Category Archives: Personal Experience

Give Me A Goy Or Get Me A Gun

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(An Early Bird dinner in Florida)

It started when Barry, the 60-year old waiter, screeched to a stop at our table. “Your table is number twenty-nine, remember that. I stink at this job, so when I screw up you can just shout ‘table 29.’”  His Groucho was so good I wanted to jump up and stick out my knee to shake his hand.  Turns out he was funny—and, unfortunately, honest.

Things moved along, the occasional call across the room for “butter, not margarine” and “Can we get our coffee now?”  No problem, Groucho did his best.  But my Jewish self-loathing, usually reserved for the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, began to rear its head as the table next to us filled up with a nine person circus.

The women.  Ahh, the women.  Blonde hair, black hair, another, the hue of Rita Hayworth in Gilda—at least that reddish hue you’d imagine it would be if the movie were in color. If I had a dime for every nip and a dollar for every tuck, I’d buy the world a Coke.  We’re talking 80 plus without a single wrinkle or wattle.  Blonde hair, black hair, silver hair.  You gotta hope they shaved their legs.

And the men.  I couldn’t quite count the dentures and none popped out—at least that I could see from my seat.

“The game last night, my god, what a way to lose,” said the man, who became The Maven. (He who knows it all).

“I watched it but don’t remember the end,” said the guy who turned out to be The Forgetter.

“How can you not remember the end?  It was the best part.  Everything happened.  Did you fall asleep?  Mother, do you know what you want to eat?”

“What?  I can’t hear you!” Blonde Mama yelled from the other end of the table.

“Are you wearing your hearing aid?”

“What are you saying?” she shouted.

“He’s asking if you know what you want to eat,” Silver Hair explained, talking into her ear.  “Why aren’t you wearing your hearing aid?  You spent a fortune for it.”

“They make my ears look too big for my head. And I don’t know why he keeps asking the same damn thing.  I always get the veal.”

Which veal?” Silver Hair tries to shorten the inevitable process with a preempt.

“The Italian one. I just don’t know what’s the matter with that kid.  He must have a gene missing!”

The Blonde Mama had a problem hearing, but when the waiter finally came, her memory was razor sharp.  She ordered with machine gun precision: matzo ball soup, salad, blue cheese dressing, veal (Parmesan, it turned out), ziti on a side plate, vegetables, iced tea with two lemons, “make sure it’s two lemons.”  I idly wondered if she was going to take one of the slices home.  When she asked for a Styrofoam cup and top in advance for half her matzo ball, I was sure of it.

Meanwhile the table had moved on to politics.

“Obama, what’s to know?”

“Plenty, just listen to Colbert,” The Maven was saying to anyone who might be listening (loud enough that “anyone” could include the entire restaurant). “I’m telling you, he’s a genius!  Him and that other guy.  Pure genius!”

“Comedians can’t be geniuses,” the Forgetter responds, “anyway, both of them are slanted. And they don’t admit it.”

The Forgetter, who had forgotten that the waiter had taken all the orders added, “The waiter won’t know what veal dish you want.”

“Ahh, another country heard from,” said his wife.  “He just took all the orders,” shaking her head.

I’d fallen into one of the Seinfeld Florida episodes.  I also realized that Jerry might be a comic genius too, but in those cases, he just sat down with a pen and paper taking notes at the early bird.  It wasn’t parody or satire.  Just what it was.

At this point Groucho brought our $9.99s.  I thought about doing the hora around their table with a pork chop in each hand, shouting that I’d spent 12 years in a yeshiva.  Restrained by Sue, I quietly dug into my chops and continued to listen.

Their main courses began to arrive.  Act Three.

Barry began selectively scattering little side bowls of broccoli around the table.

“Where’s mine?” asked Blonde Mama.

“You ordered the vegetables,” said her neighbor.

“Broccoli is a vegetable,” Blondie replied and grabbed the dish.

“You got to take this plate back,” The Maven said angrily to the waiter.  “I must have said ‘well done’ four times and look at this!  Everything is bright red!”

The waiter, looking suicidal, to his credit, calmly picks up the dish and apologizes.  “I’ll take it to the kitchen,” he says, barely getting the words out in a strangled tone.

That Blonde Mama heard.  “Just eat what’s in front of you!” she bellowed to The Maven.

“Okay, okay,” The Maven replies. “Just give me the plate. It’s fine!”  And grabbed it from the waiter who looked like he wanted to jump through the window.

At this point I needed a Gentile. I needed someone who will think an underdone steak is a penance to bear.  Or, when he realized he had ordered mixed vegetables instead of broccoli, he’d eat that succotash in silence or just quietly leave it there until it was cleared away.

I really, really needed a Gentile.  Even one just to look at.  Hell I’da admired his plaid pants and golf club.  I needed a goy or I needed a gun.

Sue saw the look on my face. “Just be patient.  There’s vodka in the freezer at your dad’s.”

Silence descended at the group’s table as everyone decided to eat.  Didn’t last too long. Someone said, “They give you your money’s worth here, anyway.”  Which began an argument about where you could eat the most for the least until their food was gone.

“Gone” really isn’t the correct word.  Half gone, quarter gone might be closer to the truth.  But the eating had stopped with an air of satisfaction surrounding the table.

Barry came back.  He knew the drill.  “How many boxes?”

“Seven big ones,” The Maven demanded, still angry about his red meat.

I remembered a friend telling me about the ultra fancy Jewish country club a few towns over.  Although the place was filled with Caddies, Mercedes, Lexis’s, and Jags, no one was allowed to bring pocketbooks or bags into the restaurant for the fancy buffet.

Not so in the Grand.  Hell, they supplied the carry-out tools.

Again the table lapsed into silence as people shoveled their food into the Styrofoam until Blonde Mama forked the unfinished matzo ball, shook it into the cup, then tilted her bowl to make sure every drop of cold liquid made it into there too.  Practice makes perfect.  Somehow I believed she could have done it in her sleep.

And then they were gone.

My nerve endings still firing, we called for our boxes, filled them up, paid the check, got in the car and headed home.  No goys, no guns, but we made it back alive.

Judging A Book By Its Cover

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 On 08/22/2011, I wrote a post titled “PHOTO SHOT” where I described the process of shooting the cover for STILL AMONG THE LIVING (which will hopefully be available for downloading sometime toward the end of this month).  What I didn’t write about was the process of choosing among a number of different possible covers and how the choice was made to go with the one I did.

The artist, Michael Paul Smith, (see “LINKS”) was kind enough to give me permission to post those that we didn’t use along with the one we did. So I thought it might be fun to let people see the ones we decided not to use and why those decisions weres made. The first two we, (Sue, Michael, and me), were easily able to lay aside.

Although we rejected both of these, one thing I really liked was the angle of the picture primarily because it showed Mark Harris’s book THE SOUTHPAW. On the other hand there was general agreement that in these versions the colors didn’t “pop,” my name and “A Matt Jacob Novel” were too washed out.  And no one really liked the lettering.

 

 

 

 

The next two engendered more debate:

This one’s lettering took too much of the picture of the table, plus the lettering itself didn’t cut it for any of us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I really liked the lettering on the second of these two—given my deco predilections but Sue and Michael felt the picture wasn’t what they were looking for since there was too much of the table itself showing, especially the brown pattern, which took the focus off the other elements of the picture and again, my name and “A Matt Jacob Novel” were too washed out—though I argued if we lettered them white on this one, I’d be good with it.  Sue and Michael countered that once we cropped the picture the proportions of the whole cover would change.

Alas, these were also put aside though they left the one I liked in its own lonely pile.

Here were two were serious contenders.  No hour and out with these. In fact, both of them made it to the final pick. The fonts worked, the lines on the bottom this one worked, though again we were going to have to pop my name and “A Matt Jacob Novel,” something that Michael indicated would be no problem.

 

 

 

 

 

I, however, had an issue with this one. The left side shading on the picture seemed cool, and I liked the two-tone idea much more than the lines on the cover directly above. Yet I felt the left side shading seemed too washed out. By this time, however, I was feeling uncomfortable about sending Michael back to the boards.  He assured me that he was enjoying the project and would certainly be willing to give it another go.

 

 

 

Which he did and created the cover we all agreed upon:

Although THE SOUTHPAW doesn’t really show, everything else about this cover was appealing.  And so, when the book does go online, this is what you’ll be seeing.

Given that this entire process is pretty damn subjective, I’d be interested to know what choices any of you might have made.

 

 

Acid In The Water Supply

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I’m not talking battery acid, toxins, or grapefruit juice.  I’m talking psychedelics here.  And I’ve long believed that every now and then, it’s been slipped into D.C.’s water supply.

The notion first hit while I watched the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination hearings.  Wasn’t surprised he was ultimately nominated (despite my respect and belief in Anita Hill), but when senator after senator took to network television to use their senatorial, stentorian tones to speechify about “pubic hairs on coke cans” and Long Dong Silver over and over again there was simply no rational explanation why they would do that to themselves.  Even Democrats–especially in prime time.  Blew my mind.  The only thing I never understood was why there’s no Best of the Hearings video.  It would sell more than all the Spring Break movies combined.

There was only one explanation; acid in the water supply.

It happened again when the House of Representatives decided to hold impeachment hearings against Bill Clinton.  I’ve never been a real fan of Big Bill, but watching Congress go through months focused on blowjobs, dicks that lean to the left and despoiled dresses while ignoring issues that actually had something to do with governing, locked and loaded my belief that D.C. had a monopoly on LSD.

Well, I was wrong.  Some subversive brought the acid to Florida.

On October 8, 2011, The Boston Globe reported that a Florida legislator, Representative Ritch Workman, has introduced a bill to repeal a ban on “Dwarf-tossing.”

For those unfamiliar with the term or game, it apparently consists of dressing Little People into light weight protective gear so men in bars can take turns seeing who can throw them the farthest.  Although Representative Workman (who has the right name) won’t call his legislation a “jobs bill,” he does make the point that lifting the ban may put a few people to work.  According to the Globe, although Workman agrees that the practice is “offensive” and “stupid,” he thinks the ban keeps willing projectiles from gainful employment.  “If this is a job they want and people would pay to see it or participate in it, why in the world would we prohibit it?”

Now before my Ron and Rand Paul friends jump to Workman’s defense, let me explain why this is an acid-in-the-water-supply proposal.  I mean, The Right likes to talk about slippery slopes with regard to gun laws, let’s look at the grade of slope here.

Why not “whack a head?”  Folks of any height can wear a protective helmet and be gainfully employed, popping up from one side of the bar while those on the other side try to beam them with hammers.

Why not “water sports?”  I guarantee there’s a larger audience for that than Dwarf-tossing.  I mean if two consenting adults want to tinkle on each other in a public setting for pay, why deny them the right to earn a living?

Why not “bestiality?”  It’s certainly not unheard of in the U.S., so why shouldn’t someone get paid if there are people who want to watch?  Not exactly a “jobs bill,” but it could put a few good men and women to work.  Actually none of these proposals, including Dwarf-tossing are gender specific.

Worse, from where I sit, damn near every Republican has been sipping the acid.  Isn’t the issue to find jobs for Little People and “the little people” of our country rather than giving more money to the rich who already have jobs or don’t need them?  Then they call those folks, “job creators,” rather than “lay-offers,” which they’ve actually been doing to protect their own wealth and profits.

But hey, I’ve used acid and I understand how easy it is to come up with great ideas while you’re tripping.  Hell, a group of us once spent an entire evening trying to enlist Hubert Humphrey’s wife to talk him into moving in with us for a month so he could better understand what young people were thinking.

Problem here, these aren’t young people tripping.  These are people in power, who create laws, regulate industries, eviscerate environmental laws, and generally make it more, not less, difficult for people to get by.  And damn near impossible for poor people to have anything but a shadow life.

So I say to those reps in Florida who will eventually vote on Dwarf-tossing–STOP DRINKING THE FUCKING WATER!

I understand that Amerika has a fascination for circuses, but let’s try to keep the freak shows under the Big Top.

This land is your land and this land is my land, sure, but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway. Bob Dylan

Not About Baseball

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In 1968, Robert Coover wrote a novel called The Universal Baseball Association about a character named Henry Waugh, who created his own board game with imaginary teams and seasons that ran in concert with the real deal.  Although the book was published long before sabermetrics, Henry brought a statistical analysis to his game that mirrored real professional baseball.

Year after year he played throughout the regular season, his dice-rolling stats generally falling within his, and baseball’s, norm.  Then, one season the entire system began to crumple, dice roll by dice roll.  Henry couldn’t understand the statistical insanity that was occurring and the rest of his life fell apart in his desperate attempt to “get it.”  Something he was never able to do and for which he paid a dear price.

Well, I’m happy to report that despite Boston’s horrific Wednesday night collapse and Tampa Bay’s incredible extra inning victory, my life isn’t headed toward Henry Waugh’s mental dumpster.

I’ve been a baseball fan for as long as I can remember.  Sitting on a stool at my grandfather’s (then father’s) tavern, waiting for the arguments about which game to show on novelty of all novelties—the bar’s television.  I was a Dodgers’ fan, but when they and the Giants deserted New York for sunnier pastures, I became my Aunt Jeanette’s (who bartended at the tavern) Yankee disciple.  She took the time to introduce me to the game’s subtleties and the different nuances of each Yankee player.  She also had the uncanny ability to foresee when a Yankee batter was “due.”  “He’s due,” she’d announce to customers and the bets would begin to fly.  She won a hell of a lot more of them than she lost.

Jeanette was so entranced with the Yankees, I never had the guts to tell her about my infidelities.  At night, under the covers, I’d huddle up to my transistor radio to listen to the San Francisco Giants games—or, at least, New York-based Les Keiter’s version of it.  Using a ticker tape, a recording of crowd noise, two sticks, and his fluid patter, he made you think you were listening to the real thing rather than his reenactment.

But then baseball at the bar and under the covers came to an abrupt end.  It slid to the back burner as I attended yeshivas where emotional survival became my game, and University of Wisconsin, where we ran the bases of politics and protests.

I quit school, joined Volunteers in Service To America (VISTA) and was assigned to Chicago where the two team city reignited my love for the game.  Although I lived and worked on the North Side, I became a White Sox fan since they had one of my favorite players, Richie Allen.  And, like other two team cities, you either rooted for one or the other.  In Chicago, to this day, The White Sox were and are “the other.”  Despite their historically low status on the rungs of winning, the Cubs are, and always have been, Chicago’s “darlings.”

Now I’ve lived in Boston for close to forty years.  Which means I’ve lived for close to forty more years.  I now have more room in my psyche—I can do “and,” not just “either/or.”  My heart belongs to Sue and I still have affection for past loves.  And my heart belongs to the Red Sox with affection left over for the teams I rooted for in past.  Maybe that’s maturity, or maybe it’s because I just love the damn game.

Hell, sometimes I think it has mystical powers. Sue, her brother Jeff, sister-in-law Donna, and I took shifts caring for Sue’s dying mother, Tsiv, who lived outside of Detroit and was hospicing at home.  Sue and I were there together during the 2006 World Series and danced around Tsiv’s bed, singing, “Go Tigers, go Tigers.”  As sick and weak as she was, Tsiv invariably waved her arms and sang along with gusto.  Gusto which ‘til my dying day I will always believe added to her life and was fueled by baseball.

It’s the game that holds me captive.  I enjoy rooting of course, but it’s baseball itself I find beautiful and fulfilling.  The grass, (even the new turf), the grace of a second baseman leaping, twisting, and throwing the ball to first for a double play, the subtle but real strategies, the individual competitions within the larger struggle, the timelessness both in the game’s history and within any specific contest.  The late George Carlin has a bit where he compares and contrasts football and baseball’s vocabulary and the degree to which the words reflect each game’s values.  I’m not willing to say that any game is a metaphor for life or reflects our cultural ideals, but even cynical me would like to think that the game played between the white lines and within the diamond reflects the best of the American us.  The individuality, the collectivity, the energy, and perhaps most importantly, the hope.

Even this last Bad Day In Mudville when three minutes after the Red Sox blew their lead and Tampa Bay (a team I viscerally dislike) overcame a seven-run deficit to win the last spot in the playoffs, there was a rightness, a justice to it. My team had spent the month sliding down a cliff, Tampa Bay spent that same month climbing a mountain.

Sure I was disappointed.  But my cousin and I, who had been texting throughout night closed shop by writing almost simultaneously, “baseball is sure one amazing game.”

Ex-Commissioner and sadly departed “Bart” Giamatti On Baseball: “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.”

Memory Flashes Of A Goodbye

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(Although the Hinterland trial is finished and I’m back home, I’ve been asked by our lead attorneys to not write publicly about what occurred.  If anyone has questions about what took place, please send them to me at zacharykleinonline@gmail.com.  I will make a good faith effort to answer every one of them as openly as possible.

As I mentioned in my post of 9/4/11, (LABOR DAY IN THE HINTERLAND–09/04/2011), my work with the law has pretty much ended with this last trial.  As I begin to move on though, thoughts about the early years working with Ron dance through my mind.

My very first case, for example, where an elderly widow sued a uranium enrichment plant for withholding medical information about her husband who died from liver cancer caused by the particularly toxic chemical the plant used on a regular basis.

I’ll never forget the widow on the stand, telling about how she and her husband learned the news of his impending death. Weeks earlier the plant offhandedly suggested he check in with his regular doctor (even though the plant’s hospital and doctors had been his regular doctors throughout the 40 years he’d worked there).  He went to a local doctor that he knew, who sent him to another town to see a liver specialist.  The couple decided to celebrate their wedding anniversary dinner by having dinner in the liver specialist’s town so they could pick up the results.

The widow drove home alone that night.  The moment the specialist saw them, he immediately admitted her husband into the hospital.  They never had that year’s anniversary dinner and damn few others.

When she finished testifying there was complete silence; the depth of emotion echoed silently in the courtroom.  The judge adjourned the case for the day.  My heart was heavy as we walked to our car and then I overhead a defense lawyer burst out laughing about her testimony.  Luckily Ron noticed, grabbed me from behind, and pulled me away.  Though I know it made sense given the trial, I’m sorry I didn’t have the chance to slam his fat, laughing face.  Well, we lost that case but rather than face a long, drawn out appeal, the defense offered her an extremely generous settlement.  I still have a thank you letter from that widow pinned to my office wall.

Then there was our campaign get the D.C. Metro to pay for houses and apartments they damaged while building three underground subway stations in a poor, Black neighborhood the city wanted to gentrify.  A lot of footwork tracking down people who lived in the community.  Trudging through a drug house to check on individual apartments that might have been damaged.  Then, after going door-to-door sitting on their stoop while they were getting high trying to elicit names and addresses.  Pretty damn crazy.  But we were able to negotiate fixes for all those we did find, and forced the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority to create a pool of money for those we didn’t.  The aftermath has been the continuing friendships we’ve maintained with many of the people we met on that mission.

Early on in my connection to the firm, an F.B.I. agent hired us to pursue a wrongful death lawsuit against DC’s government.  His wife, also an F.B.I. agent, was assigned to work with the D.C. Cold Case Squad.  Just like the TV show, this unit tries to solve old murders the police are no longer investigating.  Their headquarters were situated in a multi-purpose government building that also housed, for example, their Department of Motor Vehicles, so the building had people traipsing in and out all day long.  One day a man (wanted for murder) strolled into the building with a rifle, took the elevator up to the seventh floor and walked down the hall looking for the Homicide offices.  He mistakenly ended up in Cold Case, where he proceeded to shoot everyone in sight.  Our client’s wife was able to wound the assailant, but died in the conflict.

Now there’s this thing in the law called Sovereign Immunity, which basically means you can’t sue the government because of governmental policies.  So, for example, if you’re mugged on the street corner, you can’t sue the city for not having a cop on that corner.  Their response would simply be: our policies don’t include having police in that particular location.  However, you can overcome Sovereign Immunity if you can prove the city violated its own policies.  So, in the example above, if it had been the city’s policy to have a policeman on that particular corner at that particular time and the policeman somehow failed to do his duty, i.e. protect you from the mugging, or simply wasn’t there, then a lawsuit against the city is permissible.  (Lawyers out there, feel free to correct me if my explanation is either inadequate or inaccurate.)

The judge refused to hear the case claiming the city was protected by Sovereign Immunity.  After a long arduous appeals process, we finally got the green light.  Turns out that the City had a written policy in place that everyone walking in and out of that building was to be machine-screened or hand-wanded.  A policy that had long been neglected (this was pre-9/1/1) and the day our client’s wife was killed was no different.

And so the trial ensued.  I spent time developing juror profiles—a composite of the type person we most wanted on the jury and also of those who we didn’t want.  I wrote a series of questions (voir dire) designed to elicit information to identify people we were interested in and prepped the plaintiff and other witnesses for their testimony about that day in the Squad.  The trial began and then, from my spectator seat, I noticed a bulge in our client’s suitcoat.  During the next break I asked him about it and was shown the gun that the F.B.I. issues to all their agents.  The last thing in the world I wanted this jury to see was our client was packing—legal or not.  We had an intense argument in the bathroom about his carrying it from the next day on.  He accused me of being an anti-gun phobic, but then finally conceded that the jury probably wouldn’t like it either.  He stopped wearing it to court.

We won the case going away; and although money is never, ever a real compensation for a beloved wife, our client was awarded a substantial amount.  That night in the hotel “war room,” I finally put on my earrings that I’d taken off for the trial.  Our client came over and said, “Never in a million years could I have imagined liking, even being a friend with someone like you.”  My response was just as direct: “Never in a million years could I have imagined liking, even being a friend with someone likeyou.”  And we both broke out laughing.

Years later he sent Sue and me airplane tickets to Chicago, so we could attend his remarriage.  It was a lovely affair attended by lots of men with bulges in their suitcoats.

These have been just a few of the early memories that I have about my time working with Ron.  I have no doubt there will be more posts to come with other memories about different times and cases.  Feeling like you’ve done some good in the world stays with you.  Sixteen years is a long time and saying goodbye is difficult.

The doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live. ~Flora Whittemore