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I recently received a very kind letter from my Aunt Naomi. She had been divorced from my Uncle Mort when I was in my early teens and I had not had any communication with her since. In her note, he remarked that she heard that I had become a writer, that I had always been a writer and had wanted to be one when she and my uncle gave me a thesaurus when I graduated junior high school.

At Porter Junior High we celebrated career dress-up day once a year. You'd come to school wearing the clothes that best reflected your highest aspirations. Mine had been to become Edward R. Murrow. I found a fedora, wrote the word "press" on a small index card, and wedged it into the hatband. I imagined myself trooping up the steps to the CBS studios on Manhattan, notepad in-hand, hurrying to beat the competition with my latest scoop.

By the end of my first year of college, I had already amassed a considerable portfolio of stories, culled from interviews with Katharine Ross, Ray Bradbury, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. I had a press pass that let me into the great venues of Los Angeles, the Hollywood Bowl, the Cinerama Theatre (where I attended the opening of the film Woodstock), the Pantages, the Greek Theatre, the Ice House in Pasadena (where I'd brush elbows with emerging bands and comics), and the Shrine Auditorium. I had been to the opening of Hair, a concert of little-known Loggins and Messina, and covered anti-war marches along the Sunset Strip. By my senior year, I had transferred to San Jose State, where I amassed clips of anti-war riots, marches for Civil Rights, and the burial of a brand new Ford Pinto to wage an environmental protest. I was ready for great things.

Hardly a week following graduation I took a job with a small-town daily in Davis, a college community just west of Sacramento. We had an afternoon deadline, which meant I drove to work around 5:30 am, wrote six or seven news stories, then drove to Woodland, where a competitor paper was printed in the morning. I'd buy a copy, race back to my newsroom along Route 113, and re-write any stories that we might have missed.

My editor at The Enterprise was young, energetic, and a great mentor. But our publisher believed that the role of the paper was to echo the concerns of business and advertisers, which meant that everything I wrote passed through his heavy filter. He would re-write quotes or facts that cast the slightest aspersions on local businesses and their push for economic growth. Not an unusual role for a paper, but in a town exceptionally devoted to preserving the environment and stemming growth in the mid-1970s, it was the kiss of death. The mayor, Bob Black, had been arrested for laying his body across the railroad tracks in town through which munitions trains carried weapons westward to the Vietnam War. Now he led an effort to stem town expansion and spur the development of open space and parks.

I would cover a meeting where the council voted to stem growth, write the quotes accurately only to have them corrupted by my publisher. After a fashion, it was difficult to get anyone over at city hall to talk to me. But on the morning of September 15, 1975, I finally had my coup.

I drove to Sacramento to witness the arrival of President Gerald Ford at the state capitol. I wore my press pass in my coat pocket and carried a large format camera. Shortly after Ford arrived, I took positions with the press corps, and followed him and his secret service agents across the capitol grounds. Just outside the east entry, we passed a woman dressed in a hooded red robe.

It was Lynnette "Squeaky" Fromme, former member of the Mansion Family, who muttered something about the country going to pieces, pulled out a .45 Colt pistol and took aim. Two secret servicemen tackled her while the rest formed a wedge and spirited the President into the Capitol. I ran to a telephone and phoned in my story. We were an hour ahead of deadline and it would make the afternoon edition.

But my publisher, unsure of my ability to get facts strait, or with the right slant, decided to hold the story, awaiting confirmation of the assassination attempt by the wire services. He held it beyond deadline, and my account ran a day late.

Seventeen days later, I took my notebook with me to San Francisco. Ford was speaking at the St. Francis Hotel and I hoped to run into Megan Marshack, a college friend who was now covering the White House for AP Radio. As we waited for Ford outside the hotel we watched the secret service prepare Ford's limo. The moment the President emerged, Sarah Jane Moore was barely 40 feet away when she fired at shot at him. She was carrying a .45 automatic, 113 rounds of ammo, but the secret service got to her before she could fire a second shot. Again, my paper held my account until they could get a wire story. I had been an eyewitness to two assassination attempts and lost two scoops.

The summer of '76 I went to the Ford White House, courtesy of a press pass from Megan. As I sat in the press office, I saw a bunch of hard-drinking, bloated correspondents who awaited for "official" documents to come from the Press Secretary before heading to their typewriters and telephones. At that moment I knew that even at the apex of my career, I would be a fetch-it scribe for the interests of people in power.

It soured me. And four months later I walked into my office at my new daily paper in the Bay Area and pasted up a huge poster of Nelson Rockefeller. Under the portrait was a refrain from Daniel Webster about preserving the health of the union by breaking up large, corrupt interest groups. My editor, pissed, took it down. There was a clear rectangle now on a wall, a spot surrounded by bumper stickers, posters, press releases, and sports photos.

In the place where the poster had been, I pasted my resignation letter.

The Hearts of Soul

“If you ain’t got no money, ain’t nobody calls you honey,” Bo Diddley.

Granada Hills High School still stands at the north end of Zelzah Avenue, the same street where the first oil well in the San Fernando Valley was drilled in 1916. Granada Hills had been home to the Sunshine Ranch, where farmers tended well-manicured orange groves and grew apricots, walnuts and beans. In 1959, the same year my family moved to California, that Soviet shoe-thumping demon Nikita Khrushchev visited Granada Hills. He had wanted to go to Disneyland, but U.S. security forces were concerned for his welfare, so they chauffeured him instead to witness suburban splendor on Sophia Drive.

You'd hardly find a whiter place to live. Driving up and down our block on Gaviota Avenue, you'd see tidy lawns, each dotted with an orange tree spared when the orchards were paved for subdivisions. A Japanese-American family lived across the street. But other than the Kotas, every family resembled characters from 1950s situation comedy shows--in other words, bland beings of varying shades of white.

Over on Zelzah, we had two Blacks in our high school class. The boy ran track and the girl was a cheerleader. Among our massively huge graduating class of nearly 1,000, there were many Hispanics, reflecting the bussed-in students from neighboring Latino communities of San Fernando and Sylmar, but just our two Blacks. It would have been insane then--one year following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.-- to even think that America would ever elect a Black President.

Raised in a progressive Jewish family--my mother loved Sammy Davis, Eartha Kitt, and Jackie Robinson--I had great love for Black players on the Dodgers and Rams, and loved Elgin Baylor. But we were frightened of "Negros"--or as my father called them in unbridled Yiddish racism, "shvartzers". During the Watts Riots in the mid-60s, ash from the burning Los Angeles neighborhoods wafted over the hills and dropped like heavy snowflakes on our lawn. It snowed hatred for weeks. My parents locked the doors at night and worried that the burning would come to Granada Hills.

I had a sense of excitement for it, hoping something grim or powerful might explode into the vanilla calm of my staid adolescence. In my senior year, I took serious action: I joined Rinn and the Hearts of Soul.

Rinn wasn't very Black at all. In fact, she was Armenian. With her kinky Afro cut and wide nose, she may have passed for Black if you closed your eyes when she sang. Her two brothers played guitar and drums. But if they wanted to complete their soul band, they needed brass. So they recruited me to play tenor sax and heavily nordic Bruce Classpill to blow trumpet.

At first, we sounded like disparate parts of a rusted farm implement. But Rinn could belt out the standards. What we needed was rehearsing--and rehearsal space. Rinn said she'd look into it, and we were stoked when she picked us up at the high school band room and drove us to a house off of Chatsworth Street. It was a swell house for the neighborhood, on a large lot, with a cast-iron gate where we entered the yard. Rinn led us to a small studio that stood just beyond a wide, glistening swimming pool.

I was amazed to find myself inside a recording studio with sound-baffles in the walls and ceiling, an array of tape-to-tape equipment, microphones, mixing boards, and a genuine wonderland of guitars, saxophones, drum kits, and amplifiers. Rinn said we had the run of the place, but we had to take loving care of the instruments.

We'd work for hours on our set list: Knock on Wood, I Heard It Through the Grapevine, Tracks of My Tears, My Guy, Chain Gang, In the Midnight Hour. Rinn had worked out choreography, too, so when we were playing, Bruce and I would kick our legs in a Slauson rhythm or Mashed Potato, raise our horns, and end with a two-step shuffle. We were Black as ignorant whites could be.

There was a baritone sax in the studio and I found a way to work it into the repertoire, especially during Do You Love Me and Come See About Me. The bari took all the wind you had, and when you played the low notes, your entire body vibrated with the pitch. You were part of the instrument.

When we broke, we usually went out through the iron gate, but once we went through the house, having been invited inside for lemonade. The owner was a tall, strikingly handsome Black man with gigantic hands that wrapped all the way around when he shook mine. His name was Bo Diddley.

I had no idea he lived in the Valley. In fact, he kept the house for two more years before moving to Florida, where he passed away in June 2008.

Sadly, Rinn and the Hearts of Soul never performed a live gig. We played to friends at Bo Diddley's backyard studio, but eventually fell apart.

During that senior year, our student newspaper was invited to interview members of the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panthers. But no campus organization would host them, and the principal forbade a visit on school grounds. I'm not sure I asked their permission before volunteering my home, but my parents were great sports about it, and one evening toward the end of the semester, four Panthers drove out from Watts and held forth in our living room before a group of students and teachers.

I can't remember the details, but one of the Panthers said something that terrified my parents. My father left the room and disappeared into the den. He later said I shouldn't "try a stunt" like that again. My mother said something about their suggestion that my parents give them our television and jewelry, but I wonder.

During my first semester at college in San Jose, I was asked by the Spartan Daily to cover a meeting of the Panthers on the east side of town. It was held in a small house, packed with Panthers and revolutionaries. The speaker was Angela Davis, and when she spotted me in the crowd--which must have been easy for her--she pointed to two bodyguards and they ushered me outside. They were polite and insistent.

I am certain today that if those misguided men had only known that I had blown bari for Rinn and the Hearts of Soul they would have let me stay.

How Myoko Sakatani Saved My Life

It was the summer of 1969. On August 15, thousands of the Woodstock nation gathered at Max Yasgur's farm for the greatest music festival of the modern era. A month earlier, on July 16, the Apollo 11 spacecraft carrying astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins blasted off for the moon. That same day, I had visited a friend's house in Granada Hills. We had graduated high school just weeks before and we opened a few cans of Old English 800. I got drunk for the first time.

I went home to sleep, the world swirling at a nauseating clip around the bed. Around three in the morning I woke to a blistering headache, took some aspirin, and went back to sleep. The following morning, the 17th, I felt woozy, and still nursed a powerful headache. It was lawn-mowing day, and I was in the backyard with the push mower, running even rows across the grass in the hot sun while listening to updates of the Apollo flight on my transistor radio.

That night I went to sleep with an unabated headache and an odd twinge in my left arm. No matter how I turned in bed, it wouldn't go away. And around dawn, I woke to a suffocating chest pain. My mother woke and telephoned the doctor, who recommended in customary fashion that I take some aspirin and go back to sleep.

But I couldn't sleep, and the pain grew worse. My peripheral vision was flagging too, and I felt like I was descending down an ever narrowing crevasse. My mother got me up and into the Rambler, then we drove for the emergency room.

The doctors took one look at me, wheeled me into the coronary care wing, fitted anti-embolism stockings on my legs, and injected my stomach with a blood thinning agent that burned like a wasp sting. I spent the rest of the day in a blackout.

In the morning, the Apollo astronauts had begun orbiting the moon, and I was far from Earth as well. I woke as a cloud, floating on the ceiling of my hospital room, washed in a purple cloud, gazing from what seemed miles away at my inert shape in the coronary care bed, wires and tubes running out of my body to a bank of machines. Considering the brutality of the pain of the previous day, I felt wonderful. Peaceful. Joyous.

But moments later my mother walked in, the doctor behind her. She sat on the bed and wept. The doctor was talking to her. And at once, I felt as if I were tumbling, sucked down into a whirlpool of graying light, spinning deep into darkness.

The next time I woke, I was back in bed, listening to the beep of the heart monitor, gazing at the dull morning light streaming through the window. The Eagle had landed, and Neil Armstrong was taking humankind's first steps into moondust. I didn't know about that. What I knew was that my chest ached, my head spun, and that I felt very alone in a small room where nurses watched through a plate glass window.

One of them was Myoko Sakatani. She spent hours at my side over the following week, talking softly, reassuring me that all would be well. I was surely the only 18 year-old to ever have occupied center stage at the coronary care unit.

Edwin Zalis, head of the UCLA heart team, was brought in to diagnose the trouble. He said I had myocarditis, an infection of the heart lining. Usually fatal. Cause uncertain. I would need plenty of undisturbed rest. I was lucky, he said, to have been an athlete on the high school track team my senior year, running the hills above campus and strengthening my heart.

Myoko came in and out of the care unit in her white uniform. She held my hand. And when I asked to see my girlfriend she said that there were orders that only my immediate family could have access. I asked again, and she shook her head. The days and eves were a long blur of intravenous meals, bedpan interventions, and powerful drugs. There were other patients in the room now. I recall a man dying in the bed adjacent to mine and his monitor alarm ringing with sharp insistence until the nurses turned it off.

A week later, I had been wheeled out of the coronary care unit into the regular population. Even so, Myoko came to visit. And one evening, after everyone had gone and the halls were dark, Myoko opened the door to my room and led my girlfriend over to the bed.

* * *

I had been released at the end of the month. My father collected news magazines of the Apollo triumph and brought them to my bed at home. As I learned to walk again and build strength, I toured the neighborhood, hand-in-hand with my sweetheart. We watched the throngs at Woodstock on the television.

That year America sank further yet into the mire of Vietnam and my draft number had been called for the lottery. I was chosen 19 out of 365, destined for active duty. But Dr. Zalis said I was in no condition to serve; he wrote a letter to the draft board, and I was excused from military duty. I would go to college in the fall to study journalism at the end of the summer of 1969 when Myoko Sakatani saved my life.

Years later I contacted the hospital to try and find her. But the personnel department reported that she had left the hospital and there was no way to track her. Since then, the hospital itself has closed. But I found my own way. When I look at the moon and think of men walking there, I think of my longest summer and say a prayer of thanks.

From the Balcony

Elizabeth Anne Bloomer was born in Chicago in 1918, the daughter of a traveling salesman for a rubber company. An Episcopalian tomboy, Ms. Bloomer took a job teaching the fox trot to young girls when she was only 11 years old following the stock market crash. Four years later, her father died of carbon monoxide poisoning--an apocryphal occurrence that may have been a suicide. Later she studied dance with Martha Graham, actually appeared at Carnegie Hall, and following a disastrous first marriage and divorce in 1947, she met a veteran pilot and former Michigan football star named Gerald Ford and married the future President in October the following year.

Megan Ruth Marshack was born in Sherman Oaks, California in 1953. She had wanted to be on the boys football team, and kept her aggressive edge long after she completed her two year degree at Valley College and her journalism degree at California State University, Northridge. Tenacious, she took at job with Associated Press radio and worked her way into White House coverage, where she undoubtedly met First Lady Betty. Not long after presenting Vice President Nelson Rockefeller with a individually-wrapped supply of Oreo cookies, Megan came back to her apartment in Chevy Chase with his gift of the elegant sculpture of a Chinese jade horse.

I know, because I was staying there that week. I had been in college with Megan and admired her quick success. She was exceptionally talented, a voluptuous stunner with striking long hair and yummy lips...and the temperament of a bulldog on your cuff. She was brilliant, knew art of the Ancient Near East, and conversed with White House reporters on their own turf, on their own topics, mano a mano. She was great friends with Helen Thomas. And that summer, the summer of the Bicentennial, she had finagled a White House press pass so I could stand the following morning with the media on the White House lawn during the visit by Queen Elizabeth.

The next day, I put on my suit and caught a bus from Chevy Chase to Pennsylvania Avenue, NW. It was a stunning, sunny day with a light morning breeze. You stopped at the security kiosk on the side facing the Executive Office Building and presented your credentials, then walked the circular drive toward the press entry and the south lawn.

The entry to the south portico was roped off and the press corps crowded against the apron. Press Secretary Ron Nessen appeared on the balcony briefly, summarizing the schedule for the visit, then out came the Queen, Ford, and Betty into the brilliant sunshine. The Queen wore a blue suit, white gloves, and matching pillbox hat. As the cameras flashed, the Queen issued her stiff royal wave and plastic smile, then posed between the President and First Lady. Betty had a wide grin plastered to her face as she waved, her body uncomfortably stiff as they stood together.

After the photographers had sufficient opportunity, Ford put his hand at the Queen's elbow and steered her back toward the open door to the White House. The pair ducked inside and for a moment we were stunned. The First Lady, who apparently had no idea she had been abandoned at the rail, continued to wave and smile at the press corps. Reporters began to twitter. After a deadly odd moment passed, Ford reappeared, took his wife by the arm and escorted her off the porch.

Later in the White House press room, a reporter from the Detroit Free Press explained to me that Betty had a bad back, had been on a course of pain pills which, perhaps, accounted for her quirky trance. Later, of course, the nation learned the truth about Betty.

She had long been an anomaly among Republican First Ladies, speaking candidly about CB radios, mood rings, divorce, abortion, and drugs. Her breakthrough candor about her struggle with breast cancer and 1974 mastectomy made her a national heroine. But I am more impressed about her open struggle and victory over drugs and alcohol and her founding of the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, not far from where she and President Ford retired and lived up until his death in 2006. Renowned as a treatment center for Hollywood personalities and other wealthy people, Betty's center has flat out saved families, saved lives, and brought peace to countless others.

Here's sufficient irony if you need it: On February 8, 1940, financier John D. Rockefeller hosted a dinner for Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. The watershed event helped publicize the organization's new treatment for alcoholism while lending it credibility among New York's highest social circles. Unfortunately, Rockefeller fell ill that evening, so he sent son Nelson to host the event.

As for Megan Marshack, when I finished my Bicentennial Tour I lost touch with her forever. What I do know is that she was hired as a research assistant to Nelson Rockefeller and was the woman who called 911 as he lay dying from a heart attack. Her New York co-op was only two doors down from where the former Vice President was living, and she suddenly disappeared from public view shortly after his death, fueling suspicions in cities where suspicion is king.

It could not be as easy or simple for Megan to have escaped the limelight and achieve the peace that Betty found following that awful day on the balcony. Her name flickered briefly in the news during the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal. I'd rather associate her bravery, intellect, zest, and panache with the angels of Betty Ford's highest nature. After all, albeit briefly, Megan played tackle football with the big boys.

Fifteen Minutes

I had lost my savings, was living in a room at my parent's home in Los Angeles, struggling back to my feet--for who knows how many times already--when my friend Mike gave me a part-time job lugging audio and video gear around to conventions and business conferences. I broke a few windows in nice hotels and restaurants schlepping the heavy video monitors and speakers around tight corners. Mike took it all in stride, but you knew it bothered him to have a guy on his staff that had the dexterity of a moose.

We were working the control room at an entertainment fete honoring Gregory Peck when I asked Mike about the teleprompter. It was a computer screen that mounted directly below a camera lens so the "talent" could stare at the audience and seemingly recite long strings of text without a flinch. The screen was wired to a portable computer into which the operator had uploaded the script. You spun a small wheel to move the text down the screen, timing it with the natural speech patterns of the actor.

Mike didn't have the gear but I introduced myself to the woman running the prompter, and she gave me the number to her agency. I went down to the small studio in Hollywood, tested out at 70 words a minute on the keyboard, and was hired immediately. The owner showed me how to mount the screen beneath the camera, how to run the timing wheel, and adjust the type size since some actors had vision issues. The larger the text on the screen, the faster you would have to spin it to keep pace.

I was hardly trained appropriately when I was sent to Warner Brothers to run the prompter for a weekly sit-com with Norm MacDonald. The actors typically had their own prompter operators for the show--if they used one--but I was there to help with the production of promos or commercials. The camera gear was delicate, and I feared messing up an expensive lens, but the director of photography helped settle me down and, aside from a system crash that required a reboot, it went off famously.

Next, I was sent to run the prompter for a lawn fertilizer commercial starring James Whitmore. Whitmore was a hero from my childhood, had starred in Them!, one of my favorite horror films about giant nuclear ants that attacked Los Angeles. For the fertilizer ad, we set up on the lawn of an elegant mansion overlooking Los Angeles' elite Riverside Country Club. I was scared shitless.

The director brought Whitmore over so he could run through his lines on the prompter and Whitmore, now in his mid-70s, needed extremely large type if he were to read without the aid of his glasses. He was distinguished, smoking away on a fragrant pipe, looking over the top of his glasses at me as I spun the wheel. He was generous and kind, wishing me well in my new job, in the "industry", as everyone called it. I told him how much I loved his work, and how I scared the crap out of my brother those Saturday evenings when we watched the horror movies. It had slipped my mind that he had recently completed an Oscar worthy performance in The Shawshank Redemption as an elderly convict so troubled with the chaos of life on the outside that he hangs himself. Later I would regret commenting on his role as a hunter of giant ants.

It went so swimmingly that the production company put in a good word for me and my boss sent me out again, this time to a lot in Culver City where Arnold Schwarzenegger was completing a role where he fights the Devil incarnate. I was to film a spot he was sending distributors, encouraging them to sell the daylights out of the movie. He arrived on time, puffing away on a cigar, and decided he didn't need me. He would wing his lines. I was astounded at how short he was, despite his muscles, and four years later he would lead a recall effort that ousted California Governor Gray Davis and cost me a job at the capital.

Next, the agency sent me to Maria Conchita Alonso's house in the Hollywood Hills to shoot a promo for a charity. Sweet and elegant, she provided a great counterpoint to Schwarzenegger's pompous indifference to people around him. She had starred with Schwarzenegger in the horrible sci-fi failure Runnning Man. Alonso held a coochie dog on her lap, encouraging the crew to relax between takes, wishing me well as I boxed up the teleprompter and wheeled it carefully out the tiled entry.

For my part in "the industry" I was paid $15 an hour. The teleprompter operators, so far as I was led to believe, were not organized in an entertainment union, and so I would have to find something else to do if I were to climb out of self-inflicted debt. When I hitched my abilities to the emerging dot-com business, I found relief.

But before I quit "the industry", I had a last brush with stardom. I had acted before, as one of the thousand extras in the movie Hello Dolly. My claim was that I appeared as a member of a marching band in the parade sequence with Barbra Streisand. You can see me, age 15, with the huge bass drum in-step next to Dolly Levi. And my moment: during one of the takes, I accidentally whacked Miss Streisand in the ass with a drum mallet and it was tangled in her gown. Director Gene Kelley shouted "cut" from atop his boom, and we went back to our starting positions. Streisand had been brittle to everyone and suddenly, I was a hero among the extras on that hot August day. Even Walter Matthau gave me a wink.

So my second brush, then, came when the teleprompter agency sent me out to run the gear for a lesser-known television show called Crime Strike. The segment was to focus on home invasions, on how to protect yourself from nasty intruders. But the "heavy" had not shown up on set once I had the gear in place and the director, spotting my shaved head, the shoulder tattoos emerging from my tank-top, pressed me into service. No, I would not receive equity rates, but I would be paid for stalking a businessman, following him home in a white Torino, bursting into the house behind him and holding a knife to his throat while his poor wife looked on in terror.

I still run my copy of the video from time to time to impress my friends. I don't tell them what is coming. In the opening moments, the uniformed police adviser to the show comes on camera and discusses how creeps will stalk business owners and follow them home to rob them.

Cut to a low angle. The owner lock his business gets in his family van and heads home. The shot: framed through the window of a nearby white Torino. In the foreground: the hairy hand of the criminal tapping on his dash. Pull back to see: the Torino following the van through the streets of Glendale.

Once home, the business owner opens the front door and, in the street behind, a bearded man with a shaved head and obvious tattoos bursts from his vehicle and races up the driveway. He's really holding a plastic knife but, in the closeup, as he shoves the owner to the floor and presses the blade to his throat, the knife is real metal and flashes under the bright lights. The bearded intruder grits his teeth--he's going to get what's coming to him--and the wife shrieks...

I'm a star.

After the Galilee

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain. ~ James Baldwin

Every morning we would rise in the dark and cold Galilee and walk to the tractor shed for coffee and cookies. We divvied ourselves into work teams, climbed into the kibbutz wagons, and Yossi or Bennie or another leader would hook up the Fordson tractors and drive us up to the banana fields. The sun would toss up a broad announcement of light behind the shadows of the Golan Heights, then burst up suddenly behind a wave of wind that swept across the sea and up the ridges where we bounced along the rutted lanes. Swallows exploded from the trees and sent up volleys of squawks and fluttering wings into the brightening sky. To the south, Mt. Arbel sliced through the morning fog like the ghost-prow of a ship.

At the first crossroads we stopped to wave at Reuven, who stood motionless in his own shadow, his eyes tucked under the wide brim of his blue cotton cap. The first day when we passed, David pointed to Reuven and whispered about the faded cobalt numbers that had been tattooed into his forearm at Auschwitz. His fingertips were stained dark orange from decades of holding cigarettes, his lips drawn into a thin line, a face devoid of palpable emotion. He had lost his wife and children in the camps.

When I inquired if he ever hopped in the wagon to help harvest the bananas for export to Europe, Yossi told me he wanted nothing to do with Europe. And besides, he was too spun out to work anymore. The Hebrew word for it was masugga. It was close to the Yiddish my mother used for the same expression, meshuga. I knew it well.

We merely drove past and let Reuven be, stopping on the way back to drive him to the kibbutz commons for lunch. It was as good as it was likely to ever be for him. And if he was out in the fields contributing to the effort--in his own way--it was honorable of the kibbutz to sustain his life with food, medicine, shelter, and love. But seeing him in that state did little to unravel the decades of hatred I had mustered for the Germans.

Every fall, the Jews of the San Fernando Valley gathered at Devonshire Downs for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Thousands of us would huddle in huge halls and tents at the fairgrounds while the Rabbi read the service and the Cantor blew the sacred ram's horn. I hated it because it typically fell on the same dates of the World Series, it took me out of class during those precious get-to-know-you days of the new fall semester in school and, worst of all, you had to fast from sunset to sunset. Everyone had headaches and was miserable with atonement.

During the service, the Rabbi typically moaned about intermarriage, how it was killing off the precious bloodline of the tribes of Israel and, of course, how the Arabs were bound to push all the Israelis into the Mediterranean Sea. This moment, coupled with years of hearing diatribes from family members against Germany, German cars, blond people, the Wagnerian operas I loved to play on the stereo, etc.--added to years of watching documentaries on the Holocaust, piles of shoes, of bones, of eyeglasses, of living skeleton survivors in rags--well, I was sure the enemies of Judaism had us right where they wanted us, all assembled under one roof in the San Fernando Valley where they could turn on the gas.

So naturally, when I left Israel in the spring, when I took a ship across the Mediterranean and later boarded a bus across Europe, I would have nothing to do with Germany. When my fellow riders got off to tour the German cities along the way between Athens and Amsterdam, I stayed aboard, determined that none of my money would fall into German hands. A cavity search in the icy rain at a German border post (because of the terrorist Bader Meinhoff threat--not because there was a Jew on the bus) further set my heart and soul against them.

* * *

It took me many years to concede that I was not born with hatred, that I learned how to loathe others as a way to remain a victim in my own flesh. It was a way to take poison and forever wait for the other man to die.

In retrospect, I cannot accept my breakthrough as coincidence. The melting of the hardened heart may take a lifetime, but the suddenness of how my perspective was altered continues to astonish and remind me to search out where blindness blocks me from grace.

In early 1991 I was diagnosed with severe depression. That in and of itself was no surprise to me, given the suicides in my immediate family, or that I had spent years attempting to treat my full-body gloom with alcohol or drugs. The doctor sentenced me to cognitive therapy and a medication that felt initially like a lousy batch of LSD that some crazed hippie had concocted in his garage. It was humbling to be meshugga. I couldn't stand the counseling, which was cut-rate and run by an amateur at a county medical clinic. One time she asked me to "walk through the fire" with her support in going cold turkey off my medication, and I ended up in the hospital with toxic shock. She was fired and the facility is lucky I was too depressed to sue their hide.

That winter, I wrote a poem by the wood-burning stove in my cabin in the forest near Chimacum:

On the Promenade of the Seasonally Affected

The last Canadian goose six weeks into fall
rises off the putting green, all
business, and dives behind Mt. Townsend.
The November moon ends
all hope this year we shall not go down into winter.
We trudge through town
hands in our pockets, facing down the wind,
the raw-toothed leaves and sand.

Down in Chimacum the ensilage for cows
weeps methane. Crows pair up in rough-hewn boughs,
school girls rummage through strewn hay
gone to loam in shallow lanes.
Girls are much too new to feel the ache
of natural ruin and fall, arctic air
smokes from their lips, their hair
flared into the draining light of the season.

The rebellion of human chemistry betrays reason.
It’s early dark, dawn’s too late,
& in the collapse of the year We Affected contemplate
fatality, our blood thick beneath the ice
of dim temper, curt hearts out of practice.
A feather on the sidewalk, eiderdown,
and you weep for nothing. (The pulp mill lays down
heavy over the hills a wet black stench of paper.)

The doctor said if medicated you will need to taper
off the elixir and let the Visitor exit as he will.
How lucky to be common for just one season, spill
over into autumn, then skim the black ice of winter, into spring,
the summer light splintering in sheer white threads across the lawn.
Then you drift into fall, falling, nesting like a naturally grown
creature, family around you, friends, Christmas bright,
no sneering thief to filch you off to night.

Early in the new year, I moved to town to be closer to people. I found a lovely little place overlooking the countryside and the Straights of Juan De Fuca. You could see the masts and stacks of large steamers that sailed past town beyond the line of forested hills. Through friends, I discovered a group of depressed people who were looking for company. They sought a safe place to feel temporarily insane in a world with little tolerance for the meshugguna. We began meeting at my house every Thursday night.

There were six of us, and we all came from elsewhere. Claudia spoke with a heavy German accent, wore her hair pulled tightly into a braid, and her eyes flashed on you like a heat ray. I liked her, but felt the old interference rise up like a powerful wedge between us. Each week "We Affected" met to discuss our highs and lows, our walk among the "normal" people. (Normal, my friend Don says, is a setting on a clothes dryer). We'd end each session with prayers and hopes, holding hands, and we'd agree upon a project to complete during the upcoming week. In one case, we settled on creating art that reflected our experience.

The following Thursday night we assembled again in my candle-lit living room. We concealed our projects in a paper bag or box until it was our turn top speak. We went around the room, laughing, applauding each others audacity. It wasn't much for art, but each piece took a chink from the wall. When it was Claudia's turn, she peeled back the brown butcher paper...

It was a bird cage from a pet store. Inside the cage sat a blond-haired doll with blue eyes, alone on the floor, painted tears streaming down her face. The door to the cage was fastened tight with a padlock. "She doesn't know," Claudia said softly, "where is the key."

We sat silently a while in the candlelight, sparing the empty platitudes and false starts at meaning. We held each other.

* * *

A few months later, our group disbanded. The meshugga were all doing well, moving out into the world again in widening orbits. It was spring and the Casablanca lilies rose in the bed beside my front door. Ants marched up and down the long, green stalks and the cherry blossoms broke into fragrant faces in the trees.

Claudia and her husband left town suddenly, quite without fanfare. But before she left, Claudia dropped by to give me a gift wrapped in plain brown paper. Inside the box I found the Native American tapestry she had made, a dream catcher of dazzling threads and beads with feathers streaming from the sides. It hangs on on my wall today, helping me remember precisely how we are freed.

Dreams and wings, dear Claudia. Ich liebe dich.

Cooking Shoes

There are worse jobs than selling shoes, but I've only had a few of them. Working at the JBL stereo speaker laboratory was one. The factory was managed by Japanese workflow experts. You had to be in your seat where you glued metal nipples into the center of speaker cones by the time the bell rang to start your shift or you were docked a quarter-hour's pay. Five minutes before your break, the bell rang to tell you it was coming. Then it rang to say it was time to take ten minutes off. Five minutes into the break, it rang again to alert you the break was nearing an end and to return to your station. It rang once more at the end of the break and if you were not seated, fastening nipples with glue that melted your brain cells, you were docked another fifteen minutes' pay. And so on through lunch and quitting time. I lasted two days.

In high school I fell prey to the CutCo Knife company scheme. You were driven into strange, dangerous neighborhoods at night to go door-to-door to sell cutlery. You carried a catalog but, strangely, no knives. They would have come in handy in some of those neighborhoods. I lasted one night.

I stuck much longer--three weeks--at the Lipton Tea Factory in Santa Cruz. It was a graveyard shift. Lipton bought these fabulous German-made machines to package their products. At the top of the behemoths, you poured in sacks of loose tea. Out the bottom came cellophane-wrapped boxes, each box filled with paper-wrapped teabags in neat rows. The machines did all but sweep the factory floor and clean themselves of the monstrous piles of tea-dust that settled everywhere. Our job was to don ear protection, goggles, and surgical masks and scale the towering gantries above the machines to blow the loose tea to the floor. We carried long hoses filled with compressed air. In all this gear we looked like trashtronauts. After blowing down clouds of dust, we formed moguls of tea in the center of the floor with push-brooms and filled plastic bags with the stuff. The work had to be done while production was suspended, so we worked through the night.

I could never get used to sleeping by-day, and so I fell into a coma during our breaks and lunch hours (around 3 am). By the third week I was living in a death-trance, scaling the long gantries with wobbly legs and bracing myself against the guardrail. The end. I had my last check forwarded to my campus mailbox.

Next, I worked the carousel and thrill rides at the Beach Boardwalk. I was a good fifteen years older than the rest of the employees who popped their pimples, talked in sentences spattered with "like" and "rad", and wore the same polyester blue and orange jumpsuits with matching caps. The carousel featured a ring toss game: you'd clutch a metal ring the size of a half-dollar and toss it in the gaping mouth of a huge wooden clown as you circled past. If you hit the bulls eye, the clown would light up. Stray rings that missed the target would clang and roll to the floor. Some of the teen-aged workers would ride the edge of the carousel, trapping a ring against the concrete floor with their shoes, superheating the metal so that kids attempting to grab an extra ring during a pass would burn their fingers. I complained and was summarily transferred to the house of horrors, where I hid in the dark with orders to bust adolescents who used the opportunity to neck or smoke dope. Instead, I sat silently and would leap out in front of a passing cart and scare the crap out of them. That job lasted less than a month.

I digress. I really wanted to talk about selling shoes, which I did for the summer between my junior and senior year. My boss was Mr. Smiley. I kid you not. Mr. Smiley weighed in at over 300 pounds and had the demeanor of a man who was deprived of a lifetime of sexual privileges.

I hated selling. You were expected to direct each buying customer to the cash register where you'd press them into impulse buying of polish, laces, hosiery, handbags, belts, and other nonsense that Mr. Smiley identified as "up-fronts". So I would hide in the back for as long as I could, filing stray boxes that had been left on the showroom floor. I'd climb up a ladder and stand there, meditating on my wretched lot.

Mr. Smiley had me sussed out to perfection. He'd come through the curtains to the rear, find where I was lurking, and say, "Hyman, there's someone out there looking for you." The first few times I fell for it, then I knew it was but a ruse to get me out on the floor. Often there were no customers out there at all. But when Mr. Smiley told me to go, I went.

I hated customers. Most of the women had no intention of buying. They would pick three or four pumps at a time, and ask for sizes that bracketed their appropriate size, so you'd end up with a stack of fifteen or twenty boxes of shoes when they walked out. I won't say I didn't enjoy fitting some of them, letting my left hand cup their calves while my right twisted the shoe into place.

I could catalog the behaviors of customers and often shared my findings with my co-workers. For example, Mexican men had an aversion to large feet. They would frequently ask to see shoes in sizes much too small, and I would comply, watching them wince as I forced on pairs with a shoehorn. We would "cook" their shoes. You cooked shoes by putting a wooden block into them and twisting a hand screw that worked like a reverse vice, planing out the width of the shoes. Of course, the practice ultimately weakened the leather, so the shoes would wear out quickly, so Mr. Smiley considered cooking a boon to the footwear industry.

Sometimes Mr. Smiley assigned you to a customer--male or female--who had no conception of proper hygiene. You did all you could to keep from vomiting into your nose. Once I thought a man was wearing grimy socks only to discover that he was barefoot. We all felt that we were owed for waiting on these customers. So we'd find shoes for ourselves and bury them in the trash, take them out to the dumpster during our shift, and recover them afterward.

When I quit the shoe business forever, I owned a collection of sneakers, boots, and loafers along with an "up-fronts" assortment of belts, polish, and socks. Amelda Marcos, in her glory, had never owned so many bowling shoes.

Rocked

It began with a bang and ended in a series of distressing whimpers.

The Russians had finally bombed Los Angeles. It was not so much as a deafening boom, but a long tympani roll that gained power, then curled off to the distance in a series of decrescendos. The official report reads like this:

The 1971 San Fernando earthquake (also known as Sylmar earthquake) struck the San Fernando Valley near Sylmar at 6:00:55 a.m. PST on February 9, 1971, with a magnitude of 6.6.

Six-point-six...hardly worth a bother in the arcana of bad hands dealt humankind by our living planet. There have been stronger earthquakes in the Valley's history. The Northridge Quake in 1994 registered 6.7. It damaged my family's home, weakening walls and destroying joists, and my parents were forced to move into an apartment for months while repairs were completed.

But in the dark on this day, in my first semester of college, two minutes before my alarm clock would have gone off--except that there now would be no electricity or water for two weeks--I was lifted from bed, tossed like yesterday's pair of socks against the opposing wall, and then the bookcase fell down on me, raining a small stack of volumes, then more and more like an argument against illiteracy.

The roar had not abated when I crawled across the darkened room to the closet door, cutting my kneecaps on a mosaic of debris. Isn't that what the atomic disaster drill said: crawl to a small space without windows and sit patiently for your skin to melt.

As I sat in the closet, arms braced against the jambs for the inevitable end, you could hear the groaning of the earth as it rolled, the creaking of beams in the ceiling--hundred-pound monsters that could come down on you--glass shattering in the kitchen as cabinet doors opened and dishes cascaded to the floor, and members of my family, in their darkened rooms amidst whatever was truly happening and what their senses led them to believe was going down, screams of "Oh, God, let it stop."

The rolling stopped, along with the loud cry of the earth, and then we made our way in the dark to the front door, stepped out into the morning light that was beginning to rise up over the San Gabriel Mountains. My mother sat on the front step and fished for a cigarette. My father walked to the end of the driveway and, seeing little evidence of why any of this had happened, came back and shrugged. Up and down Gaviota Avenue people came out of their homes in their pajamas and bathrobes, hair disheveled, faces ashen and grim. Dogs, cut loose when the masonry walls of the neighborhood came down, raced up and down the avenue in packs, barking madly, tongues streaming from gritted jowls, their eyes fierce and searching.

The earthquake ruptured a segment of the San Fernando fault zone, a set of north-dipping, high-angled reverse faults along the southeastern margin of the San Gabriel Mountains. It caused more than 10 miles of discontinuous surface ruptures with average displacements of about 3 feet both horizontally and vertically. A strong aftershock sequence followed the main shock and included four quakes in the Magnitude 5 range. The quake claimed 65 lives and caused more than half a billion dollars in damage, including the destruction of two hospitals, two freeway interchanges and the Lower Van Norman Dam. Damage to the dam caused concern that the dam, of the earthen bulwark type, might collapse, in whole or in part. Much confusion ensued as various agencies declared a need for the mandatory evacuation of 40,000 people, or voluntary evacuations of various portions of the San Fernando Valley below the dam. This depended on which agency was consulted, and often the evacuees were not able to be informed of the status of an evacuation in a timely manner, often returning home just as the police arrived to notify them of a new evacuation order, or evacuating at a moment when officials decided not to evacuate. Communication was made difficult by disruption of telephone, water, and electrical service.

Twenty minutes, a half hour after the quake, we had our first aftershock where we stood in the driveway waiting for the sun to warm us up. I was sitting on the hood of my dad's Dodge and it fell beneath me, then bounced back up, and kept bouncing for half a minute. There would be two week's of these, spacing themselves out, diminishing in strength, but their unpredictable intrusions at all hours made sleep nearly impossible. With each, you experienced the trauma of the first blow that morning.

It took a while for the police to send a motorcycle down Gaviota. The officer spoke into his handset as he drove along slowly, advising us to get in our cars and drive south--preferably out of the San Fernando Valley entirely. By now it was fully light and people went back into their shattered homes to gather their belongings. If the quake had lasted two seconds longer, there would have been no motorcycle; there would have been the thunder of waves, then silence.

It was hard to think of leaving in such a hurry, but we were terrified of the consequences of remaining. There was no power in the house; it was strewn with wreckage; and somehow water from the backyard swimming pool ended up in the living room.

There have been stronger earthquakes in the Valley's history. The Northridge Quake in 1994 registered 6.7. It damaged my family's home, weakening walls and destroying joists, and they had to move into an apartment for months while repairs were completed.

But this was our first quake, and as we found flashlights and searched for essentials to pack into the car. The second of the four-successive 5.0 aftershocks rocked us again and as we dropped our lights, we were plunged into darkness again.

I was in my first semester of college, so it was important to me to pack my books, in addition to my toiletries and a few days' change of clothes. My parents and siblings packed their own satchels.

Moments later we walked back into the sunlight and put our belongings in the trunk of the Dodge. As we backed out of the drive, you could see everyone in the neighborhood--up and down Gaviota--lugging their essentials to their cars. Apparently I was the only one taking books. People carried huge televisions, armloads of rifles, cargo boxes the size of pirate's chests, skiis, power tools.... It astonished me how many of my neighbors owned rifles.

Even as rescue and firefighting efforts continued, police arrested three looters in Newhall and reported others stealing form quake-damaged stores in the desert community and sporadic looting at shops along Hollywood Boulevard.

The giant tremor swayed Los Angeles' new forest of high-rise buildings. Jutting Occidental Towers three-building complex has been closed as building crews check for structural damage.

Olvera Street, a picturesque tourist attraction adjacent to the Plaza in the heart of old Los Angeles, is a shambles of collapsed stalls and strewn merchandise.

The quake was so intense it briefly knocked out some voice communications at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, according to a spokesman. The agency said that it lost telephone contact with the Long Beach control tower.

Buildings swayed and cracked from Los Angeles west to Santa Monica, northeast to Hollywood and Burbank, then throughout the San Fernando valley and the Saugus-Newhall area.

Up the street we drove, along the shops on Devonshire where looters had already found the shattered windows on supermarkets and drug stores and were racing out with armloads of food, radios, appliances, whatever they deemed valuable and entitled to steal. People on street corners sold huge jugs of water at insane prices.

That night we tried to sleep without success at my cousin's home at the farthest end of the valley from the damaged reservoir. The morning paper ran a photograph of a small pickup truck that had been crushed when a freeway overpass dropped on it, killing the two occupants. Nine people died in their beds at local hospitals when the walls collapsed. Statues toppled off their bases and three-hundred-year-old adobe walls crumbled at the Mission San Fernando.

Once, during the week, I was allowed back into my home with police escort, to recover my asthma medication, and walked the dim halls strewn with wreckage. In the middle of the afternoon, the house shuddered under the lash of another aftershock and I braced against the walls as they wobbled.

My world had been rocked off its foundation by the power of the earth, the stupidity of its petty residents, and the end of what had been a magical suburban existence just miles from the where they filmed the television shows that portrayed simple, funny, and normal families residing in tidy homes on clean, orderly lanes lined with palm trees and manicured lawns.

Matched Luggage

Hello, I must be going,
I cannot stay, I came to say,
I must be going. -- Groucho Marx

Before all of this happened, I had been a youngster without a heavy burden, without dark sirens of judgment that would lure my heart off course. Why is it that so many of us spend the last third of our lives in search of the first third?

I've heard addicts say that when they took their first puff on a crack pipe, the immediate feeling was so euphoric, then ephemeral, and ultimately elusive that they would spend their waking hours in search of that transcendent 30 seconds. I know for a certainty that I felt that way the first time I took a handful of paper-wrapped sugar cubes from an Italian restaurant and secreted them in my coat for the ride home in my parents blue '54 Chevrolet. The discomfort of riding with unhappy people instantly went away, and I spent the entire drive home along the Ventura Freeway, unwrapping nugget after nugget in search of the first bubble of comforting solitude.

Along the way I became a virtuoso escape artist. Be it ever so humble, there's no place like out of here! Although I added preoccupations with food, drink, sex, drugs, or work as a means of avoiding a world with too many sharp edges, I knew how to disappear without the means of any artificial substance. I could drop through an inner hatch into a fuzzy sanctum where all around me buzzed, but I was secure and protected. In short: I erased myself.

I ran away from home at age 9. I was pissed off and tired of being yelled at, and so I started up Longridge Avenue without a lunch or sweater, headed north on Woodman, and got as far as the hospital when it got dark. Ten miles, maybe. Far enough to know I had created sufficient turmoil, but not far enough to continue without a plan and supplies. There would always have to be supplies. So I let the hospital call my mother.

Years later, after so many wake-up calls, I found that the pain I feared was ancient, tribal, cellular--and that I had already survived it. And here in my latter third of life, it became apparent that the evasions postponed reconciliation, were only preemptive strikes against my own happiness.

But as I said, before all of this, I had lived out in the open. I can almost see it from here. Longridge Avenue. I can see Laurie Finley. We were seven years old, living about four or five houses apart. In between lived the dreaded Mr. Feindish, who would scowl and snag softballs we hit onto his lawn before we could retrieve them. Laurie was a tomboy, although I could make no such distinctions at the time. She was my friend. She evolved from the same soul matrix as I. Loved whatever I seemed to love. And she could hit the crap out of a softball.

I remember four or five friends in my lifetime where the brambles of judgment fell away from the start. I spent every waking hour at home excited about the possibility of heading out to the street to meet Laurie Finley. I spent every moment playing alone in the yard waiting for her mother's station wagon to pull around the corner of Longridge so I could run to meet her.

But eventually my sister was born and the little house we had on Longridge was too small for us. The Saturday before we moved, Laurie Finley's mom arranged a party in their yard so I could say farewell to the neighborhood gang, but I never went. I woke up that morning and my eyes had slammed shut--an allergy the doctor said--and I was in agony.

Years later, after I had a driver's license, I drove back to Longridge and passed by the old stationwagon in Laurie Finley's yard. I did it many times over the years, but never got out and knocked on the door.

The next time I felt that way, I met Matt Garbutt. An only child, Matt was showered with affection and was the most inventive, creative boy I ever met. He could ride a unicycle and play an upright tuba at the same time. We were inseparable. We spent hours wide awake in his bedroom, making up comedy routines and satires that we recorded on reel-to-reel tape. His mom would shout for us to shut up and go to sleep. I couldn't wait to meet him in the schoolyard, at the band room, to work on our sketches. Matt was the only gentile friend at my Bar Mitzva.

But when we entered high school, Matt found a different circle of friends and had little to do with me. "It's because you're Jewish," my mother said. But that was an explanation I had heard too many times upon my failures in the social world. Most of those things happened because they happen to everyone. I followed Matt's career, after he left college and became a symphonic tuba player and conductor. We've never made contact.

In high school I found Dianne Chassman. She was lovely, delightful, gorgeous, an exceptional flautist, and we shared a friendship without a sexual trajectory. You would hardly know it to see us. I would sneak out of bed at 1 am to phone her. She had her own phone! (Not many kids our age did in those days.) We'd trade intimate secrets, share dirt on other friends, spin our separate dreams). After a while, finally, we had our own sweethearts and drifted apart. By then, I was embarking on my middle third of life.

I sometimes wonder why I no longer feel that insatiable pull toward another person, that unbridled enthusiasm for intimacy despite the rough edges. The attraction wanes. Have I been irreparably numbed, distracted by narcissism, made wary by pain I have already survived? My deepest friends today are just like me, it seems. We have matched luggage. We're here, but we're always leaving. We're loving by turn, distracted by struggles, often disappointed, and yet we're all still here, in each other's corner, a phone call away. Now the phone goes with you and sits in your pocket. So why do you sometimes seem so far?

Here I am in my last third, wondering how to return to that open place without fear, without judgment. Is it you? Is it me?

Flying Blind

Whenever I board an airliner through the jetway, I practice a well-grooved ritual that I believe keeps the plane in the air. I won't spell it all out for fear of compromising its spiritual integrity, suffice to say it involves touching the airliner with my hand, looking at the runway, talking to God, and stepping into the aircraft with faithful choreography.

My first flight in an airliner came in 1959 during our familiar transmigration of body and soul from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. We flew out of LaGuardia on a three-tailed, glamorous Lockheed Constellation, lit up by spotlights on the damp runway with its bright red "TWA" insignia behind a veil of showers. In those days, you had your own compartment and the stewardess handed you a blanket, pillow, and comfortable slippers.

You could see the fiery exhaust streaming from behind the propellers in the dark gloom and tendrils of lightning burst from the pillars of black clouds. I thought the engines had caught fire, and I slept fitfully. In the morning, the painted desert stretched out below in pink and amber light. Over Las Vegas they served eggs and bacon and toast, and after the Constellation dropped hundreds of feet in a sudden air pocket, I threw it all up in the tray.

The details may be apocryphal, but I haven't been comfortable in an airline since. Those falling oxygen masks during my flight to Athens were doozies.

Leaping Off
In an attempt to cure my fear of falling, crashing, & dying, I signed up for a full course of hang-gliding lessons in the 1970s. We drove out to Sand City near Monterey before sunrise and met on the tall dunes in the face of an offshore breeze. These were first-generation Regallo kites with delta shapes, heavy, ungainly, hard to steer, and we strapped ourselves into them, ran headlong down the dune, then lifted the leading edge into the breeze and were swept into the air. It felt as if a powerful hawk had seized your spine and dragged you into the sky. After flying forty or fifty yards, you lowered the edge and crashed into the sand.

I stayed with it much longer than I had intended, although I never gained the expertise or willingness to leap off of a cliff. And when my instructor failed to tie himself into the harness one day and fell a thousand feet from the kite during a steep dive off of the Santa Cruz mountains, I canceled the balance of my lessons.

Acting the Imbecile
In my senior year of college, The Boys took flying lessons. Dennis, Russ and Kevin signed up together. The year before they had all gotten motorcycles. I would visit them on my trips to Los Angeles from northern California during semester breaks to view the toy de jour. I was as excited about going up in a small airplane with them as one might yearn to be covered with hot tar. I hated small planes. They bounced around in the clutches of the wind. They had fixed windows that made the cramped quarters even more catastrophic when airborne. And they fell out of the sky all the time.

But fearing judgment, I crawled into the rear seat of a low-wing Grumman Tiger and Russ powered the plane down the runway as fast as the little propeller could spin. Just beyond the control tower, I expected the nose to rise gently, for Russ to throttle back and climb. Instead, he raced headlong toward the end of the tarmac where I could see the ratty weeds poking up as they grew near. At the last minute, Russ yanked back the yoke, dropped the flaps, and the plane lurched into the air with a wrenching g-force that felt like a fat man jumping on your heart.

Ten minutes later, over the Tehachapi Mountain Range, The Boys broke out the funny cigarettes, filling the cabin with smoke. I could protest, I suppose, but at that moment it felt necessary to join them.

Homeward bound, moments after Russ turned base to land the Tiger, he nearly crept up the tail of a twin-engined plane in the pattern ahead of us. "He's in the wrong place," Russ said as we shouted. I told The Boys my flying days were over, but sadly, I went again and again because I liked the pot. I was still terrified every take-off and landing, and Russ' barrel rolls, hammerheads, and other aerobatics did little to change things. My persistence in this case does not reflect upon me kindly.

New Equipment
Coming in from a delightful trip to the Yucatan, I found myself seated by my customary right-front window when the Mexicana Airlines 727 jerked up in a labored climb moments after it had descended to the runway at Chicago's O'Hare Airport. Out the window as we rose, you could see the planes crowding the runway where we had meant to land.

Terrifying. But that experience pales next to the Milan-bound charter I boarded in Toronto in 1985. Shortly after takeoff, the jet slid into a steep turn, dropped into the clouds below, and made an emergency landing. We learned after we had bussed to the relative safely of the terminal that a window had blown out in the cockpit and charts were flying around the cabin.

Hours later we boarded--unknowingly--the same aircraft, which made our landing across the ocean at Amsterdam's Schipol Airport far more exhilarating than the champagne they poured so freely to placate us. The brakes had burned up earlier on landing in Toronto. After it screeched to a stop, we left the plane and waited a few hours for, as the airlines love to say, new equipment.

A Man's World

Tell me why it is we don’t lift our voices these days and cry over what is happening. Have you noticed: The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?
I say to myself: “Go on, cry. What’s the sense of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out! See who will answer! -- Robert Bly

"The world needs a man's heart" -- Joseph Jastrab

Men do not yearn for talk about men, for we have heard abundantly on this subject most of our lives from women, and we're quick to wince, quick to blame. While mothers, daughters and wives have a determinate angle on us, they do not know the beast from the inside. We work hard, die much too young, or continue to die slowly inside, unappreciated, banishing ourselves to the sofa or, worse, we suddenly find ourselves out in the yard sharpening our blades for war.

(This is the point in the writing where real dudes or the homophobic log off the website, shred the book, set fire to bad news. But read this entire sentence before you roll your dulled, dry eyes: The reason you won't or can't participate in this discussion is because, up till now, you've never been asked by another man to have a true heart-to-heart, man-to-man. This is a different thing than slamming down your shot glass, turning to the other guy, and blaming "the bitch" for your self-inflicted misery.)

You were raised by a loving mother who supported your earliest campaigns and a father who destroyed his body to lay bread on the sideboard. Perhaps even back then, as it certainly is now, your mother worked, too. Mine built periscopes during World War II. In the fifties and sixties it all looked fine from where you sat quietly at your end of the dinner table. Dad went to the shop or office, your mother attended to the care and feeding of your body and soul and -- under best circumstances -- she tried to listen to your exploits, adventures, triumphs and early sorrows. She knew all about empathy, about love... but she did not know YOU. Dad might have known, but he wasn't saying. What you heard growing up was from women and all about your shortcomings: we're not intuitive, we're violent, we smell funny, we're strange, we're slobs, we live to screw, we're snakes and snails and puppy dog's tails.

Even among those boys who were loved and recognized in youth, there isn't a man I know today who doesn't occasionally act like an asshole. It's our nature. It's theirs, too, by the way. But women have felt our savagery historically and paid dearly, so don't ask them to concede the darker part of themselves--or suffer ours gladly. But when men won't talk to each other about our sudden melancholy, our shadowy fears, our loss of financial, spiritual or emotional security, about how it is to live for the two week golf trip, the ownership of the remote control, the ability to find a quiet place where we don't have to respond on cue to feelings we have yet to identify, we let women do our defining for us--and we end up torching the house.

Today there are thousands of decent, angry men in my life, co-heads of households who have lost the generational means of sustaining themselves and their loved ones. They sold cars or fished deep waters. They invested in training for life in a cubicle that folded up on them as when a circus leaves town forever. When I worked as a Fortune 500 web consultant, my firm hired a man to fire half the staff. A professional butcher. He was a scary fellow of innuendo, deflections, and the ability to smile to your face while he locked you out and took your badge.

There are fathers and sons, too, throughout the country, who have lost their land and found themselves numbed as a conduit in a fast-food assembly line; and there are fatherless, inner-city youths who have never understood a thing about their rage except that it flows in torrents of a steady dance beat, boys and men who have watched the upper class accelerate away from them without notice, let alone justice or compassion, or men who have listened patiently for decades now to female rage and felt themselves grow fearful, ashamed, distant and unheard. A ruthless energy runs through the thoroughfares of our cities and towns. It even appears among the fortunate men for whom life is good, where security and friendships seemingly abound, but where talk is sterile and ideas have withered.

So, let us say here and now that YOU are decidedly invited to the discussion. In fact, it's your turn. I have found men who have opened their hearts, expressed their rage, their shame, their frustrations, speaking of and listening to our relative truth without giving into fear or the need to blunt it with drugs, or gambling, or hookers, or endless food buffets and a routine coma in front of talk shows each night. When we give voice to our secrets, we discover that most of us are alike at the most profound levels. We may be violent by nature, but are loving by opportunity, by good fortune, by magic.

We need not take all too seriously the women criticizing our love of sports, or yukking up our friendships, calling them "male bonding", or "doing the guy thing." They never question communion among themselves, and perhaps some are afraid of their men changing, despite their claims otherwise. For when that happens, women will receive the equality they more than deserve; they'll lose their identity as the sole care-takers of inner life. We've abdicated our half of the responsibility, walled ourselves off of our families, our children, our peers, and our wellspring of hope. Most women I know are sick and tired, anyway, of playing mom to grown men, and men, freed by our new connections to each other, can learn to define ourselves precisely as we are: bright, organized, creative, intuitive, fathering, funny, imperfect, growing, wounded or betrayed, grieving, angry, lonely, unfulfilled, or rudderless in a cold culture we helped create and sustain by our silence.

One place to start talking is with our friends and at home, fathers speaking their truths to sons, to their fathers. Another is in the workplace, and through our music, painting, acting, hiking, being men among men. In the 1990s I attended one of those heralded Days for Men conducted by Robert Bly. I entered a hall and passed down a welcome line of every man who had entered the room before me. The 600th man into the auditorium was greeted by 599 men. There were grandpas and sons, fathers and infant boys, gays, disabled veterans, twins, cousins, great-granddads in military uniforms, drumming young men in warpaint, whooping, thundering, applauding, loving men who met to see what it looks like from the inside.

And when a solitary janitor, a woman, entered the foyer for a split second with her broom and bucket, 600 voices died.

Undaunted, I spent the next few years at Men's Wisdom Councils in Seattle, where we drummed, formed talking circles, met in small groups to talk about relationships, right livelihood, being fathers or sons, how to take care of our minds and bodies, how to find our own native spirituality. I sat in sweat lodges with men of the S'Clallam tribe, pouring water and praying over rocks for the right relationship between men and the earth, our forebears, and with our families. I built a sweat lodge in my yard and invited men to invite their friends. I taught my father to hug me--or at least helped him to remember how its done--and I kiss him every time we meet.

There once had been powerful fraternal organizations for men, where they volunteered in service to others, raised money for men's scholarships, or built sanctuaries where they could be equals without relation to their jobs, backgrounds, or income. My dad's group of choice was the Knights of Pythias, an organization founded after the Civil War. Such an odd ring to its name! And when I visited their website recently I was astounded to my core to know that my own father had been a member. The order was founded on theories of Pythagoras. "It was a maxim of Pythagoras that the two most excellent things for man were "to speak the truth and to render benefits to each other." Here is more of what they say about themselves:

"The Fraternal Order of Knights of Pythias and its members are dedicated to the cause of universal peace. Pythians are pledged to the promotion of understanding among men of good will as the surest means of attaining Universal Peace. We believe that men, meeting in a spirit of goodwill, in an honest effort of understanding, can live together on this earth in peace and harmony. We seek those who agree with this belief, and have a belief in a personal Supreme Being, to join our ranks in an effort to reach 'Peace Through Understanding'. "

Many fraternal organizations are dying out today, unable to bring aboard newcomers or reach young males. I volunteered at a Shriners' Hospital for severely burned children and learned that the number of men who join up is shrinking, meaning less funding in the future for such noble endeavors. All along I had been laughing at their silly fez caps to take the time to learn what they were about.

When I had been eight or nine, my father took me to a Russian sweat bath (he called it a schvitz) in the Jewish section of Los Angeles. But I spent the better part of the evening in the company of men, young and old, who sweat in thick clouds of steam, whacked each other's backs with eucalyptus leaves, shared conversations about synagogue, school, work, and wives. I had no idea there was such a place, and I'm sure it's long gone now.

Greening up from our own spiritual ice age won't be easy and the opportunity--the absolute necessity of it--comes at a time when men are surely needed. The ice caps are melting. There's a plan for Iraq. Brothers or butchers, which shall we be?

Our work together is not some new self-help program, for "self" is isolated and isolating, and it needs no help. "Self" rather needs our restraint. Simply, we need men in our lives, to give to ourselves freely without strings. We simply must, because it's up to us.

Turn Left at the Dog Star

"Is there anybody alive out there?" -- Bruce Springsteen

The Mercury-Atlas spacecraft carrying Alan Sheppard set sail on February 10, 1962. It was a sub-orbital venture that carried Sheppard 116 statute miles skyward and ended almost as abruptly as it began. I woke at 5 am to watch the launch on our flickering black and white television. By then I was 10 years old and had already traveled much further into space than Sheppard.

My first favorite novels were written by science fiction masters, and they cultivated in me a hunger to travel across the starry heavens to encounter, one hoped, a friendly face, an outstretched hand, people who knew how to live in this mixed-up mess of exploding personalities and uncomfortable atmospheres.

Ever since, I've searched in the star-ship of Florence's mighty Duomo, amidst the marbled forest of pillars in Notre Dame, in the glittering candles and gold elephants of Ganesh in Buddhist monasteries, among the weeping, gnashing throngs of davening Jews in synagogues, in the stoic faces inside the al-Aqsa mosque, and amidst the whirling dervishes who surf the cosmos without leaving the room. Trapped in my ever-decaying body, bound on a planet ruled by the least-qualified humans to hold the job, I sought escape to the heavens where I would find beings of my own higher nature.

In my youth, I gobbled up the first novels of early Heinlein where, in Red Planet, Jim befriends the young Martian boy Willis. After Jim rebels against the uber-authoritarian humans at his boarding school, Willis entreats his elders to let Jim live among the Martians. A friend in an unfriendly cosmos is a friend indeed. Later, I drank deep of Ray Bradbury and kept his signed copy of Golden Apples of the Sun ("How do you like these apples?" he wrote to me) until I saw him as an adult manning a booth promoting nuclear power.

And I rose the morning of each Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo launch, turning off the sound so as not to wake my parents, delighting in the raw chutzpah of men who strapped themselves into hardware that frequently blew into billions of pieces in a fireball of inept human engineering. I marveled in Ed White's first walk into space, wondering what he truly saw through his silvery visor, if the stars fanned out in vertiginous depths without atmospheric twinkle or--as I later learned--spherical aberrations of the lens. I wept when White perished in the January 27, 1967 flash fire of an oxygen-rich Apollo spacecraft, the result the alchemy of human pride and blunder.

In high school I wrote a script for Star Trek, visiting Desilu Studios for personal copy of the show's bible, a booklet that talked about the power of warp drive, the concept of transporting, and the nature of Spock's Vulcan ears. The literary agent to whom my father sent my completed script actually delivered it to Desilu and later wrote back to my dad, "The script is just too similar to recent episodes they have bought, but as a writer, your son definitely has it." Grist for a life of letters and starry explorations.

My friends, too, remained loyal to the fantasy that we'd outlive human ignorance and someday fly to the heavens. Dennis, Russ, and I packed food, sleeping bags, and wild brownies into the trunk of a blue Chevy Malibu and drove 9 hours through the night to Oregon's Columbia River Gorge in February of 1979 to see a total solar eclipse. Once you've seen one, you'll understand why people save their hard-earned money for years to fly around the world to see another. The sun rose over the sparkling river, then the birds were silent, and a shadow moved across the rolling hills of the Dalles, a black terminator rolling steadily, ominously over trees and farms until it swept directly overhead and plunged us into darkness. The stars flooded out and then the black, obverse sun gleamed like a onyx, endless eye with a flaming corona overhead. Just as the chill of night seeped down, the sun coursed effortlessly through the sudden dark and flared bright and warm overhead and the starlings burst from the trees and down the canyon in broadening circles.

We piled into the Malibu again, the three wanderers, out to the Dryden Research Center in the morning chill of April 14, 1981 to watch as the first space shuttle Columbia left its cradle atop a 747 airliner and sailed gracefully through the bright morning sky to a safe landing in the California desert. Surely, there was room for us aboard.

In college I volunteered at the NASA Ames facility for sleep experiments to explore the effects of long-term space flight. I enrolled in astronomy 101, joining other seekers on dark mountaintops for unobstructed views of heavenly bodies. Once you knew where to look, you could spot the moons of Jupiter, pinpricks of hopeful light arranged in their ecliptic plane across the bright, huge mother world --spot them with simple binoculars. And aided by telescope, you could see the azure dust of the great nebula Messier 42, just there, in the middle of the jewels of Orion's belt. The science was baffling to a lad who never passed a math class the first time. But I took a second course in planetary astronomy, continuing until the physics overwhelmed me. Dropping out, I decided that I'd rather be an innocent bystander than a scholarly inquisitor.

In the 1990s, I visited the Johnson Space Center in Houston, the control center for all manned space flights. The gigantic Apollo booster rocket lay on its side, a discarded cocoon from which spring the dreams and conquest of the lunar surface. Sometimes, I turn on the NASA channel just to watch space travelers perform their silent terpsichore over the whirling blue heavens below, the heavens that separate them from where I whirl at a thousand miles per hour on this precious living rock that bridges this world and the next one. I marvel at the black and white science films of my childhood where scientists once predicted that we would orbit satellites that forecast weather and aided communications and how, today, I watch the NASA channel via one of those artifices, that the brave new world of my childhood is the same one that I take for granted today, the same one that threatens our existence as going human concerns by our thirst for material mastery at the expense of our most-precious resource of wonder, generosity, and kindness.

In the 1960s, we embarked on what we called the Space Race. It was a race for military supremacy of the heavens. Today, the Russians we hoped to beat now share bunks with us in an orbital station we've assembled like some ticker toy of disparate parts. Over the decades I've rather thought that the race was for survival itself in the face of our own stupidity. I hoped we'd get off this diseased rock and find a new home among the wandering worlds unblemished by human stain before we exterminated ourselves on this one. We seem to be losing that race.

"Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?" Rilke wrote. "Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals are aware that we are not home in our interpreted world."

If you can, pull away from the hypnotic eye of the television some night and drive out beyond the bubble of city lights to where the Milky Way spreads its lace across the heavens. Don't you ever wonder, "Who made all of this?" Those billions of burning stars--some newly birthed, some dying, some long gone into dust--are members of our extended family. Onward against the current of our own egos we search the cosmos for the God inside of us, the universal soul that inhabits every living being residing in strange or forgotten worlds. Encountering them for the first time as we extend ourselves, they reach out to welcome us home.