Clifford Browder's Blog, page 18

394. Must Gay Sons Hate Their Mothers?

Who are these characters?  To find out, and to meet
Mr. G. Whiz, a recipe for amorous attachments, and
"Silly," click here.          The Eye That Never Sleeps Hustle


     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.


Must Gay Sons Hate Their Mothers?
         “You old fuck!” he screamed into the phone and slammed down the receiver.   Well, we all have bad days charged with tension.  True enough, but he was talking to his mother. 
         This incident my late partner Bob recorded in a journal entry dated September 2, 1988.  (For more on Bob and his journals, see post #391.)  Bob was not given to grossness or profanity.  In a moment of anger or frustration I would yell “Shit!” but he would murmur “Sugar!”  And like many a gay son, he had always been close to his mother, going to the opera with her, lunching with her, and giving her memorable gifts.  Hearing Parsifal at Easter at the Met, the two of them would sit in silence, holding hands, entranced by Wagner’s music.  More than once, when they were lunching together in Jersey City, the mother’s friends would stop by their table and congratulate her on having such a dutiful and attentive son. 
         Bob often joined his parents during their summer vacation on Nantucket, and when his father had to return to Jersey City and his job, Bob and his mother would stay on a few more days.  Recorded in photographs, those days with his mother were special.  In the father’s absence he would encourage her to smoke, which in his father’s house was strictly forbidden.  Alone together, they indulged in forbidden pleasures, they were free.  It was almost a honeymoon, and photos of him on those occasions have, to my mind, a distinctly sensual look.  Shades of Oedipus!
         So what happened?  Bob and his mother lost his father in 1982 and she grieved intensely.  Bob then came out to her, and after she had had time to absorb this, she phoned me and said, “Welcome to the family.”  All was fine here in the city, but when they went to Nantucket, where she had vacationed so often with Bob’s father, Bob had to be spouse as well as son.  As a result, if I joined them for a few days,she was jealous.  By my mere presence, I disrupted their intimacy and, for a few short hours daily, stole her son away.                    Over the next few years Bob’s mother, now living alone in her Jersey City apartment, deteriorated physically and mentally at an alarming rate.  His journals of the late 1980s tell a grim story.  He came regularly to buy her a week’s worth of groceries; to take her to her doctors’ appointments and the outfit that made her hearing aid; to escort her to a beauty parlor; and on her good days, to accompany her to a restaurant where they lunched together and sometimes were joined by me.
         By 1987 the situation was serious.  She fell repeatedly in her apartment or on the street, began forgetting or losing things, and relied on him more and more.  On Christmas Eve of that year, when the two of them were drinking beer together, she had a few too many and slid off her chair to the floor.  Unable to lift her up, Bob phoned the police, but they were slow in coming.  So at his mother’s suggestion he grabbed her legs and, with her lying on her stomach, pulled her across the floor to her bedroom, an experience that he deemed worthy of a Samuel Beckett novel, Beckett being one of his favorite authors.  But if the whole scene was grotesque, he also saw in it a certain dignity stemming from the honesty existing between a mother and her grown son.  The police finally arrived, lifted her off the floor, put her to bed, and departed.  But since she failed to realize that, at her age, she couldn’t drink beer as she once did -- meaning several beers at a time -- Bob phoned the liquor store supplying it and stopped their deliveries.  This she resented, seeing in him the father who had tyrannized her childhood in Germany, and the American husband who had forbidden her to use makeup or smoke.
         The journal entries of 1988 record the worsening situation.  On May 12 he insists that his mother “is integral to my daily breathing.”  He is embarked on an odyssey, perhaps the most important of his life.  What his mother means to him is at stake.  That morning she was a tearful child, totally relying on him, and he didn’t fail her.  His heart is drawn to her.  Or is he deluding himself?  There have been some frightening times of late, when his inner resources seemed nonexistent.  To say that his current relationship with her is of positive value “smacks of a vague insanity.”
         June 17, 1988.  His mother seems to be aging significantly week by week as he watches helplessly.  “An incredible sense of mortality is invading my sensibility.  For Mom, there is a ponderous despair.  She never speaks of the fucking religion she at one time espoused so wholeheartedly…. There is, for her, quite nothing.  A vacuum of awesome contours.  In a way she is waiting – waiting – for the end.  My own mother, wasting physically, devoid of interests, excruciatingly bored.  And I, each week, observe and my sadness deepens.  If this is to be one of the profound periods of my life, I scorn the wisdom I may eventually acquire from this extended pain.”
         For me, reading this now, his words have a chilling authenticity.  The contrast with the AARP Bulletin, whose contents address seniors, is striking.  In Bob’s journals, no photos of smiling oldsters mixed in with ads for stair-lifts, wheelchairs, and easy-to-use cellphones with zippy names.  No triumphant articles on how I overcame bipolar, or tips on how to add healthy years to your life.  Bob is now in the world of Samuel Beckett, the chronicler of despair, decay, and death.
         The entries show a progressive hardening in his tone.  His respect for her has vanished; he tells her pointedly that he feels pity for her, but little else.  Her lack of resources – an interest in literature, art, dance, and music – troubles and depresses him, for it leaves her at the mercy of her mood of the moment.  He, on the other hand, is attending concerts and ballet, and lunching or dining with friends, even while seeing to her needs.  Exasperated by her ceaseless demands, at one time or another he calls her – sometimes to her face – a child, an actress, a nuisance, a liar, a Frankenstein, a grotesque.  “My abuse toward my defenseless mother continues unabashed,” he confesses on August 26, “and I’m growing increasingly afraid of myself.”  She has drained him to the point of exhaustion. 
         And now we come to the incident of September 2 mentioned earlier.  “Ten minutes ago I called my mother an ‘old fuck’ and slammed down the phone.  I’m trembling.  This was appallingly dreadful of me, and yet the words leaped spontaneously.  No need to detail the motivation.  Worthless.  All related to her increasing lack of mind.”  Then, having stocked her up with provisions for his absence, he escapes for a few days to Nantucket.
         September 27, 1988.  “I do not wish my mother dead.  I refer rather to when she dies -- then release for me.  I wish finality for no human being despite moments of fitful anger when I may utter profanities of this ilk.  My heart, in its most honest, enduring contours, is a kind, concerned heart….   Yet I know I am capable of heartlessness, cruelty, indifference, and vengeance.  Inescapable.  Getting worse, with respect to Mom.  What, what, what can I do?  (Later.)  The final stages of everything I now share with my mother are at hand.  Quite frankly I believe I’m moving into the finality of a life.”  Even as he writes this, the memory of the famous jockey with whom he had his first sex experience 31 years before flits into his mind. 
         Anyone who has been a longtime caregiver will recognize these feelings: the intertwining of resentment, explosive anger, and regret, the dismay at moments of indifference and cruelty, and even intrusive memories of sex.  I was aware at the time of Bob’s difficulties with his mother, but only now, while reading the contents of his journals, do I appreciate the depth and intensity of his feelings.  He too -- in spite of concerts, friends, and hours-long meals in restaurants -- was desperate and alone in his suffering.  And finality would be a long time in coming.
         November 29, 1988.  “Mom looked extraordinarily frail in her thin, faded nightgown.  The strong bones of her face contrast strangely to the bird-like frame that is now her physical abode.  I was again reminded of the limitations of human existence as I helplessly surveyed the ruins of what was once a strong, healthy body – and of course I reflected on my own demise somewhere down that not-so-long road of life.”
         December 7, 1988.  “Tonight, I entered the apartment and heard her talking to herself, stating over and over again, ‘I’m all alone.  Nobody wants me anymore.’  I listened in utter sadness before I made my presence known.”  But he then went on to rant against religion, asking why didn’t J.C., an alleged miracle worker, converse with and console his mother.
         “Nobody wants me anymore.”  When I first encountered them, those words went straight to my heart.  But it’s also true that Hedwig Lagerstrom always harbored a streak of self-pity.  Even when she and her husband were both alive and in the best of health, she was capable of “down” moments when she would say dejectedly of older people, “Heart attack, they say.  But it isn’t heart attack, it’s heartbreak, and nobody cares.”  Implication: such is the fate of the elderly at the hands of an uncaring world.  And this when she was having Bob and me over for a turkey dinner, maybe in a living room cluttered up with a decorated Christmas tree, miniature illuminated houses on a mantel, a jolly little plastic Santa and Mrs. Santa, and sumptuously wrapped presents for everyone – what Bob, in his unsparing journal entries, refers to as “Christmas shit.”
         February 12, 1989.  “These recent years have destroyed any illusions regarding regarding Mom.  I view her in a clear light.  She offends me, and often disgusts me….  I am incapable of admiring or loving someone who is ignorant and shallow.  I say this in full knowledge of her sacrifice in helping to raise me.”  In his journal he is determined to be honest, and brutally honest he is.
         Especially maddening was his mother’s habit of losing things: her keys, her glasses, an important check or bill, her $800 hearing aid.  She would then “rave and flail,” while her son stayed calm.  Sometimes an item disappeared for days, then mysteriously reappeared, retrieved by her from what hiding place he would never know.  And sometimes, delusional, she would accuse her home-care aid, or even Bob, of stealing the missing item.  Once when she was missing her keys, he didn’t raise his voice but said quite calmly to her, “Maybe you stuck them up your ass.”  Whether she absorbed this and other remarks isn’t clear, since at times she was lost to reality and immersed in a world of her own.
         A journal entry for April 11, 1989, tells how, just when he had dressed her up for a Sunday dinner in an elegant restaurant, she couldn’t find her costly hearing aid.  After a half-hour search he recovered it, but now she couldn’t find her glasses.  “I started to erupt.  For a minute, I raged.  Yelled out “Bastard!” and realized, on the instant, that my profanity was aimed at the outrage of aging and not specifically at Mom.  I cooled down.”  They then left, but fearing “indelicate” table manners, he steered her to a less elegant restaurant.
         Her life now was joyless.  The apartment that had once hosted splendid turkey dinners with all the trimmings now harbored a “Samuel Beckett atmosphere.  The furniture, the wallpaper, all is dying.  Strange, sometimes dank odors come and go.  The rooms are in twilight, dim illumination.”  
         Mother’s Day brings out the worst in him.  His anger erupts “lie a tornado,” and he takes the lovely yellow carnations that he brought her, crushes them, and throws them on the floor.  In his journal the next day (May 15, 1989) he deplores “such a rotten, dastardly thing.” 
         The mother maintains what he calls her end-of-the-world act, but she is not always a passive sufferer; on one occasion she throws a pocketbook at him.  But an entry of September 25, 1989, reports that “I found her sleeping in a fetal position on her bed, blankets drawn close around her aging, shrinking body, her head resting on a tissue-thin pillow.  I saw a sleeping child.  I was deeply stunned.”  No matter how depressing the sight, his descriptive powers are unimpaired. 
         She pursues him even into his dreams.  On September 17, 1989,  while vacationing in Maine, he records one.  In it she meets him in front of a Baptist Church.  Diminished physically and barely able to speak, she seems to have no bones or blood.  She pleads to be taken to a hospital, but he slaps her to bring her back to “herself,” then drags her to a bus stop.  When she collapses on a bench, he tries again to snap her back to the person she once was.  He wants her to wear her bright pink dress for church, but she escapes him and tries to enter another church across the street.  When he picks her up and carries her back to the bus stop, she weighs nothing, seems to be air, her face a piece of pink tissue.  He scolds her for not trying to look her best, but then realizes he must get her to a hospital; his attempts to revive her are futile, even immoral.  People gather around them and someone phones for an ambulance; end of dream.  Deep in his psyche, he concludes, he still doesn’t believe she is declining.  This is his dilemma, “the thistle that burns through the night and which I’m unable to grasp and dispose of.”
         In time he will get her into a nursing home, thus relieving him of some of his responsibilities, but phone calls will come all too often from the home reporting yet another fall, or some other cause for alarm.  But at least she won’t be alone.  I visited her there with Bob.  Though she lived in reduced circumstances, being allowed only a few personal items in her room, on that occasion she seemed fairly content, and with the other residents feasted on TV.   For better or for worse, finality was still in the offing.
         Mother/son relationships have been much studied, often with differing conclusions.  I offer Bob’s story, told with brutal honesty, as yet another account of these entangled emotions, rarely soothing or heartening, mostly painful, even shocking.  Personally, I feel deeply sorry for both of them.  They were locked into a situation that neither one wanted.

          Bob's journals, correspondence files, and photo albums are a rich archive of gay life and cultural history in New York from the 1950s on.  So rich a collection that I am looking for a home for them after I too depart this luscious earth.  (Not imminent --   I'm a tough old bird.)  At the moment I have three possibilities.  If necessary, I shall query them each in turn.

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Coming soon:  Gay slang of the 1950s, plus thoughts on camp.
©   Clifford Browder   2019

393. My Bawdy, Genteel Party: Who Can Come and Who Can't

To see four poems of astonishing depth, and my latest photo, go here.

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 May 2.  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.  The fourth title in my Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York, it will be released on May 2.

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.

For my other books, see BROWDERBOOKS below, following the post.

              My Bawdy, Genteel Party
         Who Can Come and Who Can't


         I have often imagined myself hosting a dinner party with famous authors of the past and wondering which ones I would invite.  Remembering the dictum of Elsa Maxwell, the queen of party givers, “Nothing spoils a good party like a genius,” I would ask only that my guests be congenial and witty, with a hearty sense of humor.  Let's have depth, but not too much, and surface, if it shines.  Also, a touch of naughty, balanced by a dose of gentility.  No wantons, no prudes.  And so, assuming no language barrier or chronological differences, here are my choices.                  At the top of the list are the Roman poet Horace and the English poet Chaucer.  Why them?  Because Horace, in his Odes, and especially in his Satires, shows himself to be witty, humorous, congenial, and able to take a joke on himself.  As for Chaucer, anyone familiar with the Prologue to his Canterbury Tales knows that this author had a great knowledge of human nature and the world, an appreciation of irony, and an earthy sense of humor.  Sitting between the two of them, I can enjoy the company of each.



Horace, as imagined by posterity.
No authentic portrait survives.


Chaucer, a 1602 print.  He died in 1400, so who knows how accurate this is.  A public figure and a member of Parliament, 
so perhaps this is a bit too drab.

         Who next?  My choices will be from Western European literature, since I’m not familiar enough with the literature of Japan, China, India, or even Russia, though I’m sure they offer candidates galore.  So let’s stick to the West and go more or less chronologically.  The Greek authors don’t reveal themselves personally, which makes for slim pickings.  Homer has a great grasp of human nature, but did he even exist, or is he a comosite of a slew of authors?  But one other name does stand out: Aristophanes, the master of ancient comedy.  Good translations of his plays (hard to find) have left me howling with laughter, and his discourse on love, at the dinner party to end all dinner parties in Plato’s Symposium, amply confirms my decision.  But my dinner party will not aspire to the distinction of Plato’s, with its fascinating and quite serious discussion of sexual love and attraction, since “nothing spoils a good party like a genius.”


Aristophanes.  Ancient bust in the Uffizi Gallery
in Florence.  But we want him with a smile.
         So who among the Romans?  I’ve already nominated Horace.  Maybe Virgil, since in the Aeneidhis haunting phrase lacrimae rerum, “tears for things,” suggests the sadness of mortality, something akin to Wordsworth’s “still sad music of humanity.”  But maybe he’s too gentle, too melancholy, too reflective for my party; we can’t risk a party-pooper, however gifted.  As for the other poets, Catullus and Propertius are possibilities, if yanked away from brooding over their elusive ladyloves, Lesbia (aka Clodia) and Cynthia.   But brooding, unrequited lovers are just as much a risk as geniuses.
         On to the Middle Ages.  Dante, reeking of hellfire, is quite impossible. Not many possibilities here, in this most serious and devout of times, until we get toward Chaucer and the end of it.  But again, this may just be my ignorance.  So on to the Renaissance and its explosion of earthly joy and creativity. 
         In England, Shakespeare, since his plays show a wonderful grasp of human character in all its variations, and sometimes a bawdy sense of humor as well.  Yes, gentle Shakespeare, we cannot do without you.  In Italy, Benvenuto Cellini, on the basis of his uproarious Autobiography; but keeping in mind his violent streak, we’ll search him for hidden knives at the door.  


Cellini.  A 1901 bust in Florence.  Posterity didn't forget this guy.
JoJan
In France, that bawdy cleric Rabelais, with his urging to trinque, and his imagined Abbaye de Thélème and its injunction, Fais ce que voudras, “do whatever you like.”  But he and Chaucer might huddle together in a corner and swap dirty stories amid whoops of laughter, so we’ll seat them apart at the table.  


Another bust: Rabelais.  A nineteenth-century creation 
that makes him look like a scholar or a statesman.
  Sorry, but the best I can do.
Henry Salomé
And that other giant of French Renaissance literature, Montaigne?  Perhaps too serious, too studious, too judicious for our party.  And the poets from all these countries?  No, they’re much too self-centered, too gushily inspired, too lyrical; we can’t have them spouting poesy all over the place, while the rest of us are chatting civilly and dining.
         So now to the seventeenth century.  Milton?  Horrors, no.  Citing scripture, he would lecture us on theology and try to justify the ways of God to man.  We do want Molière, whose knowledge of human nature matches Shakespeare’s.  Just imagine the two of them talking shop, but for that very reason, we’ll put them at opposite ends of the table.  


Molière in the role of Julius Caesar, 1656.
An oil portrait by Nicolas Mignard.  A young
Molière, not yet overcome with sickness.

And to season the occasion with a feminine presence, we’ll invite Madame de Sévigné, whose letters, not too well known among les Anglo-Saxons, are frothy, light, and charming.  And maybe La Fontaine, though his Fables are replete with a kind of proverbial wisdom that some of the diners might find annoying, even trite.


Madame de Sévigné.  A portrait by Claude Lefèbvre,
circa 1665.  Yes, we definitely want her, if she'll come like this.
         And now to the eighteenth century.  Certainly Voltaire, who knew how to present subversive ideas with a disarming charm.  


Voltaire at his desk.  An engraving by P. Baquoy,
circa 1795, based on a painting by Monsiau.
He knew a lot.  Note that cunning smile.  
In England we’ll stay shy of Swift, whose satire could be fierce and cutting.  And Dr. Johnson?  A set-in-his-ways, stodgy Tory.  Best leave him to his coffee houses and cronies, since his unflinching conservatism risks sliding into bigotry.  But ah, at last an American, and one who might confound and even enrage the good doctor.  I mean, of course, Ben Franklin, who was a charming conversationalist, and much more than the aphoristic author of Poor Richard’s Almanack. With him on hand, wit will flash, provoking ripples of mirth. 


Franklin and the ladies of Paris.  A painting by William
Overend Geller, circa 1830.  As rebellious America's
envoy to France, he was a hit, especially with the ladies
at court.  Here, he seems to be upstaging the only couple
seated, who are probably Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
         The nineteenth century offers a slew of candidates.  Dickens certainly, for he mingled gladly with all the people, titled ladies included, who volunteered to participate in his amateur play productions.  


Dickens at his desk.  An 1858 photograph.
He died at his desk, but not this one.

Maybe Sir Walter Scott, since he is said to have hosted genially a multitude of guests, and not just literary ones, at his country estate.  And maybe Byron as well, if on his good behavior and not roaming amorously too deep into the night.  Oscar Wilde?  Yes, for his wit alone.  


Oscar, probably in New York, circa 1882.
Surface is okay, if it shines.

And George Bernard Shaw?  Likewise for his wit, though it can be acerbic.  


George Bernard Shaw, scribbling in a notebook, 1914.
But we want him scintillating with wit at our table.  Imagine
him trading quips with Oscar.  History would be made.

          Among the French I’ll take Balzac, who may fall in love with any older woman present (we’ll need to add some more). 


Balzac, an 1842 daguerreotype.  Looking a bit
Napoleonic.  We'll make him button up his shirt.
And George Sand, so she can fall in love with the youngest man present (probably Catullus).  She liked them young, sensitive, and vulnerable (think Musset, Chopin), so Catullus is definitely at risk.  (My view of her is probably influenced by Merle Oberon as Sand in the 1945 film  A Song to Remember, Hollywood's version of a life of Chopin, where she is ruthless in her final rejection of the dying Chopin (Cornel Wilde).


George Sand.  An 1838 portrait by Auguste Charpentier.
Not a raving beauty, but to be taken seriously,
and at times a bit of a flirt.
          And from America, Walt Whitman, if he’ll drop his pose as “one of the roughs,” spruce up a bit, and just be a good, easy-going, democratic fellow. 


Walt Whitman.  An 1872 photograph taken in Brooklyn.  We want the good gray poet of his later years, not the celebrant of the manly love of comrades, which reeks of homoerotic love.  We're not prudes, but we want him to mix with everyone, not just sexy young men.
         More possibilities, as the nineteenth edges into the twentieth century.  Henry James, though he might strike some as pompous, because he was urbane and well-mannered, and an astute observer of society, its ironies and nuances.


Henry James, as done memorably by Sargent, 1913.

And Proust, if we catch him before ailments and involuntary memory took him over; in the salons of his youth, he is said to have talked up a storm.  And of course Colette, so charmingly irreverent, so knowing of the world and its ways. 


A young Marcel in an 1895 photograph.
         For the full-fledged twentieth century, I’m a bit at a loss, perhaps because I’m too close to these people and lack objectivity.  Among the English bards, I would take Auden, not my favorite poet, but a good mixer, so they say.  And Christopher Isherwood, of course, but not Sir Steven Spender, not just because that knighthood bothers me (like becoming a member of the Academy in France), but because I met him once and found him supersensitive, reticent, withdrawn.  


Isherwood (left) and Auden, 1938.

Dylan Thomas?  Lord no, a drunk.  Alan Ginsberg?  No, he’d probably do a striptease, and I don’t want to see his unlovely flesh.  So how about the French?  Sartre?  Too intellectual, too too derisive, but maybe Camus.  Cocteau?  If we can drag him away from opium and his lover, and repeat Diaghilev’s inspired command to him: Emerveille-moi, “Do me wonders.”  He did end up in the Academy, but at least he went in on the arm of his lover, Jean Marais, with author Jean Genet, ex-thief and self-proclaimed pervert, as his guest.


Jean Coctrau, 1923.
         And the Irish?  James Joyce would make me nervous, since he might do a wicked sketch of us and sneak it into Ulysses.  As for Samuel Beckett, his fierce nihilism, his appetite for dark humor and decay, would put a damper on the whole affair. 
         Belatedly, I realize I’ve forgotten the Scots.  So let’s include Robert Burns, as long as he speaks in Scottish dialect.  How can we omit the author of “Auld Lang Syne” and the poem to a timorous wee beastie?


Robert Burns, a 1787 portrait.
Another target for George Sand.

          I've also slighted the Germans.  How about the eminence of eminences, Goethe? I just don't know.  He's so enshrined, so monumental.  Thomas Mann?  Ditto (though I love the Magic Mountain).  And Walter von der Vogelweide?   His name alone sings to me, there's music in it.  But I have no knowledge of medieval German, so I strike out. Land of Beethoven and Bach, forgive.  And correct me, if you can.

          So there you have it: my list of guests, in hopes of assembling a joyous, life-affirming dinner party that would long be remembered.  With hindsight I see a pattern in my choices:
·      Funny, not deep·      Juicy, not dry·      Open, not closed·      Loose, not tight·      Knowing, not naive
Had I been choosing applicants for a writers’ residence, or recipients of a prestigious literary award, I would probably have looked for just the opposite, minus “naïve.”  But for a social event like a dinner party, genial masters of chitchat are required, and if the chitchat can be witty, perceptive, and memorable, so much the better.
           So these are my choices.  Who have I left out?  Who would you invite … or disinvite?  I’d love to know.  But beware of bleeding hearts, cynics, and anyone “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”  And we do need more women.



[image error] And here am I, gobbling a dessert at the Left Bank restaurant
on Perry Street.  Photo by my friend Barbara Hitchcock, 
visiting from Maine.         

Coming soon: Must Sons Hate Their Ailing Mothers?  My partner Bob's blast at motherhood.  And blast he did; you'll see.


                                    BROWDERBOOKS

All books 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.

Readers will enjoy Clifford Browder’s lively, descriptive writing. Fans of non-fiction and more recent history will really appreciate the research that he put into these pages. His writing will definitely captivate your interest as it did mine. “Fascinating New Yorkers” is a pleasure to read and I look forward to reading more works by this author.
Readers will enjoy Clifford Browder’s lively, descriptive writing. Fans of non-fiction and more recent history will really appreciate the research that he put into these pages. His writing will definitely captivate your interest as it did mine. “Fascinating 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   

392. Must Gays Hate Catholicism?

More good news:  I have received the author's copies for my new novel, The Eye That Never Sleeps, and so can sign copies for whoever requests it.


 

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.  The fourth title in my Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York, it will be released on May 2.

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.

Available now only from the publisher, Black Rose Writing, or from the author.
15% discount from the retail price ($18.95), if you pre-order now. The book will be shipped on May 2.  For my other books, see BROWDERBOOKS below, following the post.

              Must Gays Hate Catholicism?


         Yes, my partner Bob was pretty vocal about his antipathy to Catholicism.  His diary entries in the late 1980s sizzle with resentment and hate of the Church.  Consider this entry, no location given, January 16, 1986:
The indifference of the Catholic Church to human needs revolts my sense of integrity and fair play.  I view the Catholic Church as the greatest force of oppression in this country.  It stinks with the weight of its hatreds and the sheer bulk of its hideous decrees and doctrines.  It is astonishing that some of the world’s finest art and music has been born within the perimeters of the vicious and perverse scope of Peter’s almighty Church.  This evening my heart cries sadly over the infinite ills wrought by the Pope and his despicable crew.
         This shocked me when I first read it, and I’m not even Catholic.  This is not the rant of an enraged Protestant, for Bob was a committed atheist, hostile to religion in all its forms.  If he focused on Catholicism, it’s because the Pope and the archbishop of New York were tangible targets he could aim at.  But regarding Catholicism I want to say to him simply this: “You never saw Chartres cathedral.”  For the beauty of that cathedral – the sculpture at the portals, and especially the stained glass that seems to float in space – implies a faith that is supremely spiritual.  For me, such beauty transcends any misdeeds – and historically, there were many -- committed by the Church.  


Chosovi








I would also cite the Gregorian chants, which for me have a purity and simplicity that convey the very essence of faith, a spirituality that surpasses reason and takes the listener into a realm of unquestioning devotion.
          But Bob was not so taken, even though he acquired and listened to Gregorian chants, and loved Bach’s Mass in B Minor, which he introduced me to.  Listen to his entry of August 19, 1987:
My loathing of the C. Church knows no bounds.  I am disdainful of and repulsed by all it represents.  The mythology of Big Daddy, J.C., and the Spook is incredulous. The extent to which the C. Church has perpetrated this nonsensical rubbish is appalling.  But of course it can only appeal to pea-brains or the mentally retarded, the mentally inept.  It should all be deposited inn a garbage can, where it assuredly belongs.  Shit on all of it!
         To dismiss devout Catholics as “pea-brains” or “mentally retarded” is of course ridiculous, but to understand Bob’s anger, we must dig deeper.  This was the late 1980s, and AIDS was raging unchecked, devastating the gay community.  Stoking Bob’s ire were the pronouncements of John O’Connor, Cardinal Archbishop of New York, who insisted that homosexual acts were contrary to natural law and intrinsically immoral.  O’Connor joined with the Salvation Army and other organizations in challenging an executive order from Mayor Ed Koch requiring all city contractors, including religious organizations, to provide services on a non-discriminatory basis with respect to, among other things, sexual orientation.  And they were successful; in time, the order was struck down by the courts.


An AIDS protest in 1988: ACT-UP at FDA headquarters in Maryland, demanding greater access to drugs under investigation.
         Bob’s fight with religion could take on a very personal aspect.  Writing in his favorite restaurant, the Hunan Spring, in an entry dated 8 p.m., May 13, 1987, he tells how, on Mother’s Day, he told his widowed mother, a good churchgoing Lutheran, (1) that her husband had not been a Christian, which she denied vigorously, having given him a Christian burial; and (2) that the idea of no sex before marriage had now been thrown out, which provoked another explosive response on her part, as she declared that such a notion was not right.  But Bob was correct.  His father was a ”closet atheist” who had introduced his son to the works of the freethinkers Robert Ingersoll and H.L. Mencken, both of them hostile to religion.
         After recording the explosive Mother’s Day events of May 13, Bob adds an impression at the restaurant:
At an adjacent table is a Christian or perhaps Jewish cluck “pontificating” on the divine/mystical/supernatural.  Her hair is shaped like a mushroom; her voice is very domineering and “authoritative.”  Her companion seems to be a rather wispy, basically in-agreement guy, and, oh, darling, the conversation is everything they both deserve.  The mutual (almost, not quite, since the gal predominated) conversation went on to the so remarkable, h-m-m, concern for belief and faith.  --  Same thing, no?  The cackling gal sounds like she needs a good, resounding fuck from her so-concerned (that word again) companion!  They have sat there for 45 minutes, blabbing without intelligence about the unknown. ---  Such an utter waste!
Then, shortly later, he announces that “the demented pair has left.”  He anticipates going tomorrow with a friend to Coney Island, where he anticipates “Infinity.  Air.  Possibilities.”  Clearly, his Infinity has nothing of divinity.




         Are his anti-Catholic fulminations irrelevant today, given the more gay-friendly attitude of the Church, and the more enlightened mindset of the laity?  Not at all.  “Renewed Hostilities Torment Gay Workers in Catholic Churches” is the title of a front-page article in the New York Times of Sunday, December 30, 2018.  It relates a series of incidents:
·      How an openly gay layman working for a Catholic church in San Diego arrived at the church office for work and found two words spray-painted on the wall: No Fags.  ·      How after Mass on another occasion, a stranger had swung a punch at the same gay layman, who when threats against him multiplied, finally quit his job.  ·      How in Chicago a priest burned a rainbow flag and led parishioners in a “prayer of exorcism.”  
Fueling some of these incidents is renewed public awareness of sexual abuse by hundreds of Catholic priests.  If Bob were alive today, he would hate both the Church and those trying to purify it.  His rants would thunder across the pages of his journal, with an abundance of four-letter words. 



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Anti-gay demonstrators in San Francisco in 2008.  
Scenes like this fed Bob's fury.
EwS
        From the fulminations in his diaries, one might think that Bob in those years – the 1980s – was fast becoming a cranky old oath-prone codger devoid of humor, tolerance, and compassion.  On the contrary, he was sensitive, perceptive, and especially appreciative of the magic of New York, the Village, and his two vacation islands, Monhegan and Nantucket.  And he savored Chopin played by Rachmaninoff, as well as opera, theater, and all the cultural richness of New York, supplemented by that of Boston and Washington.  Also, he had the gift of friendship.  His journals record numerous experiences shared with friends of both sexes whose friendship he treasured.  And unlike me, he rarely swore; in moments of anger or frustration, when I would say “Shit!” or something worse, he would say “Sugar!”  But he was also a determined idealist, and time and again humanity let him down.  He deplored the banality of life all around him.  His attitude could indeed be called elitist, but it was passionately felt.  His diatribes expressed a profound sense of waste, an awareness of what might have been but wasn’t, the hurt and grief of loss.
         If Bob on the subject of religion, and especially Catholicism, bothers you, wait till you hear him on the subject of Mom; American motherhood may never be the same. .

Coming soon: My Bawdy, Genteel Dinner Party, and Who Can Come and Who Can't.  (To give us a break, before my partner Bob's journal entries demolish American motherhood.)


                                    BROWDERBOOKS

All books 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. 
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

©   2019   Clifford Browder   

391. Must Gays Hate Straights?

The Eye That Never Sleeps

Here it is – my new novel!

 

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.  The fourth title in my Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York, it will be released on May 2.

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.

Available now only from the publisher, Black Rose Writing. 
15% discount from the retail price ($18.95), if you pre-order now. The book will be shipped on May 2.  For my other books, see BROWDERBOOKS below, following the post.

Must Gays Hate Straights?

         My partner Bob kept a journal throughout much of his life.  He wrote in it sometimes at home or at work, but most often while sitting for an hour or more – in a favorite Chinese restaurant whose well-tipped staff knew to leave him alone while he did so.  He was, after all, their best customer, and a friend of the owner and waiters and waitresses, whom he knew by name and gladdened with gifts at Christmas.  And if he arrived to find his favorite table occupied by other patrons, the embarrassed staff would be in a state of consternation, until reassured by him that he could take another table. 
         On quiet evenings Bob would scribble away while downing up to four Manhattans, which reminds me of an old saying that I just invented (really, adapted): “One Manhattan, two Manhattans, three Manhattans, floor.”  Bob never made it to the floor, but the writing in the journal got bigger and bigger, and sloppier and sloppier, often ending in outsized letters with the one word “Dick.”  And who was Dick?  An old lover enshrined in memory, whose brief and bumpy relationship with Bob had ended with a bang.  (Not a gunshot, just an emphatic suggestion that Bob get lost.)  How memory – with the help of alcohol – beautifies the ugly, smooths out the rough, and turns pain into pleasure!  And while Bob was scribbling and imbibing, he would listen to the conversations at tables near him and record, mock, and excoriate the speakers in his journal.  Then, as evening came on, he would note the “special blue” outside – the light of falling dusk, which calmed and reassured him.  This was followed by night in Greenwich Village, a kind of scenic magic with passing cars and people lit by diamonds of light.
         The contents of his journals – all 28 of them, plus quantities of loose pages written when no journal was at hand – expressed his thoughts and feelings of the moment, whether socially acceptable or not.  At one point early in the game, he went back and cut out the names of people he had mentioned, but then he stopped doing so, and let the first names or full names stand.  For this reason, I feel I shouldn't publish extracts containing the names of people still alive.  But many other passages, having no names, can appear without offending individuals.  Should these extracts be made public?  Yes, I think so.  In the journals Bob often expresses the hope that sometime in the future someone will read his journals and see their worth.  He acknowledges exaggerations, redundancies, and inconsistencies, but insists on his honesty, his truth to who he is.  And he spent large sums of money (in one case, $25, and in another, $35) on well-bound, beautifully formatted volumes, with blank pages guaranteed to last 300 years.  So he wanted his journals to endure and be read, and this, I think, justifies my now publishing carefully chosen extracts.  

          The journals are at least three things: an archive of gay history, including his personal experiences; an account of Coney Island, which he visited over many years and loved; and an account of New York City's cultural life -- his personal appraisal of countless ballets, plays, concerts, and operas.  Here, I will focus on the first, which I think the most revealing ... and shocking.  What follows are passages from the 1980s, when his favorite restaurant was the Hunan Spring, at the corner of West 11th and Hudson Streets, just a block from our building.  There, among other things, he scribbled his favorite hates.  


Straight Men
         At the Hunan Spring, 7 p.m., February 3, 1987: 
I believe I’m becoming quite hostile towards the majority of straight men.  I loathe the stink of them, the sight of them.  I most detest the pretentiousness, all of it.  It not only stinks, it supports the carrion of endless unhappiness and despair.        
         And again at the Hunan Spring, September 6, 1989:
Adjacent table: an outrageously loud macho guy proclaiming, “It’s better to beat the shit out of the guy.  I don’t go for the brooding shit, that’s too feminine.”  He certainly has been remarkably well-instructed by our great American society.  He has much to live for, the poor idiot.
         And in a letter to a woman friend dated May 1, 1985, of which he kept a copy:
By the way, why do most so-called straight men deny that they ever cry or worry or occasionally go through hell because of Mommy or other emotional dilemmas?  Maybe that’s why a lot of us gays refer to women when we speak of our experience, especially Hollywood women.  Types of women.  Because we identify.  It’s, sure, a little camp, but the guts of truth are inherent.  People have feelings, men included.  I hate those straight men who reject tears, sentiment, and genuine feelings.
          In a diary entry dated August 29, 1983, he explains how this antipathy developed.
There has been a change in me.  In 1977, at the start of this journal, I was not overly concerned about straight attitudes or the various straight-controlled situations lived through on a daily basis.  Now, six years later, age and events have contrived to turn me bitter.  I see, as though for the first time, the inequity of life, even here in New York.  Straight couples embracing / kissing on the street, the exploitation of family life in advertising and everywhere else, the recent loud damnation of gays because of the AIDS crisis – wow, small wonder I don’t become insane!


 Gay Men
        Not that he spared the gay crowd.  Here is an extract from his entry at the Hunan Spring for the evening of July 1, 1987:
Adjacent to me, at a table I often occupy in the corner, are two gay guys.  One is very taciturn.  The other is knowledgeable and young and, hmm, quite glib.  Shall I call him “X”?  Well, X is now speaking at length of an obscure gay bar in Hyannis, pointing out that it closes “early” and that “that’s good.”  He is now talking about someone he met recently, someone who is “unattractive, not “good-looking” ---  “X” repeats, “He is notattractive,” as though there is nothing  more  important.  The redundance is unnerving.  The attitude – oh, baby – that stinks.  The voice of “X” – pretty, aloof, so willing to give advice -- He talks about “relinquishing any preconceivedlifestyle and assuming friendship.”  If “friendship” takes place, O.K.  Otherwise, “you’re limiting yourself.”  Eeek!
         Preparing to go home, Bob adds that X’s assumptions are “utter bullshit, shallow, and misleading.”  He would like to shout at him one word: Ideals! 
         “X” abdicates, minimizes, and, subtly, satirizes everything.  Smugness.  Hauteur.  Disdain.  He must surely be disgusted with himself in private.  His youth means nothing.  His assumptions imply everything.  It is all a sham. 
         Mercifully, X had no idea of the impression he was making on the discreet observer at a nearby table.  Bob’s victims rarely did.


        Families

          Families, the very epitome of straightness, also drew his ire.  At the Hunan Spring, 7  p.m., April 13, 1987 tSix slices of orange before me, along with the remainder of my “final”    Manhattan.  And tea.  --  Behind me, a “family,” the Mama, Papa, and garrulously loud “child.”  Ugh: -- To my oranges.  For now.
         In his entries, children were not spared.  At the Hunan Spring, April 4, 1990:
Two totally obnoxious shitty brats have aggrandized a certain amount of the last hour.  Did I ever aver, definitively, that I loathe undisciplined progeny?  I abhor them.  I spit on them, including the inane, indifferent parents, and throw the entire spuming, madly-disrupting lot into a meat-grinder .  Really, fuck them all!


The Elderly


         Though his pronouncements were often aimed at the young, Bob  didn’t spare the elderly.  Consider his entry, again at the Hunan Spring, for April 15, 1987, when Bob was anticipating the ripe old age of 50:
Table adjacent has an older friend-couple – tiresome – truly ancient old creatures – where there is nothing sensitive or intelligent to talk about.  The words are sheer pap, meaningless – and, oh, how important they make it seem!  I am thoroughly disgusted with fools!  The conversation moves along utterly bland lines, and it dissolves into a wretched BATHOS.  What a waste!!!  Waste, waste!!!  The old fools, damn them.  --  My last thought: Where are the intelligent folk?  The world is replete with idiots.
His beloved restaurant could offer him refuge from the challenges of the day, serve him good Chinese food and multiple Manhattans, and soothe him with views of his “special blue” of twilight, but it couldn’t keep out fools.
         There’s a point at which his denigrations achieve a savage grandeur laced with barbs of humor.  But when we were together and I got whiffs of these sentiments – never so intense as in his diaries – I took exception, insisting that not all straight people – the great majority of humans – merited such hate.  He made some concessions: it was straight men, not straight women, that he hated; among straight women he had many friends.  And it wasn’t all straight men, but primarily the super macho types -- loud, insensitive, presumptuous -- and in that regard I had to agree they were obnoxious.  My solution was simply to put as much space as possible between them and myself, but for Bob it wasn’t so easy.  Like many gay men, from an early age he had been called “sissy” by the macho types at school, and it stung.  Behind his rage was pain.


At Work

         This problem could pursue him even at work, where he was very much the professional librarian, and the perpetrators weren’t always macho males.  Once he received a call from a woman with the outfit responsible for the library’s burglar-alarm system, who wanted to make sure the system was operating.  When he transferred the call to the appropriate staff member, he heard the woman say to someone, “He sounds as gay as they come,” unaware that Bob was still on the line.
Scorn, hatred, homophobia  -- all was in the words.  I cut in and, deliberately lowering the timbre of my voice, I stated that I’d hang on until the connection was made.  I should’ve commented directly and with sharpness on her denigrating words.  The insulting low-class bitch!
The memory of that phone call, coming just at the end of the day, haunted him afterward, as he dined at the Hunan Spring, where "my inward hostility towards mindless straights emerged.”  His imagination, he adds, was stirred in the direction of vengeance: “Very sad.”  (Hunan Spring, April 6, 1990.)
         In this instance, I can hardly blame him.  And the woman, in speaking of “as gay as they come,” betrayed her total ignorance.  If she ever came face to face with “as gay as they come” -- maybe a drag queen in garb from outer space -- she’d run shrieking from the scene.
         Which reminds me of an incident of my own.  Waiting in the office of an ophthalmologist I was seeing for the first time, I once heard a woman who had just seen the doctor say with indignation to her husband, “A lady wants to be treated like a lady.  What is he?  A goddam homosexual?”  I felt like telling her that her remark was that of a brainless idiot.  Most gay men treat women with respect and often form lifelong friendships with them.  But of course I kept my mouth shut, and when I saw the ophthalmologist, I grasped the problem at once.  Far from being gay, he was a heterosexual robot, tight-lipped and devoid of personality, who treated his patients like machinery that needed to be examined and repaired.  (Needless to say, I never went back to him.)  I wasn’t enraged by the incident, since the woman’s comment wasn’t aimed at me.  But these are the kind of remarks that gay people endured on a daily basis, and in Bob’s case they fueled the fire of his anger. 
         If Bob's diatribes against the straight world, often seasoned with four-letter words, offend you, wait till you hear him on the subject of religion in general and Catholicism in particular, another attitude that I could understand but not condone.

Coming soon: Must Gays Hate Catholicism?


                                    BROWDERBOOKS

All books 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. 
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

©   2019   Clifford Browder   

390. Three New York Adventures and a Browderboost

Big news!  Here is the cover of my next book, The Eye That Never Sleeps, the fourth title in my Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York.  For the other three titles in the series, and my nonfiction, see below under BROWDERBOOKS.


More of this in next week’s blog.

               Three New York Adventures

New York is never dull; adventures abound. Recently I had three in one week on my street, West 11th.
Adventure #1:  Returning from errands one morning, I found a neighbor and longtime friend flat on the floor of the vestibule, unable to get to his feet.  While getting his mail from his mailbox, he had slipped on a pile of loose newspapers that had accumulated in the vestibule, unclaimed by our ever absent neighbors.         “I can’t get up,” he said.  “I’m so embarrassed.”         “Don’t be embarrassed,” I said.  “This is a practical problem with a practical solution.  I’ll get you up, but you’ll have to cooperate.  First, slide over so I can enter.  I can’t help you from out here.”         Where my assurance came from, I’ll never know.  He slid, I entered.         “Now I’m going to open the inner door and hold it open with the door stop.  Then I want you to slide or crawl into the building and over to the foot of the stairs.”         Still muttering about his embarrassment, he slid himself into the building and reached the foot of the stairs.         “Now,” I said, “lift yourself up onto the lowest step.  I’ll help, if necessary.”         With effort, he lifted himself up onto the lowest step without any help from me.         “Now,” I said, “lift yourself up onto the second step.”         With effort, he did.         “Bravo,” I said.  “Now onto the third step, if you can.”         With effort, he did.         “Now,” I said, pretentiously in command, “grab hold of the railing and lift yourself up.  Get your legs under you.  I’ll help, if necessary.”         With great effort, but without help from me, he grabbed the railing of the stairs and lifted himself up.  Once on his feet, he was fine.  I gave him his mail, and he started up the stairs.  I followed.  Exhausted and greatly relieved, he entered his apartment.  What luck for him that I had come when I did!  End of Adventure #1.


                  Normal?  Not me!  I'm a New Yorker.


Adventure #2.  On a recent Sunday I lunched again at Philip Marie, a popular restaurant on the corner of West 11th and Hudson Streets, just a block from my building.  As usual, it was jammed and noisy, but because I was alone, they could seat me at a table for two; larger groups had to wait.  I ordered my usual: yogurt and granola topped with sliced strawberries, followed by a cappuccino.  Having nibbled cheese and sipped wine in my apartment, I needed no more.  The noise was so great – New Yorkers talk, as they live, with intensity – I couldn’t hear even a word of the conversation of the two young women at the table next to mine.  But I had a good view of a young woman seated with her male escort at a certain distance from my table.  I couldn’t not see her.  She was attractive but not a stellar beauty, but she flashed a warm smile, while talking cheerfully with her companion.  When I paid my bill and was preparing to leave, I had a sudden impulse to go over to their table and say to her,         “Please don’t be offended my my comment; it’s meant as a compliment.  If I were younger (which I’m not), and if I were straight (which I’m not), I would want to know young women like you.  He” – a gesture toward her companion – “is a lucky guy.”         And having said this, I would leave.  Though strongly tempted to do it, I chose to be cautious and left without saying a word.  She never knew I even existed.         A query to all the women who read this post:  If a total stranger came up to you while dining in a restaurant and addressed you in this fashion, would you be flattered, annoyed, or maybe just puzzled, wondering, “Who is this nut and what does he want?”  The men can answer too, but it’s the reaction of women that I most want.  Please do let me know.  New York being New York, I’ll probably never see her or her escort again.


                 New York: Is there anywhere else?


Adventure #3.  Leaving the restaurant, I found the weather windless and mild enough that I decided to walk down West 11th toward the river.  Between Greenwich and Washington Streets, on the north or uptown side of West 11th, I came to a series of storefronts on what is otherwise a mostly residential block.  I have chronicled this stretch before, with wine bars, a café, a beauty salon, etc.  But what caught my eye once again was, under a red lantern, the cluttered window of Turks & Frogs, a wine bar, with WINE in gold letters in front of it. 
Not the window display that I saw, but the sloop,
the two-candle candelabras, and the vertical
ANTIQUES sign are recognizable.
Photo courtesy of Turks & Frogs.
         Intrigued, I stopped and studied it.  In the middle of the window was a low three-drawer cabinet only two and a half feet high, and on top of it, a large model of a Hudson River sloop.  In front of the sloop were three small bound volumes tied together that, when I squinted, I deciphered as Winston Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples, first published in four volumes in 1956.  On one side of the cabinet was a large glass bowl full to the brim with corks.  Near it were a two-candle candelabra, an orange globe of the world suspended from the ceiling, and what looked like the gaping mouth of an old Victrola speaker.  On the other side of the cabinet was a matching two-candle candelabra, a large wicker basket enclosing a one-gallon wine jug, a vertical sign saying ANTIQUES, and another lantern.  The whole window looked charmingly old and quaint – antiques indeed, and I, a history buff, made notes to remember in detail the display, the most interesting one I have seen on West 11th from Seventh Avenue all the way to the river.  Peering in the front door, I could see a darkened interior with a row of tables each with a lit lamp: an inviting décor, but with no one – patrons or staff – in sight.  How could it be so empty?         Later, back home at my computer, I learned that Turks & Frogs opens  at 4 p.m. – which explained why, when I saw it at 3 p.m., it was empty.  And since it stays open until 4 a.m., it must entice patrons deep into the night.  I also learned what mulled wine is: a wine, usually red, infused with spices and served warm.  What kind of midnight revels it hosts, I will never know, since I'm not a midnight guy.  But mulled wine seems like just the thing to warm you up on a cold and windy winter night!  And since it is known as glögg in Sweden, I encountered it long ago when I and my mother were invited over to a friend’s house for snacks and a glass of glögg.  I still remember the wonderful spiced aroma given off by the wine.  Maybe sometime this winter I will conceive a yearning for it and, soon after 4 p.m., satisfy it at Turks & Frogs.  Thus ends, for now, Adventure #3.  Would anyone like to go some late afternoon to Turks & Frogs?  

         Because I deem it truly imaginative and original, and capable of lifting the spirit, I hereby award the Turks & Frogs window display a BROWDERBOOST, a purely verbal award (no $) that I give out only rarely on my outings in this city.  Congrats, Turks & Frogs.


           Intensity + diversity = creativity = New York.



         Has anyone else had a New York adventure?  Needn’t be a big one; maybe just a small one, even trivial, like mine.  If so, let me know.  With your permission, I may share it with followers of this blog. 



Coming soon: Some extracts from my deceased partner Bob's diaries.  Those who knew him may be shocked.


                                    BROWDERBOOKS

All books 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. 
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

©   2019   Clifford Browder   

389. War Is Fun

                    THE  BIG  HUSTLE


Here's a new twist --

Bill Hope, the street kid turned pickpocket who tells his story in Bill Hope: His Story, the second title of my Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York, is the only one of my characters to get interviewed by Lisa Burton, the famous radio interviewer. Not only is Lisa famous, but she's downright sexy.  For a view of her, and her interview with Bill, go here.  Oh, and by the way, she's a robot.



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.  Signed copies available from the author.

                              The  Small  Hustle


Bargain, bargain, bargain!  All my paperbacks are now available from me (but not from Amazon et al.) through December 31 with free shipping.  (U.S. only.  Sorry, Canada, Australia, and Japan.)  This is my hustle for the biggest gift-giving season of the year, and I want everyone to be happy (myself included).  For the books, see under BROWDERBOOKS below, following the post.  As always, signed copies are available from the author. 



                        WAR  IS  FUN

Disclaimer:I have never served in the military, and for that reason usually avoid topics relating to military service.  I know of war and related matters only what others tell or write about it.  This post began as a simple query about a statement that haunted me, evolved from there, and ended up overwhelming me and compelling me to write about it.  The result follows.  I welcome feedback, whether negative or positive, from those with firsthand experience of war.


         Long ago, back in the fervent and fabled 1960s, I heard a radio interview on WBAI (where else?) with Jean Houston, a controversial author and New Age priestess – and some would say a guru of uplift and an intellectual and spiritual dilettante.  What struck me then, and still strikes me now, was her assertion, “We’ve got to make peace sexy!”  The Vietnam War was raging, opposition to it was growing, and she was obviously in the camp of the peaceniks.  Inspired by her declaration, I wrote a poem on peace and mailed it to her via WBAI.  She in time responded with enthusiasm, told me she had read my poem at her gatherings, and invited me to join her, when she came my way, and read my poem to the attendees.  I chose not to, since admission was pricey and she said nothing about free entry, and in time I came to dislike the poem and discarded it.  But her declaration still echoes in my psyche: “We’ve got to make peace sexy!”


         By implication, this statement admits that war is sexy.  We can agree with General Sherman, the ravager of Georgia, that war is hell, and describe it as cruel and destructive and tragic, but the fact remains, it’s sexy.  Recently I read online the anonymous account of an Afghanistan vet who admitted that he missed the rush of combat, the excitement of war.  Alternating with his dreams of horror are dreams of glory.  To re-experience the thrill of war, he sometimes goes sky-diving.  And if his comments have provoked bitter criticism, he has also received letters from other vets thanking him for telling it as it is; for all its horrors, they too miss the excitement of war.


         In his play The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams’s young protagonist laments that circumstances prevent his fulfilling himself as a man by being a hunter, a lover, and a warrior.  The first great epic in Western literature, Homer’s Iliad,shows the cruelty and horror of war, and the relentless hand of fate, but for all involved, there is also glory.  


And in modern times we glorify Napoleon, whose countless campaigns devastated much of Europe.  Yes, he was a brilliant general, but the death toll of those campaigns, military and civilian combined, is estimated at between 3.25 and 6.5 million.  Yet book after book is written about him, and his doings still provoke our fascination.


         We grow up in a celebration of war, even while war is denounced.  “Bang, bang! You’re dead!” resonated through my childhood, as I and my friends fought imaginary wars and brandished imaginary guns.  The movies were full of wars, whether Technicolor epics of the British empire (where the diabolical natives always lost to the noble British imperialists), or, supplanting such films during World War II, Hollywood epics where we American “good guys” always won, and the enemy – treacherous little Japanese, or brutal Nazi sadists – always lost.  This, of course, was the “good” war, uncontroversial, opposed only by a few deluded pacifists and my father, an unreconstructed isolationist who thought that President Roosevelt, our commander-in-chief, was, as a result of polio, not quite right in his head.


         Googling “war is fun” on the Internet, I came upon an article by a German who had volunteered to fight in the Kosovo Liberation Army.  He says that, if a unit learns that an enemy tank formation is approaching, most of the soldiers will freak out and be paralyzed by fear, while a few smile and say, “Okay, let’s do it!”  He is obviously one of those who smile, for in an actual battle he and another soldier were laughing as they shot at enemy tanks.  The other soldiers thought them crazy, but then, after a while, they joined in.  After all, this may be your last day on earth, there’s no one here to judge you, so why not make the most of it?  It’s the elite forces, he adds, that are most likely to enjoy combat; he heard British soldiers referring to battles as “parties.”  But if soldiers in regular units make jokes before battle, the jokes stop the moment the battle begins.


         This topic is faced squarely by William Broyles, Jr., in “Why Men Love War,” an article first published in Esquire in November 1984, and now available online.  Broyles tells how, when he visited a fellow Vietnam vet years later, his friend told him, “What people can’t understand is how much fun Vietnam was.  I loved it.  I loved it, and I can’t tell anybody.”  There, spoken honestly but furtively, is the dirty little secret: war is fun.
  
         Broyles then admits that, even though war is terrible, he too loved it.  But it’s hard to convey this feeling, for civilian-issued nouns and verbs seem made for a different universe.  War is supposed to be a necessary evil, a patriotic duty to be discharged and then put behind you.  


To love war is to mock the very values we supposedly fight for.  And yet, when Broyles remembers combat in Vietnam years before – a war he didn’t believe in and never wanted to fight – he misses it because he loved it.  It has nothing to do with vanished notions of honor and glory, or the mindless bliss of martyrdom, or patriotic hysteria, or addiction.  He loved it for its intensity, its freedom from ordinary constraints, its serene clarity that lets you know who your friends and enemies are.  No sport he had ever played gave him such a deep awareness of his physical and emotional limits.  On the verge of an enemy attack, he was terrified, ashamed, and eager for it to happen again.  And there is comradeship, a bond of trust that, unlike marriage, cannot be broken by boredom or divorce.  War breeds a love that has no reasons, that transcends race and personality and education – all those things that make a difference in peace.  But when he came home, everyday life reclaimed him, and the comradeship was gone.  Plans to meet with his Vietnam buddies never worked out.  They exchanged Christmas cards for a few years, then nothing.  But the Vietnam Memorial in Washington is something special for vets; they touch the names on the wall, remember their buddies, and give them their due.


         These reasons why men love war can be told without risk of disapproval.  There are other, more troubling reasons stemming from the union, deep in the core of their being, of sex and destruction, beauty and horror, love and death.                     War may be the only way in which most men touch the mythic domains in our soul.  It is, for men, at some terrible level, the closest thing to what childbirth is for women: the initiation into the power of life and death.  It is like lifting off the corner of the universe and looking at what’s underneath.  To see war is to see into the dark heart of things, that no-man’s-land between life and death, or even beyond.
         Which is why, Broyles declares, every war story told by a vet is a lie.  They are true on a certain level, they have a moral, and even a mythic, truth, rather than the literal one.  They remind the tellers and listeners of their place in the world.  Yet every war story is about death and the love of destruction, the thrill of killing that lurks inside us all.  Anyone who has fired a bazooka or a machine gun, Broyles insists, knows the power in your finger, the “soft, seductive touch of the trigger.”  Just move that finger slightly, and a truck or a house or people disappear.  There is a link between this thrill and the children’s games ending with “Bang bang you’re dead”: both involve war as fantasy.  Real war is a game, more seductive for being played at terrible risk.  He remembers the facial expression of a lieutenant colonel looking at the dead bodies of the elite enemy troops that his men had killed the night before: “It was the look of a person transported into ecstasy.”  And what did Broyles do, upon seeing this?  He smiled back.


         Boyles’s conclusion is fierce and gripping:
          The power of war, like the power of love, springs from man's heart. The one yields death, the other life. But life without death has no meaning; nor, at its deepest level, does love without war. Without war we could not know from what depths love rises, or what power it must have to overcome such evil and redeem us.  It is no accident that men love war, as love and war are at the core of man.  It is not only that we must love one another or die. We must love one another and die. War, like death, is always with us, a constant companion, a secret sharer. To deny its seduction, to overcome death, our love for peace, for life itself, must be greater than we think possible, greater even than we can imagine.
But throughout Broyles’s discussion the cause of war – the rationale that governments put forth to stir up the populace – is irrelevant.  Whether a war is justified or not, it is fun.


         I have never encountered a discussion of the attractions of war that touched me, and frightened me, as much as this one.  Maybe there’s hint of it in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and more than a hint of it somewhere in the Iliad.  Maybe, and maybe not. Thanks to Broyles, I have looked deep into the human abyss, and it scares me, for there, like a coiled serpent, or a festering and incurable disease, lurks the love and joy of war.        Turelio

Coming soon: The Magic of New York.  Or maybe some extracts from my deceased partner Bob's diaries; those who knew him will be shocked.


                           BROWDERBOOKS

All books 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. 
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

©   2018   Clifford Browder   

388. Booze and Me

                                 Hustle No. 1

This is the one that's getting sales in England.  Here too, I hope. Mini-biographies of some of the most colorful people who lived or died in the city where anything goes.  My personal favorites: Cardinal (Was He or Wasn't He?) Spellman and his double life; J.P. Morgan and his nose; Brooke Astor, with whom I could have danced up a storm; and Texas Guinan, who when her speakeasy was raided and she and all her patrons were arrested, threw a party for patrons, reporters, and police at the police station.  

Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.









                Hustle No. 2:  Holiday Special



Bargain, bargain, bargain!  All my paperbacks are now available from me (but not from Amazon et al.) through December 31 with free shipping.  (U.S. only.  Sorry, Canada, Australia, and Japan.)  This is my hustle for the biggest gift-giving season of the year, and I want everyone to be happy (myself included).  For the books, see under BROWDERBOOKS below, following the post on booze and me.  As always, signed copies are available from the author. 

                     BOOZE  AND  ME

         “You don’t know anything about drinks!” my partner Bob declared, with a touch of scorn, when in my apartment, early in our relationship, he saw me fumbling an attempt to serve him some alcoholic concoction he had requested.  Far from feeling put down or insulted, I took it as a back-handed compliment, since most of his friends were alcoholics, and mine were not.

         That I ever came to terms with alcohol is surprising, given my beginnings.  I was born and raised in Evanston, the first suburb north of Chicago, which was determinedly dry and, in consequence, the national headquarters of the WCTU (Woman’s Christian Temperance Union), that heroic striver for temperance. In Evanston, no liquor could be sold within the city limits, for sober Methodists had founded Northwestern University on the lakeshore in the 1850s, and the university’s charter banned the sale of liquor within four miles of the university.  Of course one could bring in liquor and serve it discreetly at home, as I knew from an early age, when, exploring the alley that ran beside our house, I detected a telltale smell from the contents of a neighbor’s garbage cans.  I didn’t know what it was, but it was suspicious, and only that one neighbor’s cans gave a whiff of it.  The nearest liquor stores were on Howard Street, the boundary between sober, honest, Republican Evanston and the huge, corrupt, and bibulous Democratic city of Chicago.  Or one could drive west four miles and find roadside bars and liquor stores catering to Northwestern students of a thirsty disposition.          Even if liquor had been flowing everywhere in Evanston, our house would have been the exception.  “No Browder can drink!” my father often exclaimed, and for good reason.  He had once imbibed a little too freely, until my mother got her minister to talk to him, following which the imbibing stopped cold.  As I would learn later, his father, a brilliant young lawyer in Indianapolis, had ruined his career and marriage through alcoholism.  When my grandmother saw that her husband wasn’t going to change, she divorced him – unusual in those days, but she was a strong-willed woman -- took not a penny of alimony, and sent her four sons out to sell newspapers on the street.  It was a tough, challenging childhood, with just barely enough food for all, but my father and his siblings came through.          So in our house, alcohol in any form was taboo – a ban that lasted as long as my father did, reinforced by strictures at the Methodist Sunday School that I attended.  Methodist Sunday School? you may ask.  Didn’t that involve taking communion with bread and wine?  Bread, yes, wine no; Welch’s Grape Juice was substituted.  




instead of




         Once, at family gathering at an aunt’s home, my Uncle Mox was present.  An Annapolis graduate and now a stern-faced captain in the Navy, when off duty he could be a bit of a clown.  He faked a fashion parade, holding an umbrella up at an elegant angle, and then appeared in various hats confiscated from other members of the family, including the ladies.  This performance delighted my brother David and me, the only children present, but my father, suspecting his brother’s inspiration, frowned.  And he frowned even more when, sure enough, Uncle Mox produced a flask and offered me and David a nip.  We obliged him, but I winced at the unfamiliar taste.  Sensing his brother’s disapproval, Uncle Mox said, “It’s better that they get their first taste from me, than from some bum in a bar!”  My father was not convinced.
         When I went off by train to California to college, the Santa Fe line spent a whole day crossing the level plains of Kansas, and the bar in the club car was closed, since Kansas was the one state in the union that was still dry.  Not that I cared; just turning 18, I wasn’t into liquor, and it wasn’t into me. At college I participated in the inevitable freshman-year beer drinking, facilitated by a draft card with an altered birth date that made me 21, but this did not distract me from my studies.  After all, I was only half Browder, and the other half, my mother’s family, the Felts, had no history of alcoholism.  But for my older brother it would be a different story; he would in time become an alcoholic, though he finally quit.
         When I was about to enter high school, a Catholic family had moved in on Bryant Avenue, the one-block street where I grew up in north Evanston.  Their arrival occasioned the hushed comment among the Protestant neighbors, “They’re Catholic, you know,” answered by a discreet, “Oh.”  But since the family had three attractive teen-age daughters, their home soon became the teen-age center of the neighborhood, and remained so throughout my high-school years.  And when I first came home from college for the Christmas holiday, I was invited to a party that the girls were giving for their Northwestern friends.  Eyebrows were raised again among the neighbors when a truck drove into their back yard and unloaded quantities of beer destined for the gullets of the guests.  

On Bryant Avenue ... !
Bjarki Sigursveinsson
But the imbibing was discreet, no one got drunk, and a good time was had by all.  Still, for sober Bryant Avenue, it was an unprecedented event.  Only years later, when my mother became a widow, did she drive a short distance out of town to buy wine to serve her clubwomen friends.  The club ladies convened at her residence for serious discussions of plays or poetry, intensely cultural occasions that could hardly be termed orgies.
         After college I got a Fulbight scholarship and spent two years in Europe studying French language and literature and hitchhiking around on vacations.  To initiate me into the marvels of liqueurs, in Paris my friend Bill bought tiny bottles of Bénédictine, Chartreuse, and Cointreau.  

Their taste, sweet and pungent, was a new experience for me, and even a sip or two went a long way, for they are high in alcoholic content.  Learning that the first two had been perfected over many years by French monks, my Protestant psyche was smitten with respect for those adventurous holy men, and for what Catholicism, which shunned Welch’s Grape Juice for real wine in communion, was all about.  (I didn’t realize at the time that the monks perfected their liqueurs primarily for medicinal purposes.  A noble goal, but not what I had in mind.)  Dining in modest French restaurants on a student’s budget, I learned even there how to eat a meal course by course, and how to sip wine in the process.  France, after all, was not Evanston, and I was only half Browder.
         When I came to New York for graduate studies, I was suddenly immersed in a culture where drinking, and often heavy drinking, was the custom.  So began my adventures and misadventures with gin.  Everyone was drinking martinis, often with only a trace of vermouth, so I did, too.  I soon learned that one martini made me sociable; two made me a babbling idiot and a friend of everyone; and three fuzzed my mind and guaranteed a fearsome hangover on the morrow.  Only gradually did I come to learn that martinis were not for me, whereupon I instituted a ban that continues to this day.
My enemy.
Dennis Mojado
         But that was not the end of gin for me.  When the sultry, hot days of summer hit New York, I learned that a gin and tonic was just the thing, cool and refreshing, but with so modest an input of gin that I didn’t get drunk.  Civilized drinking at last!  From my martini days I had already learned the different brands of gin, with costly Beefeater at the top, until I heard of even costlier Tanqueray.  Fortunately, I came to shun these English exotics and settled for a good, solid American brand: Gordon’s, less classy, perhaps, but easier on the budget.         Yes, gin has had a special place in my life, which is strange, since I’m not drawn to hard liquor.  When, at election time, conservatives praise the manly whiskey-drinking heartland and evince scorn for the wimpish wine-sipping elitists of Martha’s Vineyard, I know which side I’m on; even though I’ve never been there, I’ll take Martha’s Vineyard and its elitist wine-sippers any time.  Yes, to this day I go with wines, not whiskey.  But since I like gin and tonics, gin is different.  For one thing, I’ve trodden it and even been tripped and wounded by it in the wild.           Essential to all gins is the juniper berry, and one species of the juniper shrub it comes from is trailing juniper, known as trailing yew on Monhegan, the island off midcoast Maine where I have often vacationed.  A prostrate, mat-forming plant, it likes sandy soil and on Monhegan is especially common in a low, sandy area known as Lobster Cove.  I have often hiked there, have been tripped by it, and once got a sprained ankle that had me housebound and limping for days.  Yet from this treacherous trailing plant, as from other forms of juniper, comes the dark purple berry that flavors all gins.  The name itself, “gin,” is an Anglicization of the French word for juniper, genièvre, or maybe the Dutch word genever.  And its history is colorful as well.

[image error]Downloadall sizesUse this fileon the webUse this fileon a wiki Email a linkto this file Informationabout reusing Juniper berries, ripening and ripe.
         Gin in some form dates from the Middle Ages and was considered medicinal.  (That’s what they all say, isn’t it?  Coca-Cola and heroin were once advertised as  medicines, too.)  Be that as it may, when Hollanders tried the medicine – WOW! – it did wonders for them.  And when English soldiers went to reinforce the Dutch fighting the Spaniards around Antwerp in 1585, they tried the new drink and again – WOW! – they found themselves supercharged with courage.           The English soldiers took their “Dutch Courage” back to England, where, being cheap and easy to produce, it became vastly and disastrously popular, especially with the urban poor.  Hogarth’s 1751 engraving “Gin Lane” shows the resulting devastation, which caused the government to legislate bans on the drink, which in turn provoked the production of illicit gins.  Such gin, flavored with turpentine, bore names like Cuckold’s Comfort, Royal Poverty, and My Lady’s Eye Water. 
Hogarth's "Gin Lane."
         Modern gin dates from the late nineteenth century, when several London distillers began producing a refined, nonsweet gin quite different from the one that got Gin Lane its name.  But gin was still favored by working-class Londoners, as evidenced by Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion, when Eliza Dolittle says of her mother that “gin was mother’s milk to her.”  And history was repeated in America in the 1920s, when Prohibition spurred the production of “bathtub gin,” which was indeed at times made in a bathtub.  But Prohibition was repealed, and gin, being mixable, was used in numerous cocktails and is so used today.
         Here are a few special experiences with alcoholic drinks that I treasure.

·      A wine that Bob and I bought at a modest price, not expecting anything special, and that proved to be velvety, or what the French call velouté.  And instead of one blunt, unchanging taste, it was like a musical phrase, starting on one note and modulating to another.  We experienced this twice, to our surprise and with no strain to our wallets.


·      Alone in my apartment on a cold winter night, drinking full-bodied coffee that I had made myself, while sipping Courvoisier VSOP (Very Superior Old Pale), an imported French cognac that did put a strain on my wallet.  Sipping from a brandy snifter, I could savor its rich aroma before drinking it.  And if I had a cold, it did wonders in masking the symptoms while I imbibed and savored.·      Sipping wine and nibbling an assertive cheddar cheese with my ailing partner Bob, and our friend John Anderson, at Bob’s bedside while he had Parkinson’s.  It was our Sunday ritual, following which John and I went out to lunch, and Bob’s home-care aide served him in bed.  These were not velvety wines, just ordinary ones that I bought cheap (ten dollars at the most), and that John, on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being best, rated as 4 or 5.  But even in these unremarkable wines he and Bob could register nuances of flavor that my palate failed to detect.·      To sip the Italian liqueur Strega after a sumptuous meal at Gargiulo’s, Bob’s and my favorite Italian restaurant, located in distant Coney Island and reached by a long above-ground subway ride through the wilds of Brooklyn.  Yellow-tinted, Strega is a blend of some seventy herbal ingredients and has a bold, rich taste with a trace of mint.  Strega is the Italian word for “witch,” and it did indeed bewitch us, even to the point of ordering a second one that was usually on the house.  Wonderfully relaxed, we coasted on this experience all the way back by subway to Manhattan.
Hendrick ter Brugghen, The Merry Drinker.
He's having fun, but not my style at all.
         Obviously, I’m a savor-and-sip imbiber, not a guzzler.  For me, this is civilized drinking.  And when, a few times in the past, I drank too much and got tipsy, and drawled or mumbled my speech, I felt great self-contempt and got home and to bed as soon as I could.  Blessed are the prudent and the at least semi-sober.  But as a friend once reminded me, down through the ages and in all cultures, alcohol and tobacco have been celebrated in poetry, art, and song; of the joys of abstinence, hardly a word.



Coming soon:  A grim one: War Is Fun.


                           BROWDERBOOKS

All books 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. 
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

©   2018   Clifford Browder   

387. Authors Are Oddballs

                               Holiday Special



Bargain, bargain, bargain!  All my paperbacks are now available from me (but not from Amazon et al.) through December 31 with free shipping.  (U.S. only.  Sorry, Canada, Australia, and Japan.)  This is my offer for the biggest gift-giving season of the year, and I want everyone to be happy (myself included).  For the books, see under BROWDERBOOKS below, following the post on Authors Are Oddballs (which we are).  As always, signed copies are available. 
          Books do make excellent gifts.  No, I don’t mean e-books, I mean real books that you can touch and stroke and smell, and throw across the room, if you don’t like them, or clasp them to your bosom, if you do.  Books with margins where you can scrawl “How true!” or “This author is nuts!”  Books that give you an authentic “booky” experience, and that you can talk up (or down) to friends.  So buy, buy, buy – it’s seasonal, it’s fun, it's insane, it helps the economy, it's patriotic, it's totally and utterly American.




           This novel, about New York City and the slave trade, got a great review from the U.S. Review of Books .  Most people don't know that, on the eve of our Civil War, New York City was the center of the North  Atlantic slave trade; ships from here picked up slaves on the west coast of Africa and delivered them to the Spanish colony of Cuba, where the authorities weren't enforcing the ban on the trade.  How did the slavers get away with it?  And how did seemingly respectable people, women as well as men, hide their involvement in the trade?  It's quite a story.



                      Authors Are Oddballs

        Yes, authors are oddballs, but they’re survivors, too.  With me, it began in my childhood, when I had to survive my brother, gym, Teddy Roosevelt, and Miss Kiess.  When my brother, who was three years older than me, came toward me, I didn’t know if he would kiss me or hit me, and he didn’t know either.  He was a creature of impulses.  In a playground once, for no good reason, he hurled a brick at me, probably to scare me and not intending to hit me.  But hit me he did, and I ran home screaming in pain, with a big lump on my forehead that they rushed me to a hospital to have x-rayed.  Fortunately, there was no fracture, just pain and a lump.  What my parents did to my brother, I don’t know, but it was probably severe.         Gym was a horror because I was nearsighted – the first in my class to wear glasses – and a bookworm, too.  My world was up close: books, toy soldiers, and an elaborate castle that I made out of sheets of cardboard stolen from my father's laundered shirts.  That huge world out there, where boys my age played football and baseball, was risky and dangerous; out there bad things happened.  My father, a great outdoorsman, disapproved of my behavior.  He told me how Teddy Roosevelt as a boy was a weakling, easily bullied by other boys, until he went out West, toughened up, and came back physically strong and self-assured, a man.  He told the story so often that I yearned to get a photo of Teddy, tack it to a wall, and hurl darts into his toothy grin.  Lacking both the photo and the darts, I never did.




What a target!  All I'd need is ...



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         And finally, Miss Kiess.  She was my music teacher in seventh and eighth grade, a dry little tight-knit woman in her fifties, who put the good music students in the back rows of her classroom, and the poor ones in front, where she could keep an eye on them and police their warbling.  Unable to read music or sing on key, I of course was in front.  


A mystery that no one ever explained to me.  No "Music for Dummies" back then.
Detecting a false note, she would single out the culprit (usually a him and often me) and make him correct his singing.  She usually called me “boy” or “Browder.” rarely by my first name.  Though intelligent and sensitive, she was mean and sour, with a wry sense of humor.  Once she told us how, when growing up in Texas, she fell into some quicksand.  Obviously, she survived, but I became convinced that God put that quicksand there for a purpose, and lamented that it hadn’t done its job.  (Beware of abusing a budding writer; we will take our revenge, as I am doing now.)


If only...
 Andrew Tatlow

         Yes, authors are survivors, albeit with scars, but maybe we all are, too.  So what makes writers really different?  We cannot not write; it’s in our  blood and bones.  While other people in their off hours socialize, drink, laugh, gossip, do drugs, have sex, and make love to their mobile devices, we authors sit at our desk or computer, scribbling or typing away.  And we’re oddball in other ways, too.  Take me, for instance.  I’ve never owned a car, a television, or a cellphone.  I manage my computer, but with misgivings and suspicion (the feeling is mutual).  Ours is not a friendship, more of an armed truce.  And yet, we need each other, desperately.


My friend and enemy, sometimes provoking shocking fulminations.
All About Apple museum

         So what am I writing?  These days, nonfiction about New York, and historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York.  Though I was born and raised in the Midwest, and went to college in Southern California, I am a committed New Yorker, convinced that this crowded, noisy, expensive, and nerve-racking city is unique.  It’s where you can lose yourself or find  yourself, think and learn and grow.  It’s intense, diverse, creative.  Not for everyone, but for those who need it to become themselves.  For them, a sign that once dominated the Staten Island ferry terminal says it all:  NEW YORK.  IS  THERE  ANYWHERE  ELSE?          So of course I write about it; how could I not?  About weird and wonderful people like Eliza Jumel, the prostitute’s daughter who got to know two former kings and a future emperor.  And the cosmetics queen Helena Rubinstein (“Beauty is power”), and Quentin Crisp, the self-styled Stately Homo of England, both of whom truly realized themselves in the city that never sleeps.  And sinister people like the vicious lawyer Roy Cohn, and the serial killer David Berkowitz, who terrorized three boroughs.  They were all very real New Yorkers and left their mark.  And I also do fictional characters in the nineteenth century: a penniless street kid turned pickpocket who yearns for better; a respectably raised young man who becomes a male prostitute and falls in love with his most difficult client; and the strange friendship of a dapper young bank robber and the detective hired by the banks to apprehend him.         When not writing I do other things, and here again I’m a bit of an oddball.  For years I hiked, both in the city’s parks and along the Palisades, those towering New Jersey cliffs that line the Hudson River.  And for a real challenge, I hiked upstate in the vast stretches of Harriman Park, where, if I went on a weekday, I would be the only one on the trail, alone in a wilderness (though not designated such) with nothing to look at but trees and the blue sky overhead.  I also watched birds through binoculars, an obsession that used to strike the unafflicted as just plain weird, until the rise of the environmental movement redeemed it in their eyes.          And I looked at more than birds; weird again.   What other word is there for someone enamored of mushrooms (to look at, not to eat), who bonds lovingly with Hairy Parchment, Jelly Tooth, and Worm Coral, with Stinkhorn tipped with smelly green slime, and the exquisite but fatal beauty of Destroying Angel?  What drew me to these oddities?  Wonder, a deep feeling of awe in the presence of the natural world, this teeming life-force all around us, this magic, if only we would look: the irrepressible Big Mama from whom we come, and to whom in the end we return.  So awesome, so inviting, and so smothering is she, that I flee back into my other obsession, my writing, and into the man-made wonders, and the noise and confusion and excitement, of the city of New York. 

Coming soon:  Me and booze.  There's lots to say on the subject.

                             BROWDERBOOKS

All books 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. 


©   2018   Clifford Browder   

386. Must We All Be Whores? The Great American Hustle

Good news!  My historical novel Dark Knowledge, about New York and the slave trade, just got a good online review from the US Review of Books.



                               HOLIDAY  SPECIAL


Bargain, bargain, bargain!  All my paperbacks are now available from me (but not from Amazon et al.) through December 31 with free shipping.  (U.S. only.  Sorry, Canada, Australia, and Japan.)  This is my hustle – oops, I mean generous offer – for the biggest gift-giving season of the year, and I want everyone to be happy (myself included).  For the books, see under BROWDERBOOKS below, following the post on (ahem) hustling.  As always, signed copies are available. 
          You’ll have to admit, books do make excellent gifts.  No, I don’t mean e-books, I mean real books that you can touch and stroke and smell.  Books that you can throw across the room, if you don’t like them, or clasp them to your bosom, if you do.  Books with margins where you can scrawl “How true!” or “This author is an idiot!”  Books that give you an authentic “booky” experience, and that you can talk up (or down) to friends.  So buy, buy, buy – it’s seasonal, it’s American, it’s fun, and an essential part of life.

          MUST  WE  ALL  BE  WHORES?        THE  GREAT  AMERICAN   HUSTLE

         I once likened the role of an author trying to sell his books at a book fair to a whore strutting her charms on the sidewalk.  But in an article on the first page of the Sunday Review section of the New York Times of November 25, “We’re All in Sales Now,” author Ruth Whippman says that she is part of the 35 percent of the American work force that work as freelancers, whether as their main source of income or as a side hustle.  More than 18 million Americans, she explains, are now involved in some kind of direct sales or multilevel marketing scheme, shelling out money on products that they then try to sell to friends and neighbors – a percentage that is predicted to grow substantially.  Some 47 percent of millennials  already work this way.  Share my blog post, buy my book, click on my link, follow me on Instagram, donate to this, crowdfund that: it’s an endless Black Friday of the soul.  And, she adds, a “special hellspring of anxiety.” 

          Yes, we tweet and share and schmooze and blog, and like and comment on other people’s tweets and shares and schmoozes and blogs, all in the hope of selling them something later.  The trick, of course, is to do it while acting as if you aren’t doing it at all.  And there are hundreds of experts – she calls them “influencers – selling advice on how to do it (which in itself is a sure-fire money-making hustle).  And one finds oneself evaluating one’s friendships on the basis of who bought my thing and who didn’t.  Worse still, we evaluate ourselves by how many we have sold.  Result: we’re becoming “paranoid, jittery, self-critical, and judgmental.”  And anxiety, depression, and suicide are on the rise.
          To much of which I plead guilty.  This blog begins with a hustle and invites people to subscribe to get e-mails announcing new posts and vague future offers of whatever.  Yes, I insist – quite sincerely – that my friends don’t, I repeat, don’t have to buy my books, but at the end of each post is a section called BROWDERBOOKS (note the bold letters) listing all the juicy reads available, and one can always hope.  And I carry business cards with my e-mail address and the name of my blog, just in case some casual new acquaintance shows a slight interest in who I am and what I do.  And at home I have a slew of printouts – far too many to absorb – telling me how to expand my e-mail list, write sexy e-mails, feature my age and appearance and who-knows-what to make myself stand out from all the other marketers doing the same thing.  And be honest, dear readers, don’t you do, or haven’t you at some in the past done the same thing?  Whether we admit it or not, we all are busy marketing ourselves.


Jim Fisk
          But this, I insist, is, and always has been, the American way.  Yes, social media and the Internet give it a new and distinct twenty-first-century flavor, but Americans have always been hustlers, and pretty good ones at that.  Robber baron Jim Fisk, who delighted to stand the world on its ear with his financial shenanigans on Wall Street, started out as a Yankee peddler with a jingly wagon with flame-red wheels, and then a whole team of jingly wagons with flame-red wheels, ranging all over New England  selling housewives shoelaces and pots and pans and kettles, and silks and calicoes by the yard.  And he told his hired salesmen, “If you can’t sell ’em silks, sell ’em calicoes.  And if that don’t work, sell ’em thimbles or frying pans or thread.  Just make sure you sell!”  He was soon known as the Prince of Peddlers.


P.T. Barnum
          And how about Barnum, that master of humbug?  In 1850 he sold Jenny Lind, the Swedish nightingale, to a whole nation completely ignorant of opera and coloratura singing, a nation so stricken with “the Jenny Lind fever” that if they couldn't get tickets to her opening concert here in New York at the Battery, they hired rowboats and went out into the harbor, so they could hear her distant warbling by water, if not by land.  And to entice his fellow citizens into his American Museum, he advertised it not as an amusement – puritanical Americans might shy away from that – but as educational, and thus got them to come see its flea circus, rifle range, Feejee Mermaid (a mummified monkey’s body with a fish’s tail), midgets, trained bears, and educated rats.  Receiving 15,000 visitors a day, the museum was so popular, such a symbol of Yankee success, and Barnum was so fervently pro-Union during the Civil War,, that Confederates tried to burn it down, but failed, though it burned down a year later all by itself.  Not that conflagrations stopped Barnum; he went on to launch P.T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome, an enterprise that in time became the largest circus in the world, and one that, as a matter of fact, toured the world.  When it came to hustling, Phineas T. Barnum couldn’t be topped.


Barnum's circus in England, 1888.
          And the notorious business known as advertising began as, and continues to be, a distinctly American hustle.  It was born out of the patent medicines of another day such as Mugwump Specific, Hamlin’s Wizard Oil, Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment, Prickly Ash Bitters, Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People, Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, Cocaine Tooth Drops, Brain Salt, and a host of others.  



Promoted with sleek, sexy bottles, seductive or sinister ads, posters on horsecars, throwaways slipped under residential doors, sandwichmen in public places, and even signs on mountainsides along rail lines in the distant Far West, they promised to cure catarrh, harness and saddle galls, tooth ache, dyspepsia, women’s ailments, biliousness, sea sickness, cancer, and unmentionable diseases that were sometimes mentioned.  Of course government regulations have put a stop to all that, have they not?  As seen in the history of Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, defense contractors, the sugar industry, and countless others.  American hustlers know how to hustle through, under, or around regulations, and give money to Congress to help them do it.  But why labor the obvious?  This is known. 
          Hustling has spread long since to the American high school.  When I attended Evanston Township High School (ETHS) in the 1940s, the students were encouraged, almost pressured, to go out and sell magazine subscriptions to the public.  What the reason for this was, I didn’t quite absorb at the time.  Later, I learned that it was to earn money so the high school could invite celebrities and other persons of note to address the all-school assembly.  Of those who came, I distinctly remember Paul Robeson and his rich, resonant bass voice, and Langston Hughes, who read his poem, “Me and my baby have two ways to do the Charleston.”  So maybe our hustling served a cultural purpose, but hustlers we definitely were.

Coming soon:  It's wide open.  Many possibilities.

                  BROWDERBOOKS

All books 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. 


©   2018   Clifford Browder   

385. In the Shadow of Death: A Memorial

                        A Glance at Crumbling Coney


         I have been reading my deceased partner Bob’s diary entries, combining them with his files of correspondence and the photos in his photo albums, so as to create an archive of gay history dating from the 1950s to the present.  His perception and appreciation of meaningful details is notable, as seen in this excerpt from an entry of November 2, 1966, reporting an off-season visit to his beloved Coney Island, then well past the days of its glory.
       Yesterday was a beautiful, painful day.  The fog was thick and low at Coney Island.  Steeplechase Park stands in ruins, but splendid even to the end, with strands of lights falling from a gaping bony roof, pillars and statuary crumbling, the wreckers crunching to pulp the once-glorious installments and walls and railings.  A clown prop with outstretched arms was floating from a rope against the foggy sky and turning bravely in all directions as if to sustain the one final laugh, the one last attempt to convince whoever might see, that childhood must persist.  But it is finished.
This was written only for himself in his journal, with no expectation of its being read by others.  But the same attention to detail invested with feeling characterizes his two works of fiction, both set in Coney Island: The Coney Island Memoirs of Sebastian Strong and The Professor and Other Tales of Coney Island.  (For these works, see post #384.  For my books, see BROWDERBOOKS below.)

        In the Shadow of Death: A Memorial

         Dedicated in 2016, it’s an airy, odd-looking thing, neither building nor statue nor group of statues, just a bunch of triangles, plus benches and a sunken fountain.  A triangular roof tops three triangular white steel sides that leave plenty of open space for winter winds to sweep through, nor does it give much shade in summer.  A large plaque identifies it as the NYC AIDS MEMORIAL PARK IN ST. VINCENT’S TRIANGLE.  It honors the more than 100,000 New Yorkers – men, women, and children -- who died of AIDS, and their caregivers.  The triangular site once belonged to St. Vincent’s Hospital, the now-vanished institution (fiercely mourned by Villagers) that, overwhelmed by an influx of patients filling its beds and hallways, in 1984 opened the first AIDS ward in the city, and the second in the nation.  Back in the 1980s, when AIDS first surfaced, there were large gay male communities in the West Village and Chelsea, Chelsea being the neighborhood immediately north of West 14th Street, the northern boundary of the Village.  Just a block away from the Memorial, on West 13th Street, is the LGBT Community Center, where ACT-UP and other activist AIDS groups first organized.  And the Memorial continues to be the site of gatherings in support of the ongoing fight against AIDS.
FULBERT
         The Memorial is, of course, a constant reminder of those grim times in the 1980s and 1990s when AIDS raged, seemingly unstoppable.  My partner Bob and I, being monogamous, didn’t have to worry about AIDS and never even got tested for it.  Our generation was for the most part beyond the years of sexual activity, but younger friends had their lives savagely disrupted.  I saw this when, in 1994, following surgery for colon cancer, I did volunteer work for the Whole Foods Project, a nonprofit advocating a plant-based diet in the fight against AIDS and cancer.  I have vivid memories of those years before a remedy for AIDS was discovered:
·      A necrology bulletin board in the Whole Foods Project center where deaths of former members were duly noted in alarming numbers.·      A gay program on radio station WBAI whose staff dwindled over time, with the ailing survivors calling in to announce that they were “still hanging in there,” until they weren’t.·      A friend’s remark, “It’s the feisty ones who survive,” meaning that those who threw out their medications --  notably AZT – and embraced a plant-based diet and healthy life style were the ones who survived.·      A large contingent in the annual Gay Pride parade marching under a banner, FIGHTING FOR OUR LIVES.·      Visiting a friend in the hospital diagnosed with pneumonia, a common but curable illness for AIDS patients, whose immune systems were compromised.·      Frequent funerals of men involved in publishing, theater, and the arts, men supposedly in the prime of life, who almost always proved to be gay and victims of AIDS.·      Stories of office coworkers who, learning that a colleague who just left had AIDS, sprayed the office with disinfectant – a useless and ludicrous gesture, in that AIDS was communicated only through an exchange of bodily fluids.·      Seeing in a park a man slumped in a wheelchair, totally wasted, with a healthy young man attending him, the one in the wheelchair almost always a victim of AIDS.·      The amazing camaraderie at the Whole Foods Project lunches, where AIDS and cancer survivors – teachers, artists, editors, writers, actors, students, and taxi drivers – exchanged useful information about treatments, physicians, and negotiating the city bureaucracy for assistance, all of us afflicted with, or survivors of, a life-threatening illness, but always cheerful and upbeat. 
         As a Whole Foods Project volunteer, I sometimes received letters or phone calls from an AIDS patient living in some remote area, who had heard of us while watching a TV interview with Richard, our founder.  What was he to do, with no AIDS group in his locale, and no health food store?  I always sent him a bundle of information on a whole-foods approach to illness – the only information he could get.  (This was before the Internet.)  This was all I could do, but it was a start.
         And what, by the way, was meant by the term “whole foods”?  Food not tampered with, not “improved” with additives, food with all its nutrients intact.  Whole grains, not “refined” ones.  Vegetables and fruit from organic farms, free from pesticides and preservatives.  Food without sucrose, that white, refined sugar on the counter or table of restaurants throughout the country – a food so questionable that some don’t even label it a food.  Memorable was the day when, at a Whole Foods Project luncheon, I heard two members separately quote their doctor as saying, “Cancer loves sugar” – a comment lodged in my mind ever since.  And it might just as easily have been, “AIDS loves sugar.”

         Awareness of AIDS pursued Bob and me even to our idyllic vacation retreat in Maine, Monhegan Island, where we found our usual cabin curtainless, and Barbara, the friend who rented to us, explained why.  In the previous summer a man of about 30 named Steven had come to the island, had a look at the cabin, rented it for a month, left the island, and returned with his ailing friend, Eric, who was exhausted by the boat trip from the mainland.  Deposited in the cabin, Eric looked wasted, and immediately it was whispered in town, “There’s someone with AIDS on the island!”  Fortunately, it never went beyond that.  Helped by his friend, Eric managed a walk to Lobster Cove and back – not a long distance – but he could do no more.  Most of the time the two of them just sat out in the yard and enjoyed the weather and the island.  Though the word “AIDS “ was never uttered, Eric was clearly deteriorating and finally had to leave the island for care on the mainland.  He died in a local hospital within a day or so.  Steven returned to the island and cleaned the cabin thoroughly, even to the point of removing the curtains and bagging them for disposal.  Obviously, he was determined to leave no trace of AIDS behind.  He had wanted his dying friend to spend his last days on this beautiful island, but the time they had there was short.

         AIDS came in the wake of the Gay Pride movement of the 60’s and 70’s, and the time of the new sexual freedom.  It was so ravaging that one is tempted to see in this unprecedented “gay plague” a ruthless return to the norm (whatever that might be), a grim judgment wreaked upon revelers by God or nature or karma.  After poppers and hard drugs and endless boozing and cruising and sex with multiple partners – after this orgy of liberation – came the ghastly reckoning, the reminder that “anything goes” has its consequences, that nothing in this life comes free.

Coming next:  Must We All Be Whores?  The Woes of Self-Promotion.


                                 BROWDERBOOKS

All books 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. 


©   2018   Clifford Browder