom. Then his wife arrived.
So that is coincidence. And so we see the oddness of this earth, in which things from vast distances can be brought face to face in total happenstance in mundane settings.
For instance, I have never threatened to breach the fortress of fame, ever. But I have been mistaken for the famous. Granted, it's more typical for me to be mistaken for an employee of the Strand Bookstore, but...
Although I don't remember exactly when, it was certainly before I began dating Chung-Yung that I was mistaken for Harvey Keitel. I was standing on the corner of 7th Ave and Christopher St., wearing a smart leather jacket I grant, when two girls for whom I was already too old approached smiling and asked if I was him. Maybe it's my nose; I dunno.
Celebrity spotting is a local sport, of course. I came across Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder filming at Father Demo Square. I saw Jeff Goldblum standing on the curb near Times Square, evidently awaiting filming because a girl stood beside him holding an umbrella above his head, protecting his coif from the drizzle. I saw Nicol Williamson and his girl carrying groceries down 10th St. And I saw Willem Dafoe in a sleeveless t-shirt on a hot, humid day passing the church on Fifth Ave. Liv Tyler lived in my building. I rode the elevator with her as she was hauling her laundry upstairs. She was tall. And I saw her walking on 9th St. Believe me, she looks way different without her makeup.
But I wouldn't have known it was her for sure if I hadn't asked Said, the concierge. He not only affirmed it, but told me what floor she lived on, which I thought overstepped the bounds of discretion.
I never had but one moment of unhappiness with Said. After I moved in with Chung-Yung, I attempted to rent my apartment by putting a notice on the lobby's bulletin board. After every week, it seemed, my notice came down. I admit I sometimes take things personally. My old girlfriend Margaret recommended the agent she had used to rent her studio, Ken Somethinorother. "He owns the building," she had said. In other words, Ken monopolized owner rentals in 24 Fifth. How? I soon thought I had found out. I first invited Ken's services, but I dismissed him when he asked me to lower my asking price. He said, quote, "If you get that price, you'll break all records." Well, I did get my price, but it took a while.
As my notices came down week after week, I began to suspect foul play. Did Ken remove every non-Ken notice whenever he entered the building? Of course not. The super did it. Every owner looking to rent would ask the super, "How do I rent my apartment," and the super would say, "I know a great agent." That's how things work in New York. Ken would pay the super to work for him, and the super would look out for Ken. So the super was taking my notices down. I asked Said about this, and Said would only say he didn't know anything, but he said it in a voice louder than necessary. That was a sure confession. So the next time I put my notice up, I glued it.
Glue. I have a history with glue. Few things give me as much pleasure as ticking off some asshole. I enjoy making an obstruction of myself. And glue, let's face it, is a symbol of resistance, of obstruction, of unwillingness to move.
When I got fired from Teachers College, I made sure they knew I was gone. I left some tacks in my chair seat. I glued papers to my desk top and within the drawers. I also left a few mousetraps within the drawers, positioned to go off if the drawers were roughly opened. What I was most proud of was my work with the in/out chart. The dumb bitch who ran the department had put on the wall a chart with all our names and little checker-like magnets to be moved when we were in or out of the office. It was her idea of communication and efficiency, something she did instead of serving the students.
Yeah, I hated her, but I'm giving an accurate picture of her ability. I could show you the student newspapers. Every semester they ran the same headline: "Financial Aid Office Vows to Improve Service". Well, anyhow, my last act was to glue my little checker magnet permanently in the "IN" position. I imagined the dumb bitch coming in the next morning and thinking, "Thank god he's gone at last", and reaching up her stupid finger to move my little checker magnet to the "OUT" position...she was stupid, alright. I remember all the staff sitting in a meeting called by the new Head of Admissions, a man hired for the purpose of solving our office's problems. He had a blackboard and a pointer, and in a teacherly fashion he began citing problems and then asked how we might solve them. And I had been watching the dumb bitch's face, with the expression of a stunned cow upon it, and as the new Head got to his question, the dumb bitch's mouth moved soundlessly...air moved in and out of her hole. Finally, after cogitations that in physicists would have explained quantum mechanics, she uttered, "Empowerment?"
The Head of Admissions wasn't a bad guy even though he fired me. He had to fire someone. Was he going to fire the dumb bitch? She wanted me out. But she was the boss. You don't rise in life by firing the boss.
He had previously complimented me for discovering that the dumb bitch botched her addition in some funding figures and was on the verge of costing the school $40,000. When I pointed this out to him, with all the spreadsheet numbers, he said, "I think you saved the school $40,000."
When he let me go, I reminded him of this; I repeated to him his own words, and he sort of waffled. No denial he had said it. Just some uncomfortable ers and ums. You don't have to take my word for this. I've got it on tape. Yes. I went out and bought one of those nifty pocket-sized tape recorders and went in to see him with a tape whirring away. Sometimes I get nostalgic and listen to it a bit. Someone - my niece or nephew probably - will listen to that tape after I'm dead, just as they will probably find that nudist magazine someone left in the hall and I've never thrown out.
If Freud were alive and interested, he would say of my tales, "Vot he is doing is exhibiting the human urge for confession, the necessity of lifting the heavy burden of wrong-doing from his shoulders. Ja!"
Freud's wrong.
I'm not confessing. I'm bragging. These are treasured moments in my life.
But I admit I feel a trifle guilty about one thing I did with a gluepot, and this brings us back to my abode, where the story's climax will presently appear. Gulity with an explanation.
I wasn't sure that it was the super who was tearing down my notices. You see, there was another notice on the bulletin board, this one from a girl in the building announcing her similar intention to sublet. I began to think about how her notice remained up while mine came down. The moral state of most American girls is not a pretty thing to contemplate, particularly in New York City. I've long ago decided that American girls have next to nothing that might constitute a moral sense. They may have sympathy or pity, particularly if dumb animals are involved, but they've spent their entire lives being told that they deserve everything - on this earth and in the afterlife. And if an American girl conceived that my notice might stand between her and what she wanted, well!
The idea that someone is shafting me from a hiding place sort of puts me into a state resembling insanity. Chip has said for many years I was going to come to a bad end because I don't take it, it being all the injustices of life. But then Chip never met a tube-steak he didn't lube himself to receive.
So I called the number. The girl had listed some items for sale from her apartment. I said I wanted to see her futon and bookcases. She said I could come anytime the next day except between two and five, when she would be out. I said I'd stop by after five. I came at three. With a tube of glue, I sealed her door lock. I had a good time imagining her trying to get into her apartment on the day before she was due to move.
Yeah. I feel a little guilty, thinking maybe I hit the wrong target. But then, nobody in America apologizes for hitting the wrong target anymore. You can ask around. 9/11 changed everything. I'll give you a great example. Literally a day or two before we invaded Iraq, the news showed a big hole in Baghdad. Our vaunted intelligence had believed Saddam Hussein had been in a restaurant. The restaurant had been where the hole now was. Well, he wasn't there. Oops. Better luck next time. But nobody ever, ever, ever mentioned the thought that jumped into my mind. I never heard of no dictator, not ever, who had ever been in a restaurant by himself. Dictators are not known to go to restaurants to cook their own meals and wash their own dishes. So the conclusion is inescapable that innocent people died although Saddam did not. One cook, one waiter, one busboy, one dishwasher - minimum. Dead. As innocent as the old man behind the diner counter pouring coffee. And nobody, nobody, nobody ever mentioned it. Erased from the earth in total anonymity. Somebody I know said there is always collateral damage in war. Yeah. I'd like to talk to him after he suffered some.
So I feel a little guilty, but what kind of throwback am I? Innocent people are killed every day by the orders of the top, top, top people in this country, and they never say they're sorry. Moreover, if I had been them, I wouldn't have done it, so I wouldn't have to say sorry or feel guilty either.
So I can still turn on the lights in my bathroom while I shave.
However, you may be starting to wonder if I have become a mite unglued myself, and so I better proceed to my ending.
Last Tuesday I returned from work about two. I entered my elevator and pushed twelve. Then, without pushing another button, the elevator stopped on eight. The door opened. In front of the door stood a thickset man with stringy white hair. He had my nose.
People in the building are always pushing the down button and then the up elevator stops and they get on and go up when they want to go down, and so the neighborly thing to do is inform them. I held up my thumb and said, "Going up." The man said in a hoarse voice, "I didn't push the button." The door closed.
I dropped my bag in my apartment. I left to run some errands. I stopped in front of Said's desk. I said, "Said, is there an actor in this building?"
"What's his name?" asked Said.
"Harvey," I said.
"Harvey?" asked Said.
"Harvey Keitel," I said.
"Oh, HARVEY!" said Said. "Yeah, Harvey comes here. He visits here. I've seen him about three times. Yeah, Harvey." Said leaned back smiling. I did not ask Said if he thought I resembled Harvey. I thought it was enough proof of my thesis that I would now be able to say an elevator door opened and Harvey Keitel spoke to me.
As I said, from the ends of the earth brought face to face with total happenstance in mundane settings. I think it IS my nose.