I am getting my hair cut at Nelson’s, near 259th Street.

Newly renovated interior. Brick walls, recessed lighting, new comfy barber chairs (6), waiting area gallery of pleather & chrome Barcelona replica seats.

The eyes of the cutters are all intense as they tend to their clients, snipping and buzzing and shaving away. Latin ballads, duets mostly, on the sound system. With the start of every chorus, all the cutters begin to sing along with the song, in perfect pitch, while still intently cutting.

My haircutter, Mariana, smiles beatifically as they sing. She is old enough to be their mother. My high school Spanish strains, yet I can sense from their bantering between songs that they love and respect her and that she digs them as well.

I am at peace.

Staring at the blank page is like jumping into a lake where you don’t know how cold it is, or if there are biting fish in there, or sharp stones on the bottom. You have to just take the plunge, when you start a new story.

Well, I took the plunge when I wrote “Diablo: The Life and Times of No. 414666”. It just got published, and here it is, for you to enjoy, share, like, and discuss. Tell me what you think of my talking piano. Click on the link, scroll down to FICTION, look for my name and story title and open ‘er up! Clunky, but give it a whirl.

https://wp.blazevox.org/?portfolio=blazevox23-spring-2023

Yeah, the way we were. Do you remember where you were when you heard news so bad it felt like your guts flipped worse than after eating a rancid tuna sandwich on a hot summer day?

That’s what this story is about. It’s a memory torrent, a jumble of memories that came rushing back the day I heard my dad’s death was imminent. It is published in Heavy Feather Review, with an audio clip and a short interview. And here it is:

https://heavyfeatherreview.org/2023/03/28/thirty-nine-bye-byes/

David Crosby’s death hurtled me back in time. What I discovered? The “me” that lived in New York City back in June of 1970? That guy is a long time gone. But not forgotten.

They played the Fillmore East just a month after Kent State and we were seething. “They” meaning Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. “We” meaning our “core four”: me, Dave, Didi, and Andy. Where are they now? Talk about “long time gone.”

In dog-owner parlance, we were all “rescues”. My home life, like Dave’s, was a physical and psychological shambles. Andy basically had run away from home and lived in a room in a ramshackle Evelyn Place house. Didi escaped a home headed by a predatory stepfather and a manic-depressive mom who painted images of screaming black skulls. Her younger brother hung himself from the fire escape of their flat just south of the Cross-Bronx.

Somehow, we found each other and gave each other the gift of peace, even as the war in Vietnam escalated.

That Saturday night in June of 1970, we got on the #4 train at Fordham Road, got off at Union Square, and walked downtown to the show. We reeked of Caswell-Massey Patchouli, the fragrance a friend dubbed “hippie fart.” We sported long hair. Muttonchop sideburns. Pocket tees. Levi bells. L’il Abner work boots. Thick leather watch straps. Didi wore one of her hand-embroidered peasant blouses. That is, full ’70 white-kid-in- CUNY regalia.

On the downtown train, I remember sitting on the hard grey bench of the Redbird and absently stretching my feet out. They may have touched the base of the silver center-pole. A transit cop came through, and tapped my leg with his baton. I moved my foot back about half an inch. Just enough to complete this little pas de deux without incident.

Outside in the street, the crowd of kids in Union Square was thick. We knifed through, across the street from Dave’s back-office, night-shift, insurance job. This was months before he started his new career as mail carrier for the U.S. Postal Service in the Hudson Valley. You got it: hippie mailman. Back then, coming home at 2 a.m. from Union Square to Nereid Avenue on the #2 train was a nightly adventure. He had a lucky spot on the 14th Street platform; it was the spot where he never got mugged.

Closer to the Fillmore, the East Village air became fragrant. I finished the last of my pint of Bali-Hai. We showed our $5.50 tickets and entered our palace.

The music was superb. Soaring harmonies, anchored by Crosby’s angelic voice. An acoustic set. An electric set. All recorded for the “Four-Way Street” double album.

The set intensified. And then they played “Ohio.” Boom! EVERYBODY UP!

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We all knew, we all thought: “that could have been us.”

Long, long Neil Young/one-note outtro. Searing our souls. But then, as knowing showmen, they concluded with “Find the Cost of Freedom”.

Q

We exited into the early summer soot. Still shaking with emotion, we ambled onto the uptown IRT. In ’71 I got a job at the Mount Vernon Sectional Center for the USPS, on the truck platform, while still taking 15 credits at CUNY-Lehman, all in the morning. There, I witnessed knife fights between the long-haul truckers (crackers) and the brothers. Why? The drunk/strung-out truckers thought they weren’t getting unloaded fast enough.

One evening, a guy on the platform pulling a fully-loaded skid away from a belt popped a heart-attack. The supervisor took the time card from the guy’s shirt pocket and punched him out on the clock because, I guess, nobody dies on USPS time.

Guys just back from ‘Nam, feeling lucky to be alive, would work beaucoup OT, buy new muscle cars and pack their noses with coke in the parking lot. The Sec Center piped in a top-40 AM station. “American Pie” was in heavy rotation that fall. It seemed as if I heard “A LONG LONG TIME AGO…..” blast over the PA three times an hour. I wanted to scream. This wasn’t working. I was failing everything, but taking home $178 a week. Big money. And yet: “Bad news on the doorstep…I couldn’t take one more step…”

I knew then, that this wasn’t for me. It was never going to be just about the money. In time, I cut my hair. But not my values. For better or for worse. “Guess I’ll set a course and go,” I thought, echoing the lyric to “Wooden Ships”.

“Something touched me deep inside” the day David Van Cortlandt Crosby died. He came from an old-line family. But he, too, was a rescue. We rescues know too well how hurtful value judgements on our choices can be. Could Croz be an asshole? Remember the punchline to the old joke about the whiny customer, the chicken, and the butcher: “Lady, could YOU pass such a test?”

We simply try our best, wooden ships, sailing on the tide. “Easy, you know, the way it’s supposed to be. Very free and easy.”

“Guess I’ll set a course, and go.”

New Year’s Eve is here, and somehow I am flooded with memories of a special summer more than sixty years ago and a hundred miles north, in the hamlet of Parksville, Sullivan County, New York.

Why? My son and his wife, joined by two other couples — all dear friends — have a tradition: they rent a house upstate and unplug to escape the artificiality of New Year’s Eve in New York City. Over a long snowy weekend, the crew cooks extravagant meals, drinks copiously, and contentedly dreams of better days in front of a roaring fireplace.

Back in the day, we didn’t have to unplug, because those were simpler times and we were perpetually unplugged. But, technology now being what it is, this year, the six Millennials are up in Livingston Manor, one town north of Parksville on Route 17.

Route 17. It’s called the “Quickway” because it allowed tenement dwellers of mid-20th century city life (remember: NO A/C back then) to escape the stifling heat and humidity of the outer boroughs in “no time” — at least when compared with the slow as molasses Old Route 17. Once our dads downshifted so their old cars could groan up the steep Wurtsboro Hills, they knew it was a matter of time before the fresh air, blue skies, and cold mountain streams of Sullivan County towns to the north awaited.

My childhood summers in Sullivan County were long ago. The area has gone through hard times — failed local economies and the elusive dream of legalized gambling were gateways to a plague of drugs and despair, and hotel and store foreclosures. I’m told that, in recent years, property values in nearby Ulster and Greene Counties have soared. A rising tide floats all boats; no wonder there has been an uptick in Sullivan County vacation home sales by downstaters, Covidiots in search of fresh air, green fields, and pastoral settings.

But back to Parksville. I had a great-uncle who flew military planes in World War I. He survived, prospered in the rag trade, and made some money. He bought a house in Parksville, not far from where my “poor relations” family once stayed every summer, in various bungalow colonies in and around Liberty and Monticello, two towns to the south.

I was a car-crazy little Fordham Road street urchin, and so I fell hard for Uncle Jack’s Cadillac Sedan de Ville. Acres of chrome. Wide-ass white wall tires. Red leather seats. Air-con. Power windows. He let me sit in his snazzy car with the a/c on during hot summer days, while the grownups shmoozed.

Uncle Jack’s house was huge, with a wide, wrap-around porch that me and my older cousins, Dori and Betty, would run around endlessly, working up a powerful hot summer thirst that only my aunt Hilda’s homemade lemonade could quench. Dori and Betty were smart, cute, and “wild” (my parents’ adjective, not mine; the dour little kid that was me thought they personified Supergirl status).

One day, Dori and Betty had an idea: exploring in the woods on the other side of the road. Game on. We found a path and started walking, deep into the forest. We carefully negotiated streams, fallen logs, collapsed hunter cabins. In the canopy of trees, it got darker and darker. We found salamanders. Dori kicked at deer pellets. We laughed to think of our parents, back at the house, playing boring old pinochle, when we were having so much fun.

In time, we got hungry. And thirsty. We were far from home base, or so we thought, for distances are “farther” and time is “longer” when you’re a little kid. But we pressed on, our shoes now muddy and soaked from fording streams in the deep forest.

Then, in the distance, we heard the unmistakable sound of water over rocks. Fresh water!!!! We rounded a bend and stopped short at the sight of an old man, in a dirty white dress shirt, black slacks, cracked leather shoes, sitting on a kitchen chair by the bank of the stream. He wore a yarmulke and tzitzis, the latter being the knotted fringes worn by Israelites since antiquity.

By the chair was a clear water glass held by a rope. He nodded to us and motioned us to come forward. We looked at each other with raised eyebrows. Dori pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows and I knew what she meant: “Ah, what the hell?”

Dori and Betty moved towards the man and I followed. The guy held the glass by the rope, lowered it into a deep pool of water, and carefully pulled it up. He proffered it to Dori. Dori reached out and took the glass by her fingertips as if she was a princess reaching for a diamond-encrusted chalice.

She sipped the stream water and solemnly passed the glass to Betty. As Dori smiled, Betty sipped and she, too, smiled. She passed the glass to me.

The old man nodded as if to say, “go ahead, drink.” I noticed a powder-blue pouch of Bugler cigarette tobacco in his back pocket and I relaxed; my maternal grandpa chain-smoked Buglers, so I figured this guy was ok.

I held the glass and sipped.

Tears of joy came to my eyes. Friends, that was the freshest, coldest, sweetest water I have ever tasted in my life.

I passed the glass back to the old man. He spoke not one word to us. He just nodded and smiled, and sat back down on his kitchen chair.

“C’mon, let’s head back,” Dori said.

“Yeah, before they realize how long we’ve been gone,” Betty added.

We waved goodbye to the old man, who seemed lost in thought by the side of the stream. He looked up and waved back. We picked up the trail and ambled back to the big country house with the wrap-around porch. It seemed like hours but we finally made it by late afternoon. The July sun was still high in the sky when we caught a whiff of the intoxicating aroma of dinner fixings that came from Hilda’s huge country kitchen. We knew we were close to home and we picked up the pace, crossed the road and trudged up the rutted gravel driveway.

We were just unplugged kids in an unplugged world. Our parents didn’t ask where we were or what we did. They simply left us kids on our own, free-range. And we didn’t mention the old man and his water station. That would be our little secret, forever and for all-time.

That evening, our entire family ate heartily from dishes and flatware passed down from the Old Country, and us kids drank copiously from pitchers of freshly made lemonade. There was barley soup, a huge platter of roast chicken and big bowls of rice, with candy-sweet carrots from Hilda’s garden. Homemade blueberry pie with a lattice crust was for dessert. After dinner, us kids played tag, as fireflies flitted. The dads lit Garcia y Vegas, drank schnapps, and the moms smoked Old Golds and kibbitzed. Dori lit punks for us kids, with her dad’s chrome Zippo. Night fell, the moon was huge, and the air was cool.

I was staring at Jack’s Caddy and dreaming of driving someday, travelling great distances in a future far from the Bronx. “Look up,” my great-uncle suddenly said to me, with a tap on my shoulder. He pointed heavenward.

It was a shooting star. Me, Dori and Betty stared, mouths agape. And then the three of us hugged. It had been a long day, full of adventure, and we were pooped. We sensed that this moment was special.

Enrobed in our scent of little-kid sweat, we three wearily went inside, and were tucked in by our moms. Moonlight streamed through the shears, and we tumbled into sleep, to the sound of our elders laughing and clinking glasses. They had made it through the dangers of Europe, the Great Depression, the horrors of two World Wars. In time, they too came inside, out of the chilly mountain air, and sat in front of a roaring fireplace, contentedly dreaming of better days ahead.

Just like my son, his wife, and their friends did on New Year’s Eve.

Stay safe everyone….

It was a lifetime ago, or so it seems. I recently read this story in Brooklyn, and I offer it to you now, as a remembrance of what happened that fateful night at The Dakota, here in NYC. Real New Yorkers know, and will never forget. This story is included in my newest collection, “A Shoebox Full of Money” — available via www.martykleinman.com.

MARK LIPSHUTZ, DOMINANT HANDBALL STAR, DIES

By the time he was on his deathbed, Mark Lipshutz was a real pain in the ass.

“I hate Navy guys,” he wheezed that mild, shirtsleeves, December night.   I remember it like yesterday, the sixty-four degree high, freaky for a New York December, the year I turned twenty-nine. 

I came to Mr. L’s room with his dinner.  It was late, and I was about to finish my shift.  A small black lighter was next to a pack of Jacks, right there on his tray.  I just shook my head. 

“Man, I give up with you,” I said. 

He smiled, and then coughed until he was red in the face.  It sounded loose, phlegmy, like pieces of lung got loose and rattled around his chest.  He squinted his eyes in pain, but you couldn’t get him to stop for no money in the world.  The smoking, or the bitching. 

And about the Navy?  He knew damn well I was on the McKinley.  Right after New Year’s? In sixty-nine?  We made way for the Philippines.  Now, the McKinley being a flagship meant we carried a rear admiral.  But it was slow.  Took us eight days to get to Pearl.  And a lifetime to get to Da Nang, where right away we saw, off to starboard, the bloated body of one of our guys, a pilot, just floating there.  I was eighteen.  This shit was real.

But back to Mr. L.  That night, I moved his cigarettes and put his dinner down on the tray, and right away he gives me the stink eye.

“Get that shit outta here,” he grumbled.

“Mr. L,” I said, “that’s a perfectly good veggie burrito. You need to keep your strength up if you want to get back onto the courts come this spring.” 

Word around the hospital? Mr. L had been the greatest handball player in history.  Bear in mind, now, that back in high school, up in the Bronx back in the day, me and my friends didn’t play handball.  I was all about hoops, and baseball, first base.  I didn’t know nothing about the handball world.

What I do know, though, is that to win in this life, you got to have an edge.  Me? I could run and I could jump.  Made our third baseman look good, leaping high for his throws.  And hoops?  I played solid D and just smacked those shots away.

Now, with Mr. L?  I am told that back in the day, he was a quick little guy, maybe five-six, hundred and forty or so, and I believe it.  Hairy, though.  Even at the end.  Chest, back, legs, everywhere you looked.  Thick curly hair.  His ears looked like those crazy tufts of leaves and whatnot you see popping out of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.  

But he was built.  I give him that.  Good muscle tone, even for an older guy.  Had those old school, black high-top Keds he’d wear to rehab, along with these baggy grey sweatpants and a blue sweatshirt, turned inside-out, sleeves cut off.   

However, the main thing? His edge?  He was ambidextrous, see, as good with his left hand as his right.  And he was sneaky with it, too.  He told me once, while we were drinking Hennessy in plastic water cups, how during a match he’d play with his opponent’s head.  First, he made it look like a lucky shot with his left hand, let the guy get some easy points, get on a roll.  Then he’d drop the hammer.  Killers from the left, killers from the right, cutters, spinners, jumpers, whips.

“I let ‘em get a few points,” he said.  “Then I just get rid of ‘em.”

That last month was rough.  Mr. L was in a lot of pain.  It spread all over. His doctors tried to do right by him, keep him comfortable, but it was everywhere.  Finally, they upped the dosage on his pain meds to the point where he was in and out.  One time, just before, you know, I came by to check on him.  It was late, I remember that much.  Right away, I saw that he was out.  But as soon as I tiptoed in, his droopy old eyes creaked open.  I never saw him look that way.  I mean, the dude looked twenty years older.  His whole face just sagged and his eyes…it was like the light behind his eyes went from a hundred- to forty watts.

“Gimme that lighter,” he said.

“Why don’t you stop?” I asked.

Nothing.  No response.

And then, he looked at me, with a sadness in his face I’d never seen before, but I’ve seen it in a dog, like when they’re done, and they kinda know it?  And one day they just skulk off into the woods, to die alone, in peace?

At the time, I’d been there at Roosevelt Hospital a couple of years and you hear the doctors talk.  The pulmonary guys, the orthopedists, the cardiologists, you get a sense of things, medical-wise, you know?  And I would hear the psychiatrists too.  And what the shrinks would say is, look at the patient – not where the patient is pointing. 

And here was a guy, man, who came up from nothing, I mean nothing, on the Brooklyn streets of Williamsburg during the Depression. He turned to handball like I took to hoops, because it was the cheapest sport to play.  All you needed was a ball.  Mr. L, he took his dad’s old winter gloves out of the closet, and turned them inside-out, those were his handball gloves, early on.  He went to Eastern District High, with guys like Red Auerbach, practiced hard, eventually won a national championship, went into the service, Marines, survived World War Two, barnstormed the country giving handball exhibitions and really made the sport popular during the fifties.  In his world, he was a rock star.

And then, life happened.  The bottle, two divorces, some run ins with the law, a gambling dispute with the wrong kind of guy.  Eventually, he moved to Brighton Beach, where he paid the rent hustling handball by the ocean, on the cracked courts of Asser Levy Park.

And now, on that particular night, way back in nineteen eighty, there was that look in his eyes.  Like I said, it was late when I came in with his dinner tray and he started in on the Navy again.

“C’mon, Mr. L.  The game’s almost over,” I said, fluffing up his pillows.  Monday Night Football was his thing. 

“The game?”

“Dolphins Patriots?”

He snorted.  “They both stink on ice.  Take the Patriots with the points.”

Down the hall, the nurses had the oldies station on, because I could hear that twangy Beatles song, “All My Loving.”

“God, I hate the fucken Beatles,” he said.  He reached for the clicker, turned on the game, and upped the volume.  Howard Cosell’s nasal drone drowned the song out.  Mr. L was right.  The game was a stinker.  This was way before, you know, the Patriots got on their roll.  He turned to me.

“Did I ever tell you I played Russian Roulette?” he asked, eyes on the game. It was late in the fourth quarter.

“Uh, no?”  I raised my eyebrows.  This was a new one.

“Well, I did,” he said.  “Twice.  In the service.  I retired, undefeated.”

“Anything else you want to tell me?”  I said, as Russ Francis caught a thirty-eight yard pass from Cavanaugh. Touchdown. The Patriots were up, thirteen to six.

The score seemed to pick Mr. L up, because, out of nowhere, he started to tell me another story about his life back in the day. 

“I tell you about the time I got arrested up in Monticello?”

I shook my head, “no.”

“It was the year I drove a Dugan’s Bakery truck upstate. Same year that song came out.” He scratched his head.  “I remember seein’ those mopes play it on Ed Sullivan.” 

There was a commotion down the hall, just then, a lot of screaming, crying.  Doctors were being paged to come to the ER.  There was a gunshot victim.  Strange, I remember, because Monday nights were usually quiet.

“They found me parked behind Davco, the sporting goods store there on Main Street,” Mr. L said.  “I was asleep, dead drunk, behind the wheel of the truck.”  

The Dolphins tied it up.  But the Patriots charged right back and got into field goal range, as time wound down in regulation.

“But I think what pissed them off most was that I peeled the tops offa all the chocolate cupcakes.”

“What did you do with them?”

He smiled a crooked smile. “I fucken ate them.  Whaddaya think I did with them?”

The seconds ticked off the game clock.  The Patriots’ John Smith took his practice kicks and trotted onto the field along with the rest of the field goal unit.

“Close the fucken door already,” Mr. L said.  “All that shrieking and crying out in the hallway is driving me nuts.”

As I closed the door, Cosell’s voice suddenly got very low.  “Remember, this is just a football game,” Cosell said.

“Oh what the fuck?” Mr. L shouted at the television.  “Just call the fucken game, will ya?”

            But Cosell continued.  “An unspeakable tragedy confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City: John Lennon, outside his apartment building on the West Side of New York City…the most famous perhaps of all the Beatles…shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital. Dead on arrival…”

            I looked at Mr. L, and he looked back at me, like he wanted me to explain.

            “Hard to go back to the game after that newsflash,” Cosell said.

            “Indeed it is,” Frank Gifford said.

            Mr. L, one-time handball champion, a guy who made it out of the Brooklyn streets, survived war, survived life, got uncommonly quiet.

            “Some fucken world we live in,” he said, as a single tear rolled down his cheek.  “Some fucken world.”

            And just like that, Mr. L’s eyes closed, never to open again.  Smith’s kick was blocked.  Then the clock ran out and it was overtime at the Orange Bowl.

It is no surprise that just prior to many Thanksgiving Days, I develop crippling back spasms.

It’s a fun time, Thanksgiving. AND it’s a lot of work that requires planning and execution. My wife and I have hosted a large gathering every year since 1994 or so, back in Brooklyn. Our teamwork rules the day. Yesterday was no exception.

But.

At a certain stage of life, bad things happen on big holidays. One Thanksgiving more than 50 years ago, while visiting relatives in Connecticut, my dad suffered a heart attack.

It was not fatal. However, it framed the fragility of my family’s foundation, and at a particularly bad time. I was a teenager lost in anxiety. Viet Nam was heating up. School was overwhelming. My family members were at each other’s throats.

I remember each and every moment of that T-Day visit in a way that I would come to remember the morning (mourning?) of 9/11 thirty years later.

We were about to leave my cousin’s warm, spacious, and well-run home and return 60 miles south to our shithole in the Bronx. My dad sat back down. “Give me a minute,” he said.

He sighed, and slowly got up and put on his coat. “What’s the matter?” my uncle, the doctor, asked.

“I feel nauseous,” he said. We all laughed. My father stuffed his face to the max every Thanksgiving.

Then he sat back down. “I gotta lay down,” he said. My uncle got his medical bag, did a few tests, and got on the phone.

The ambulance took him to the local hospital, where he stayed for the next three weeks. He was stabilized and I was told that he suffered a “mild” heart attack. Typical for WWII vets of the era, proper diet and exercise were hardly watchwords. Statins were yet to become a glimmer in Big Pharma’s eye. He was put on a low-calorie diet and a short leash by his brother, the doctor.

He had to buy an exercise bike. No more subways. No more kishka, hard salami, pastrami, potted meat, black-and-white cookies, sour cream and bananas. No more Raleighs. No more beer!

He got better, while I got worse. While he was away, my home fell apart. My mother was minimally capable in the best of circumstances and my dad’s heart attack proved to be the low tide that revealed all the psychological creepy-crawlies that slithered beneath the surface of her toxic personality.

I would come home from school and my part-time job to see a shambles of a household. My younger sister stayed in her room crying. My mother would lie on the sofa, in the dark, lost in alcohol, crying and watching tv. Roger Grimsby would report the body count from ‘Nam on Eyewitness News. A draft lottery was being finalized.

I felt like the Gene Wilder character in “The Producers” as he moaned “no…way…out…no…way…out….”

Humans are remarkably resilient, or so I’m told. I did my best to salvage the situation. I drove my mother to visit my Dad in Connecticut every week while he was in the hospital. I took care of myself as well. I recommitted to doing well in school, and pulled myself by the bootstraps to advance in life, job after job, year after year, to the point where I can look back now and see how far I’ve come in life, considering the shaky ground from where I started.

It was a slog. I mean, of course, life itself is a slog for most of us. But bad things that happen on holidays tend to take their toll. That particular Thanksgiving created a memory that kneecaps me to this very day.

My back is a little better today, by the way. In fact, I will probably be back in the gym by tomorrow.

Marcus Aurelius said, “Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.”

I got the news today, oh boy. My buddy from high school and college died. It was horrifying and quick. Diagnosed in May. Dead in October. Same age as me.

We went separate ways after graduation. I hacked my way through life like an explorer with a machete in the rain forest. It has been a slog, it is exhausting, but I stubbornly wanted to make a life for myself swirled in a world of words. So onward I’ve marched, for nearly half a century, first as an office boy, then an insurance clerk, then as a marketer of remaindered books, and finally as a promoter of other people’s products and personal achievements — all to support my writing habit. I am not “rich”. Not financially. I have the best wife and son one could ask for. I have what I need. I push ahead.

My late friend chose another path. Long ago, he dreamed of life as a Supreme Court justice. He came from modest means, as did I. He had a sharp mind and a rapier wit. Among his many interests was photography. He taught himself film development as a kid, and dodged a headshot of himself into a portrait of the entire SCOTUS team.

He then managed to insert the image of a mutual friend into a photo of a swirling toilet bowl. All of us dopey young guys howled with laughter at my friend’s photographic magic trick. We all begged him to dodge our faces into a toilet bowl.

His friendship helped rescue me, for back then I was an emotional mess. Together we played cards, partied, and road-tripped throughout the Northeast and into Canada. I saw a wider world. I imagined that there might actually be a way out of my plight.

He met a girl while in school, at a relatively young age. They fell in love. His fondness for Southern Comfort mixed with Dr. Brown’s Cream Soda evolved to fine wine. Her family had a successful contracting company out-of-state. They married and he joined the company and helped grow it to new heights. No law school. No judgeships. But all the material comforts of the American Dream: Travel! Cars! Vacation homes! And he had the blessing of unconditional love from his wife and kids, no small matter.

I only saw him two or three times in the last forty-plus years. But his death prompts internal discussions about roads-not-taken. He grew the family business, helped his customers solve problems, and employed many people. I wonder, though, if late at night he wished he had pursued his dream of judgeships. Or was he perfectly content with his role as loving husband, dad, brother, mentor, service provider, and friend.

“Now take what’s left, and live it properly.” My question is, define “properly.”

Alev hasholem, RF. May your memory be a blessing.

Massages, facial treatments, spa sessions and new age music were not in the lexicon back in The Bronx.

Aches and pains? “Recovery Period”? Ha. Walk it off. Suck it up. Pop some aspirin. Ice it. Heat it. Maybe — maybe — if you were fancy-pants you soaked post-football bones in Epsom salts.

So it was with great trepidation that I recently spent 40 minutes in “the waters” during a mini-vacation with friends in Saratoga Springs, 180 miles north of Fordham Road.

I mean, were “the waters” just a lot of hype? What would it do, other than chew through 40 minutes on a gloriously sunny summer’s day?

And, was it communal? Was it private? Would I have to wear a swimsuit, or go nakey? Was it hot? Cold? Was it pandemic proof?

My wife and her friend booked the appointment but had no answers for me as I nervously eyed the rows of pines beside the roadway in Saratoga park grounds. We passed one sturdy brick out-building after another as we wound our way to the Roosevelt Bath House.

We arrived on-time for our treatments. I wore swimming trunks and had a change of clothes with me in my Bronx Luggage. That is, a Garden Gourmet shopping bag.

We then got a 30-second overview from a tiny woman who had the pallor and paunch of the industrious three-pack-a-day, Busch Beer imbiber. With a cheery, if broken, smile, she led me to a private chamber reminiscent of a high-ceiling, subway-tiled treatment room in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

“Here’s the tub,” my guide said. Yeah, no duh. It was huge and a bit high-walled. “It’s deeper than you think. Be careful. And there’s the bathroom, and if you need to cool off, here’s a glass of water and there’s the cold water tap. See you in 40 minutes.”

So where do I rinse off? “Oh, you don’t,” she said. “You’ll feel your skin tingle and feel softer and smoother.” I was unconvinced but, like, whatever, being “far from the shallow now” as Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper would have sung.

The attendant lady left. I took off my Dickie’s pocket-tee shirt and swim trunks and kicked off my Keens shoes. The tub was filled with what looked like rusty, bubbly bilge water. I wondered how far we were from the toxic liquids of New York’s Love Canal.

I put one foot inside the tub, and then the other. I slowly sat down and issued an Archimedes “eureka!” as the water rose precariously close to the brim of the tub. I slid back with great care.

The water was justthisclose to hot. I looked up at the ceiling. New age music was piped in from…somewhere.

I looked around. The walls of the tub had brown corrosion of a color that gave me great pause. Tiny bubbles burst around my body. I closed my eyes and silenced the inner voice that shouted “this is silly”.

The steady-state ache in my left knee soon disappeared. The stiffness in my lower back dissipated. My skin felt softer. Not greasy or oily or salty, but somehow more supple.

I let my mind wander and my imagination tumbled about like newly-laundered clothes in a dryer set to “delicates”.

I snapped my fingers, as Archimedes might have done, as I came up with a name for this experience: Aqua Opiates.

I made the water a little cooler. I took a sip of water. I closed my eyes. In no time, there was a tap tap tapping at my chamber door. It wasn’t a raven. It was the kindly attendant with a heated, soft and fluffy blue towel.

“When you’re dressed you can meet your party in the Relaxation Room down the hall,” she said.

Calmed, clean, pain-free and, now, dry, I dressed and ambled over. There was a peaceful waterfall and soft New Age music. Double-wide cushy seating. A table with apples and photos of guests from years gone by. Oh no! I thought. Is this really the Overlook Hotel?

There, in the corner, was my wife, who waved me over. And sitting nearby were our friends. I looked around the Relaxation Room. I guess it was as expected: the other guests, newly exfoliated, jabbed at their smart phones, texting, scrolling, catching up with work, remotely, from the Roosevelt Bath House in the end-stage of this, The Age of Covid.

But me? I’m hooked on Aqua Opiates. More please.

I once had a midtown office window that faced Bryant Park.

I marveled at how that green space was transformed from a drug den (“psst…sen…sen…sen”) to a leafy respite and performance space. I would people-watch from my aerie and make up story lines about the little figures seventeen floors below.

I did this during office hours. My job was to create compelling story lines that would highlight client achievements, and to create new programming that would attract new clients. Willie Loman’s was a “shoe leather” approach, while I let my synapses do the walking.

Anyhow, one fine day I turned away from my keyboard, put my feet up on the window sill, leaned back, took in the Bryant Park scene, and cast my mind out into the sea of ideas. Like fishing, one must be patient, and only jiggle the line once in a while, to attract a lunker. My brain surfed my internal Internet, slip-sliding from one shard of an idea to another.

My reverie was shattered by the visage of my boss, his reflection in the panoramic window overlooking the park.

“So. Kleinman. Busy as a bee, huh?” he said.

And I said, “yup.” And by the close of business, a kick-ass proposal was written, and we landed a big account.

I come to you today in praise of daydreaming. There was even an article in The New York Times about it recently.

The creative process is fragile and ideas of value are like souffles; they are easy to fall. I have a little reminder taped to my keyboard, which underscores the delicacy of the creative mind:

–this is awesome

–this is tricky

–this is shit

–I am shit

–this might be ok

–this is awesome

Here we are in the dog days of summer. The air is heavy and the temps are high. Energy is sub-optimal. It’s a perfect time to sit back, reflect, read a book, hit “pause”, cast your mind out into the ocean of ideas, and let it drift. No one is watching. No one is judging. It’s just you, your brain, and your thoughts.

Finally at peace, finally free of the electronic noise, you are truly yourself.

It may not seem so to the casual observer, but in this state of blissful creativity, you will truly be busy as a bee. And loving every minute of it.