Clifford Browder's Blog, page 17

403. Breaking the Law

BROWDERBOOKS

Countdown:  As of 7 a.m. today, 3 weeks, 4 days, 2 hours, 3 minutes until the release of The Eye That Never Sleeps, at which point all pre-ordered books will be shipped. (Assuming the publisher starts shipping at 9 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.)

 

A story of the strangest friendship that ever was: a dapper young bank thief and the detective hired by the banks to apprehend him.  For more about this and my other books, go here.  
Fascinating New Yorkers has been reviewed by The US Review of Books.  Reviewer Gabriella Tutino says, "There's something for everyone here in this collection of profiles, and it serves as a source of inspiration for readers who love NYC."  For the whole review, click on US Review.

                                        Breaking the Law

         This post is all about lawbreaking and those who do it, and why.  But first, I should explain that I’m taking “law” to mean, not just statute law, but any rule or regulation put forth by authority.   As for lawbreakers, I’ll start with myself.
         Years ago, when I was still hiking in city parks and beyond, I went to Pelham Bay Park to hike and pick raspberries that grew there in brambles all over the park.  As I was picking them, a park vehicle stopped nearby, and three park employees came rushing over, two young Latinos and an older woman.”         “Picking berries is forbidden,” announced the woman.         “Oh, I didn’t know that,” I said in all honesty.         “Yes, it is.  Just leave them for the birds.”         “I will,” I said.  “I honestly didn’t know.”         It was agreed that I could keep what I had already picked, but no more.  That settled, the trio returned to their vehicle and drove off.  Why all  three of them had to come running over, when a quiet reprimand from one would have sufficed, escaped me.  Nor had I ever seen birds eating wild raspberries; mulberries, yes, but never raspberries.


What got me in trouble.
Alpsdake
         Later that day, having traipsed about the park, I was leaving, when I saw a motor vehicle of the Parks Department mowing a growth of grass and weeds.  Near the edge of the park was a stand of chicories, a common summer roadside wildflower, a lovely sky-blue in color.  Though the chicories were not blocking any path or other feature of the park, the vehicle, driven by another park employee, quickly mowed them down. 
         This angered me.  Since the park people were so insensitive to the beauty of wildflowers, I vowed then and there that I would pick raspberries to my heart’s content.  But not in plain sight, and not near a path that could accommodate park vehicles.  Since the park is large, and there are many narrow paths where vehicles can never go, this was easy, for the stalwart guardians of the park were wholly motorized and never left their vehicles to patrol on foot.  So I became one of a multitude of park visitors who harvested wild raspberries in the month of July.  And since my fellow law breakers came on weekends and harvested every ripe berry in sight, I learned to come on Thursday or Friday, by which time another crop of berries would have ripened.  My diet was enriched for several weeks with fresh wild berries, nor was I robbing the birds of a feast, since I never saw one in the brambles.


Here am I, breaking the laws of a vegan diet.
Gooey goodies are verboten.
         This was not the only time that park employees proved overzealous.  In 1986 the Parks Commissioner took exception to Steve “Wildman” Brill leading groups on foraging expeditions in the city’s parks.  Brill, a bespectacled, bearded ecologist who on these tours usually wore a pith helmet, was teaching people how to forage, that is, to find free food growing in the parks.  So on Saturday, March 29, two undercover park rangers signed up for a trek, paid Brill in marked bills, and tagged along as he invaded Central Park, taking photos of him as he foraged.  At the end of the tour the two minions of order radioed for help, and two uniformed park police arrived, arrested Brill for criminal mischief, handcuffed him, and whisked the desperado off to the Central Park station house, where he was fingerprinted and given a summons to appear in court April 18. 


Steve Brill, eating something wild.
Photo courtesy of Steve Brill.
         Interviewed by the press, Brill confessed to picking and eating dandelions and other weeds in the park.  That a man had been arrested for eating a dandelion in Central Park was widely reported, but the public, instead of sharing the Parks Commissioner’s indignation, gasped in disbelief and then erupted in laughter.  Of all the crimes to be arrested for – eating a dandelion in Central Park!  Both radio and press went wild.


TEETH OFF THE GRASSParks Muzzle Weed MavenThe Man Who Ate Manhattan
TOUR HOST GETS TASTE OF LAWPlanted Decoys Nab Foraging BotanistThe Man Who Ate Manhattan was nabbed in mid-bite.
          
          The charges were soon dropped, and since he knew the parks’ edible plants better than anyone, the miscreant was hired by the Parks and Recreation Department to lead foraging tours in the parks, but to limit his attention to plentiful species.  Sometime after that I went with Brill twice, once in Central Park and once in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, and can testify that he had always harvested only plentiful species that grew abundantly in certain locations year after year.  
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What got Steve Brill in trouble.
Tony WebsterAnd on those tours he recounted gleefully how he had once been arrested for the heinous crime of picking and eating a dandelion in Central Park.  That was years ago, but to my knowledge he is still leading groups on foraging tours in the city and elsewhere.  And I on occasion, while hiking alone in Pelham Bay Park, have at times picked, not only raspberries, but also in late summer a bunch of mugwort, an aromatic plant that grows there abundantly to the point of choking out other species; I use it to give a tang to my salads.


Mugwort
R. A. Nonenmacher
         I have broken other laws as well.  In years of drought, the state has often closed its trails to  hikers, for fear of fires.  But hikers’ associations have protested, arguing that seasoned hikers build no fires in drought-stricken areas, and would be useful scouts for reporting problems along the trails.  Once, not knowing of the closure, I went to hike along the Palisades and found the trail shut off.  I hesitate, undecided, and along came a runner who had been running along the trail.  If he can, I can, I decided, and I’m not about to start any fires.  So off I went.
         This reminds how, when the solons of Washington managed to shut down the government a few years ago, friends of mine who loved to hike in Acadia National Park in Maine found the park closed.  Insisting that they, as tax-paying citizens, owned the parks, they found a way in and hiked the trails like always.  And they weren’t the only ones; there were dozens of other patriotic intruders doing the same.
         So far, these lawbreakers, myself included, can justify their actions, which were a reaction to arbitrary and unreasonable authority.  Now let’s take it a step further.  Back in the 1970s, when you entered the subway system by inserting a token in the turnstile, a friend of mine admits to having used slugs instead.  The slugs were flat metal disks about the size of a token and thus let you ride the subway free.  Did she feel guilt?  Not at all.  This was back when a rebellious young generation embraced the motto “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.”  Being under thirty, she considered herself a member of the counter culture, and the MTA – the Metropolitan Transportation authority, which ran the subways – was clearly the establishment.  The trains were old, without air-conditioning, and filthy, and muggings on the platforms were only too common.  She got the idea of substituting slugs for tokens from a Vietnam vet who came back from there very angry.  She finally stopped using slugs when the girlfriend of someone she knew, who wore a fur coat and had an executive position at Exxon, got arrested by the subway cops.  My friend still has one of the slugs and is proud of her act of subversion.
         For me, her story is problematic.  I’m not a born rebel, got along well in school without breaking rules as my older brother did, thus often getting himself in trouble.  Not that I’m a blind conformist, just one who can usually fulfill himself without breaking rules or wanting to.  When, occasionally, I’ve seen someone jump over a subway turnstile without paying, it annoys me, since I’ve always paid my way.  So it becomes a question of when can you justify breaking the law, and how do you avoid the implication of self-interest.  My friend knew why she did it.  What justification did the executive in the fur coat have?  Nothing convincing, I suspect.
         Once, to avoid jury duty, I lied.  Jury duty is always a chore, but I had done it many times, sometimes at a cost to myself, since I was a freelance editor working on my own, with no employer to continue paying me while I served.  But one day, when I was in a second-hand bookstore on Fourth Avenue, some people came in who had just been to the jury duty office downtown.  They were livid with rage, having been treated nastily, and had to tell their story to others so as to recover a bit of sanity.  Their story so angered me in turn that I decided to dodge jury duty.  When next summoned, I wrote a short note saying I had left the city and moved to Illinois.  I forwarded the pre-addressed, sealed note to my mother in Evanston, Illinois, and asked her to mail it.  She did, so it arrived with an Illinois postmark and I was not summoned for jury duty.  Then, in time, when jury duty conditions had been improved, I decided to move back to the city and be a dutiful citizen; when summoned next, I served.  And served and served, until age finally made me exempt.  Did I feel guilty about my deceit?  Remembering the story of those people, I did not.  But having absented myself for a while, honesty finally won out, and I resumed serving until legally exempt.
         Now here’s another story about lawbreaking that raises a key issue.  While corresponding with a gay inmate in North Carolina, I encouraged him to write his memoir, which, sometimes with great pain, he did.  In the course of it he told me of working as a camp counselor in a boys’ camp in North Carolina, where a boy of about sixteen told him in confidence a story.  The boy – let’s call him Don – lived in a small town with his parents and younger brother.  One day he heard from the other boys his age that a man had moved into town and was having sex with the boys.  The sex was consensual, and the kids liked it.  So Don connected with the man, liked him, and had great sex.  Then his younger brother likewise connected with the man and had sex.  Then one day the police turned up at Don’s house.  Having heard rumors about the man having sex with underage boys, they had arrested him and needed a witness to testify in court.  The man was a threat to the community, they insisted, and had to be locked up in prison.  Under great pressure, Don agreed, though he said nothing of his younger brother’s involvement.
         So on the day of the trial Don and his father went to court.  When Don was called to testify, he saw the man in detention and reflected.  He liked the man and the sex, and he didn’t think the man had harmed him or anyone.  So he admitted that he knew the man, but denied that they had had sex.  This threw the whole courtroom into an uproar, with prosecution and defense shouting at each other, and the judge pounding his gavel for order.  The judge ordered a brief recess so the prosecution could confer with the witness, and Don and his father met with a social worker in a side room.  The social worker, a formidable older woman, told Don that he had to testify, so they could lock the man up and put an end to his criminal behavior.  But Don didn’t think the man had ever harmed anyone or posed a threat to society.         “Lady,” he said, “right now I’m more scared of you than I am of him.”         The woman’s jaw dropped in astonishment.         “If you don’t mind,” said Don’s father, “I’m taking my son home.”         So Don and his father went home, and for want of a witness, the charges had to be dropped.  Don’s father kept Don at home for the next few days, until the man moved away.  So ended Don’s story.
         Hearing this story gave me cause for reflection.  Being under oath, Don had committed perjury, but I felt he was justified, for he was being forced to do something that he thought was wrong.  I then reached a conclusion that has stayed with me to this day:  It’s not enough to tell the truth.  You must tell the truth for the right reason.
         Do I then advocate perjury?  Only in very special circumstances, as was the case with Don.  But there are times when the standard rules don’t hold, and we have to recognize this and act accordingly.  But these exceptions are rare; usually the rules hold up.
         None of the people mentioned so far were lawbreakers in the usual sense of the term; they were not habitual offenders posing a serious threat to society.  Have I ever encountered a true lawbreaker?  Once, in a case involving a drug addict, but not even then, for he was to be pitied. 
         One other incident comes to mind.  Once, in the subway, I did encounter a man who struck me as dangerous.  He was sitting across from me, talking with a strange fervor to the woman with him.  Something about his intensity alarmed me.  He and the woman got off at the same stop where I did, and I could see them hurrying ahead of me.  As they passed a newsstand on the platform, the man reached out and grabbed a newspaper without slowing his pace for a moment, and the two of them then disappeared in the crowd.  He seized the paper so quickly that I knew he had done it before and thought nothing of it.  I was sure he was some sort of habitual criminal, and dangerous.  No hard evidence, just a gut feeling of my own, but I have a hunch I was right.


Billy the Kid (1859-1881).  Born in New York City!

         Americans have always had a tendency to admire outlaws: Jesse James, Billy the Kid, John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde.  There is something romantic about these people, and their image is only enhanced by their violent deaths.  We don’t want to be them, but we envy their living dangerously, their rejection of conventionality and routine.  This lax attitude is balanced out in our psyche by our judgmental streak, our relish at the downfall of the great, our need to find and prosecute villains – spies, Communists, child molesters, terrorists, Muslims – in short, our need of witch hunts.  Woven into our lives are lawbreakers, whether we fear them or admire them, or both.  Either way, we can’t get free of them; they’re a part of us.


An FBI poster, 1934.  He sure got attention.

Coming soon:  ???

402. Explorers Club: A Stuffed Cheetah, the Penis of a Sperm Whale, and for Dinner, Ostrich and Madagascar Cockroaches

BROWDERBOOKS

My latest:

 

A story of the strangest friendship that ever was: a dapper young bank thief and the detective hired by the banks to apprehend him.  For more about this and my other books, go here.  
Fascinating New Yorkers has been reviewed by The US Review of Books.  Reviewer Gabriella Tutino says, "There's something for everyone here in this collection of profiles, and it serves as a source of inspiration for readers who love NYC."  For the whole review, click on US Review.

Small Talk

It's an old joke, appropriate for Valentine's Day, but I can't resist repeating it.
He:  Darling, I don't know what to do.  My heart tells me one thing, and my head, another.
She:  What do you hear from your liver?


      Explorers Club: A Stuffed Cheetah, the Penis of a                Sperm Whale, and for Dinner, Ostrich                     with Madagascar Cockroaches 

         I first heard of the Explorers Club when I read Thor Heyerdahl’s book The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft across the South Seas, telling how he and five others, all Norwegian except for one Swede, left Peru on a raft in 1947 and sailed across the Pacific to Polynesia.  Heyerdahl believed that people from South America had once crossed the Pacific to settle in Polynesia, and his expedition, using only materials available in South America in pre-Columbian times, was designed to show that this was possible.  Before they left, Heyerdahl visited the Explorers Club in New York and discussed the expedition with members there, one of whom was so excited by the expedition that he wished that he too could go.  And Heyerdahl’s account was fascinating, telling how they lived on fish that were tossed up on the raft, how on the 97th day out they made contact with the inhabitants of one atoll, but were unable to land safely; how three days later the raft struck a reef and was eventually beached on an uninhabited island, where a few days later they were found by men from a village on a nearby island, and in time were taken to Tahiti by a French schooner with the salvaged raft in tow.  He had traveled 4,340 miles and spent 101 days at sea.  Heyerdahl believed that he had made his point, though not all anthropologists agree; the matter is still being debated.

Heyerdahl's raft, 1947.
Nasjonalbiblioteket, Norway
         Such was my first awareness of the Explorers Club and its members.  I could well imagine them sailing thousands of miles across the ocean, at the mercy of wind and waves, or penetrating the jungles of New Guinea to be welcomed by natives with poisoned darts or bows and arrows, or trekking Arctic ice caps in the most incredibly frigid of climates, maybe stalked by a hungry polar bear.  Adventures that I myself would never dare to undertake, but exciting to read about if one is snug and comfy at home, and inclined to applaud the doughty doings of others.           As regards New Guinea, I have heard that it harbors some of the last wilderness to be explored.  I also recall seeing, long ago, a photograph taken from an airplane, showing a bunch of New Guinea aboriginals shooting arrows at the low-flying plane.  Similarly, I recall the attempt by five American evangelicals to Christianize the Huaorani, an isolated tribe in the rain forest of Ecuador who are known and feared for their violence.  In 1956 the undertaking ended in the massacre of all five missionaries, following which the widow of one victim and the sister of another went to live among the Huaorani.  They succeeded in converting many, including some involved in the massacre, but at the cost of promoting contact between the tribe and the outside world.  Not an Explorers Club undertaking, but one showing that there are still remote primal peoples on this earth, to contact whom is an adventure fraught with danger for both them and their presumably “civilized” discoverers.
         Now back to the Explorers Club.  My attention was drawn to it by a recent article in the New York Times: “What’s Left for the Explorers Club to Explore?” by Alyson Krueger, in the Metropolitan section of the Sunday Times of March 24, 2019.  The article discusses the difference between the older members, for whom exploration meant going to faraway places and bringing back significant artifacts, and the younger members, some of them still in college, who thanks to technology can do their exploring from their couch.  One young explorer uses high-resolution satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to to track whales, and another builds robots able to explore  caves, so humans don’t have to.  The difference between traditional exploring and the means used by the young newcomers is vast and could well create tension among the membership.         That membership totals about 3,500 today, with chapters all over the world.  To understand the stance of the old-timers among them, it’s useful to glance at the history of the club, which was founded in 1904 in New York City to promote the scientific exploration of the world by supporting research and education in the sciences.  The seven founding members included two polar explorers, a museum curator, an archaeologist, a war correspondent and author, a professor of physics, and an ethnologist.  Dedicated from the start to science, it wasn’t just place for veteran explorers to get together to swap adventure stories and share tips on clothing and equipment, perhaps over a drink or two, though that probably happened also.  And the members were doers, responsible for a lot of firsts that the club’s website proudly lists:
·      North Pole, 1909.·      South Pole, 1911.·      Summit of Mount Everest, 1953.·      Greatest Ocean Depth, 1960.·      Surface of the Moon, 1969. 
         The club’s flag has gone with these explorers and has flown at both poles, in the ocean’s nether depths, on the bleak and sterile surface of the moon, and even in outer space.  To be a member and carry the flag, one must be actively involved in scientific exploration.  But there have been honorary members too, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Charles A. Lindbergh, Prince Philip, and Albert I, Prince of Monaco.
The Explorers Club headquarters on 70th Street.
Jonathan S. Knowles
         Today the club’s headquarters is located in a six-story Jacobean revival mansion at 46 East 70th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, with heavy entrance doors and ornate turn-of-the-century stained glass windows inside  There, mementoes from earlier endeavors are on display.  A virtual tour online shows the elongated tusks of a rare species of elephant flanking a fireplace, and the preserved head, mouth agape and showing daggerlike teeth, of a lion donated by Theodore Roosevelt.  Also displayed are tusks galore, a formal gilt-framed portrait of an explorer, a huge polar bear rearing on its hind legs, a stuffed cheetah, stones from Mount Everest, a stag’s head with branching antlers, and a globe used by Heyerdahl to plan his expedition.  Topping them all, perhaps, is the penis of a sperm whale.

Rhododendrites
         Plaques on the walls commemorate  members’ firsts.  Also on display are flags that flew on the moon.  In all, to date there have been 202 numbered flags, each one displayed on an expedition and returned to the club with a written report of the expedition.  Also in the building are a library, and on the top floor, research archives comprising 13,000 books, 1,000 museum objects, 5,000 maps, and 500 films.
         Once a year hundreds of members gather for the legendary dinner, famous for its unusual cuisine.  Once the pièce de résistance was a 235-pound ostrich that took six and a half hours to cook, along with Madagascar cockroaches raised on a farm in New Jersey.  Another dinner featured martinis with goats’ eyes, a steamed goat penis with honey, and for dessert, strawberries dipped in white chocolates garnished with maggot sprinkles.  But these delicacies are available only to members.
         Today a clubhouse full of phallic jutting tusks, mounted severed heads, and whole stuffed wild animals displayed as hunters’ trophies raises an eyebrow or two … or three or four or five.  Wild animals once so plentiful are being killed off the world over, and hunters’ trophies are seen by many as both antiquated and barbaric.  This view is often shared by the club’s young members, tech-oriented and not veterans of treks in distant places.  Recently, in the club’s annual weekend, it broke with tradition to let its young members present their initiatives.  The young members are using new tools to take a closer look at environments that have already been discovered, forcing the older ones to rethink and expand the notion of exploration.  For the young, tech is in, trophies are out.  The whole atmosphere of the clubhouse can strike them as outdated, Victorian, quaint.  Some oldsters resist this invasion of the young, clinging to trophies and the traditional view of exploration, while others welcome the initiatives of the young and declare that satellites and lasers are cool.


Coming soon:  Breaking the Law

©   2019   Clifford Browder

401. The Magic of West 11th Street: A Perfect Day

BROWDERBOOKS

My latest:

 

A story of the strangest friendship that ever was: a dapper young bank thief and the detective hired by the banks to apprehend him.  For more about this and my other books, go here.  
Fascinating New Yorkers has been reviewed by The US Review of Books.  Reviewer Gabriella Tutino says, "There's something for everyone here in this collection of profiles, and it serves as a source of inspiration for readers who love NYC."  For the whole review, click on US Review.

Small Talk
And now, to spice things up, here are two examples of a library director of some years ago (not in this area) who thought he was brilliant.  
To a patron wanting information about Walt Whitman, he said Walt was the husband of Christie  Whitman, former governor of New Jersey.To another patron wanting information about the Gettysburg Address, he went to check the phone books.No, I haven't made these up.



             The Magic of West 11th Street: A Perfect Day

           Another where-but-in-New-York story.  One thing I like about the West Village is that I can go out and have adventures within a few blocks of my building.  Last Sunday, March 17, I did just that.  I lunched again at Philip Marie, a trendy restaurant at West 11th and Hudson, just a block from my building.  As usual for Sunday brunch, it was jammed and noisy, mostly a young crowd under 30, though they let me in anyway.  I got my favorite table, near the front window, with a good view of the street and, just diagonally across, another of my favorite local restaurants, Frankie’s 570.  It was a sunny day and the wind had died down; people were sitting outside both Frankie’s and Philip Marie – hopefully, a sign of spring.  The windows of Philip Marie were plastered with paper shamrocks, and outside, tied on a long string to a railing, two green balloons danced in the wind.  Only then did I realize that this was St. Patrick’s Day; fortunately, I was wearing a green T-shirt, and I can always fake a brogue.
         What I love about Sunday brunch at Philip Marie’s – as at other West Village restaurants – is the mix of New Yorkers.  Yes, there are a few couples, but mostly it’s oddball combinations: 5 guys and 2 girls, 6 girls and 1 guy, 3 girls and no guys, and so on.  For many it’s probably a time to see friends and get updated.  Among the girls, long hair is definitely in, and bare shoulders are perhaps another harbinger of spring.  The noise is deafening, but I don’t mind: they’re all New Yorkers intensely having fun.  On the wall across the room is a sign:
Happinessdoes not depend on whatyou have or who you are.It rests solely on what you think.                                                               -- Buddha
A noble thought, but at Philip Marie’s Sunday brunch, there isn’t much thinking, just a lot of loud talking.
         The waiters know me and know my usual fare: yogurt and granola with strawberries, followed by a cappuccino.  As I consumed it and the noise raged on, outside I saw the passing traffic on Hudson Street; cars, yellow cabs, bikes, an occasional tour bus, police cars, and rarely – a reminder of the graver side of life – an ambulance, its siren screaming.
          At a table nearby there were three girls talking and laughing exuberantly.  As they got up to leave, one of them started grooving, rocking from side to side and raising her arms high in the air.  So from a sitting position I started grooving too, rocking my arms and shoulders back and forth.  She noticed, pointed to me, and squealed with delight.  Her friends turned, saw me, and likewise squealed with delight.  As they passed me bound for the exit, I announced, “My motto: geezers rock”; more squeals of delight.  The grooving one embraced me and kissed me on the cheek.  A smart phone appeared, and three of us put our heads close together and grinned at the camera: click, click, click.  Then more good-byes and they left.  It was all over in five minutes or less.  The diners at neighboring tables were so engrossed in their talk or their mobile devices, they hadn’t noticed our moment of silliness and joy.  But I love the purity of it.  We’ll probably never see each other again, but they’ll remember that grooving white-haired guy in the photos and have a few more laughs.  Where but in New York?
         It being a sunny day without too much wind, I decided once again to walk down West 11th Street toward the river.  And once again, on the uptown side of the street, between Greenwich Street and Washington, I came to the Robin Rice Gallery at 325 West 11th, which features exhibits of black-and-white photographs.  Just beyond it is Turks & Frogs, a wine bar with an interesting window display – on this occasion, as often before, a model sailboat on top of a chest, flanked by bottles, candle holders, and other objects.  I have chronicled both the gallery and the wine bar before in this blog.
         Going on a block, I glimpsed from a distance the Palazzo Chupi, a towering superstructure of a building whose top Italian palazzo-style floors, to the scandal of the West Village, once flaunted a Pepto-Bismol pink.  That pink has now softened to a lusterless shade that neighbors and myself have gotten used to and almost like.  At that point I decided to retrace my steps and visit the Robin Rice Gallery, which was exhibiting the photographs of Robin Rice herself, the gallery owner.  And just in time: this was the last day of the exhibit.  I was the only visitor, though two young women were sitting in front, busy doing something connected with the gallery.  I had seen the exhibit before, but this time I picked up a list of the photographs and made notes on the ones that I found especially impressive.
           Most of the works exhibited were black-and-whites, but on the wall at the end of the gallery were over a dozen in color, including one dated 1977 and featuring Andy Warhol at the Studio 54 opening and signed by him in a slashing scribble across it.  Several of the other photos were also from the 1977 opening of Studio 54, a trendy nightclub favored by trendy people in the 1970s.  So Robin Rice goes back a ways and did get around.
         It was the black-and-whites that drew my attention, and the descriptions often came as a surprise.  For instance:
·      No. 10.  A large hand, open, upraised.  Title: “Milly, W. 12th Street, New York.”·      No. 24.  A row of looming dark hulks of shapes, suggesting towering rocks along a rugged coast, maybe in Italy or Cornwall, England.  Title: “Near Penn Station, New York.”·      No. 28.  Two high heels on tiptoe, casting shadows on pavement, and two men’s shoes planted firmly on the ground.  Title: “Greenwich Village, Lynn and Angelo.”·      No. 51.  An allée with cypresses.  Title: “Maureen, Villa Boccella, Lucca, Italy.”  Not a surprise, this one.·      No. 53.  A large seascape showing a broad stretch of sand and sea, and a horse and rider splashing ahead in shallow water.  Title: “Horse in the Celtic Sea, Penzance, Cornwall, UK.”·      No. 56.  A couple embracing so closely that you can barely tell them apart, both scantily clad, him in the briefest briefs, her in a wide-brimmed hat and maybe nothing else.  Title: “Sarah and Archer.”  No, not in the West Village; in Los Angeles.
And these are only some of the photos that caught my eye.
         The photos bear dates from 1975 to 2018, and are taken in places as diverse as New York, Rome, Montauk, South Africa, Paris, Chicago, Brazil, Fire Island Pines, Devon in the English Channel, Eastern Caribbean, Minnesota, Naples, and Los Angeles.  Yes, Robin Rice did get around.  And the prices?  Anywhere from $600 to $3,000 unframed, and more if framed.
         As I left, I told the two young women that I did a blog on New York and would mention the gallery.  Delighted, they asked the name of the blog, and I gave them my card, promising to notify them when I published the post.  They then gave me a card announcing their next exhibition: Michael McLaughlin, “41 Degrees Latitude,” opening reception Wednesday, April 10.  I will attend the reception, if I can.  Hopefully, I’ll have better luck this time.  Last winter I meant to go to one, but was prevented by a heavy fall of snow.
         Such was my West Village adventure of Sunday, March 17.  Not exceptional, but not mediocre.  A fine example of life in Greenwich Village, and the inexhaustible excitement and cultural richness of New York.  


Coming soon: ???

©   2019   Clifford Browder

400. Cancer, and How I Healed Myself

BROWDERBOOKS

My latest:

 

A story of the strangest friendship that ever was: a dapper young bank thief and the detective hired by the banks to apprehend him.  For more about this and my other books, go here.  
Fascinating New Yorkers has been reviewed by The US Review of Books.  Reviewer Gabriella Tutino says, "There's something for everyone here in this collection of profiles, and it serves as a source of inspiration for readers who love NYC."  For the whole review, click on US Review.

             Cancer, and How I Healed Myself

         Cancer: a word that terrifies.  A scourge, a killer.  When the figures are in, in the U.S. alone some 609,640 mortalities are expected in 2018.  Scary. #Cancer
         For me, it all started with my annual physical back in January 1994.  When my doctor reviewed the results, she reported:  “You’re a bit anemic.  If you were a menstruating woman, I wouldn’t be concerned.  But for a man, it’s suspicious.  I’ll refer you to a gastroenterologist for a colonoscopy.”
         I didn’t know what a colonoscopy was, and I couldn’t even pronounce “gastroenterology,” but it seemed that I was bleeding internally.  Having no symptoms, I doubted if anything was amiss.
         Time passed; no one contacted me about a colonoscopy, but my bowels were acting up.  On March 19 I wrote my doctor to report these symptoms, and from then on things moved fast.  I soon saw Dr. Malinovsky, a genial older man who gave me instructions for the colonoscopy.  Primarily, I had to fast, drink some foul-tasting liquid called MoviPrep to clear out my bowels, and then, the following morning, show up at my medical center at Third Avenue and 96th Street at an ungodly hour. 
         So on April 5, 1994, with my partner Bob in tow to see me home, I showed up, undressed from the waist down, lay flat on my belly on an examination table, got sedated, and let the good doctor rape me gently with a finger-thick, lithe black snake of a tube that he poked into my rectum.  On a table next to me, right at eye level, was a screen that showed what was happening in color.  It beat any TV that I had ever seen, flashing red, orange, red, as white dots of popcorn flitted across. 
         “The colon wall,” said the doctor.  “Now we’ll make this turn.”
         His assistant plied my belly; cramps.  I hardly noticed, riveted by the screen’s polychrome display: green splotches, egg yolk, orange peels, then ever receding grottoes, tunnels, and reefs where light had never been.  “Another turn,” said the doctor.  More massaging, cramps.  On the screen, crypts of cantaloupe, brown lichens, candied yam. 
         “There,” said the doctor quietly, “is what we’re looking for.”
         Nested in a niche, blobs of an aborted mushroom, a wrinkled, hunched pink worm.
         “Biopsy,” says the doctor.  On the screen, tweezers appeared, tweaked it.  A red kiss, then another.  “A polyp or a cancer,” said the doctor.  “Probably a cancer.”
         Under sedation, I took this gently, philosophically, almost as if he were speaking of someone else.  I felt distantly vulnerable, important. 
         One last look at the screen: sleeping, coiled pink muscle of eel.  My enemy, my threat.  Almost an embryo, mine, weirdly beautiful.
         Cancer: the threat of it began to hit home.  My mother had warned me long ago that there was cancer in the family on her side, including several deaths.  Cancer: the dread of the word.  Not some infection from outside, but my own body in rebellion, its cells in disorder, engendering a small lethal worm of a tumor that could kill me.  But while Bob worried, I stayed calm.
         Surgery was ordered, as soon as possible. Then, good reference librarian that he was, Bob at his library read up on colon cancer.  Another baffling word came up: metastasis, meaning the spread of cancer from its original site.  Survival rate of surgery before metastasis: 90 percent.  After metastasis:10.  
         I saw the surgeon, a man with a friendly, reassuring smile.  “A common surgery; I do two or three a week.  We’ve got lots more colon than we need; you can spare some, not to worry.  Unless, of course, the lymph nodes are involved.”  He scheduled it for May 3.
         Lymph nodes: what the hell were they?  From a college biology class I remembered something about a lymph system and its nodes, but not much.  And unlike Bob, I preferred to know no more.  But I learned plenty when the results of the biopsy came through: yes, malignancy, requiring immediate action; the date of the surgery was advanced to April 19.  Also, there was a lovely photograph in color showing me the bulbous, pink tumor nesting in my gut.  (No photo here of tumors in the gut.   Don't want to cause revulsion in my viewers.)
         Surgery would remove the tumor, but unless I did something, the cancer would return.  I consulted my friend Patrick, who advised me on vitamin supplements.  Then I consulted a holistic MD, who took one look at the photograph and said emphatically, “Get that thing out of you as soon as you can!”  He approved Patrick's suggestions and recommended two more: Quercetin and Coenzyme Q10, neither of which I had ever heard of.  These antioxidants would be my follow-up program after surgery.
          At noon on April 19 I checked into Beth Israel Hospital at First Avenue and 16th Street on the Lower East Side.  Soon I was in my room, donning a hospital monkey gown and awaiting the residents, the nurses, the anesthesiologist, and whomever else might have reason to see me.  My room was quiet, but when my roommate moved out, the hospital asked me to take another room nearby, so they could put two female patients in the room together.  Foolishly, I agreed, and found myself stuck with a roommate who day and night played his radio or TV loud, and resisted any reasonable plea to turn it down.  He was constantly on the phone, ordering his teenage son out of bed and off to school in the morning, or ordering a meal from a deli, or talking to his sister.  Doctors were in and out of his half of the room constantly, and I gathered that he had experienced
·      diabetes that had cost him an amputated foot·      a recent heart attack ·      a mild stroke·      other ailments
          In spite of which, he was ordering food from a deli!  A longtime resident, he knew the hospital staff, and the ways of coping with life in a hospital.  It was a relief when, early the next morning, they wheeled me off on a stretcher to the operating room.
         In the room adjoining the room of the actual operation, I chatted amiably with one of the staff, a motherly black woman of about forty who told me she was trying to stop smoking; I encouraged her and wished her well.  Then, nothing; the anesthesia had done its job.
         I woke up in recovery and was soon wheeled back to my room.  Still groggy from anesthesia, I was hooked up to an intravenous unit that was feeding me, and had a long scar and a string of stitches across my puffed-up abdomen.  When Bob finally saw me, he found me gaunt and weak, but plucky and resilient.  He had had a nightmare of trying to get through to me by phone, being switched to recovery and back to the information desk, then to intensive care and back again to info, with the suggestion that he try again later.  But once he saw me in my room, he could tell that the hospital staff were professional and efficient.  He brought a small plant with yellow blossoms to grace my bedside table.
         The next several days were memorable.  For early word of the surgery results, my surgeon had suggested that I query the hospital residents on their daily morning round, since one or more of them might have witnessed the surgery.  Sure enough, one had: a burly, deep-voiced man in his late 30s.  “A tumor as big as a golf ball.  Probably in there a good ten years.  But the liver looked fine.”  Not altogether reassuring, but later I would learn that his comment on the liver was encouraging, since that was where colon cancer usually spread next.  But all depended on forthcoming results of further tests.  I would be there several days, at the mercy of my roommate's radio.  But when I heard him snoring at night, I could ask a nurse to turn his radio off and enjoy a half night of sound sleep. 
         Hospital mores are unique unto themselves.  The key question asked of me by doctors and nurses alike was, “Have you passed gas?”  When I could finally, with a triumphant smile, say yes, a dozen people cheered.  But I couldn’t urinate.  Finally the sweetest little Asian nurse inserted a catheter into my penis, briefly causing me such discomfort that the mere thought of it makes me shudder to this day.  Finally, the golden fluid flowed.
         Visiting me, the hospital staff announced themselves by the way they entered.  On their daily morning calls the residents, a burly one and a thin one in the lead, had a bustle that was unmistakable; I recognized it before they were in the room.  Hearing them, I tensed, for I knew they would poke about my wound, causing pain; in anticipation, I learned to inhale and hold my breath until they had finished.  Once they showed up with two young women, presumably medical students also.  But when the women were out of earshot, the burly resident said to the thin one. “I just don’t know about them, I don’t think they’re for real.  When I saw my first operation, I knew at once that this was what I wanted to do: to cut.  How about you?  Were you watching it all up close?”  “No,” said the thin one, “I was always on the edge of the group, half asleep.”  The burly one did indeed strike me as a surgeon in the making: bold, blunt, forthright; I hoped he could be deft with his instruments as well.
         Everyone who came into that room wanted to jab something into me – a thermometer, a needle, whatever – or take something out.  There were only two exceptions: the nutritionist, with suggestions for easing back into a normal diet, and a social worker arranging for aftercare at home.  Both were young women, both were gentle.
          When Bob saw me again, he brought the blankets and ear plugs I had requested.  I had been shivering under thin sheets in a cool room, hence the blankets, and the ear plugs were my pitiful defense against my neighbor’s radio and mouthings.  Except for Bob, I wanted no phone calls or visitors for the next day or two, so I could get on with my healing.  The catheter had been removed, and next went the intravenous feeding; I could now enjoy the marvels of hospital food.  Soon I was walking up and down the corridors, eager to get home.
         On April 27 I was home and back into my normal diet, roughage and all.  “My patients can eat anything they want!” my surgeon had exclaimed, scornful of the dietician’s caution.  Result: cramps.  So I heeded her advice, eating mushy foods at first, and adding more substantial foods one at a time.  No more cramps; soon I was back to my normal diet.
         A visiting nurse came daily to change the dressing on my wound.  Each time it was a different nurse, but they all knew what to do.  The spots on the bandages grew steadily smaller, as the wound slowly closed.  One of the nurses told me something that has stayed with me to this day: even after a surgery wound has closed, the body continues healing within, though the patient is completely unaware of it.  I found this wonderfully reassuring.
         The wound closed; the surgeon’s job was done.  In a last session he explained my situation.  Of 25 lymph nodes removed with the tumor and examined, one had cancer.  Metastasis; they had operated just in time.  Cancer, he said, is like a fire in a house.  At first it is small, confined to one room; if, outside the room, you put your hand to the wall, you would feel no heat.  Then the fire spreads throughout the room; if you put your hand to the wall, you would for sure feel heat.  This is where I was.  Then the fire burns through the wall and spreads to the whole house: metastasis: only 10 percent survive.
         So what should I do?  Chemotherapy was recommended.  The surgeon  himself was neutral; some of his patients did chemo, some did not.  He suggested that I talk to the oncologist and hear what he had to say, then decide.  So I did.
Chemotherapy
         The oncologist was a friendly little mustached man; far from threatening, he looked like your favorite uncle.  In a soft voice he explained that, in my case, the chances of recurrence were 40 percent; chemo could reduce it to 20.  I would come once a week for several weeks and let them drip chemicals into my veins.  I said I would ponder the matter and let him  know.
This ... ?
... or this?
         Ponder I did not, for I had already made up my mind.  I was doing volunteer work for the Whole Foods Project, a small nonprofit advocating a nutritional approach to AIDS and cancer, and could take cooking lessons there and absorb a different, unorthodox approach to healing.  Would I rather lie passively and let them drip alien substances into me, or take an active role in my healing, learning to cook and eat vegan?  Chemo, like radiation, was the best that mainstream medicine could offer, but it involved unpleasant side effects, some of them horrendous, and would treat the symptom only, not the cause of the cancer.  For me, an easy choice: I went vegan.  When the oncologist phoned, I told him I would not do chemo.
         So I took cooking classes and learned to eat vegan: lots of fruits and veggies, lots of beans and whole grains, less salt, no sugar, no meat or dairy.  I discovered the wonders of barley pilaf, apple and sweet potato roast, sea vegetables, leeks, and millet and tempeh loaf -- all delicious.  It was easy, it was fun.  Then suddenly, one day, there were severe cramps in my abdomen.  Lying down didn’t help, nor did standing up and pacing in the apartment.  I was desperate; it was hell.  I phoned the surgeon, left a message.  Then, just as suddenly, the cramps stopped, stopped cold.  When my surgeon phoned and learned this, he was relieved.  His conclusion: my body was still adjusting to the surgery; no cause for alarm. 
         There would be cramps again, twice; both times they stopped as suddenly as they began.  After that, no more cramps.  I went out birdwatching again, and in June I marched with the Whole Foods Project in the annual Gay Pride Parade.  In the following years periodic colonoscopies revealed either nothing or a small polyp easily removed.  I had healed.
No, I'm not in this one.  But you get the idea.
Diana Beato

         My cancer story has a happy ending; many do not.  Lacking professional credentials, and knowing how people cling to their habits, I was not one to preach alternative procedures to others.  But on two occasions I did, for they involved close friends whose fate greatly concerned me.  Both listened, neither was persuaded.  They lived orthodox, and orthodox they died.  It hurt.
         I still have the report of my final diagnosis, and the color photographs of the tumor that tried to kill me.  The tumor: weirdly beautiful, I thought at the time.  Today, obscene.
Coming soon:  ???
©   2019   Clifford Browder

399. The Magic of Trash: Finders Keepers, Ptolemy, and Voodoo

BROWDERBOOKS

My latest:


 

A story of the strangest friendship that ever was: a dapper young bank thief and the detective hired by the banks to apprehend him.  For more about this and my other books, go here.  
Fascinating New Yorkers has been reviewed by The US Review of Books.  Reviewer Gabriella Tutino says, "There's something for everyone here in this collection of profiles, and it serves as a source of inspiration for readers who love NYC."  For the whole review, click on US Review.
                   The Magic of Trash:    Finders Keepers, Ptolemy, and Voodoo

         The streets and sidewalks of New York have tales to tell. One never knows what one may find there.  I don’t mean the big stuff like discarded furniture, but little stuff dropped by accident or thrown away as trash.  The Metropolitan section of the Times of February 24 of this year has an Album page with photos and  text by Sara Barrett.  Under the caption “Lost and Found” she lists lost items she has found on the pavements of the city, with photos that she began taking of them, framed as the items were by crosswalk stripes, cracked asphalt, and black dots of sidewalk gum.  The photos show a key, gloves, a small bag spilling out yellow sticks of French fries, a little toy truck, and one or two items that I can’t make out.  Each dropped item has a story, though one will never know it.   
         To round out her piece, Barrett adds an anecdote told her by a friend. One Thanksgiving the friend saw a man carrying out of Whole Foods a large tray with what looked like a family dinner: turkey, stuffing, cranberry dressing, mashed potatoes, cornbread, pie, the works.  Alas, he stumbled and it all went on the ground.  Food everywhere – what a photo it would have made!
         I too have my stories about dropped or lost items on pavement.  I’ll start with one that grieves me to this day.  I had done a freelance editing job for Johnson Reprint, an affiliate of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.  By way of extra thanks, the in-house editor wrapped up for me a replica of Ptolemy’s map of the world, a 2nd century BCE map based on the geographer Claudius Ptolemy's Geography (circa 150 BCE).  Used for centuries thereafter, the map was featured in the text I had edited, which was to appear in a limited edition, a costly collector's item accompanied by the replica.  I was thrilled to have the replica and planned to mount it on the wall of my apartment.  As I walked through midtown to the subway, I stopped to rearrange the several items I was burdened with, and in so doing left the Ptolemy map behind.  Only when I got home did I discover its loss, too late to retrieve it: gone!  Whoever found it found a rare item, and must have wondered how and why it had been left on a midtown street.  I hope they found a good use for it.

Ptolemy's map of the world, as reproduced in a European monastery in 1467.  Accurate for Europe and North Africa, 
hazy for the Far East.
         In that case I was the loser, but I have often been the finder.  In or next to an overflowing trash can on West 4thStreet in the Village I once found a law student’s class notes, now discarded perhaps in celebration of getting his degree and moving on.  The notes meant nothing to me, but they were bound in binders that I could indeed use, so I tossed the notes and trotted off with the binders.
         A few years ago, on the day following the annual Gay Pride Parade in June, I found a discarded little rainbow flag attached to a splintered stick.  I grabbed it, repaired the splintered stick with tape, and display the flag annually every June.

Tim Evanson

         Once a lost item delivered itself to me.  One windy afternoon I saw a large black umbrella come flying through the air.  It drifted up, then down, and finally bounced and skittered along over the pavement.  I quickly grabbed it, and discovered it was missing its U-shaped handle, but was otherwise intact and usable.  I waited for a few minutes, expecting to see its owner, holding the handle, come dashing after it, but no one appeared.  Finders keepers.  So I took my trouvaille home, and it served me well for years.
         For decades I have been the guy who finds pens, especially push-point pens.  I have found them on sidewalks in the city, in parks, along highways, and even on wilderness trails.  Half of them worked, half didn’t.  Thanks to those that did, I’ve rarely needed to buy new pens.
         Another item I keep an eye out for on the streets is feathers; I need them for my hats, especially my Aussie outback hats, of which only one now survives.   When new, these hats have a smart look with one brim pinned back to the crown; adding a feather gives them a nice jaunty touch.  Back in my hiking days I found bright yellow flicker feathers, probably the result of a hawk’s kill.  But those days and hikes are over, so I have to settle for pigeon feathers, which are only dull gray or a mix of white and gray.  How I yearn for color!

A pigeon's feather.  Not much color here.
Prosthetic Head
Flicker feathers.  See why I prefer them to pigeon feathers?
Yellowfeather
         Another find: a panel of blonde wood, about 9 by 16 inches, that was leaning against a trash can on Seventh Avenue.  On an impulse I picked it up, admired its finish, and discovered why it had been discarded: a thin crack.  But the crack blended in nicely with the grain and was hardly noticeable, so I took it.  Today it sits in my downtown-facing bedroom window, with a Christmas cactus on it, though I hope to move the cactus elsewhere, so I can admire the panel itself.  I love woody things.
         The oddest find I ever had was not on the street but inside.  Going up the monumental stairs inside the front entrance of the public library building at Fifth Avenue and 42ndStreet, I found there on the steps what looked like a pair of men’s briefs.  Dumbfounded, I paused and looked again.  Yes, men’s briefs.  Why and how they got there, I will never know.  I went on up the stairs, wondering, and wonder to this day.
         If I included parks and gardens, I could add two items that litter such spaces throughout the country: orange peels and used condoms.  Such deposits cause foreign visitors to assume that Americans make lots of love and eat an inordinate amount of oranges.  But to these two items I would add a third: plastic spoons.  

Everywhere.  As for the other, you know what they look like.Saycheeeeeese
And whenever, in the past, I hiked a trail that for a little while went alongside a highway, as I once did in Pelham Bay Park, the ground along that highway was littered with items thrown from cars: plastic cups and spoons, cigarette butts, empty matchbooks, crumpled tissues, newspapers and magazines, broken combs – whatever.  Motorists blithely toss things out the window and think they’ve disposed of them, which for themselves they have; but their trash hasn’t disappeared, it’s there for someone else to pick up – or not pick up.  Let’s face it, Americans are pigs.  We think a yard or garden is an ashtray, and a park a trash dump.  And we could do so much better.

Portland Airport
U.S. National Archives
It's bad in the U.S., but it could be worse.
This is in the Dominican Republic.
Twice25         And that’s not all.  Hiking on a trail on Staten Island, just past Moses’ Folly – the looming, unfinished overpasses of a Robert Moses throughway that Staten Islanders succeeded in stopping – I used to go down a steep descent to a streambed, and then up again to another stretch of canceled highway.  At the bottom, near the stream, loomed four or five strange shapes combining rusty metal, glass, and verdant overgrowth: abandoned automobiles that people had dumped there and left, and which nature had slowly covered with growth.  Well hidden, these relics at least were not eyesores; in fact, they had a certain weird beauty, a touch of surrealism.

GPS 56
         Getting back to the city’s streets and sidewalks, I will note that some items are strictly seasonal.  In winter, gloves., usually just one.  In spring, the shed white petals of the Callery pear tree (Pyrus calleryana), an import from China now planted as a shade tree.  The second most common shade tree in the city, every April it explodes into masses of white blossoms.  Everyone sees the blossoms, but apart from a few botanists, I’m the only one who knows the name of the tree, a source of great petty delight to me every spring.  But it’s best not to sniff the blossoms, since they smell of rotting fish and semen.   Whew!  And who or what is “Callery”?  No idea.

Lovely to look at; don't sniff.
         In summer, tiny wildflowers poke up through cracks in the sidewalks.  Not lost or dropped items, to be sure, but since I’m the only one to notice them and even seek them out, I include them anyway, so I can enjoy another great petty delight.  

         Similarly, in the fall the bright golden yellow of seaside goldenrod (Solidago sempervorens) pokes out on the sides of numerous Hudson River piers, whose renovated parklike surfaces rest upon the rotten wood of the original piers. Cracks and crevices in those old piers hold the tiny pockets of soil that nourish the plants.  Looking down from the railing lining the edge of the piers, I rarely fail to see the goldenrod’s clublike spikes of flowers and thick, fleshy green leaves – the last goldenrod of the season to bloom.



                  Every autumn, along the streets of the West Village, one sees the fan-shaped, bifurcated leaves of the gingko tree (Gingko biloba) turn yellow and fall to the ground.

Being unique in shape, the leaves are easy to recognize.
H. ZellAnother import from China and the only surviving species of its family (it dates back some 270 million years), it does well in urban environments and is planted widely as a shade tree.  In the fall it litters the ground with its nutlike seeds, but few passersby even notice, unless they squash one on the pavement.  

Gingko fruit.  But to get at the seeds is work; you have to crack the nut open.

But in Pelham Bay Park I have seen older Chinese women plucking the fruit up from the grass.  Why?  Because the seeds are used in traditional Chinese cooking, and in Chinese medicine as well – a medicinal use that Wikipedia insists is not justified by controlled studies.  Also, extracts from the leaves are sold as dietary supplements beneficial for cognitive function, but here too Wikipedia finds no supporting scientific evidence.  Wikipedia, it should be noted, is notoriously hostile to alternative medicine, and should not be taken as the final word in such matters.  The controversial nutritionist Gary Null endorses such uses of gingko, and rails against the prejudices of Wikipedia.  Personally, if I were afflicted with memory loss and lack of attention, I’d give gingko a try, preferably under the guidance of an experienced professional.  The seeds have also been used as aphrodisiacs, but then, what hasn’t? (Examples: chili peppers, avocado, bananas, chocolate, honey, watermelon, olive oil, figs, artichoke, cherries, pumpkin seeds, carrots, and oh yes, that much vaunted myth of my teen years, Spanish fly.)

         The weirdest of my finds occurred years ago in Van Cortlandt Park, when in an open area I came upon a burnt site sprinkled with chicken feathers.  A burnt site by itself is not unusual, for families often picnic in the parks.  But why the feathers?  Then it hit me: voodoo.  I know little about voodoo, but it is practiced here among the Haitians.  Farfetched, you say?  So I thought, at first, but upon reflection I was sure. There was something about that site that suggested it, something weird.  Voodoo ceremonies often involve fire and the sacrifice of animals -- in this case, chickens.  So back then voodoo was being practiced in Van Cortlandt Park, and may still be practiced there today.

. Voodoo celebration in New Orleans, 2009.  
But nothing like this, surely, in Van Cortlandt Park.
Joe Van

Coming soon:  ???


©  2019  Clifford Browder   

398. New York vs. the Suburbs

                                           BROWDERBOOKS

My latest:



 

A story of the strangest friendship that ever was: a dapper young bank thief and the detective hired by the banks to apprehend him. For more about this and my other books, go here.

                             A  BROWDERCHIRP
At the Vatican conclave of bishops called by the Pope to examine clerical abuse of minors, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano accused the Pope of protecting abusive gay clerics and called for his resignation.  His Eminence deems it appropriate that the meeting's opening date coincided with the feast of St. Peter Damian, an 11th-century monk who fought against sins of sodomy in the church.  But some church historians questioned the saint's relevance as a model, since he had also denounced as immoral a Byzantine princess who had introduced the practice of eating with a fork.
         NEW  YORK  vs.  THE  SUBURBS
         Big cities and suburbs often seem at odds.  Not surprising, since suburbs are people by refugees from big cities, and by others who are repelled by the idea of ever living or working in a city city.  Suburbanites think of themselves as neat, clean, honest, and law-abiding, as opposed to those deluded hordes of residents subject to the noise, dirt, congestion, and corruption of their metropolis.  I grew up in Evanston, Illinois, the first suburb north of Chicago, and this was certainly true of Evanstonians, sophisticated though they were in many ways.  Howard Street, the boundary, was lined on the Chicago side with liquor stores, whose owners and their political allies, having gobbled up Rogers Park, the neighborhood just north of Howard Street and once an independent suburb, looked with lust on innocent Evanston.  Certainly it was a tempting target, being headquarters of the WCTU and the driest of very dry communities.  But the Evanston dads who commuted to jobs in Chicago, as mine did, were very much a part of Chicago too, and many an Evanstonian snuck across Howard Street, or drove west to get beyond the bounds of Evanston, to stock up, ever so discreetly, on their supply of liquor.  So suburbs are linked indissolubly to their big city, unlike, say, New York upstaters who can assert convincingly that they depend in no way on the Big Apple, and would be quite happy if it managed to somehow disappear.  (Except, of course, that state tax revenues from New Yorkers help pay for various statewide amenities that upstaters too enjoy.)
         That said, let’s have a look at how my deceased partner Bob, a Jersey City boy turned inveterate New Yorker, viewed the suburbs during what he called his Proustian adventure of February 23, 1991, and recorded the next day in his diary.  For on that occasion he and his aging mother were taken by relatives to Wayne, New Jersey, to visit his widowed Tante Martha, age 88, his mother’s older sister, now living in a nursing home in that community.  The home, a sprawling one-level complex, smelled and looked like a hospital, and Martha was allowed a pitifully small space with a narrow bed, small table with artificial plants, a calendar on the wall, a closet, and a shared bathroom.  Martha looked much as she had when Bob last saw her eight years earlier, except for her swollen legs, the result of frostbite from over a year earlier, when she fell in her garden and lay helpless on the ground for hours, before anyone discovered her.  Always dominant, she talked endlessly, reminding Bob of a  Samuel Beckett play or a scene from his novel Malone Meurt.  At times she looked at Bob’s mother and told her of her sister Hedwig in Jersey City, unaware that Hedwig was right there in front of her.  Yet her voice was clear and she seemed marvelously healthy, her nutmeg-colored skin making Bob’s mother seem pale by comparison.
         By noon Bob and his mother found themselves in the plush living room of his cousin Fred and his wife Donna, and the real suburban adventure began.  There was not one book in sight. – for Bob, a telling  detail.  Instead, on the coffee table there were photos, and on the piano stool, sheet music.  Fred looked older, having gray hair, and lines on his face that spoke of years of hard work.  Years and years and years dominated the conversation and how everyone had changed.  But when Donna told Bob that he hadn’t changed, he was aware of the makeup on his face, but pleased, being determined to be himself (albeit gay, though only his mother knew it) and project a younger Laggy.  They then sat around the dining room table and had coffee and cakes, and two hours later, after Donna took some photos, they disbanded. 
         We were in a suburban fantasy land with a lush blue sky overhead, extraordinarily vital air, and also an awful sense of the kind of remoteness I experienced in Stafford, Virginia, almost a year ago.  WAYNE and STAFFORD, where in each place you look out a window and see clarity of light, but, baby, no New York Times paper machine and no Chinese restaurant a block away.  Except for the automobile, there is no quite feasible way of buying a container of milk.  One can walk, but it requires stamina and time.
So ended Bob’s visit to the fantasy land of suburbia, where he rarely ventured and and could not imagine living. 
          What then was Bob’s life like in the city?  Let’s just have a look at the month of March 1991, as recorded in his diary, usually written at the Hunan Spring restaurant at the corner of West 11th and Bleecker, one block from our building.  I’ll give only the highlights.  The first March entry is on the 3rd.
March 3.  Had his friend Hugh Manning over for dinner and a slide show of his recent visit to the Grand Canyon.  Gave Hugh a Navajo silver/turquoise/coral piece of jewelry that he bought at the Canyon; Hugh loved it.  Did the slide show to Wagnerian music and cognac.  / Remembers being recently accosted in a friendly way by a Chinese man he didn’t recognize – probably well-tipped waiter from a restaurant. / When Hugh was here, he and Cliff and I made an impromptu phone call to Mary Stanley in Bath, Maine, having once rented rooms in her summer home on Monhegan Island.  Wonders if Mary, now close to 90, had ever experienced passion, love, or kindness.
March 5.  Contemplating retirement from Jersey City Public Library, learned that his health insurance will continue after retirement.  Hopes then to visit Nantucket at least once a year. / Picked up his tax return at H&R Block; will get a substantial refund, can buy a new desk chair and living room drapes, and pay off part of his charge account debt.
March 7.  Must work another 2 or 3 years to get Social Security and Medicare coverage. / Got good report from Dr. Fox; blood pressure okay. / Saw two Diaghilev ballets by the Joffrey at the State Theater. / From the restaurant can see the apartment above the White Horse Tavern where Hortense Seliger, his mistress (briefly) of many years ago, once lived.  Hears conversation of two gay men at a nearby table: “I don’t give my love easily, but he just hates me.”
March 11.  Angry confrontation with his friend and coworker Natasha in Reference Department at the library. / Great evening with Cliff last Saturday; tender, breathtaking sex Sunday morning. / Saw mother in Jersey City, sitting in silence, waiting…  Took her to dinner at the Lincoln Inn.  Saw old friend and fellow librarian Joan there with her lover, Tony.
March 13.  Cold-warm weather as spring approaches. / Saw Joffrey production of Romeo and Juliet; memorable. / Edith, my virgin lesbian, with whom I attend concerts; an insomniac, frustrated. / Thinks of two women friends who won’t fully accept him as gay: “Bye, sucking shit-assed bitches!”
March 18.  Saw more Joffrey. / Showed Grand Canyon slides to Natasha and her husband Lee Saturday night, did dishes till 2 a.m. / Loquacious straight male duo nearby babble about cinema production, scripts, directors.  New York is the film capital of, hmm, the world.  Their derogatory attitude toward women.
March 21.  Political nonsense boiling again at library.  Director may be demoted and a new director brought in.   Wore yellow sweater to work to commemorate renewal of spring.  “I was a yellow rose, a finch, a pale antique coin.”
March 21.  At restaurant, remembers Hortense again; no time now to write her now.  “My final Manhattan has suffused me deliciously.”
March 24.  Fire in our friend Ed Kennebeck’s building on West 4th Street, but quickly controlled.  Arson?  Gay bashing?  Owners of ground-floor boutique are gay.  Detectives on the case.  Ed came over briefly, his clothes smelling of smoke. / Italian dinner with Cliff at the Napoli on Spring Street. / “In a week, a shitty Christian Easter.”   Will take Mom to dinner.
March 28.  Spoke for 10 minutes to the Library board, defending the integrity of the Reference Department; needs a full staff of six professionals; applauded by coworkers.
March 29,  Good Friday.  Took mother to beauty parlor, then to lunch at Lincoln Inn.  The Inn a geriatric club, the old gals wearing much jewelry and lipstick, and adoring their cocktails.  Coming back, remembers Hortense, with whom he once saw Parsifal on Good Friday.
April 1. Arthritis in finger; pain. / Cliff and I dined with Mom yesterday, Easter, at the Inn; we all had turkey.  Gave the hostess an expensive Dior dusting powder; she was delighted.  Cliff shows sincere interest in his mother.  She glowed.
         So much for March 1991.  Two thoughts:
·      Slide shows of the Grand Canyon, Joffrey ballets, a frustrated virgin lesbian friend, Italian and Chinese dinners, babble about cinema production, a suspected gay bashing…  No, Robert would not have been happy in Wayne, New Jersey, or any other suburb.  He needed New York, its cultural riches, its dangers, its diversity.

·      To have helped another human being fulfill him/herself sensually is no small thing.  Desire is holy.

Coming soon:  The Magic of Trash: Finders Keepers, Ptolemy and Voodoo.


©  2019  Clifford Browder  

397. Artists or Whores? Geishas, Nautch Girls, and the Dancers of Lahore

                      BROWDERBOOKS

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Artists or Whores?  Geishas, Nautch Girls, and the Dancers of Lahore

         This post takes a glance at certain occupations of women in foreign settings that have always enjoyed a somewhat ambiguous status.  I have no personal knowledge of these occupations or the societies that created them, but have consulted knowledgeable friends.  We’ll look first at the geishas in Japan.  We’ve all heard of them and, as Westerners, wondered to what extent their services include sex.  In other words, are they highly trained call girls or not?
The Geishas of Japan
         That Japan, which I have never visited, is a fiercely male-dominated society was first made clear to me when a gay friend who had married a Japanese woman explained,  “In Japan, if a husband wants to go out alone for an evening, the wife doesn’t ask any questions.”  Being addicted to gay sex, my friend took full advantage, and his wife, traditionally raised, let him do it and slowly began to understand where his true sexual preferences lay.  So far as I know, they stayed together, and as he got older, he had companionship at home to cushion the loss of youth and its adventures.  Not that I recommend such an arrangement for everyone; I felt sorry for the wife. That said, on to the geishas.
         The word “geisha” means “art person” or “entertainer,” and the traditional geisha must be proficient in music, dance, storytelling, and small talk.  The profession emerged in the eighteenth century, and its predecessors were indeed high-class prostitutes catering to the male elite.  The first geishas were in fact men who entertained clients waiting to see the most popular courtesans of the day.  So the confusion of geishas with high-class prostitutes dates from the very beginning of the profession.  In time the male geishas disappeared, and many geishas became entertainers only, artists whose services did not include sex.  Their role was distinctly different from that of the wife, who had to be modest, sober, responsible.  And the geisha was single; if she married, she had to leave the profession.


Geishas dancing.
Jon Rawlinson
         In the aftermath of World War II, women had to go to work in factories or otherwise contribute to postwar reconstruction, and fewer women became geishas.  At the same time, prostitutes servicing the GIs began referring to themselves as “geisha girls.”  But there was also an effort to return to the traditional role of entertainment only, for which a rigorous training was required.  Geishas lived in geisha houses in what were called “tea house districts” or “entertainment districts,” though successful ones might move out and live on their own.  A geisha could have a boyfriend or lover, but this was quite apart from her life as a traditional geisha, which might involve flirting, but no sex.
         The 1953 Broadway play The Teahouse of the August Moon, later made into a movie, was a gentle spoof on postwar Americans trying to Westernize and democratize a village on the occupied island of Okinawa and getting “Easternized” instead.  One of the funniest scenes in the film is when a geisha tries to teach her movements to a bunch of village women; the contrast between her graceful movements and the clumsy ones of the fat and sweaty villagers is hilarious.  The play was even done on Okinawa with an authentic geisha playing the geisha.  Though Okinawans would in time have many complaints about the American occupation, the Americans’ ability to laugh at themselves was appreciated at the time.


A geisha in Kyoto today.
James Trosh
         And today?  The training of a geisha is, and always has been, long and arduous, and the kimonos and other accessories are costly.  Young women who choose to enter the profession may go deeply into debt to their mentors.  As a result, fewer young women are tempted to do so.  A geisha’s life is glamorous chiefly from the point of view of the male consumer.  When one sees a geisha today in Kyoto, a friend informs me, she is tightly scheduled and always in a rush.  Though geishas are not prostitutes, prostitutes have dressed in similar attire, causing confusion.  Also, Japanese men pressure geishas for sex and often succeed.  So the geishas still exist, but their profession is under siege.  And even by tourists, who pester them in the streets of the entertainment districts and even tug at their kimono sleeves, wanting to take their photograph.


A geisha at a banquet of Europeans today.Steven & Courtney Johnson & Horwitz
         And how do the geishas stand in the eyes of feminists?  Japanese feminists have seen them as exploited, but many geishas insist that they are liberated feminists who support themselves while living in a women-centered society where males function only as guests: a special smaller world within the larger male-dominated society that is Japan.
The Nautch Girls of India
         Years ago I read a long Indian novel about life in India either just before independence or soon after.  Among the many characters was a dancer past her prime and concerned about the future of her daughter, who by tradition would become a dancer, too.  The dancers obviously enjoyed an ambiguous status, still in demand but not accepted by polite society.


Two nineteenth-century Nautch girls; a painting.
         A friend of mine from Calcutta told me how her great-grandfather and his friends debated earnestly over which renowned dancer, or Nautch girl, should be invited to dance for them on a holiday.  The dance was held in a hall from which the women of the household were excluded.  Paid well, the dancer gave them a spectacular performance, with confetti-like bits of colored paper on the floor that she kicked up into sprays of many colors.  My friend’s grandmother viewed the dancers as glorified prostitutes.


Two Nautch girls in Hyderabad; an 1860s photograph.
         Nautch girls existed in the Mughal period in India, when, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Muslim emperors ruled northern India.  Quite distinct from the temple dancers who performed for the Hindu gods thought to reside in a temple, Nautch girls performed for the ruling elite, and to do so were taught, at an early age, the art of music and dance and reciting poetry.  They were specialists in refined conversation, and used their beauty and charm to entertain their wealthy clients.  Often they had a long-term monogamous relationship with one client, who might be a British officer, a nawab, a rajah, or a wealthy landowner.  They flourished throughout India, but those from Lucknow, a prominent cultural center, were especially in demand and could charge high fees.  But when British women and missionaries began arriving in India, they put a stop to the Nautch girls seducing the British men.  Many influential Indians likewise began condemning the dancers, whose glory days were over.  Once independence came to India, the government did away with the large landowners, who then could no longer patronize the dancers, and the Nautch girls became a thing of the past.


Nautch girls dancing; a 1920s etching.
The Dancers of Lahore
         What prompted this post in the first place was an article in the Times of January 6, 2019, whose caption announced: They Once Danced for Royalty.  Now It’s Mostly Leering Men.  In an interview a Pakistani dancer tells how she once danced in rooms adorned with plush velvet pillows and fine carpets to the music of a troupe of trained musicians, entertaining the wealthiest men of Pakistan.  But now she travels with a boom box and dances for ogling men who want just one thing: sex.  Quite a comedown for a profession that for centuries performed in palaces for maharajahs and their guests.  Once a respected tradition akin to the geishas of Japan, the dancers offered not sex but refined companionship; they had to have knowledge of the arts, music, and even politics.  But it was always a risky occupation, especially for young dancers who might be sexually exploited.  Yet some of the dancers acquired wealth and influence, and even married into the elite. 


A dancer performing, 1899.
           The dancing girls of Lahore were closely related to the Nautch girls of India, for in the Mughal period and the time of the British Raj there was no Pakistan separate from India.  When British rule came to what is now Pakistan in 1858, the dancers were criticized by the Victorian colonizers as examples of the voluptuous indolence of the East.  But the dancers persisted, and more than one colonizer became colonized.  When independence came to Pakistan and India in 1947, and with it, violence, many Muslim dancers in northern India fled to Lahore, the cultural capital of Pakistan, where the art form enjoyed a renaissance.  If a dancer was courted over time by a customer, she might finally enter into a monogamous relationship with him and bear his children.  But as Pakistan became a more conservative Islamic state, it became less tolerant of the dancers, who were driven underground.  Now a dancer waits discreetly at home for phone calls from men who want to entertain their friends.  Some young dancers have fled abroad, but there are those who remain and insist that their art form is legitimate and strive to keep it alive.
In the West Today
         In male-dominated societies some women have always found ways to acquire a degree of independence, and these women in Japan, Pakistan, and India are good examples.  That they were at times confused with prostitutes reflects the fact that there were also gifted and successful courtesans who also achieved a degree of independence.  In Western societies these Eastern traditions did not exist, but some women escaped male dominance by presiding over salons frequented by the ruling elite, or by taking the veil and in time becoming a mother superior in charge of a community of nuns.  And in all societies some women have specialized in providing refined companionship and diversion to men other than what their wives could provide.

         In seventeenth and eighteenth-century France, ironically, marriage was a way to freedom.  Unmarried girls were closely supervised, so they could make a satisfactory marriage, but married women enjoyed considerable freedom.  This is seen in one noble’s dictum to his wife following their wedding night: “Madame, I give you full freedom, except for princes of the blood and lackeys.”  Princes of the blood posed political risks, and lackeys, being mere servants, were too demeaning, but otherwise the world – meaning the male world – was hers to conquer, preferably with a bit of tact, and he would be doing the same with women.  Of course one can question whether marital freedom was true freedom for women, or simply a form of subjugation by sex.


Ninon de Lenclos, a noted courtesan of seventeenth-century France.  She frequented salons, had one of her own,
encouraged the young Molière, and years later left money 
to the young Voltaire so he could buy books.  Power of a kind.
         In England and the U.S. the cause of women’s liberation was taken up by militant suffragettes, who after years of campaigning finally did win the vote.  But in the U.S. it’s no coincidence that Prohibition followed, banning the saloons that working-class males had always seen as their home away from home, and where much of their wages might disappear, before they went home to a peeved wife needing money to run the household and feed the kids.  One man’s (or woman’s) freedom can be another’s subjugation.  


Carrie Nation, a fiery temperance campaigner,
who took an ax to U.S. saloons and their contents.
           In France, women got the vote only in 1944, because the male ruling elite, fiercely anticlerical, were afraid that the women would vote for Catholic candidates.  And when I visited friends in Germany in 1953, my closest German friend, no stodgy conservative, thought American women much too independent.  And when his younger brother came to this country and served in the Air Force, he married not an American, but a young woman from Germany.  How it will go in the future for this country, where feminists have in many ways triumphed, but are still campaigning for more, I don’t profess to know.  But it will be interesting to watch from the sidelines as the fight sparks on … and on.

Source note:  For information about the dancing girls of Lahore, I am indebted to a Pakistani friend and to the Maria Abi-habib article mentioned earlier, which appeared in the International section of the New York Times of Sunday, January 6, 2019.

Coming soon:  Sin.

396. Beauties, Dancers, Whores

                 The Eye That Never Sleeps 


     Pre-order my new novel,The Eye That Never Sleeps, from the publisher, Black Rose Writing, at a 15% discount from the retail price of $18.95; it will ship on the release date, May 2. E-book available soon after that.  Author's copies available now at $20.00 + postage.


 
Summary: The fourth title in my Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York, The Eye That Never Sleeps tells the story of the strangest friendship that ever was. Hired by the city’s bankers to apprehend the thief who is plundering their banks, private detective Sheldon Minick develops a friendship with his chief suspect, Nicholas Hale, an elegant young man-about-town who is in every way the sober Methodist detective’s opposite. They agree to a truce and undertake each to show the other the city that he knows and values.  Further adventures follow, including a cancan, a gore-splattered slaughterhouse, and a brothel with leap-frogging whores.  But when the truce ends, the inevitable finale comes in the dark midnight vaults of a bank.
Not a standard detective story.  Sheldon Minick is scared of women, wears elevator heels, and loves to belt out Methodist hymns at church.  He is fascinated by Nicholas Hale, who is young, dapper, free-spending -- a risk-taker, deft with women, bisexual.

                     Beauties, Dancers, Whores


         This post was inspired by three beauties at the Met, the scandalous Madame X, and a celestial dancer.

         I am fascinated by the works of the Spanish master Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (let’s just call him Goya), who painted portraits, genre paintings, heroic historical scenes, and grotesque works conveying the horrors of war.  Trouble is, you don’t find much of his work outside Spain.  So when, some years ago, the Met announced two Goya works on temporary loan from the museum of Lille in northern France, I rushed to see them.  (Lille?  Yes, Lille.  Because Napoleon encouraged provincial museums to expand their collections, and Lille managed to snag two Goyas).
         The two Goyas, though acquired by Lille separately, were a perfect pair, for they were about the same size and displayed elegantly dresses majas.  At the time I took maja to mean a belle or beauty, which seemed to fit the subjects of these paintings.  One shows two gauzily dressed young women sitting in a box at a bullfight, with two shadowy, mysterious gentlemen behind them.  


Another version, with a balcony, at the Met.
Sailko
The other painting shows a well-dressed young woman reading a letter, while her maid holds a parasol over her.  (A love letter, the museum notes suggested.)  On the ground near her, presenting a stark contrast, are several working-class women doing their laundry on a river bank.  Clearly, she is a lady, or a good imitation of one, and they are not.
         The two paintings made a great impression on me, and I wondered what kind of a reputation the majas might have.  This was, after all, Goya’s Spain of the early nineteenth century, far more conservative than post-revolutionary France.  And when, recently, I found an online definition of majaas “a Spanish belle of the lower class,” I was even more curious.  If these majas are of the working class, who paid for their finery?  The mysterious gentlemen escorts of the bullfight/balcony scene, one suspects. So are majas simply glorified whores?
         In the nineteenth-century U.S. it was risky for a respectable woman to draw undue attention to herself.  Middle-class wives didn’t want their names in the newspapers, and if they had their portrait painted, it was meant for display only in the home.  This was true even in sophisticated Paris, where the American artist John Singer Sargent shocked the public when he exhibited, in the 1884 Paris Salon, his Portrait of Madame X.  
Here she is, with both shoulder straps intact.
The work showed a handsome woman in black satin, her head in profile, with one strap of her low-cut gown unfastened.  The subject of the dramatic painting, the world soon learned, was the American wife of the French banker Pierre Gautreau, noted for her beauty and her rumored infidelities.  The work was not painted on commission, but at a request from the artist.  The reaction to it was so negative that Mme Gautreau, who at first thought it a masterpiece, felt humiliated, and the chagrinned young artist left Paris for London and remained there for the rest of his lengthy career.  As for the painting itself, Singer kept it, later displayed it at international exhibitions, and sold it to the Met in 1916, convinced that it was the best work he had ever done.  Another version is in the Tate in London.
         If respectable women were not supposed to put themselves on display, what about actresses?  The public might applaud an actress’s brilliant performance in the theater, but respectable women wouldn’t think of inviting her into their home, and dreaded the thought that one of their sons might fall in love with a thespian (the meaning of which they weren’t quite sure).  So actresses were both acclaimed and excluded -- the same ambiguous position that burdened Molière and his troupe, men and women alike, in seventeenth-century France.  
         A woman’s respectability is the subject of Henry James’s delightful story “The Siege of London” (1883).  It opens with two Americans at the Paris opera, a newcomer,and a seasoned widower wise in the ways of the world.  The newcomer confesses that he doesn’t understand how his friend can tell at a glance if a woman is respectable.  Eyeing a box with his opera glasses, he asks the old hand if the woman there is respectable or not.  His friend takes a look and immediately says she isn’t, but adds that the young man with her is.  Then he realizes that he once knew the woman and decides to say hello to her at the intermission.  So begins a story that hinges on whether or not a much-married American woman can in any way be called respectable.
         The women mentioned so far – Goya’s majas, Sargent’s Mme Gautreau, and James’s protagonist – risked society’s rejection, but they were not performers.  If in the nineteenth century respectable women were not supposed to put themselves on display, what about actresses?  Respectable women and their husbands might applaud an actress’s brilliant performance in the theater, but they wouldn’t think of inviting her into their home, and dreaded the thought that one of their sons might fall in love with a thespian (the meaning of which they weren’t quite sure).  This applied even to Sarah Bernhardt, the acclaimed French actress whose first tour of America in 1880 garnered attention, rave reviews, and money (which, being debt-prone, she could use), but not respectability.  Not that she needed it, preferring freedom and a series of male lovers.  “Have you seen my latest?” she would ask an old acquaintance, usually referring to some fledgling actor discovered in the provinces, whom she had annexed and, to the annoyance of her troupe, given roles he was unequipped to handle.  (The annexed young man lasted a season or two.)  So society’s wariness of actresses was not without foundation. 
Lola Montez in Munich, 1847.
         So how about dancers?  Worse still.  A dancer’s ability to wreak societal havoc was demonstrated by the career of the Irish dancer who took the name Lola Montez. After engaging in numerous dalliances and provoking a duel between two admirers with fatal results in Paris, in 1846 she performed in Munich.  There she became the mistress of the smitten king, Ludwig I, who created her Countess of Landsfeld and gave her an annuity. She then meddled in politics, and when the 1848 revolution erupted, Ludwig no. 1 had to abdicate, and she too fled the country.  Coming in time to the U.S., she shocked and titillated audiences, especially the gold miners in California, with her wiggly Spider Dance.  In and out of marriages, she began wasting away, spent her last days doing rescue work among fallen women, and died in Brooklyn in 1861, at age 39, of syphilis.  She is buried in Green-Wood cemetery, a repository of celebrities that also harbors Boss Tweed, assorted minor Roosevelts, and mobster Albert Anastasia.  Good company, indeed.
         Mention of the notorious Lola brings to mind – at least to my mind – the life-size sandstone statue of a contorted Hindu dancer in the South Asia hall of the Met.  


RosemaniaThough she lacks arms and legs, she looks wonderfully supple and sensual.  Identified as a celestial dancer of the mid-eleventh century, she must be performing in honor of the gods, who are thought to inhabit temples and consider them their home.  Presumably the real-life celestial dancer would be performing in a temple, but I can't help wondering about the status of her secular equivalent, perhaps a dancer at court.  Would she hope to captivate a monarch, as Lola did, or to advance her position in society otherwise? 
         Such matters will be considered in the next post; see below.


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Coming soon:  Artists or Whores?  Nautch Girls, Geishas, and the Dancing Girls of Lahore.



©   Clifford Browder   2019

        

395. Gay Slang of the 1950s, plus Thoughts on Camp

                   The Eye That Never Sleeps 


     If you want my new novel, The Eye That Never Sleeps, and can wait until the release date, May 2, pre-order it now from the publisher, Black Rose Writing, at a 15% discount from the retail price of $18.95; it will ship on May 2.  The e-book will be available soon after that date.  The more sales I have online, the better.  I will sign copies later on request.  If you can't wait, buy a signed author's copy from me now at $20.00 + postage.


 

Did you ever have a friend who at times acted like your enemy, or an enemy who at times became your friend?  The Eye That Never Sleeps tells the story of just such a friendship.  To be released May 2, this is fourth title in my Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York.  Detective Sheldon Minick, one of the two main characters, is already known to readers of my novel Bill Hope, for characters in the series turn up in more than one novel.

Summary: Hired by the city’s bankers to track down and apprehend the thief who is plundering their banks, private detective Sheldon Minick develops a friendship with his chief suspect, Nicholas Hale, an elegant young man-about-town who is in every way the sober Methodist detective’s opposite. They agree to a truce and undertake each to show the other the city that he knows and values.  Further adventures follow, including a cancan, a gore-splattered slaughterhouse, and a brothel with leap-frogging whores.  But when the truce ends, the inevitable finale comes in the dark midnight vaults of a bank.

This is not a standard detective story.  Sheldon Minick is a bit scared of women, wears elevator heels to add to his height, and loves to belt out Methodist hymns at church (though he leaves the praying to his wife).  He is fascinated by Nicholas Hale, who is young, dapper, free-spending -- a risk-taker, deft with women, bisexual.

                 Gay Slang of the 1950s, 
                plus Thoughts on Camp


         Self-conscious subgroups have always had a lingo of their own, and that has certainly been true of gay people, especially when they constituted an underground society, hidden from the majority straight world but known to the knowing few.  Gay men needed their own society and slang, for the straight world – with exceptions – viewed them with scorn and distaste.  Or worse still, with pity.  Here are some of the straight world’s terms for gay males back in the 1950s, ranging from the least to the most offensive.
1.    Homo2.    Queer3.    Faggot, fag4.    Fairy5.    Pervert6.    Degenerate
To which I might add "fruit" and the adjective "fruity," except that today I wouldn't add it at all.  Instead, I can imagine a gay kid saying, "Fruit?  What's wrong with being soft, ripe, sweet, and good to eat?  I'll buy into that, you bet!"

         When I first entered the gay world in New York in the 1950s, I learned its lingo effortlessly, picking it up from gay friends and from the talk in gay bars.  Using it made you feel special and in the know; it stamped you as a member of your tribe.  So here are some of the terms I learned.  I suspect that some are still current today, and others forgotten or remembered fondly as “quaint.”
butch / nelly:  a masculine / feminine gay person  (also used as adjectives)
queen:  feminine gay guy  (often used loosely for gay men generally)
fluff:  nelly  (used by the macho leather jacket crowd for non-leather gays)
trick:  a gay guy you’ve had (or hope to have) sex with (as in “to pick up tricks”)
an ex:  a gay guy you once had sex with  (“one of my exes”)
trade:  hetero males willing to have sex with gay guys (often with a suggestion that they are latently gay, as in the saying “Today’s trade is tomorrow’s competition”)
rough trade: violence-prone trade
S and M: sado-masochism (a kind of cult among some gay men)
hustler: a male prostitute
chicken: a young gay guy new to the game, innocent

swish: an effeminate gay man (also used as a verb and adjective)
auntie: an older gay guy (pejorative)
sea food: sailors
jail bait:  a gay kid below the age of consent

fish: a woman (pejorative)
fag hag: a hetero woman who hangs out with gay guys (not pejorative)
blow job: oral sex
69: simultaneous oral sex of two male partners (a verb and adjective)
tea room: rest room, john
to cruise: to go looking for a partner for sex
to camp: to talk or behave in an ostentatiously gay manner
         The term “camp,” whether a verb, an adjective, or a noun, is of unknown origin, though many origins have been proposed.  Be that as it may, it has quite a history.  I first knew it in the 1950s as a gay verb, as just noted.  By the 1960s it was used more broadly in the meaning of “excessive” or “over the top,” and as such was akin to “theatrical” and “artificial.”  It might or might not be pejorative, but often suggested a trendy and “with it” pattern of behavior.  Very influential was Susan Sontag’s 1964 article “Notes on Camp” in the Partisan Review.  She defined “camp” as “one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon,” but went on to call it “failed seriousness,” which some have labeled not “camp” but “campiness,” meaning frivolous and “so bad it’s good.”  For some, it was identified not only with artifice and ostentation, but also with naïve middle-class pretentiousness, in which case the trendy became teasingly pejorative. 
Carmen in all her glory, in
The Gang's All Here, 1950.
         One example of “camp” cited by Sontag was singer and movie star Carmen Miranda, "The Brazilian Bombshell," whom I recall appearing in old musicals wearing tropical fruits that came off as outrageously and implausibly funny.  In time, “camp” came to include drag queens and other performers like Dame Edna, Divine, Boy George, and Liberace.  And if some of those names don’t register with you, it shows how the concept has morphed over time.  
Dame Edna in 2012.
Dame Edna
Liberace in 1974.
Allan warren          “Camp” is ambiguous, elusive.  One may well ask if it is frivolous or serious, or a combination of both.  Is it a gay term or has it lost that connotation?  Is it trendy or hopelessly dated?  Ask a dozen historians, and you’ll get a dozen answers.  So I’ll leave it to younger generations to use the term as they wish, or to bury it in oblivion.  But let’s face it, “camp” has always been fun.


                           BROWDERBOOKS
For my other books, go here.


Coming soon:  No idea, but something will happen.

©   Clifford Browder   2019

BROWDERBOOKS

                                      BROWDERBOOKS


All my books, nonfiction and historical fiction, relate to the wild, crazy, and hugely creative city of New York.  All are available online as indicated, or from the author. 


1.   No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World  (Mill City Press, 2015).  Winner of the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016.  All about anything and everything New York: alcoholics, abortionists, greenmarkets, Occupy Wall Street, the Gay Pride Parade, my mugging in Central Park, peyote visions, and an artist who made art of a blackened human toe.  
If you love the city (or hate it), this may be the book for you. An award winner, it sold well at BookCon 2017 and 2018, and at the Brooklyn Book Festival 2018.



Reviews
"If you want wonderful inside tales about New York, this is the book for you.  Cliff Browder has a way with his writing that makes the city I lived in for 40 plus years come alive in a new and delightful way. A refreshing view on NYC that will not disappoint."  Five-star Amazon customer review by Bill L.
"To read No Place for Normal: New York is to enter into Cliff Browder’s rich and engaging sixty years of adult life in New York. Yes, he delves back before his time – from the city’s origins to the 19th Century that Ms. Trollope and Mr. Dickens encounter to robber barons and slums that marked highs and lows of the earlier Twentieth Century. But Browder has lived such an engaged and curious life that he can’t help but cross paths with every layer and period of society. There is something Whitmanesque in his outlook."  Five-star Amazon customer review by Michael P. Hartnett.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
2.   Bill Hope: His Story  (Anaphora Literary Press, 2017), the second novel in the Metropolis series.  New York City, 1870s: From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, young Bill Hope spills out in a torrent of words the story of his career as a pickpocket and shoplifter; his brutal treatment at Sing Sing and escape from another prison in a coffin; his forays into brownstones and polite society; and his sojourn among the “loonies” in a madhouse, from which he emerges to face betrayal and death threats, and possible involvement in a murder.  Driving him throughout is a fierce desire for better, a persistent and undying hope.
For readers who like historical fiction and a fast-moving story.






Reviews
"A real yarn of a story about a lovable pickpocket who gets into trouble and has a great adventure.  A must read."  Five-star Amazon customer review by nicole w brown.
"This was a fun book.  The main character seemed like a cross between Huck Finn and a Charles Dickens character.  I would recommend this."  Four-star LibraryThing review by stephvin.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

3.  Dark Knowledge (Anaphora Literary Press, 2018), the third novel in the Metropolis series.  Adult and young adult.  A fast-moving historical novel about New York City and the slave trade, with the sights and sounds and smells of the waterfront. 

New York City, late 1860s.  When young Chris Harmony learns that members of his family may have been involved in the illegal pre-Civil War slave trade, he is appalled.  Determined to learn the truth, he begins an investigation that takes him into a dingy waterfront saloon, musty old maritime records that yield startling secrets, and elegant brownstone parlors that may have been furnished by the trade.  Since those once involved dread exposure, he meets denials and evasions, then threats, and a key witness is murdered.  What price must Chris pay to learn the painful truth and proclaim it?
Reviews

"A lively and entertaining tale.  The writing styles, plot, pace and character development were excellent."  Four-star LibraryThing early review by BridgitDavis.
"At first the plot ... seemed a bit contrived, but I was soon swept up in the tale."  Four-star LibraryThing early review by snash.
"I am glad that I have read this book as it goes into great detail and the presentation is amazing.  The Author obviously knows his stuff."  Four-star LibraryThing early review by Moiser20.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.


4.   The Pleasuring of Men  (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a respectably raised young man who chooses to become a male prostitute in late 1860s New York and falls in love with his most difficult client.

What was the gay scene like in nineteenth-century New York?   Gay romance, but women have read it and reviewed it.  (The cover illustration doesn't hurt.)





Reviews
"At times amusing, gritty, heartfelt and a little sexy -- this would make a great summer read."  Four-star Amazon customer review by BobW.
"Really more of a fantasy of a 19th century gay life than any kind of historical representation of the same."  Three-star Goodreads review by Rachel.
"The detail Browder brings to this glimpse into history is only equaled by his writing of credible and interesting characters.  Highly recommended."  Five-star Goodreads review by Nan Hawthorne.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

5.  Fascinating New Yorkers: Power Freaks, Mobsters, liberated Women, Creators, Queers and Crazies (Black Rose Writing, 2018).  A collection of posts from this blog.  Short biographical sketches of people, some remembered and some forgotten, who lived or died in New York.  All kinds of wild stuff, plus some stuff that isn't quite wild but fascinating.  New York is a mecca for hustlers of every kind, some likable and some horrible, but they are never boring.




Reviews
"Fascinating New Yorkers by Clifford Browder was like sitting down with a dear friend and catching up on the latest gossip and stories. Written with a flair to keep the reader turning the pages, I couldn't stop reading it and thinking about the subjects of each New Yorker. I love NYC and this book just added to the list of reasons why, a must read for those who love NYC and the people who have lived there." Five-star NetGalley review by Patty Ramirez, librarian.
"Unputdownable."  Five-star review by Dipali Sen, retired librarian.
"I felt like I was gossiping with a friend when reading this, as the author wrote about New Yorkers who are unique in one way or another. I am hoping for another book featuring more New Yorkers, as I couldn't put this down and read it in one sitting!"  Five-star NetGalley review by Cristie Underwood.
g New Yorkers” is a pleasure to read and I look forward to reading more works by this author.
"Fascinating New Yorkers is a pleasure to read and I look forward to reading more works by this author." Five-star Reader Views review by Paige Lovitt.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

©   2019   Clifford Browder