Busy.

It's 7:00 and once again I am in an lonely-halled office.

The only other sound's the whoosh of white noise.

Or the occasional janitor wheeling something, somewhere.

My nose is down an inch or so.

It's been butted up against the grindstone for so long.

I'm busy.

And I keep getting busier.

I guess it's like that old adage.

When you need something done, give it to the busy person.

Listen, I'm sorry this post sucks.

Too much work to do.

Awards and Cadillac.

Cadillac, the once-vaunted automaker, seems to change agencies as often as John Boehner changes tanning salons. They're now at Publicis and have just launched yet another new advertising campaign themed "Dare Greatly."

If you've ever pondered how far the agency business has strayed from its original intent, you only need to read the bit of the story I've excerpted below.

While Cadillac hemorrhages sales--will they go the way of Mercury, Oldsmobile, Plymouth and others--the advertising trade press is wondering if their newest filmic abortus "will ever win any awards."

Let me be clear.

Cadillac is all but irrelevant.

And the "Dare Greatly" spot referenced above doesn't even show the product.

Look, Cadillac is selling fewer cars per year than they sold 60 years ago when the US had only about 170 million people as opposed to our 320 million today.

Dear Cadillac Agencies and Trade Press: It's not about winning awards. It's about selling cars while you rebuild a moribund brand.

A warm night in Torreon, Mexico.

We were losing, as we were so often that summer. This time we were down against the Vaqueros Laguna, the Laguna Cowboys of Torreon, Coahuila, just a four or five hour drive due west from Saltillo, past Matamores on old Route 40, through the desert.

I've always been a window-looker-outer--and this was the era before iPods and streaming video--the Golden Era of looking out of bus windows. Some guys jabber on a team bus, others sing, or play the seat in-front of them as drums. Others do a crossword, or read a paperback. Most sleep. Me, even today, I look out of windows.

The desert on either side of Route 40, I thought to myself, was probably the loneliest place I'd ever seen. Just dust and scrub and every so often a saguaro or a clump of sage. Lonely sage, like the left-behinds from a lost civilization. You'd see a shack once in a while, abandoned, which only made you wonder. What was someone doing out there in the first place? Why? How? What were they hoping for? What had they thought they could accomplish? And where had they gone now that they were no more.

We would pass through dusty little towns that rang like sad bells in the dust. A bodega. A painted sign reading "cerveza," or Coca-Cola. And political graffiti on every paintable surface. We would pass through these towns in our team bus with the words "Seraperos de Saltillo" painted on the side with a baseball wrapped in a colorful Serape, and children would laugh and wave and run after us. If we stopped for gas or for water for the radiator, the men would come out holding three beer bottles in each hand, or four, balanced like ballerinas between their fingers and the women would come with fruits or little fried cakes dusted with sugar that I still, I'll admit, on occasion crave.

These scenes were better, to me anyway who was seeing them for the first time, these scenes were better than anything on TV. They were life unvarnished and unadorned, without the gloss of Hollywood, without the pall of a laugh-track.

We arrived in Torreon, with its industrial smoke and its dust and its still lagoon, a sick brownish green from algaed water simmering still in the heat. We passed the tall marble memorial to the 303 Chinese coolies killed by Revolutionaries in 1911 and we arrived, finally, our throats dry with dust despite the beers we bought along the way, at Estadio Revolucion--Revolution Stadium, where Pancho Villa led the masses, until he was shot dead, shot 40 times with dum-dum bullets in his 1919 black Dodge, nine of those bullets hitting him in the head and chest, scattering the pumpkin seeds he was nibbling on as he drove.

We arrived at the Estadio Revolucion and peeled out of our sports-jackets and slacks and fell into our away grey uniforms. In minutes, just minutes we were out in the field playing pepper, turning major-league double plays and slugging the batting practice balls for the wooden fences or the benches not yet black with people.

I was back at third that evening. Clemente Bonilla was back in right, his hamstring was no longer pulled and the blazing rookie who replaced me at third, Gonzalo Bustamante, who had shown such promise just weeks before, had come back down to earth with a thud. His .400 batting average was now a terrestrial .250 and soon he would, like so many others, be beating the Mexican bushes, or saguaro, looking for work--and for a way to hit a curve.

We were down three to zip and couldn't touch their guy. He had mown us down four frames in a row, with no one even marking him, no one hitting the ball with any strength. I came up in the fifth determined to get on and when a pitch came inside, instead of turning to avoid it I stuck out my left elbow and got myself nicked.

I was on base, our first runner of the night.

I saw her, again, as I led off the bag and took my lead to second. She was wearing the same white dress as she had on in Reynoso. And she sat not on one of the wooden bleachers but on a beaten valise she had placed in the aisle. I looked at her and tried. Tried to get her attention. Tried to see if she was there only by coincidence, or even if it was the same girl.

I led off first and our bats came alive. Buentello stroked an opposite field single sending me to third. I came in when Angelo Diablo squeezed a bunt down the line. He made in safely to first, Buentello to second and we were down 3-1, with two men on and none down.

We kept hitting the ball. Javier, batting for Valenzuela in the ninth slot, knocked in Buentello and moved Diablo to third. Then hit hit hit. And we were up 5-3 and batting around when it became my turn at the plate.

Hector Quesdailla our manager yelled a cheer he had created from the dugout.

"Jorrrrrrrrrrrrrrgeeeeeeee," he chanted, elongating the syllables.

"Navidad," responded our bench, clipping the word.

"Jorrrrrrrrrrrrrgeeeeeeeee."

"Navidad."

Garibay was on second, two down. And their guy grooved one high and tight but a little less tight than it should have been. It was right where I had my power. In a moment, the ball I had slugged was sailing over the forest green outfield wall.

7-3.

"Jorge Navidad!" I heard the girl yell as I trotted my circuit. "Jorge Navidad."

That's the way the game ended and we were ebullient in the locker-room. The games didn't matter that much anymore--we were firmly entrenched in seventh or eighth place, but a win is a win and a come-from-behind win even moreso.

When I left the locker-room for the bus back to the hotel, the girl was there. She was sitting on her valise, waiting for me.

"Jorge Navidad," she said.

Her name was Karmen. Karmen Rodriguez and in the ten minutes we spent talking, me in crappy Spanish, her in crappy English, we were deep in love. It was my first love. Perhaps unfortunately, not my last.

She was a ticket-taker at Estadio de Beisbol Francisco I. Madero, our home ballpark. She told me she loved me. Words I hadn't heard before. Ever.

Hector came out of the locker-room and headed for the bus. He looked at her. He looked at me. He turned back to her.

"This is my son," he said. "You be good to my son."

"Your son," she whispered with her large brown eyes lowered demurely, "I love for him."

With that, the three of us boarded our team bus to our hotel. Salome Rojas, my roomie, tripled up with Buentello and Cesar for the night. Karmen and I had my room alone.

"Jorge Navidad," she whispered as I locked the door for the night. "I be good to Hector's son," she said. And she shut the light. "I love for him."

Brando on the M-15.

I was sitting on a slow (redundant) downtown express bus this morning perseverating, I'll admit, about all the things I needed to do today. Being a freelancer is never having to say "I'm sorry." Or "I can't." Or for that matter, "You'll have it later."

It's an on-demand world, and the race goes to the swift, the strong and the well-prepared.

My mental to-do list was getting to the point where it was as long as Hadrian's Wall and I was feeling more than a little agita.

Then.

Marlon Brando got on the bus.

A perfect replica.

The same puglistic underbite.

The same concave pencil eyebrows.

The same beaten bomber's jacket he wore in "On the Waterfront." The only thing missing was the longshoreman's cargo hook my Brando didn't have affixed to his shoulder.

Then, unfortunately, my Brando ruined the effect.

He pulled a can of Red Bull from his pocket.

And sipped at it.

Here's how the real Brando drank.

Here's how you treat a frail.

Pay especial attention at around 1:40 in.

Way back in 1939.

We talk, in our business today, about experiences. I wonder how many people have ever actually had one. Or, if like most things in our lives--like small coffees they call 'talls,' they have been verbally watered-down into meaninglessness.

I'll tell you something, seeing "Aida" at the Met is an experience.

Seeing Ray Charles and the Raelettes at the Blue Note is an experience.

Seeing Ralph Fiennes read TS Eliot's "Four Quartets," well, that's an experience, too.

Seeing 'Medea' performed in Attic Greek (though my Greek is rusty) at an amphitheatre on the site of the Parthenon, that counts, too.

I've never seen an app or a commercial or some other contemporary bushwa come close.

Sorry.

On Saturday night, a small local movie house in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, rickety and reeking of artificial flavor decided for Valentine's Day that they would present one of the great movies of all time on what passes for in the 21st Century, a big screen.

So my wife, my 23-year-old daughter, Uncle Slappy, Aunt Sylvie and myself piled into my daughter's new white Subaru and arrived at the Varsity Theatre early.

We grabbed popcorn and soda water and settled into our up-front seats. Max Steiner's music came up, a little wobbly through the non-state-of-the-art sound system, and then the corny type with little "wind marks" on all the letters.

I wondered if the movie were to be re-done today if re-creating the "wind marks" would cost as much as the entire movie did in 1939.

We read the opening title card. We read. And we were inside the glorification of the gallant old South, of muscled men with pencil mustaches and winsome virgins with unfreckled bosoms and 17-inch waists.

We laughed. We laughed at Butterfly McQueen high pitched manipulations. We laughed at Hattie McDaniel's brusque wisdom and minstrel-show ministrations. We laughed mostly at Scarlett's weaving her web and Rhett being onto her like feathers on a duck.

It was an experience, it was. Four-and-a-half-hours of dated-ness and eternal story-telling. With wisdom, duplicitousness, laughter, bravery and pain.

It's like nothing you see on your computer, your 60-inch TV which might be spying on you, your, god forbid, your smart phone.

There's nothing like seeing a classic as it was meant to be seen.

I've seen "Shane" on a big screen. And "Bad Day at Black Rock," with the opening train scene in stunning Cinemascope, and most of Keaton (not Michael) and Chaplin and Lloyd. I've also seen "Animal Crackers" with the Marx's and "The Third Man," when the audience went as still as death as Orson said "a cuckoo clock."

GWTW was surpassing.

People throw around the word classic to denote anything they remember from their childhood, whether it's a "Scooby Doo" rerun or a comedy with Pauley Shore.

That's ok.

I won't piss on your parade.

But someday you should take the time.

To see what you're really missing.

To see what those words, experience and classic, really mean.

New York cab ride.

As usual I had miles to go.

Rushing to a meeting.

And miscalculating how long it would take to get up and over.

And over some more.

The thing that screwed me up, actually, was the elevator.

The building I was leaving apparently has one of the originals.

You know, installed by Elisha Otis in 1853.

Ca-chunck ca-chunck ca-chunck wheeeze ca-chunck.

It was like that for 14 floors.

I ran out like a prisoner released from Camarillo.

Free at last.

I couldn't find a cab.

Nine-degree weather can do that.

Finally, I found one going the wrong way.

The driver snapped at me.

"I can't make a left, man."

"Just do what you have to do."

And he did.

He wove more than Betsy Ross.

Around trucks. Past New Jersey-ites. Underneath city buses.

We made it to the West Side Highway.

The man didn't just have a sixth-sense.

He had eight, nine, ten senses.

Every lane he chose was the right one.

He was a wizard.

A magician.

We made it.

Six minutes late.

"Where are you from?" I asked.

"Nepal."

"They don't drive like that in Kathmandu," I said.

"They don't drive like me anywhere."

Ten dollar tip.

Women in the Tempus Fugit.

Ah, Insomnia.

Dame of the Night. Queen of Darkness. The Black Goddess of Sleeplessness.

She dropped by my bedstead and knelt to kiss me awake.

"Go away," I said. "I am no longer in your thrall."

"Ha," she laughed, kissing my forehead. "Ha. You are mine."

She pulled me from warmth. She dressed me caressingly. And there we were. In 4-degree weather. With Whiskey, my almost-three-year-old golden retriever, trudging in the chill, to the Tempus Fugit.

No, friends, not the West-coast version thereof, that one Rich Siegel haunts. But the dark, gloomy original. Foreboding yet friendly.

Whiskey settled into her spot, at the foot of my stool. The bartender brought her a small wooden bowl of water and then hustled back around the teak and pulled me a Pike's (the ALE that won for YALE!)

"They're all here tonight," the bartender began.

I sipped at my Pike's and scanned the room. Except for a table at the back against the wall, near the signed glossy photograph of ex-heavyweight champion Gene Tunney, the place seemed as neat as a new hotel room. That table had a chair pulled about three inches out and an old "New York Journal-American" newspaper folded in thirds on its top. That newspaper had ceased publication in 1966.

I drained my amber and he deftly yielded another, wiping the teak in front of me and settling it in front of me.

"Who's here?" I asked stupidly.

"Every woman who ever was, whomever had a hold on you. This is the hour when memory dances and does a rousing can-can in your Hippocampus."

"Lovely," I said. "I come here because they don't know this place."

"They're where you are." He consoled. "As the one and only Barbara Stanwyck said in Sturges' "The Lady Eve," 'You have no idea what a long-legged gal can do without doing anything.'"

"Sturges could sling it," I admitted. "Stanwyck also said 'I need a man like the axe needs a turkey.'"

He laughed and slid over a small bowl of salted Spanish peanuts. As is my wont, I pushed them his way.

"No woman wants a round man."

He be-suds'd me again, filling my juice glass full of Pike's for a third time. I scanned the room for lithe athletic blondes, dark-eyed brunettes and even a well-upholstered redhead or two.

"Hello girls," I announced.

He laughed at that and walked over to the coat tree where I had hung up my red-hunting jacket along with my Russian Astrakhan lid. He helped me on with my things.

"Go home," he said. "Go home to the one who matters."

I slid two twenties his way.

He slid them back.

"Cheaper than alimony."

Whiskey and I walked home alone in the dark cold.

A Guest from the West.

Rich Siegel writes a great, funny, insightful blog on advertising and life called Round Seventeen, visit it here. Often.

We decided to trade places for a day. Today Rich has written Ad Aged, below, and my day's post is on his blog.

Enjoy.

---

I have always been jealous of my friend George’s apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Not because of its view of the East River. Or its colorful doorman whose quick and colorful snappy retorts are often quoted by residents of the building.

Truth is, I’ve never stepped foot in the place. But it is in Manhattan. In the city where I was born. And it is in walking distance to the famous Tempus Fugit where they serve Pike’s Ale (The ALE that won for YALE.)

So you can imagine my delight when I heard that Tempus Fugit was following in the footsteps of other successful drinking establishments, like Benigans, Fuddruckers and Applebees, was in expansion mode and had opened the doors to Tempus Fugit West.

Even more exciting, TFW, was right here in Culver City, on the East end of town in a building, near a building where Charles Bukowski had once urinated on.

I wanted to make my first venture to TFW a special one, so I purposely waited for one of those Southern Californian nights that lent itself to moody over imbibement. It was Tuesday and the temperature had already dropped in the low 50’s. Moreover, as the local weatherman had teased for a week, a low pressure system was viciously working its way down from Santa Barbara and was drenching Southern California with “Intermittent Sprinkles.”

Nevertheless, I braved the elements and made my way towards the Tempus Fugit West where I was quick to discover they served a new microbrew, Mustache Dan’s – The IPA that beat UofA. I cozied up to the bar and made eye contact with my barkeep, who carefully poured me a pint while pointing out some of the finer points of the TFW, which to my disappointment seemed unlike its east coast counterpart.

“Check out the pock-marked floors. Are you seeing that? Those are new, freshly pock marked floors?” asked the overly enthusiastic bartender.

“Yes,” I replied, hoping to stem his eagerness.

“We have a guy from Brentwood who came in and pocked the floor. He has his own business. Best floor-pocking this side of Barrington Ave. If you want your floors pocked I can give you his card.”

I made quick work of the first Mustache Dan’s (The IPA that beat UofA) and ordered a second. At this point I tried to steer the conversation in another direction.

I hadn’t come to the Tempus Fugit West in search of any life wisdom. On the other hand I wasn’t averse to listening to a worldly saloonkeeper prattle on about his recent safari in Namibia. Or his dalliance with a leggy secretary….er, Administrative Assistant who worked the seedier section of Boyle Heights. Hell, I’d even entertain an overwrought soapbox sermon drawn from the writings of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.

But Brad, my bartender, was not game. In fact, when prodded, Brad admitted

he had never read any classic literature and was a huge fan of the Cliff Notes.

“I do like Russian Dressing on my salad. And isn’t it the same as Thousand Island? Which is weird because I don’t think Russia has a Thousand Islands. Or does it? I don’t know, I’m a Wheel of Fortune guy. Do you like that show?”  

The Intermittent Sprinkles had turned to a Light drizzle and I thought it best to start my walk home before shallow puddles started forming on the streets. I drained my beer thinking my experience with Tempus Fugit West was not what I had hoped.

I reached in my wallet and pushed a twenty dollar bill across the slick slate bar, polished by a guy in Pacoima who also does flooring and shower tiling. Brad didn’t slide the twenty back in my direction with a wink and a smile, which might have redeemed the evening.

He put the bill in the cash register and waited…

“That’s two IPA’s and the Kale chips….comes to $26.50.”

A poet.

Last night, late, I "discovered" a great voice. A surpassing New York poet, Babs Gonzales. Gonzales was most famous for his hit "Op Pop A Da" and for being Errol Flynn's chauffeur.

He is as New York as the Yankees.

As New York as grime.

As New York as fuhgeddaboutit.

As New York as Joseph Mitchell and the New Yorker.

As New York as it gets.

Dig.

And be dug.

My friend, Joseph Mitchell.

"The New Yorker," yes, the New Yorker, has a short piece in this week's issue by my favorite writer, the late Joseph Mitchell.

Mitchell worked at the magazine for nearly 60 years but spent the last 30 years or so not publishing anything. For whatever reason, the magazine's editors accepted his lack of production and his presence in the office.

For the last few months or so, some pages of Mitchell's unfinished and unpublished memoir have been unearthed and the New Yorker has taken to printing short pieces. Last night, I read this week's installment, three pages of his third chapter called "A Place of Pasts."

Whenever I feel like I can't write, which happens, I turn to Mitchell. He seems to cut to the heart of the matter, to banish superfluity and to get the job done. He is plain, honest and clear.

The piece just published in the New Yorker wasn't my favorite of his. But here it is. You'll feel better, I think, for reading it.

A Place of Pasts

Finding worlds in the city.

BY JOSEPH MITCHELL

Joseph Mitchell was born in 1908 into a prosperous family of North Carolina cotton and tobacco growers. At the age of twenty-one, he came to New York City to pursue a career as a writer, and he started contributing to this magazine four years later. In the late sixties and the early seventies, he began writing a memoir. What follows was intended to be the third chapter but was never finished.

In the fall of 1968, without at first realizing what was happening to me, I began living in the past. These days, when I reflect on this and add up the years that have gone by, I can hardly believe it: I have been living in the past for over twenty years—living mostly in the past, I should say, or living in the past as much as possible.

And now, right away, before I go any further, I must interrupt myself and say that I am not entirely satisfied with the phrase “living in the past” as a description of my way of life—it makes me sound like some kind of sad old recluse—but living in the past is the closest I can come to it; I hope that my meaning will become clearer as I go along.

In my time, I have known quite a few of the worlds and the worlds within worlds of which New York City is made up, such as the world of the newspapers, the world of the criminal courts, the world of the museums, the world of the racetracks, the world of the tugboat fleets, the world of the old bookstores, the world of the old left-behind churches down in the financial district, the world of the old Irish saloons, the world of the old Staten Island oyster ports, the world of the party-boat piers at Sheepshead Bay, and the worlds of the city’s two great botanical gardens, the Botanical one in the Bronx and the Botanic one in Brooklyn. 

As a reporter and as a curiosity seeker and as an architecture buff and as a Sunday walker and later on as a member of committees in a variety of Save-this and Save-that and Friends-of-this and Friends-of-that organizations and eventually as one of the commissioners on the Landmarks Preservation Commission, I have known some of these worlds from the inside. Even so, I have never really felt altogether at home in any of them. And I have always felt at home in the Fulton Fish Market.And I should also say that when I say the past I mean a number of pasts, a hodgepodge of pasts, a spider’s web of pasts, a jungle of pasts: my own past; my father’s past; my mother’s past; the pasts of my brothers and sisters; the past of a small farming town geographically misnamed Fairmont down in the cypress swamps and black gum bottoms and wild magnolia bays of southeastern North Carolina, a town in which I grew up and from which I fled as soon as I could but which I go back to as often as I can and have for years and for which even at this late date I am now and then all of a sudden and for no conscious reason at all heart-wrenchingly homesick; the pasts of several furnished-room houses and side-street hotels in New York City in which I lived during the early years of the Depression, when I was first discovering the city, and that disappeared one by one without a trace a long time ago but that evidently made a deep impression on me, for every once in a while the parlor or the lobby of one of them or my old room in one of them turns up eerily recognizable in a dream; the pasts of a number of speakeasies, diners, greasy spoons, and drugstore lunch counters scattered all over the city that I knew very well in the same period and that also have disappeared and that also turn up in dreams; the pasts of a score or so of strange men and women—bohemians, visionaries, obsessives, impostors, fanatics, lost souls, gypsy kings and gypsy queens, and out-and-out freak-show freaks—whom I got to know and kept in touch with for years while working as a newspaper reporter and whom I thought of back then as being uniquely strange, only-one-of-a-kind-in-the-whole-world strange, but whom, since almost everybody has come to seem strange to me, including myself, I now think of, without taking a thing away from them, as being strange all right, no doubt about that, but also as being stereotypes—as being stereotypically strange, so to speak, or perhaps prototypically strange would be more exact or archetypically strange or even ur-strange or maybe old-fashioned pre-Freudian-insight strange would be about right, three good examples of whom are (1) a bearded lady who was billed as Lady Olga and who spent summers out on the road in circus sideshows and winters in a basement sideshow on Forty-second Street called Hubert’s Museum, and who used to be introduced to audiences by sideshow professors as having been born in a castle in Potsdam, Germany, and being the half sister of a French duke but who I learned to my astonishment when I first talked with her actually came from a farm in a county in North Carolina six counties west of the county I come from and who loved this farm and started longing to go back to it almost from the moment she left it at the age of twenty-one to work in a circus but who made her relatives uncomfortable when she went back for a visit (“ ‘How long are you going to stay’ was always the first question they asked me,” she once said) and who finally quit going back and from then on thought of herself as an exile and spoke of herself as an exile (“Some people are exiled by the government,” she would say, “and some are exiled by the po-lice or the F.B.I. or the head of some old labor union or the Mafia or the Black Hand or the K.K.K., but I was exiled by my own flesh and blood”), and who became a legend in the sideshow world because of her imaginatively sarcastic and sometimes imaginatively obscene and sometimes imaginatively brutal remarks about people in sideshow audiences delivered deadpan and sotto voce to her fellow-freaks grouped around her on the platform, and (2) a street preacher named James Jefferson Davis Hall, who also came up here from the South and who lived in what he called sackcloth-and-ashes poverty in a tenement off Ninth Avenue in the Forties and who believed that God had given him the ability to read between the lines in the Bible and who also believed that while doing so he had discovered that the end of the world was soon to take place and who also believed that he had been guided by God to make this discovery and who furthermore believed that God had chosen him to go forth and let the people of the world know what he had discovered or else supposing he kept this dreadful knowledge to himself God would turn his back on him and in time to come he would be judged as having committed the unforgivable sin and would burn in Hell forever and who consequently trudged up and down the principal streets and avenues of the city for a generation desperately crying out his message until he wore himself out and who is dead and gone now and long dead and gone but whose message remembered in the middle of the night (“It’s coming! Oh, it’s coming!” he would cry out. “The end of the world is coming! Oh, yes! Any day now! Any night now! Any hour now! Any minute now! Any second now!”) doesn’t seem as improbable as it used to, and (3) an old Serbian gypsy woman named Mary Miller—she called herself Madame Miller—whom I got to know with the help of an old-enemy-become-old-friend of hers, a retired detective in the Pickpocket and Confidence Squad, and whom I visited a number of times over a period of ten years in a succession of her ofisas, or fortune-telling parlors, and who was fascinating to me because she was always smiling and gentle and serene, an unusually sweet-natured old woman, a good mother, a good grandmother, a good great-grandmother, but who nevertheless had a reputation among detectives in con-game squads in police departments in big cities all over the country for the uncanny perceptiveness with which she could pick out women of a narrowly specific kind—middle-aged, depressed, unstable, and suggestible, and with access to a bank account, almost always a good-sized savings bank account—from the general run of those who came to her to have their fortunes told and for the mercilessness with which she could gradually get hold of their money by performing a cruel old gypsy swindle on them, the hokkano baro, or the big trick; and, finally, not to mention a good many other pasts, the past of New York City insofar as it is connected directly or indirectly with my own past, and particularly the past of the part of New York City that is known as lower Manhattan, the part that runs from the Battery to the Brooklyn Bridge and that encompasses the Fulton Fish Market and its environs, and which is part of the city that I look upon, if you will forgive me for sounding so high-flown, as my spiritual home.

I know the exact day that I began living in the past. I didn’t know it then, of course, but I know it now. The day was October 4, 1968, a Friday. I had recently been in what I guess could be called a period of depression, during which, on the advice of a doctor, I had begun keeping a detailed diary, really a journal, and I have continued to keep it, so that I have a record of everything of any consequence that happened to me on that day and on almost every day of my life since then. 

On that day, according to my diary, a dream woke me up around 4 A.M. In this dream, I was standing on the muddy bank of a stream that I recognized, because of a peculiar old slammed-together split-rail bridge crossing it, as being the central stream running through Old Field Swamp, a cypress swamp near my home in North Carolina. I had often fished in this stream as a boy. 

In the dream, I was fishing for redfin pike with a snare hook hung from a line on the end of a reed pole. I was watching a sandbar in some shallow water out in the middle of the stream that the sun was shining on, and I was waiting for a pike to show up over the sandbar where it would be clearly visible and where I could maneuver my line until I had the hook under it and could snatch it out of the water. I was intent on what I was doing and oblivious to everything else. And then I happened to look up, and I saw that the bridge was on fire. And then I saw that the mud on the opposite bank was beginning to quiver and bubble and spit like lava and that smoke and flames were beginning to rise from it. 

And then, a few moments later, while I was standing there, staring, fish and alligators and snakes and muskrats and mud turtles and bullfrogs began floating down the stream, all belly up, and I realized that the central stream of Old Field Swamp had turned into one of the rivers of Hell. I dropped my pole and spun around and started running as hard as I could up a muddy path that led out of the swamp, but the mud on it was also beginning to quiver and bubble and spit, so I plunged into a briar patch beside the path and tried to fight my way through it, whereupon I woke up. I woke up with my heart in my mouth. ♦