510. Americans Are Pigs

                        BROWDERBOOKS

                                          Wild New York

Lots is happening:

• I and an in-house editor are working on my new novel, Lady of the Chameleons, no. 6 in my Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York.  It will hopefully be published this year.
• I continue to promote Forbidden Brownstones, no. 5 in the Metropolis series.
• I and a technical expert are working on a one-minute book trailer for  Forbidden Brownstones, something I have never done before.
• I am working on a new edition of Fascinating New Yorkers, no. 2 in my Wild New York series of nonfiction titles about New York and New Yorkers.  The new cover is stunning.
• I just finished a Books Butterfly promotion of the e-book of New Yorkers: A Feisty People..., no. 3 in my Wild New York nonfiction series.  The e-book was offered at .99 cents, bit is now $2.99.

Yes, I'm a busy boy.  But not without problems, mostly technical.  Hopefully they will somehow be resolved.  But SEO (search engine optimization) continues elude me, and mastering it is necessary to boost your online sales.  So it goes.

              AMERICANS  ARE  PIGS

I have often visited the Jefferson Market Garden on Greenwich Avenue near Sixth Avenue in the West Village.  As I walk its paths, I usually see litter near the fence.  The litter is only near the fence, where passersby on the sidewalk outside can toss it onto the grounds; the rest of the garden is clean, for people who visit it are not ones to foul it with litter.  But the litter near the fences reminds me of something the renowned theater director Harold Clurman once said at the Actors Studio, while commenting on a scene from a play about life in small-town Middle America: “Americans are pigs.”  He said this in a certain context, but it has stayed with me ever since.

New York City litter, as seen by a Dutch visitor.
Steven Lek

         Yes, Americans are pigs.  We have many redeeming qualities, but when it comes to littering and the environment, we are pigs.  We use gardens like ashtrays, and parks like  dumps.  In my hiking days a trail sometimes went for a short distance alongside a highway, and always, without exception, the shoulder of the road was littered with plastic cups and spoons, tinfoil, crumpled paper napkins, cigarette butts, whatever, and the litter often went for eight or ten feet off the road.  People in passing cars toss stuff out the window and, for them, it is disposed of, vanished, gone.  Yes, it has gone, but it hasn’t vanished; it has added to the litter along the highway.  I experienced this especially on the Palisades and in Pelham Bay Park.

         Once, on Staten Island, I was hiking through the woods in Wolfe’s Pond Park, hoping for a bit of nature, but what struck me most was the litter.  Disgusted at first, I finally began to feel a weird fascination at the richness and variety of it, and began jotting down notes that would later become a poem.  Looking at that poem today, I find a chronicle of the specifics encountered back then:

·      Cheese Doodle bags

·      Yoohoo bottles (“Five vitamins, three minerals”)

·      matchbook covers (“Finish high school now”)

·      Tangy Taffy wrappers

·      dented Budweiser cans

·      crumpled tinted tissues

·      soggy mattresses

·      Eureka disposable dust bag and filter packages

·      empty Merit and Marlboro and True cigarette packages

·      Snickers and Doublemint wrappings

·      Pepsi bottles

·      deranged grocery carts

·      bits of foam rubber and sponge

        This list is, in its strange way, a comment on American consumerism, and as regards the culprits involved, the proximity of Tottenville High School is not irrelevant; the youth of our nation are just as culpable as their motorized elders.  But the presence of discarded grocery carts and mattresses incriminates the elders of the neighborhood as well, or rather, it incriminated them back then, since I don’t know what the situation is today in Wolfe's Pond Park or Tottenville High School.

An attempt at better in New York, courtesy of the EPA: a cement trash 
can, not easily overturned or stolen.  But have you seen one lately? 
This was back in 1973.

         New York City litter can sometimes achieve the status of surreal.  The French Surrealists of yore imagined a locomotive abandoned in a forest as surreal, but in this country their fantasy has become only too real.  While hiking the Blue Trail in the Greenbelt of Staten Island (with apologies to the responsible citizens of that borough), I often crossed over the Staten Island Expressway on an abandoned highway ramp known as Moses’ Folly, a relic from an attempt by Robert Moses to ram a highway right smack through the Greenbelt, a project that was stopped by local opposition.  The abandoned ramp, lunging high in the air to nowhere, is surreal enough, and the graffiti covering it do not detract from the victory, literally monumental, of the embattled local residents and environmentalists.  But after crossing the expressway on the ramp, the Blue Trail turns sharply to the left and steeply descends a wooded ravine to a trickle of a stream, before climbing up another steep incline to another abandoned ramp and continuing on its way.  In that wooded ravine I have seen numerous abandoned cars, overgrown with vines almost to the point of vanishing: New York City litter on the grand scale, if you like, and absolutely surreal, but litter none the less.  

Tommi Nummelin

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         On Broad Channel in Jamaica Bay, Queens, while accessing the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, I once also encountered an abandoned car.  Incensed at this violation of otherwise unspoiled nature, I relieved my bladder on the offending vehicle.

         Visitors to our cities have commented on the prevalence in the streets and parks of trash, particularly used condoms and orange peels.  With some justification they conclude that Americans have a great propensity for making love and eating oranges.  To the litany of New York City trash I would add plastic as well: plastic cups, plates, knives, forks, and spoons that I have found fouling the most delightful vistas of natural scenery, not to mention the gutters and abandoned lots of our cities. Such is trash, nycike .  And in winter, when the trees are stripped bare of foliage, one can see, impaled high lup on twigs like tattered ensigns, dozens of plastic bags.

         Yet Americans, when they set their minds to it, can do better.  The state of Maine, where I have often vacationed, has highways free from litter.  The moment you cross the state line, you notice the change, the result of a statewide campaign to keep Maine green.  And here in New York City, the volunteers of various conservancies and neighborhood organizations have done wonders in eliminating trash and litter from our parks and public spaces. 

         Keep Britain tidy: such were the signs that I used to see during a visit long ago to England.  “Tidy” is not a concept to be applied to the United States, a vast nation stretching the width of a continent; we’re just too big to be tidy.  But if every citizen picked up a single bit of litter every day, the result would be astonishing.  

        Humans are capable of keeping their cities clean.  A world traveler of my acquaintance assures me that Tokyo, with a much greater population than New York, is spotlessly clean and unlittered.  But here in the U.S., except for a blessed minority, we are too hurried, too involved in our busy lives, to be concerned about such trivia as trash and littering.  To judge by the litter in New York City and its environs, yes, alas, Americans are pigs.

©  2021 Clifford Browder 

             

509. My Suicides

                 BROWDERBOOKS

                             WILD NEW YORK

 

Good news!  Two items, actually.

1. My novel Forbidden Brownstones is featured on Reedsy Discovery.  I would appreciate anyone going there to give it an up vote.  This obligates you in no way; just click on Upvote.  And thanks.

2. My novel Lady of the Chameleons, the sixth title in my Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York, has been accepted for publication by E.L. Marker, an imprint of WiDo Publishing, the same outfit that published Forbidden Brownstones.  

I have a hybrid contract under which they provide the services that publishers give their authors, but I have control.  This means, for example, that only I can decide to stop publishing the book.  My previous small press chose not to renew my contract and stopped publishing my two books on their list.  That can't happen here; only I can decide such things.  This set-up costs me something, but this is not a vanity press, and the cost is worth it.

What is Lady of the Chameleons about? A famous French actress, patterned in part (but only in part) on Sarah Bernhardt, comes to tour in this country and takes a young American reporter as her guide and lover.  He tells the story, but she dominates.  She is imperious, demanding, and superbly self-confident, but in quiet moments sensitive and vulnerable.  He copes as best he can.

And now, on to my suicides...

                    My Suicides 

Just three.  At least, three that I remember.  The first one, and probably the most significant, took place far from New York, in the tranquil Chicago suburb of Evanston, where I grew up.  It was the year after my college graduation, when I was marking time hoping for a Fulbright scholarship that would get me to Europe, while reading and rereading the English poets and  taking beginning Greek with Professor Dorjahn at Northwestern.  Dorjahn, the head of the tiny Classics Department, was a crusty and demanding teacher who loved teaching this course, the gateway to Greek and the classics.  He had been known to reduce sensitive females to tears, so in the first semester was relieved to find only hardy males in this class of five.  A staunch Republican, he thought nothing of denouncing President Truman as a haberdasher out of his depth, but for all his crustiness and prejudices, we loved him.  Which, come to think of it, has nothing to do with suicides.

     As the months wore on, the gray vapors of depression began to infiltrate my being.  Reading poetry and taking Greek was fine, but it was hardly a  life in itself.  I was living at home after four years of college elsewhere, had lost contact with my Evanston friends, dated rarely, had little social life.  Not being used to introspection – at least, not the kind that probes deep into one’s own psyche – I found myself borne slowly on the current of my moods.  Attracted at this point to neither men nor women, I was in a strange limbo of indifference and abandonment, one that even today I have trouble understanding.  Excitement over something I was reading, or my progress in learning Greek, alternated with withdrawal, with alienation from everyone and everything around me.  And of all this, not a word to anyone.  Then I would snap out of it, read more, learn more; but sooner or later the gray mood crept back in.

     One evening that fall or winter, when that mood was upon me, without further reflection and almost like a sleepwalker I slipped out of the house unnoticed by my family, went to the garage, and in the darkness sat in the driver’s seat of my father’s car and, after a few moments of hesitation, turned the motor on.  The garage doors were shut, so monoxide poisoning was possible, even probable, and I knew it.  But the motor started with such a roar that it alarmed me and, fearing discovery, I quickly shut it off.  I then left the garage and slipped back into the house, still unnoticed by anyone.  Was I relieved, alarmed, amused by this fiasco?  I don’t recall.  Was it just a game that I intended to lose?  I doubt it.  The risk was real, and if the motor had come on with a gentle purr, I could well have seen the matter through.

     After that, sensing a need for change, I took a part-time afternoon job at a local insurance company, retrieving applications from the files when the staff had need of them: a menial job, but one that shook me free of those gray vapors.  If the Fulbright didn’t come through, I resolved to go to New York and find a job; I had to get free of family and a suburban life that depressed me.  But the Fulbright did finally come through, and from then on I was feverishly brushing up my French, with no time for either sex or depression.  So ends the account of my first suicide, hitherto untold to anyone.

A suicide prevention poster of the Department of Defense. 
Suicide is common among returning vets.

     Fast forward now to 1965.  I’m a college French teacher now in New York, unattached, a very unpublished poet, but with many friends, many interests, few of the latter related to teaching nineteen-year-olds French.  My friend Vernon Newton got a volume of poetry published, and I was invited to a celebration of the event given by some mutual acquaintances.  I went, found a friendly crowd imbibing wine, and there, prominently displayed on a bureau, the volume, of which I later received an autographed copy.  Toward the end of the party it was obvious that the poet and some of his friends were going out to a dinner to which I was not invited.  But another friend, John Anderson, was going out with some other guests for dinner and invited me to join them; for some reason I refused.  

     Instead, I went home, lapsed again into the gray mood of depression, and without reflection turned the oven on without lighting the gas, kneeled down, and stuck my head in, covering it with a towel so as to keep the gas from spreading and dissipating.  I remained in this awkward position for quite a while, breathing in deeply and hoping to gently pass out and shuffle off this mortal coil.  But I remained stubbornly alive and alert, and finally, deciding the whole business was ridiculous, got up, turned the gas off, and went to bed.

     Why had I done this?  Jealous of my published friend?  I don’t think so; I wished Vernon and his volume well.  Depressed because I was not invited to the dinner party?  Maybe, but neither was John Anderson, who invited me to join his friends for dinner.  More to the point, I suspect, was my dislike of teaching – a dislike whose growing intensity I dared not admit to myself – and my frustrated wish for a relationship, as opposed to occasional sex with strangers.  It was still the era of the Mafia-run gay bars, crowded on Saturday nights, smoke-filled, and guarded by a thug at the door: not my preferred habitat by a long shot.  And my frustration as an unpublished writer probably counted for something as well. Yet even today, with hindsight, I can’t explain the incident adequately; it simply happened.

     “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce,” Karl Marx famously observed.  So it was with me and suicide, if we grant the first two attempts the grandiose label of tragedy; the third was certainly farce.  It must have come a year or two after the second suicide.  I had contemplated various possibilities, albeit with a certain detachment.  Suicide by jumping out a window was no good; I lived in a third-story apartment.  Besides, the dizzying plunge would be terrifying, and my splat on the pavement below might injure some passerby with whom I had no quarrel; pedestrian safety must be considered.  Suicide by revolver would be quick, neat, and clean, and once you twitched the trigger, no chance for reappraisal; alas, I had no revolver.  Finally I settled on a novel method: suicide by aspirin.  Granted, I had never heard of it succeeding; in fact, I had never heard of it at all.  But it seemed worth trying, and maybe, just maybe, it might work.

Fine for headaches.  But suicide???
Ragesoss

   So one evening when that gray mood was upon me, I emptied a whole bottle of aspirin, swallowing one tablet after another, then went to bed and fell asleep, wondering if I would ever wake up.  The next morning I did, unmistakably alive, but with a feeling of weakness, a foul taste of aspirin in my mouth, and a craving for ice cream, a craving like I had never known before, worthy of a pregnant woman, and specifically for vanilla.  Too weak to go out, I phoned my friend Gene, told him I was under the weather and asked him to bring me the ice cream; no word, of course, of the aspirin.  This he gladly did and, being a former ministerial student, he lingered a while and exhibited a most sympathetic bedside manner.  After Gene left, I devoured the ice cream, probably a whole pint at least.  It seemed to work wonders, since the aspirin taste diminished and I felt stronger by the minute.  But that awful taste, the faintest hint of it, hung on for days.  As did my sense of the ludicrous.  Suicide by monoxide has a certain minimal dignity, and suicide by the oven stops just this side of the ridiculous.  But let’s face it, suicide by aspirin plunges deep into the realm of absurdity.

     Such was my third suicide.  Often I escaped depression by simply going to bed and sleeping, a far better solution than alcohol or drugs. Then the gray vapors vanished, and with them the urge to suicide, owing to two changes: I quit teaching, I met my partner Bob.  These games then faded in memory, became definitively a thing of the past.

     Were these attempts simply a game, a toying with fate that I had no real intention of pushing through to completion?  It’s hard to say.  A game, perhaps, but always with risk.  There are better, less dangerous games to play.  But the games served a purpose; following each attempt came a long period of calm and equanimity totally free of depression.  As Nietzsche observed, “The thought of suicide is a great consolation; it gets one through many a bad night.”  

     None of my friends or family had any inkling of all this, not one.  And certainly not my students, since every Monday morning I showed up on the campus as well scrubbed as ever, ready to leaven the sodden weight of grammar with attempts at quicksilver wit.  

     Why do I now relate all this, having never revealed it before to anyone?  Two reasons: it’s an ancient story, and with distance I see the humor.  But what I don’t fully grasp to this day is the motivation, which I can only  surmise.  The young man of those years is in many ways a stranger to me, and a baffling one at that.  How complicated we humans are, what a tangle of motives and frustrations, a mystery even more to ourselves than to others!

               

©  2021 Clifford Browder

508. Did they really say it? Famous false quotes.

                     BROWDERBOOKS

                                      Wild New York

The ebook of Forbidden Brownstones, the fifth in my Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York, now ranks #957 in Amazon's Kindle Store for ebooks, #11 in Coming of Age Fiction, and #1 in Black & African American Historical Fiction.  And it is currently free.  Yes, I said free.

Never before has a book of mine got such high ratings from Amazon.  (The ebook of my historical novel Dark Knowledge, for instance, is #18,285 in Historical Mysteries in the Kindle Store.)  The explanation: I listed Forbidden Brownstones in categories where there is little competition.  And if you want it, and want it cheap, now is the time to get it.  Go here.

And it would be super wonderful if ebook readers gave it a reader review.  Reviews can be three or two sentences long, or even one sentence or a few words.  The book has garnered excellent editorial (professional) reviews, but so far, only two reader reviews, albeit both of them five stars.  But the author would appreciate any honest review, regardless of the number of stars.

• 
  

Did they really say it?  Famous false quotes.

Famous sayings are attributed to historical figures, but often falsely.  Of the quotes listed here, how many are authentic and how many are false?  See if you can tell.  Some knowledge of American and French history will help.

1. After me, the deluge.  Madame de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV, anticipating the French Revolution or other woes to come.

2. O liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!  Madame Roland, a Girondin (moderate), on her way to the guillotine, a victim of Robespierre and the Jacobins.

3. Lafayette, we are here!  General Pershing, commander of the American forces landing in France in 1917 to help the French fight the Germans in World War I.  Lafayette had helped us win our independence from Britain in the Revolution.

4. So you are the little lady who started this big war!  President Abraham Lincoln to Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, an international bestseller that exposed the evils of slavery. At a White House reception during the Civil War.

5. Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable!  Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, a staunch defender of the Union, while debating a Southern senator in 1830.  The debate foreshadowed Southern secession years later and the outbreak of the Civil War.

6.  Let 'em eat cake!  Marie Antoinette, when told that the people were rioting because they had no bread.  Cited as an example of royal disdain, at the beginning of the French Revolution.

7.  I shall return!  General Douglas MacArthur, when ordered out of the Philippines in 1942, while the Japanese were invading the islands.  He returned in 1944, splashing heroically shoreward through the surf (in full view of photographers) as American forces invaded the Philippine island of Leyte.

8.  Law?  What do I care about the law?  I got the power, hain't I?  Robber baron Commodore Vanderbilt, when told that what he wanted to do was illegal.

9.  What this country needs is a splendid little war!  Teddy Roosevelt, who got just such a war, the Spanish-American War of 1898.  He charged up San Juan Hill in Cuba, became a national hero and, in time, President.

10.  This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.  President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in a speech to the American people in the 1930s, when the nation had to cope with the Great Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe, followed by World War II.

Answers: Numbers 2, 5, 7, and 10 are authentic; all the others are false.  Roosevelt's statement (#10) concluded his acceptance speech, when the Democratic Party nominated him to run for re-election in 1936.

So how did you do, if you tried to separate the authentic quotes from the unauthentic?  Here are some comments on the unauthentic ones:

1.  No evidence she said it.

3.  Pershing didn't himself say it, but Colonel E. Stanton did, upon visiting Lafayette's tomb in France in 1917.

4.  This story surfaced long after Lincoln and Harriet Beecher Stowe had died, therefore is highly suspect.

6.  Sometimes rephrased as "Why don't they eat cake?"  This version shows royal ignorance, not disdain, but is still suspect.

8.  Probably a distortion of an authentic remark by Vanderbilt indicating impatience with the law.

9.  Not said by Teddy, though he certainly agreed.  In a letter to President McKinley in 1898, Secretary of War John Hay referred to the war with Spain as "a splendid little war."  It was short (three months) and ended in total victory for the US.

Coming soon: My Suicides.

 ©  2021  Clifford Browder

507. Death by Water in Central Park

 

                     BROWDERBOOKS

                                     Wild New York

In spite of white prejudice, Junius Fox, a young black man, acquires power as the gatekeeper of the city's most exclusive brothel.  But his obsessive need to possess a brownstone involves him in fantasies of arson and murder, and he must choose between the woman he loves and an obsession that has become who he is.  Love vs. self-identity.  What will he decide?

The fifth title in the Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York.   

Available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and WiDo Publishing.

            Death by Water in Central Park

There are so many ways to die in the city – death by fire, death by hit-and-run, death by old age and loneliness – but death by water would seem to be a rare one, especially in Central Park.  The park is one of the glories of New York City: right in the middle of noisy, congested Manhattan, a big, long strip of green where New Yorkers go to relax, have a picnic lunch, jog, watch migrating birds and nocturnal raccoons, walk their dogs, or introduce urban school kids to the wonders of nature.  But also, it seems, to die.  In 2017, for example, there were four deaths within three months, which is highly unusual, and three of them by water.  And three were discovered in the spring, which is when the Police Department says it is commonest.

         Around noon on Tuesday, May 9, a park worker spotted a man’s body, face down and naked, in the Jacqueline Kennedy Reservoir near East 86^th Street in Central Park.  The Reservoir is a vast body of water about 37 feet deep, with a strong current.  I have often hiked along its rim, marveling at the shimmering sunlight on its rippled waters and observing ducks through binoculars, while joggers and speed-walkers brushed past me: a scene of quiet recreation and calm.  Informed, the police came, marked off the area with yellow caution tape announcing POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS, retrieved the body, and examined it.  Because it was badly decomposed, they were unable to get fingerprints, but said that the man was probably in his 20s or 30s and appeared to have been in the water at least one month.  His clothes had rotted away, but there was no sign of trauma on the body, suggesting that no crime was involved.

The Reservoir in June.  Joggers, speed walkers,
strollers, and occasionally a corpse.
Carsten Kessler

         Just one day later, at about 7:20 a.m. on Wednesday, May 10, a man’s body bobbed to the surface of the Pond, in the southeast corner of the park at 59^th Street and Fifth Avenue.  The police again came, and medical examiner officials took photographs of the body, which was wearing only pants and shoes and had probably been in the lake’s seven-foot-deep water two weeks at the most.  An ID was recovered, identifying him as Anthony McAfee, a homeless man.  This on the heels of the first recovered body was highly unusual, and for the park’s joggers and tourists, unsettling, but again there was no sign of trauma on the body, except an eye nibbled by turtles or other wildlife.

         One month later, at about 8 a.m. on Sunday, June 11, a passerby spotted someone floating in the Conservatory Pond near Fifth Avenue and East 74^th Street and jumped in to effect a rescue, only to find that he was rescuing a corpse.  The would-be rescuer then phoned 911, but by the time the police and fire department arrived, the fully clothed body had been fished out of the water and was lying on the ground.  It was a male African American who appeared to be in his 20s or 30s.  Once again, an unusual and unsettling incident in the most tranquil of settings, a pond where children float radio-controlled model boats, or climb over a nearby statue of Alice and various creatures from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  

         Finally – if one dare say “finally” – the body of a woman was discovered around 6:30 a.m. on Thursday, July 13, lying face down on a rock near the East Drive and East 62^ndStreet.  Fully clothed and apparently in her late 20s or early 30s, she too showed no signs of violence, but a pill bottle was lying next to the body.  At last report she, like two of the others, remained unidentified.

         Four deaths in Central Park in a two-month period, three of them in water – unprecedented.  Or is it?  An article by Lauren Evans in the Village Voice of July 7, 2017, lists deaths in the park since 1884, when the body of a man was discovered in the Reservoir.  In 1889 a suicide was reported there of a fashionably dressed young man in patent leather dancing shoes who removed his topcoat and derby, climbed over the Reservoir railing, and walked into the waters to his death.  The reason?  Lack of funds. 

         The Evans article also recorded numerous other suicides in the Reservoir, usually motivated by failure in business or love, though in one case by failure as a writer, and in another, because of schizophrenia.  Reservoir deaths declined noticeably after a ten-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire was installed around its rim in 1926, but even after that, suicide was still an option for those able to scale the barrier.  And there were always alternatives: the Conservatory Pond already mentioned, and the Harlem Meer in the northeast corner of the park.  If people want to die by water in the park, they will always find a way.  Meanwhile joggers and dog-walkers and birdwatchers and picnickers continue to flock to its grassy fields and woods, and people rent boats to go boating on the Lake, unmindful of the deaths that have occurred in its tranquil expanses. 

Source note:  This post was initially inspired by an article by Benjamin Mueller and Emily Palmer, "2 Bodies Found This Week in Central Park Waters," in the New York Times of May 11, 2017, supplemented thereafter by other newspaper articles, including the one by Lauren Evans in the Village Voice of July 7, 2017, cited above.

©  2021  Clifford Browder