(unpublished essay, 2008)

Back when I was in my first semester as a college freshman I took a public speaking class. For my final speech my topic was on the very hip topic of why we shouldn’t have dropped that Bomb on Japan. I put a lot of work into it, and my arguments were pretty adamant, and even though my delivery was mumbly and nervous, the writing was no doubt sharp and self-assured. It always was.

But I wish I had known ahead of time that the popular, liberal, mild mannered little instructor—one of the most beloved teachers in the school—had been a rifleman in one of the divisions scheduled to hit the beaches in Kyushu, the planned first phase of the final defeat of Japan. Let’s just say he didn’t agree with my speech. It was the only time all semester he had raised his voice in class, maybe the only time ever. All his calm public speaking demeanor caved in. I remember his angry “Bullshit!” About how he and his buddies had all considered themselves dead men. How the bomb had saved his life and the lives of thousands of soldiers from the suicidally fanatical Japanese who, every man, woman and child of them, would die in defense of their emperor. You could hear the fear, repressed these past thirty years, filling his mind. He was visibly trembling, his voice cracked with emotion and constrained outrage, a total what-the-fuck-do-you-know moment. The class sat in shocked silence. After a minute, maybe two, he collected himself and was teacher again. He even regained his sweet charm. I returned to my seat. The other students looked away; some of the girls smiled wanly. Oh man.  I felt like the Bomb had been dropped on me. And I deserved every kiloton of it.

He gave me a generous B. But that was the end of my public speaking career.

(Unpublished essay inspired by images from Paul Fusco’s RFK Funeral Train, 2000)

I was eleven years old.  Just done a report on Bobby Kennedy. Irish Catholic on my Mom’s side and raised that way, we adored the Kennedy’s. Went to bed knowing he’d won. Woke up and went out and picked up the paper. A tiny item on the front page mentioned he’d been shot. There was fear in the house. That inchoate, lightning bolt fear—Not again.

He was dead sometime that afternoon.

I’ll never forget the funeral train. Its televised passage took days crossing the country; gut-wrenching, tear-streaked days of despair and patriotism and just regular people crowding unbeckoned by the trackside, silent. They prayed, saluted, cried, or just watched. Very very still. Town after town. Village after village. Rockwell’s America, Faulkner’s America, Robert Johnson’s and John Philip Sousa’s America. One after another.

Months later we visited the grave site, as we had his brother’s earlier, who had then lay under an earthen pile. Now John was protected by solemn concrete armor, while his brother, the frail one, lay still under a heap of earth, covered with flowers and marked with flickering candles. Mom shushed us kids, and prayed silently.

Sometimes something is torn out of a kid, and never replaced.

(from a lost draft of a letter written in 1992 that disappeared from my neophyte fingers into the bowels of my C drive to be rediscovered much later, 1992)

The violence never came near our place, though the building I work in was right in the thick of things. Indeed, I was one of the last people to get out of the building before it got caught up in the rioting, mobs of Mexicans and Salvadorans, for the most part, swirling about looting and burning. Someone looking down from the roof of the building watched as a huge black guy drove up, got out of his car and smashed in all the windows of the Bullock’s Wilshire department store with a sledge hammer, then got back in his car and drive off. The locals  just swarmed in, stealing everything:  dresses worth thousands, art, jewelry. It’s an original Frank Lloyd Wright designed building and beautiful, but a warren of the obnoxious rich and it’s hard to feel too much pity but it’s always a shame to see such an architectural masterpiece so stricken. The next day— actually three days later, the area was a bit of a no mans land for a while— it’s windows shattered and tattered remains of drapes fluttering in the breeze, shit and rubble and broken up furniture strewn about the sidewalks I thought of those old WW1 photos of the stoven-in Clothe Hall at Ypres in Flanders, gutted by the German artillery. But then it’s always good to see things in the light of history; it gives them a certain perspective they otherwise lack— a three dimensionality if I may….  

You actually saw parts of town that are no more— the burning in the areas about where you had yer little accident were incredible— vast, like fire bombings in WW2. Hollywood Boulevard took a hit, too, and they stole Madonna’s bra, which is probably the reason that she had photos taken fucking that dog [probably not, actually.].

(2011)

We were in St. Charles County this summer, driving along the Mississippi River through a hellacious thunder storm. It was pretty exciting. We’d been driving along a little county road for miles and miles, which at one point led us out onto a gravel road that went for miles through the marshes, and the plan was to take this little ferry back across the river into Illiinos and enter St Louis from the east, crossing the giant bridge there with the arch aglow in the twilight. Seemed very romantic.  The rain put an end to that. The wind was blowing hard and the river was bucking and foaming and the ferry,  just  a little two car thing, was tied up at the dock. We drove on, slowly, and when we entered St. Charles County I got a creeped out feeling. I know a guy locked up there. He was a real hip cat in the day….popular college DJ, member of a hip noisy band, he knew everybody. He worked where I worked and was well liked, made quite a presence. Then came the crack up…we watched him disintegrate. Who knows why. The real world is harsh but you can’t hide in the underground all your life. Well, he got weird, lost his job, his wife left him, he headed east, wound up in St. Louis and it all went completely to hell from there. He rotted in a St Charles jail for a couple years. He was rotting there that blustery day we drove along the river. Gave me a weird feeling. It lifted soon enough. The bed that night felt good and I slept deeply. When we passed through St. Charles County again the next day it was sunny and I wasn’t creeped out at all. Kansas City beckoned with a night of blues and barbeque, and we drove straight west to get there.