Famous for Thirty Seconds

Did you ever play that "Kevin Bacon" game, where players try to trace a connection between anyone they can think of...and Kevin Bacon?

I could play that game. Kevin Bacon walked right past my taxicab one afternoon. I was parked at a taxi stand in front of the Hotel Monaco in Alexandria, Virginia. Bacon came out of the hotel, walked right past my nose and went into a boutique on the other side of King Street. For the record, he looked awful. Dirty, greasy clothes, greasy hair, sunglasses. No doubt he was hoping not to be recognized. If that was the intent, it almost worked. I looked at him as he went by and thought, "Hey, that guy looks like Kevin Bacon." Later that night I learned that he and his brothers, who had a pop music combo, were performing at the hotel.

But it's not Kevin Bacon I'm thinking about right this moment. A lot of us can trace a six-degrees-of-separation line between ourselves and some famous person, or persons. Not long ago I played the name-dropping game on the way to dinner with my childhood pal Jim Provenza, who was in town on business.

I told him that not once, but twice, I'd had Senator John Warner of Virginia as a passenger in my cab. On one of those two occasions I actually picked him up at his house in Alexandria and drove him up to Capitol Hill.

Jim, an attorney who works in Sacramento, told me that he knows Leon Panetta, currently the director of the CIA.

I countered that play with an admittedly-less impressive connection: Thomas A. Shannon, as of this writing U.S. ambassador to Brazil, is an old crony of mine from my own days with the State Department. Tom and I served in Brazil together way back when he was just a junior officer. Since then he has risen as high as Assistant Secretary of State. More than once, just to keep him humble (not necessary, by the way: Tom is the soul of easygoing, self-effacing irony) I would sometimes remind him of his relatively-humble origins. Tom does not fit the stereotype of the career diplomat as a spoiled, prep-school scion of northeastern Old Money. Like me, Tom is a San Diego County boy (albeit one who holds a PhD from Oxford.)

 "Don't get the big head, Mr. Chief-of-Mission material," I'd say to him. "You're just a surfer from Clairemont Mesa."

He'd laugh. Tom can't bullshit me; I'm from Chula Vista, just a few miles south of him.

But I had to admit that Jim won that particular hand: countering a CIA chief with an ambassador is like holding a pair of jacks against three of a kind.

I took the next pot, though. Once, standing at the second-floor bar of the famous off-Broadway restaurant Sardi's in New York, my friend Charlie Berigan and I got to meet James Coburn, who sidled up to the bar with his wife Pat for a drink and, there being no other spots available, stood right next to me.

Senators, spookmasters, ambassadors, movie actors. All good plays. But how many can claim a six-degrees-of-separation line connecting them not with one, but two convicted killers? And one of them definitely on the "A" list, a household name in the world of crime.

I can. And it was from this experience that I can lay claim to my share of Andy Warhol's famous dictum about how in the future everybody's going to be famous for fifteen minutes.

I once got to be famous for longer than fifteen minutes. Try a whole weekend.

By now I'm sure you're all a-dither, wondering who my two killers were. I'll get the more famous name out of the way first. Chuck Manson, who would probably have a fit if anyone called him Chuck. But he's 76 and in prison; I'm not afraid. Chuck, Chuck, Chuck. Nyeh. But that's right. I am speaking of Charlie "Charles" Manson, head of the Manson "family" and power behind the infamous Tate-LoBianco murders of 1969.

My late father, by the way, (since we're playing this game) was a personal acquaintance of Vincent Bugliosi, the district attorney who prosecuted Manson.

But no, I have never actually met Charles Manson. He was almost a neighbor for a while. But that's only because I lived and worked in Vacaville, California in the early-to-mid 1980s, and Manson was an inmate at California Medical Facility Vacaville for some years.

Don't let the name of the place fool you; CMF Vacaville is not a hospital. It is a prison. It got the name "Medical Facility" back in the days when psychopathic killers could still be called "criminally insane." I don't know what they call such people now, probably something like "upbringing-challenged," since sociopaths usually turn out to have had bad childhoods, and in our current culture somebody else, usually your parents, is always responsible for whatever stupid or evil thing you might do.  CMF Vacaville was a prison specifically for the "upbringing-challenged" crowd. I've been inside it, but only as part of a media tour of its remodeled facilities in 1984. Among my fellow tourists that day was then-California Governor George Deukmejian. Deukmejian made a speech. I just looked around and thought about the dreadful claustrophobia I would get in one of those eight-by-four cells.

As a writer for the Vacaville Reporter newspaper in 1981, I got to listen to a tape of one of Manson's parole hearings at CMF. Manson, as I remember, was channeling Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny, playing with a couple of rubber balls during the hearing and asking pertinent questions like "Why are we here? What's all this about?" He was trying to freak everybody out by acting crazier than usual.

The "other" killer in this tale is much lesser-known than Manson, but every bit as vicious. I mean, this guy tried to kill Manson. He must be bad.

His name was Jan Holmstrom. Not as famous as Manson, no, but a pretty bad dude. In 1974, in Pasadena, Holmstrom killed his father with four blasts from a shotgun, then handed the gun to a Cub Scout who was standing nearby, and walked away.

Believe it or not, Holmstrom was a Hare Krishna. That's right, one of those people you see prancing around at airports, barefoot and baldheaded, shaking jingle bells and passing out religious literature.

I don't think the Hare Krishnas would want to make Jan Holmstrom their poster boy.

On the morning of September 25, 1984, inside the grounds of CMF Vacaville, Manson and Holmstrom got into a "religious argument." Holmstrom complained, specifically, that Manson had objected to his Hare Krishna chanting, and threatened him. Not to be outdone, Jan poured some paint thinner on Chuck and set him on fire.

That's where I come into the picture. You see, at the moment that all of this was happening, I was doing my laundry.

Well, yeah, I was. Doing my laundry. I was a radio news broadcaster at KUIC, 95.3 FM, upper Solano County's only FM radio station in those days. Yes, you can stream my alma mater on the Internet now, if you care to: http://www.kuic.com/. The last time I checked, one of the deejays who worked there way back when I did, Rick Batiste, was still on the air at "Quick-95." Not much ambition, I guess.

As I remember, I was temporarily without a car. My 1975 Ford Maverick had been totaled in an accident on the Oakland Bay Bridge not too long before, when my roommate, Doug Parker, on his way to pick up two friends of ours at San Francisco International Airport who were flying in from Philadelphia, got rear-ended pretty badly in heavy traffic. The maypole-dance with the insurance companies was still in progress, and for the moment I had no car. I was going to and from the studio on a bicycle.

As I was sorting my socks and underwear, I got a phone call from my boss at the station, news director Paul Hosley. Something had happened at CMF, but he was in the middle of his morning news block and didn't have time to look into it himself. He asked me to call the prison and talk to the public affairs officer.

I don't remember the guy's name. But I got him on the phone. "I hear you have a news item for us," I said.

"Yeah, and you're going to want to run tape," he said.

"Well, I'm not at the studio, I'm at home. I can't run tape from here. Whaddaya got?"

"I'm telling you, Kelley, you're gonna want to run tape," he insisted.

"Why don't you tell me what it is first? I don't have a car, and I'd have to ride my bike down to the studio to run tape."

"Okay," he said. Then he started reading the release. "At eight-eighteen this morning, inmate Charles Manson was attacked and set on fire by inmate Jan Holmstrom..."

"Hold it," I said. "I want to run tape."

"I knew you would."

"Let me call you back in fifteen minutes." Socks and underwear forgotten, I jumped on the old Huffy and got myself down to the studio as fast as I could pedal.

As subscribers to the Associated Press, we at KUIC radio could also be contributors. Once in a great while the AP might be interested in something we had to offer them, usually something involving a death. We'd get a credit line, and five bucks, for a wire story. For example when our good friend Toby Johnson, one of our disc jockeys who had been fired months earlier, got killed in a head-on collision between his car and an RV early one morning on Highway 29 over near St. Helena in the Napa Valley, AP picked that up from us. I phoned it to them, and a few minutes later, here it came over the wire, slugged "FROM KELLEY DUPUIS, K-U-I-C VACAVILLE." We were all in shock over Toby's death, but traffic fatalities were traffic fatalities, and the AP liked them.

A story on the wire would get you five bucks. But a voicer, that is to say, a 30-second audiotape segment, would get you $25 if the AP wanted it.

Needless to say, they wanted the Charlie-and-Jan barbeque story from CMF. And they wanted a voicer.

I'd taken the call, cut the tape and written the copy, so if anyone was going to do a voicer, it was going to be me. The guy from AP in Sacramento was explicit, though: 30 seconds. No more.

He and I must have spent half an hour on this. My voicer kept coming in at 36 seconds, or 34. It took several tries to get it whittled down to an exact 30.

I was allowed no "intro." Local stations, if they used the item, would provide that themselves. The voicer was just me, reeling off the facts of the incident in 30 seconds. My "outro" as we called the tag line at the end, was simply, "Kelley Dupuis, Vacaville." AP was one big family. One big cheap family. Local stations that might use the clip would do their own intro, something along the lines of , " Convicted killer Charles Manson, serving a life sentence at Vacaville state prison, was attacked and set on fire this morning in what was apparently a religious disagreement. Kelley Dupuis of KUIC Vacaville has details." Then they'd roll the tape of me.

Given the fact that we were all living on starvation wages in those days, I smacked my lips over the 25 bucks I was going to get for this. Other than that, I didn't give it much more of another thought. Who, outside of our area, was going to be interested in such a thing?

Silly question. Lurid sells. Radio stations all over California picked this item up. In fact, as far as I know, AP stations in other states may have run it as well. After all, this was Charles Manson we were talking about, the Mariah Carey of killers.

I got a surprise the following Sunday. Okay, it was a pleasant surprise, although I can see where a lot of folks would hesitate to use the term "pleasant surprise" in connection with a story like that. What can I tell you? Reporters have big egos. Why else would we be willing to work like galley slaves for the kind of pay that forced most of us to share quarters with other reporters?

The surprise came during a telephone conversation the following Sunday with my mom. Mom had a monthly appointment to have her hair done, always on Saturday. Since it was a regular appointment, she usually saw at least one person at the hairdressers' whom she knew. Now I was living in Vacaville, which is about 35 miles west of the state capital, Sacramento. My folks lived way down in Chula Vista, where I grew up, about 600-some miles to the south. Mom was not, by any stretch of the imagination, in our broadcast area.

She said, "I saw Mrs. So-and-So at the hairdressers' yesterday. She asked me, 'What's the name of that boy of yours again, the one who's a journalist?'"

"Oh," my mom replied, "You mean Kelley."

"Yeah, Kelley!" her friend replied. "I heard him on KSDO this morning, talking about Charles Manson."

KSDO, one of the oldest AM radio stations in San Diego. They'd picked up my voicer!

Damn, I'd hit the big time! San Diego!

It was the only time I ever did. My voice never got anywhere near a big radio market again, that I know of. I had to take my 25 bucks, plus the knowledge that my own voice had been broadcast over Greater San Diego for 30 whole seconds, giving everybody the hottest news item of the week. (Get it? The hottest news item? Rim shot.)

The following year I gave up radio and joined the State Department, giving up humiliating pay in exchange for a humiliating job. But I did get a dozen or so years of world travel out of that deal.

Manson, as far as I know, has traveled no further than the trip from Vacaville to his new home in San Quentin, to which he was later transferred, in all the years since he and I made a showbiz team together.

And he's been famous for most of his life.

Some People Have All The Luck

I just finished reading, back-to-back, two books by David Sedaris.

I've already decided that I don't like him especially.

I had a similar experience years ago with Anais Nin. But I had to read three volumes of her diaries before I got sick of her. The honeymoon ended quickly, but it did last three volumes.

I went through all the usual stages of an affair with La Nin by reading her diaries, which I only learned later had been heavily-edited, hence some of the mendacity and what used to be called "glaring omissions" of which I ultimately suspected her. It was this mendacity of hers which ended our romantic relationship. That, and how wildly self-absorbed she was. How, I wondered, could a married woman write page after page in her diaries, describing pregnancy and childbirth, without once mentioning her husband? (Subsequent reading revealed the dark reason: Anais aborted that baby, whose real father was Henry Miller, author of Tropic of Cancer.)

But poor old Hugh Guiler, Anais' long-suffering banker husband, probably wouldn't have gotten a mention even if the baby had been his. He was "edited out" of Anais' diaries generally, in much the same way Stalin had photographs in Soviet history books edited to erase the people he'd killed.

But I went through all the stages with Anais: awareness, infatuation, fantasies (she was, after all, dead by the time I read her diaries) and then finally disillusionment and the desire for a breakup, in this case the return of her books to the public library. But the relationship ran an ordinary and not-entirely unexpected course. I understood, after sending her back to the shelves, both how Henry Miller could have become so infatuated with her himself, and also why Gore Vidal, who had a much more jaundiced eye than Miller, dissed her so thoroughly in his own memoirs. Vidal described himself and Nin as two "chicken hawks," and I don't think anyone could have said it better.

On the other hand, I didn't need three volumes, but only a couple of hundred pages to become acquainted with Sedaris and his jokes, especially the ones he keeps repeating, like "my childhood was awkward and unpleasant because I grew up gay." Yeah? Well, my childhood was awkward and unpleasant because I had a weird first name, and between the ages of 13 and 18, bad acne. I don't browbeat the world with it. In any case, by the end of the second book of his that I read, I was already sick of listening to him.

Still,  I can hear the screeching already. 

"You...you...you...HOMOPHOBE!!!"

Admit to not caring for any member of any federally-protected grievance group, for whatever reason, and you're going to be immediately labeled a "Fill-In-The-The-Blank-O-Phobe" by its PR wing. Meaning, of course, a "phobe" of whatever grievance group your victim belongs to. In this case, the grievance group just happens to be gays, and if there's any doubt in your mind, just read anything Sedaris has ever written. This guy has been dining out on "gay" for years. Someone should tell him that it really isn't avant-garde anymore to whine about how no one understood you when you were a child because you preferred baking banana-nut muffins to playing football. (Hey, as a teen I preferred muffin-baking, or for that matter almost any other activity, to football, and I'm straight. I just don't like football. Never did, particularly.)

Unfortunately for all of the "homophobe" screechers out there, Sedaris' sexual orientation has nothing to do with my dislike of him. It's his narcissism that rubs me the wrong way. That, and the fact that I find him as funny as hell maybe 15 percent of the time, but as funny as a root canal the other 85 percent. Especially when he's talking about dying animals and floating turds. Yuk-yuk-yuk.

By the way, is there a correlation between gayness and narcissism? Ask W.H. Auden. He was gay, and he thought there was. But don't ask me. Ask him. He's dead, but ask him anyway. (I tend to think Auden was a little too enamoured ((note spelling)) of Freud, but that was common among intellectuals of his generation.)

Sorry, friends of my ex-wife:* hurling the epithet "homophobe" at anyone who fails to approve of one of your group for any reason whatever sounds just a LITTLE bit too much to me like my late father's old, tried-and-true method of winning arguments. Any time someone began to get the best of him in an exchange of opinions, or merely to question the reasonableness of his latest ill-informed rant, (usually punctuated with an index finger stabbing into the air or into his interlocutor's chest) my dad would begin jumping up and down screaming "You hate me! You hate me! You've AWAYS hated me!"

I called this technique of my father's, and still call it this even though my father, like Auden, is dead, the "Beaver Cleaver Bluff." In one episode of Leave It To Beaver, Beaver ran from the room shouting "Everyone in this house is against me!" Boy, did that sound like my father! Anyone who dared to disagree with my father about anything was immediately branded his personal enemy. Oh, I tell you, it was great having a nine year-old for a father.

My father, by the way, was a homophobe, and such a screechy one himself that we often found ourselves repeating Hamlet's old saw about the lady who doth protest too much. He also hated Jews, blacks, women, the French, (clear self-loathing, that last; my father, who hated "the Frogs," actually spoke Canadian French very well) the pope, (ditto; he came from a Catholic family) men who wore their hair long, Mexicans, (although he spoke Spanish as well as he did French) Jane Fonda and cilantro. I think my father considered it an unconscionable outrage that anyone should feel sorry for anybody in the world except him.

But at least my father didn't write books. I'll give him credit for that. David Sedaris does, and I just finished reading two of them: Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim and Me Talk Pretty One Day. Read two of a guy's books, particularly if they're written in the first person and are basically all about him, and I think you can be excused for deciding you don't like him even if you've never actually met the guy face-to-face.

For, in these two books anyway, himself is just about all Sedaris writes about. Himself, his family and his boyfriends.

Okay, jealousy is in the mix. This guy gets buckets of money, literary awards and God-knows what all else for telling tawdry, insipid anecdotes about himself and his family. Hey, I've been doing that on my blog for years, and nobody has showered me with money, awards and appearances on National Public Radio. What's so special about David Sedaris? He's funny sometimes. So what? My younger sister was funny. She didn't get to be famous and lionized for it.

And another okay:  I hear Sedaris is also a playwright, and I admit that I have not seen any of his plays. Maybe he's another Noel Coward. I don't know. But these two books I read are basically blogs-between-covers, and I don't see why he should get showered with ticker-tape and fame for doing something thousands upon thousands of us have been doing since technology caught up with our rampant egos and allowed us a forum in which to pop off about ourselves and our own not so much differently than he does.

So how come he gets all the attention? Maybe he is funnier and cleverer than I am. Plenty of people are, but most of them haven't been richly rewarded for it. In fact most of the clever, funny people I know are as obscure and unknown as I am. This guy must have a good agent. I don't suppose he, she or it would be interested in talking to me.

But if they see this and surprise me, I'll let you know.

* My ex-wife Valerie, a Washington, D.C. real-estate hawker the last time I spoke with her, is the only Gay Rights advocate I have ever met who is, technically, not gay. Valerie generally prefers men, although she does tend to prefer them in a "Sugar Mama" sort of scenario (she being the sugar mama.) Like Lawrence Welk, whose genius it was to find a  previously-untapped "niche audience" among the Geritol crowd, Valerie has made the LGBT community her own niche market. And since the gay community is mostly where she makes her money, Valerie tends to sound off on gay rights like the aging Christopher Isherwood (although, generally speaking, more as a cheerleader, who knows on which side her pom-poms are glued, than as a player.)

Of Round Numbers, DNA and other Spooky Stuff

                        

Top left: my mother circa 1940, about age 19.

Lower photo: 1954. The baby on my mom's lap is my older sister Carla. I wouldn't come along until the following year. Carla was the apple of her mother's eye. I wasn't the apple of anyone's.



"There is nothing more sad or more glorious than generations changing hands." -- John Mellenkamp, from the liner notes to his album Scarecrow, 1985

I was out driving my cab tonight when the Mexican national anthem began to play on XLNC-1, the classical music radio station here in San Diego which serves San Diego and northern Baja California, announcing classical pieces in Spanish and then, when they're over, back-announcing them in English.

That's how I know it's midnight: XLNC-1 always plays the Mexican national anthem, Hymno Nacional Mexicano at midnight.

And these days (or I should say, nights) I am usually still driving around at midnight when the music plays, picking up and dropping off for Red Cab of San Diego.

My anecdotal life: the cherry on the sundae of my evening tonight was ferrying two drunks back to the La Quinta Inn after midnight. The police turned them over to me after a fracas outside the Star Gazer, a noisy bar on Broadway. A third member of their party, their buddy, had apparently been severely kicked, pounded and stomped in some difference of opinion which may have been racial (the Star-Gazer's regular Saturday-night clientele mixes drunken black guys with drunken white guys: you do the math) and was at UCSD Medical Center. No doubt they had been involved in the fracas as well. They were both as plowed as beanfields, and I handled them with extreme care. It was okay, though; when I dropped them at the La Quinta, they tipped me.

Anyway, when I heard Hymno Nacional Mexicano tonight, I knew not only that it was midnight, but also that it was now, officially, April 3rd.

April 3rd is the birthday of two members of my family. It's the anniversary of the birth of my mother, Sheila Marjorie Winrow Dupuis, born April 3rd, 1921. I say "anniversary of the birth" because my mother isn't with us anymore. She died on October 1, 2000 at age 79.

It is also the birthday of my cousin Melissa Gray Billon Thirloway, born April 3rd, 1951, who hasn't spoken to me in 30 years.

That is correct. My mother and my cousin Melissa were born 30 years apart, to the day. Of the implications of this, more in a moment, as Nabokov said in Transparent Things. (He, too, for reasons that will soon become obvious, fits into this little narrative.)

It is only Melissa's birthday, by the way, not (and I hope not until I'm "anniversaried" myself) an "anniversary." Melissa is still with us, and as far as I know, so are my other Billon cousins, her older sister Shari and her younger brother John. Melissa and I, while we do not share a birthday, do have that one thing in common: both of us were the middle child in a set of three.

I've always been partial to the Billons, but I'll get to that some other time. (I will, too. My uncle Pete Billon, Shari, John and Melissa's father, was a real character. I loved him, but he was a character. We had that in common, Uncle Pete and I. Two characters, we. We came to blows once, Uncle Pete and I. That happens when two "characters" split a bottle of Scotch. I don't care; I loved him anyway.)

Of his wife, Jessie Winrow Billon, I could, and hopefully will, say a great deal more some other time. I adored my Aunt Jessie.

It took some digging, but I found two older photos of my mother. My cousin Melissa appears to the right. She looks more like her father than she does like her mother. (And by the way, has more of her father's personality than her mother's. Believe me, I know. I knew both her and her father very well. She's the female version of him. No wonder I could never get along with her. )

I also decided to throw in a picture of a butterfly. Hey, it's my blog. I can stick butterflies on it anywhere I want.

My mother was quite beautiful. So were her younger sisters, my aunts Jessie and Bernice. Grandma Winrow had a framed photo on her piano of my Aunt Jessie and Uncle Pete, taken on their wedding day in 1944. It looked like a shot from some hokey home-front movie that Hollywood might have churned out during the war. My Uncle Pete, (whom I always thought looked a little like James Arness, TV's Marshal Dillon) was dapper in his flyer's uniform, and I swear my Aunt Jessie looked like June Allyson.

Atop the old upright were also a tinted photo of my mother, aged about 18, and a little, framed red-white-and-blue sampler that said "America, Love It or Leave It."

I'm not making any of this up.

The "baby" of the family, my Uncle Bert Winrow, (1927-2008) got the richest dollop of all this DNA. He was movie-star handsome, which you can see in a photo of him taken during World War II when he was in the Navy.

There he is, in his sailor suit, looking like a member of the cast of Leonard Bernstein's On The Town. It'd be positively queasy-making if he weren't my beloved uncle.  But he was.

I've seen the photos from my parents' wedding in 1950. Uncle Bert, aged 23, was one of my dad's groomsmen. He looks like the smiling punk he was. (I can get away with saying that; my cousin Steve Winrow, one of my favorite people in the world, has also seen those wedding photos and he agrees with me that his dad did indeed look like a punk that day.)

How I came out looking like I did is anybody's guess. I'm not beautiful, or anything remotely approaching it. I don't think I look like either of my parents. Neither did my late sister Lynn, and she was beautiful when she was young, before depression, booze, painkillers and junk food swelled her up and killed her off at age 47.

The only one of us Dupuis kids who even remotely resembles one of our parents is my sister Carla. She has Dad's nose. (All I got was his personality, which no doubt has much to do with the fact that I've been divorced twice and currently live alone. I don't look like my father, but my mother told me often enough that I sure as hell sound like him. )

Great. I seem to have inherited the personality of the man with whom I had the most problems. (See Three Flies Up: My Father, Baseball and Me, by me, Outskirts Press, 2008.)

But this isn't about me. It's about my mom and Melissa, the two birthday girls. Yes, my mom was beautiful when she was young, and Melissa was a stunner at 22 or so. Now it can be told, as they used to say: when I was 18 and Melissa was 22, I had a perfectly horrific crush on her. (Actually, I made this confession to Aunt Jessie and Uncle Pete 25 years ago. Uncle Pete's only comment: "Call her.")

Melissa and her husband Jeff have two (I think) fully grown children: daughter Briana and son Tyler. I think the Thirloway "children" would both be in their thirties now, but I haven't seen a photo of either of them since they were babies, and I've never met either of them. Not long after they were married in 1977, Melissa and Jeff took up residence in Seattle. I've spent my share of time in the state of Washington, but believe it or not, I have never been to Seattle. To me, Washington always meant Spokane.

But I'm sure that Briana and Tyler Thirloway must be favored of the gods. Their mother was gorgeous, and their dad was a very handsome fellow who, I think, might even still have hair. (Lucky Jeff; I got my dad's hair, which is to say I don't have any, and haven't since I was about 30. I first had noticeable hair loss at 20. My father, taking me out for dinner on my 20th birthday in 1975, poo-poohed my worries: "You don't have my hair, you have your mother's hair," he said. Well, if I do, I hope someone can find it.)

Now. When James Watson and Francis Crick broke the genetic code back in the early nineteen-fifties, all they did was scratch the surface of what are far, far deeper mysteries.

I'm going to tell you an anecdote. It was a flash-and-gone moment in my life, but one that I have never forgotten, because it would have made me think of Vladimir Nabokov if I had known his work at the time this moment occurred. But I was going-on 18 that day and had not yet discovered Pale Fire, Lolita, or one of my all-time favorite books, Speak, Memory.

I didn't start reading Nabokov until a few years later. But his curiously intense visual sense led him to be unusual among writers. Nabokov was the most "visual" of writers, and he had a way of treating narratives as though they were chess problems. (He loved chess and composed many chess problems, by the way.) Nabokov noticed things, things that most of us usually miss. A quarter of a century ago we would have called him "right-brained." He liked to stick little puzzles in his narratives and challenge his readers to notice them.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote novels the way he
played chess. Nobody else has ever done this,
that I know of, anyway.

And...here comes coincidence number two (coincidence number one will come shortly): there was a popular book in the mid-1980s called Drawing On The Right Side Of the Brain. It put forth the idea that the right sides of our brains handle things like spatial relationships, while the left sides handle the conceptual stuff, language, grammar and all that. It was a "how-to" book; it showed  you how you could become good at drawing by trying to "shut off" the left side of your brain, the part that handled ideas and concepts, and liberate the right side, the part that processed visual images and spatial relationships.

An interesting concept, discredited now I think. But I was trying to draw in those days...and so was my Aunt Jessie, who lent me her copy of the book. I tried its exercises.

"Pay attention," as Nabokov might have said (if he'd thought to say it.)  "Pay attention" was Nabokov's "message," the only message his writings would ever send. Small wonder that he was derided for so many years as a writer who supposedly had "nothing to say." He had plenty to say: "Pay attention" is one hell of a message.

So pay attention: my Aunt Jessie lent me this book.

(About now, if you know Schubert, the early bars of the piano part of his Erlkonig should be sounding in your head: "doodley-doodley-do, do-do," etc. )

I would expect that Melissa would "get" this, by the way. When we were young, I wanted to be a poet and Melissa wanted to sing opera. She knew Schubert's music. I was discovering it. She had just graduated from Occidental College in Los Angeles when we started talking about music. She had thought that she wanted to major in choral conducting. Then she decided she wanted to sing. We started writing letters to each other.  (No e-mail in 1973.) Pretty soon we got into an argument. Then we kissed and made up. Then we got into another argument. Melissa and I simply do not get along. And I adore her as much as I adored her mother. But in the hard-to-get-along-with sweepstakes, Melissa would blow her mother away in the first round. So would I.

"Opposites attract" may be a truism, but it doesn't apply in this tale. Melissa and I are too much alike, that's our problem. Or it was until we both got too old to care.

Dateline: Pasadena, California. Time: late summer, 1973. Melissa had just graduated from "Oxy" as it's called; I had graduated from high school in June and was about to start college myself.

On an impulse (I had access to the family Chevrolet) I hauled myself up to Altadena (near Pasadena) where Melissa was sharing an apartment that summer with her equally-beautiful friend Peggy. I sometimes wonder whatever became of Peggy. The last time I saw her was at my cousin John's first wedding in 1976.

My unannounced arrival left both of them a little nonplussed. I suppose that was the idea. It was a Saturday night. I don't remember many details, but Melissa and I talked rather late into the night, then I bunked on the living-room couch. I think we managed to avoid quarreling; don't ask me how. I do remember that Melissa was wearing a flowing dress of some mauve-gray color when I barged in, and was barefoot. I still had hair, was parting it in the middle as fashion dictated in those blow-dried days, and was also sporting an ugly gash on my nose. My boss at the Union 76 station where I was pumping gas that summer had a black labrador, who bit me on the very day I quit. I still have the scar on my nose.

I think I was wearing a light-blue turtleneck sweater, jeans and Hush Puppies. Well, maybe my memory is better than I thought. Take note, shade of Nabokov (who, by the way, named the dead poet of his novel Pale Fire "John Shade." Clever.)

I arrived on Saturday night. By Sunday afternoon Melissa clearly didn't know what to do with me. I was getting ready to leave, though probably not as quickly as she and Peggy would have liked. Anyway, she suggested we go out and have lunch.

There was a popular delicatessen in Pasadena in those days, whose name escapes me now. It was a mouthful, no pun intended: "Rumpelmayer's," or something like that. Melissa and Peggy agreed that this would be the best place for us two cousins to go and get a bite to eat.

We went there, Melissa driving the ponderous white Ford Thunderbird she drove that summer (Uncle Pete picked it out -- don't ask.)

As teenagers will be, (especially if they're in the incubation period of painful crushes), I was extremely self-conscious. We stood at the counter in this deli, Melissa and I, looking at the menu. All of the sandwiches they served were named after celebrities. This was where my self-consciousness kicked in: I just couldn't make myself order a "Mickey Rooney" or a "Robert Redford." It was too embarrassing.

Melissa noticed my discomfort and suggested we might go somewhere else. We did. She drove us to a coffee shop which was called...oh, hell. The Pepper Mill? The Salt Shaker? Something like that.

We sat opposite each other in a booth and ordered lunch. And it was while we were waiting for our food that Nabokov's butterfly flew through the room. (Oh, yes. For the uninitiated, Nabokov was a lepidopterist as well as a writer; butterflies are a regular presence in his work, and now I suddenly understand why I chose to stick a butterfly at the top of this posting.)

So we're sitting there. We're chatting. Melissa is gorgeous. I'm shy. There's a long, embarrassed pause in the conversation. She winks at me.

That was when that butterfly (here it is, folks: coincidence number one) landed on my shoulder. I've never forgotten it.

Melissa's wink was a long, slow one accompanied by an affectionate grin, a sort of tightening around the mouth. The kind of grin you give someone with whom you share a secret.

My mother's grin. My mother's wink. I swear to God, for one fleeting nanosecond there I had the unmistakable impression that I was sitting in that booth with my mother. The way Melissa looked at me, grinned and winked, was exactly, right down to the twitch, the way my mother would grin and wink at me. It was eerie. And it only lasted a fraction of a second. But somehow, in that Augenblick, the Billon genes and the Winrow genes and the Gray genes and all the rest came together and struck The Lost Chord. For a second, Melissa became Sheila. Melissa became my mom.

Oh, sneaky, sneaky DNA. So on-target in its knittings and weavings, so on-the-mark in its splashes of watercolor. It would have done Nabokov proud, that moment. But I was a few weeks shy of 18 and hadn't read him yet. In the years since, having read his stuff over and over, I know that I participated in a truly nabokovian moment that afternoon. And I'm deeply, profoundly grateful.

Here's to you, maestro. Happy Birthday to the shade of my mom, who I'd like to think is sharing a snicker with you as I write this. And Happy Birthday, dear Melissa.

And here's to DNA, and life's most precious, sometimes-fathomable mysteries. (If you pay attention!)

I love you all very much.

Kelley

Self-Portrait, 2011

Self-Portrait

2011

Q: If you had to live in just one place – without ever leaving – where would it be?

A: That’s a very tough question. For a goodly portion of my adult life I was all over the map, owing mostly to my being a foreign service employee for a dozen years. That accounts for most, if not quite all, of my foreign travel: western Europe, Brazil, Cote d’Ivoire, European Russia.  But I’ve also lived all over California, in both Washingtons, (state and D.C.) Maryland, Virginia and (very briefly) Nevada. 

My first gut-level answer would be Paris, but I don’t know. Paris is actually a rather small city, at least the interesting part of it, and I think I would get claustrophobia there after a while. Los Angeles has plenty of elbow room, but having grown up in southern California, I feel like I've had enough of it. New York? Forget it. Ironically, "the city that never sleeps" is not the place for a guy who has as much trouble sleeping as I do.

I guess I would have to say that I’d rather be dead than live in one place without ever leaving. That’s subject to change, of course. The older you get, the less inclined you are to wander. Having said that, as of this writing I'm packing for the former Soviet Republic of Georgia.

Q: What do you plan to do there?
A: Teach English and stare at the mountains.

Q: Do you plan to do any writing while you're over there?
A: As the Mexicans put it, "No se, vamos a ver." I'll make notes of course; I always do that.

Q: Do you prefer animals to people?

A: I like both. But I agree with Truman Capote, who once observed that people who feel more warmly toward dogs, cats and horses than they do toward people are often secretively cruel. Hitler loved dogs.

Q: Are you cruel?

A: I try not to be. I regard cruelty as the most abominable of vices. I can think of nothing that makes me angrier than cruelty of any kind, and one of my problems with the British in general is that so much of their "comedy" is based on cruelty. But sometimes I am cruel with my big mouth, especially when I’m angry. But I always regret it immediately, and either do what I can to make up for it, or, if the victim of my cruelty chooses not to be forgiving, beat up on myself about it. I’m still carrying around past cruelties for which I have not forgiven myself. All I can say is, that’s a strong incentive not to repeat the crime.

Q: Do you have many friends?

A: No. Most of my friends are dead. There are maybe five people I more or less trust.

Q: What qualities do you look for in friends?

A: Well, patience is a big one. I have taxed the patience of everyone I’ve ever loved, and in some cases taxed it beyond endurance. I’m as aware of this as I am of the fact that I’m sometimes cruel, and loathe this tendency in myself just as much as the other, that I lay upon other people the patience which I don’t have. Compassion is important. And intelligence. I have never had a friend who wasn’t intelligent, although once or twice I have been in love with women who, despite great gifts, turned out to be stupid. I’m currently in love with a woman who is smarter than I am, but doesn’t like to read.

Q: Are you often disappointed by a friend?

A: Not really. I’ve had some unpleasant surprises with people I thought to be friends, but not since I was in elementary school has anyone who purported to be my friend ever betrayed me. But friends change as do we all, and sometimes I find that I like the later version of a friend less than the earlier one.

Q: Are you a truthful person?

A: I think so. That’s not to say that I always tell the truth, but I’m a miserably poor liar, so I usually just don’t try it. I wouldn’t have made a good actor, although some people have told me that I should have been an actor. I disagree. If I say something and I don’t mean it, you can tell. It’s easier to lie as a writer of course; no one can see your face when you do it. But I don’t like lying, it makes me uncomfortable and gives me guilt, especially if I’m lying to someone I love.

Q: Do you believe in God?
A: Yes, but I think that question raises more questions than answers. I believe in God, but on the surface of it anyway, I don't really think God and I have much use for each other. "Nonsense," orthodox believers will huff. "God made you. God loves you." Well, I don't know. I once made a water balloon to throw at somebody; that didn't mean I loved it. Anyone who has ever watched a cat play with a mouse has some idea of how I envision my relationship with God. Mark Twain famously considered God to be essentially malign; well, Twain's daughter had died and he was extremely bitter.

Having said all that, I have as much impatience with Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris and the rest of that "new atheist" crowd as I have with my landlord's pea-brained neighbor who has a truly nauseating vanity license plate that reads, "IR4GIVN." Isn't that just the most icky-poo cutesy thing you ever heard? I can't STAND religion when it stoops to the bumper-sticker level of discourse, especially when it borrows the sick-making argot of advertising agencies: "Got Jesus?" (That one really makes me want to puke.) But the insidious operative principle, in the case of both atheists and fundamentalists, is "certainty."

Atheists are always talking about how much cruelty and misery religion has caused. I don't see that atheism has a great track record for spreading, peace, love and joy either. I wouldn't want Robespierre, Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, Pol Pot, Enver Hoxha or Kim il-Sung coming down my chimney on Christmas Eve.
      
I really don't see a whole lot of difference between Truly Convinced fundamentalists and Truly Convinced Atheists. Both think they have the True Answer, and people who think they have the True Answer often become killers in the name of it.

Q: How do you like to occupy your spare time?

A: I really like to read. I always have. Reading coalesced for me when I was about six, and I’ve never stopped. My favorite authors when I was a child included Madeleine L’Engle and Scott O’Dell, and I loved the Hardy Boys mysteries. As a preadolescent I was crazy about science fiction for a while – Arthur C. Clarke was a favorite. As an adult I have admired Hemingway, Faulkner, Henry Miller and Saul Bellow on the American side of the pond, Joyce, Nabokov, Tolstoy, Proust and Mann from the other side. I wonder if it's a coincidence, by the way, that Philip Roth considers himself a disciple of Kafka, and while admiring Kafka's genius, and Roth's brilliance, I find Kafka and Roth both depressing. Orson Welles thought his film version of The Trial the best movie he ever made. Perhaps it is, but it depressed me almost beyond endurance.

I love movies, although I have not been inside a theater to see a feature film since 2006. I usually rent them from Netflix or watch them on my computer. A list of my favorite films would include Mr. Roberts, Casablanca, Lawrence of Arabia, and believe it or not, Francis Ford Coppola’s little 1987 time-warp fantasy Peggy Sue Got Married. (Memory is the closest thing I have to a fetish, and films about going back in time are one of my weaknesses. Peggy Sue Got Married always makes me cry, as do Somewhere in Time and (in its final moments) Field of Dreams. I had a troubled relationship with my father, but we both loved baseball, and at the end of the film, when Ray Kinsella and his long-dead father begin playing catch, look out: I’ll be crying within moments.

 By the way, have you ever noticed how many of the plots of mainstream American film dramas center around the idea of revenge? Revenge seems to be the nation's pet fantasy, as reliving (and, by implication, correcting) the past is mine.

Q: What are you reading these days?
A: Rilke.

Q: Why especially Rilke?

A: I'm fascinated by him. Can't make head nor tail of him. I think James Merrill said the same thing about him. Hey, if he's good enough to confuse a poet like Merrill, who am I to complain? Merrill said that it was Rilke's sheer eloquence he found so compelling. I would have to agree.

Q: Anything else?
A: I just finished reading Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground, and have given a re-read to parts of Henry Miller's wonderful album of California memories, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. As you can see, the motion of my reading can best be described as Brownian. It's a flit-and-dive thing.

Q: Of what are you most afraid?

A: Homelessness. Death, too, of course, but death is something you only have to deal with once. The idea of ending up homeless scares the shit out of me. I see homeless people all the time, as do we all, and try to hand them a couple of bucks when I can. Then I think of the song Eleanor Rigby and my heart sinks into my shoes. There but for the luck of the Irish go I.

Q: You're not Irish. Your last name is French.

A: Uh-huh, but that's on my Dad's side. My father's people were canucks -- they came down from Trois-Riviere, Quebec in the early 20th century and wound up in Massachusetts, where my father was born. My biological grandmother on my mother's side was Irish. Her name was Annie Russell. Her family came from County Meath. That's where Kells is. You know, The Book of Kells? Can't get more Irish than that. My maternal grandfather, Bertram Winrow, met Annie Russell on a steamship bound for Peru in 1914. They were married that same year. She died in July, 1921, when my mother, their only child, was three months old.

Q: What happened to your mother after that?
A: My grandfather brought her to America. Born in 1879 in England, he was in the British merchant marine for a good many years. During his seafaring days he met and became friendly with a family in Pittsburgh, PA named Gray. There he met Edith Gray, who became Edith Gray Winrow in 1924. She and my grandfather went on to have three children of their own, but Edith Gray embraced and raised my mom as one of her own. Edith Winrow was the woman I knew as "Grandma." She died in 1967, when I was 11 years old.

Q: England, Ireland, Peru, Pennsylvania. How did you end up in southern California?
A: Grandpa Winrow came west in 1929 to join a friend of his in a business venture, which I understand was to have been regular air cargo freight service from the west coast of the U.S. to South America. But one of my family's curses is its ill-timing (and mine is absolutely the worst.) You can probably guess what happened. 1929. Yes, the stock market crashed, Grandpa Winrow and his buddy were wiped out, and the family was mired in San Diego County. Eighty years on, there are only two of us left here now, myself and my sister Carla. And I'm looking to get out.

Q: Why would anybody want to leave a beautiful place like San Diego?
A: The family's gone, and the family homestead, a house my grandfather bought in 1941, was sold after my father's death in 2005. There's nothing left here for me but memories. If you saw the Woody Allen film Radio Days, you might remember its poignant ending, in which Allen, as voice-over narrator, reminds one and all that memories fade with each passing year. All this played out against Kurt Weill's September Song, to me the saddest song ever written. By the way, the photo at the head of this blog was taken on the front porch of that very same family homestead I just mentioned. It was taken in the spring of 2005. Behind me, in the house, is my father. He has less than six months to live.

Q: Did you know either of your grandfathers?
A: No. Grandpa Winrow died six years before I was born, in the very same room in which my father would die 56 years later. I don't even know what Grandpa Dupuis looked like. My dad probably didn't know, either. My paternal grandfather ran off and deserted his family when my father was a little boy.

Q: What shocks you, if anything?

A: I touched on this above. Deliberate cruelty. Cruelty for its own sake. And any work of art, be it film, book or whatever, that is deliberately mean-spirited or makes light of mean-spiritedness. Very hip people thought the movie Blue Velvet a sophisticated spoof of something. I saw only ugliness. I hated every minute of it.

Q: It’s been three years since you published Three Flies Up, your memoir of you and your dad. Reader reaction to it was surprisingly good, you said. What have you written since?

A: A novel, The Vespers of 1610. It was a disaster. Nobody read it, and those who did, didn’t like it. I had a copy of it sent to the woman I love, and I suspect she threw it away unopened. Good for her.

Q: What went wrong with it?

A: Well, it takes a special kind of dude to make the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk fly, and I’m no Richard Wagner, what can I tell you? Nobody offered to help me with it, so I tried to do the whole thing myself: writing, editing, proofreading.

No one can be their own editor. The book was too long, its story line too amorphous and some of its moments stretched credulity. My oldest lit-crit friend said he couldn’t understand what the point of it was. He went on to say that I tried to “stuff too much into it,” too many ideas, too many concepts. It didn’t work. The best thing about the book was the painting on the cover, which I painted, by the way. Gesamtkunstwerk. Well, I tried.

Q: Do you exercise?

A: Not as much as I used to. I was doing some light weightlifting and leg-lifts every afternoon, but I gave myself a nasty case of tendonitis in my right elbow. I used to be a dedicated jogger, but gave it up. I recently bought a new bicycle, but I can’t seem to find time to ride it. I gave myself a surfboard as a birthday present last fall and I haven’t even taken it to the beach yet – have to figure out a way to strap it to the roof of a taxicab.

Q: Still, I can see that since the last time we saw each other, you’ve lost a lot of weight. What’s your dieting secret?

A: Believe me, you wouldn’t want to go on the Kelley Dupuis Diet. I don’t recommend it to anyone. The first thing you do is, go into a near-suicidal depression. Then you start self-medicating with booze. The liquor turns you into a Jekyll-and-Hyde, and you drive away the only woman who ever gave you perfect, unqualified love, the only woman who ever truly made you happy. After that you get sick. Gut-sick. Throwing-up sick. Then, facing the shambles of your life, you realize that you have two choices: quit drinking or quit living. So you quit drinking. It’s too late to save anything but your own worthless skin, but you do it anyway. Then, your body suddenly deprived of all the sugar that resides in alcohol, your weight begins to drop. The “booze fat” melts.

Q: So how much weight did you lose?

A: When I left Alexandria, Virginia in July, 2010 I weighed about 200 pounds. The following March I weighed myself at a doctor’s office, and I was down to 172. I was surprised; I didn’t think I’d lost that much weight. My sister, a nurse, advised me strongly not to lose any more weight. Any further weight loss, she hinted, might be unhealthy. I guess. At 55 I weigh only seven pounds more than I weighed in high school.

Q: What’s the most hopeful word in any language?

A: Love.

Q: And the most dangerous?

A: Love.

Q: Have you ever wanted to kill anybody?

A: Yes, but never for more than five minutes. And I’m not a spur-of-the-moment kind of guy, so thus far the casualty count of my homicidal rages is 0. Zero people, that is. Plenty of lamps, chairs, computers, tables, beds, vases, bottles, glasses, typewriters, walls, doorknobs, doorjambs, beverage bottles, windows…and one Xerox machine.

Q: Whose Xerox machine was it?

A: The government’s.

Q: Is there any particular thing you feel that you lack the courage to do, but would do it if you had the courage?

A: Sure. Commit suicide. If I had the guts, I would have killed myself four months ago.

Q: Why?

A: Well, there's never any one reason, is there? It's like you never become depressed for just one reason. It's always a concatenation of things. Suffice it to say that if I had had the courage to do it, I would have killed myself the day Holly Inder told that she didn't love me anymore. I don't find a whole lot that's admirable in Goethe's character Werther, but I do admire him for having the courage to off himself for unrequited love. It was the best career move he ever made.

Q: You're joking of course. About killing yourself.

A: Yeah, probably.

Q: What are your political interests?

A: I have none. As a former journalist, I’ve had my share of contact with elected officials, and I can honestly say that I have never met one, Republican or Democrat, whom I would trust holding the stake for a football pool. I don’t vote anymore, I don’t read newspapers anymore, nor do I watch TV news, listen to news on the radio or follow news on the Internet. When people send me those conservative e-mails bashing Obama or expressing outrage over immigration policy, I delete them. It’s not because I like Obama particularly, it’s just that the news itself depresses me. Outrage is both time-and-energy consuming, and what good does it do anyone in the long run? 

By the way, before I opted to become completely nonpolitical, (one of the best decisions I ever made) I used to be quite conservative. But I haven't become "liberal" in the sense that the media use the word, not by a longshot; you'll never hear me trying to sell the idea that more government is the solution to any problem. Still, I have moments when I wonder what people are thinking. The other day I saw a bumper sticker that said something like "There Are No Hyphenated Americans." I understand the sentiment, but that particular one is unrealistic. "Hyphenated" Americans are the only kind we've ever had, or been. Just look at any account of growing up in say, New York or Chicago a century ago. The wops, spics, kikes, micks, bohunks and whathaveyou were forever chasing each other up and down city streets, looking to bust heads. The discourse may be less brutal now, but we've always been a nation of immigrants, and never, really, a "melting pot."

          
I voted for John McCain in 2008, but not with any particular enthusiasm, and I will never vote again in any election. I'm done with it. I guess you could say that I’m a recovered journalist. I like what Cary Grant said at the beginning of the film Father Goose: “Two years ago I made my peace with the world. If the world can’t keep the peace with itself, that’s not my problem.”

Q: If you could be anything, what would you like to be?
A. Financially independent, same as everyone else. Next, invisible. Imagine the possibilities of that. Finally, it would be SO nice if I were able to simply erase memories selectively, as some people I know seem able to do. I envy them that, Oh God, how I envy that ability.

Q: What are your chief vices? And virtues?

A: Well, I don’t drink anymore, and I never did do drugs. I don’t gamble. You couldn’t pay me to watch TV. I guess the only vice I have left is cigars. And smokeless tobacco, since you can’t smoke in a cab. Virtues? I think my chief virtue is gratitude. Only once did I ever betray someone who was kind to me, and I have never stopped regretting it, out-of-my-head drunk, depressed and angry as I was when I did it. What I did was to hurt — and perhaps even briefly endanger – someone I adored, and it was inexcusable. My gratitude to her remained, and remains, profound, however, along with my gratitude to artists in every medium, poets, composers, playwrights, novelists and painters who have warmed my soul most with their works. I think I understand a lot about writing in particular, and when I read something really good, I’m engulfed in a sense of wonder. That goes double for music. Music is a form of magic for me.

Q: Do you have a particular guiding principle that you live by?
A: Yeah. "If it looks too good to be true," it is.

Q: Suppose you were drowning. What images, in classic tradition, do you envision rolling across your mind?

A: A wintry day around Christmas, 1958. I’m three years old, and sitting in a pile of snow in the backyard of my family’s home in Burlington, Vermont. I’m pretending I’m Santa Claus, and the pile of snow behind me is my sleigh. I look over the rooftop of the house and in the late-afternoon blue sky, see the moon.

           
Summer, 1967. Silver Strand State Beach, Coronado, California. I get caught in a riptide and almost do drown. Fortunately the lifeguard is paying attention to his responsibilities, sees I’m in trouble, and comes to fish me out of the surf. My mother, getting wind of what just happened, drags me all over the beach trying to find this lifeguard so she can “thank” him. Already feeling stupid for having gotten caught in a riptide to begin with, I’m now so completely mortified that I want to crawl off and die.

           
Fall, 1968. Spokane, Washington. I’m thirteen, and come home from the Cinerama Theater, where I’ve just seen 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time, so awed by the experience that my younger sister has to come sit by my bed and talk to me for a while before I can get calmed down and go to sleep.

           
February, 1986. Snow-covered Manassas, Virginia. Late on a Saturday night. I’m sitting in the living room of a two-story townhouse owned by the girl of my dreams, whom I met barely two months earlier. We’ve been out for dinner and are back, quietly talking. She’s smoking one cigarette after another. I want terribly to kiss her, but I’m afraid of being rebuffed. Suddenly, in a flash of courage coming from I-don’t-know-where, I pluck from her fingers the cigarette she’s preparing to light and say, “Why don’t you skip this one?” Then I do kiss her. And to my delighted surprise, instead of smacking me in my presumptuous bazoo, she kisses me back. We sit there and kiss for a long time. Then, toward dawn, she takes my hand and we go upstairs to bed. I’m beside myself with lack-of-sleep fatigue, but happier than I can remember being in a very long time.

           
August, 1995. Lloret de Mar, Spain. A person with whom my involvement got me sent home to Washington from the American embassy in Moscow the previous year suddenly appears before my eyes in the lobby of a hotel. She’s talking to another woman, facing the other way, and doesn’t see me come in and put my suitcases down. She is dressed as I had never seen her dressed in Russia, in a sleeveless yellow blouse, dark gray skirt and sandals. She has cropped her hair close since I last saw her. I’m a day late, thanks to mechanical problems with an Air France L-1011 back in Washington. She sees me and throws herself into my arms.

           
October, 2000. I’m sitting in the living room of my one-bedroom apartment in Baltimore, Maryland, watching Richard Gere in The Cotton Club on AMC with my pal from Moscow, Boris Demidov. The telephone rings. It’s my younger sister, sobbing. My mother had a stroke yesterday, and they’ve taken her off life-support. My mother is dead.

           
Now the Polaroids begin to slap down in more rapid succession: My high-school graduation. My initiation into adult sex at an ocean-view resort on the Pacific  in Ventura, California, late summer 1975. Disembarking from a TWA flight from JFK to Frankfurt in March 1986, the first time I set foot on European soil. Another plane memory: looking down at the Russian countryside around Moscow while flying for the first time in Sheremetovo in May, 1993, and thinking that this part of Russia looked a lot like Ohio.

           
Many others. But I’m fading as they fade. As the poet wrote:

It’s not fading, but it’s falling apart,

this artifact from a family Christmas

like all the other family Christmases

of which I knew nothing and was no part.

Why have I kept it with me all these years?

You tell me. The dog in your arms has died,

and you’re an adult now. You weren’t that day.

Your expression makes that winter-dawn clear.

It was not so at all when you gave me

this small gift. We were young – that’s obvious

from the unspoiled arrogance that I see

in those ineffably convinced brown eyes

and parted red lips, awaiting the click.

We’re idiots. Only pictures are wise.

           
Okay, The poet was me. The real-life girl in the Polaroid described by the poem was the dream-girl alluded to above, the chain-smoker whom I impulsively kissed that magic late winter night in 1986.

           
And I do believe that only pictures are wise.

           

In Everyone's Life, There's A....

I've been keeping a journal since I was 13.

My first journal was a pale blue wirebound cardboard datebook from a drugstore, 5 x 7. How I came to have this little notebook I don't remember. Perhaps my mother brought it home and didn't use it, and I found it in a drawer somewhere. Perhaps I bought it myself. Those details have escaped me, and so have all the journals that I meticulously kept all through high school and college.  Hundreds of pages worth, gone, including the journal entry I wrote on the morning of the day I graduated from Chula Vista High School. June 15, 1973. I've thought about having a hypnotist put me "under" and see if under hypnosis I might be able to reconstruct what I wrote that long-ago morning before I donned that blue cap and gown and went off to fetch my diploma.

But you see, on the eve of my 22nd birthday, in 1977, a girl named Melody broke my heart. Overreacting, as poets so often do, (yes, I was a teenage poet) I took all of the journals I had kept during the previous seven years, tossed them into a metal drum and put a match to them.  Written records of high school and college days, gone.

Of some of those destroyed notebooks I say, "Whew. That's a relief. No one will ever see that." Of others, well...

It was in the early spring of 1969 that I began keeping my first diary. My family was living in Spokane, Washington that year. I was in the eighth grade. Entries were short, terse and didn't say much. "High 59. No mail. My sisters watching Dark Shadows after school. Drab day."

Well, I was 13. You couldn't expect my diaries to run in the same crowd as those of Samuel Pepys or Anais Nin.

On the other hand, some noteworthy things did work their way into that first-ever notebook of mine.

My first kiss, for instance. Although the notebook is long gone, this page I remember clearly.

I'm talking about my first real kiss, the first time I ever kissed a girl on the lips, not just the cheek. That's a rite-of-passage in anyone's life. Or it used to be, anyway.

First kiss. Yes, I do remember mine.

Her name was Nancy. Nancy Layton. She was a school friend of my late younger sister Lynn's.

Nancy, the poor girl, had the misfortune to be extremely pretty. She was a pert little blonde, her hair worn Beatles-style, with bangs in front, and on the sides hanging just down over her ears; slightly oriental (or feline, if you prefer, a trait she shared with my second wife) green eyes; slightly turned-up nose. Nancy was also precocious in her development, by which I mean of course that at age 13 she had gotten a jump on puberty and already had well-developed breasts. Big ones. I call this "misfortune" because naturally, being so well and so precociously endowed, she had the boys after her all the time, and also (I knew this because I was a boy) talking about her when she wasn't there.

By the time Nancy started the seventh grade at Jonas Salk Junior High School in Spokane that fall, she already had "a reputation." Boys were on Nancy's tail constantly, you know, like those packs of dogs you see sniffing around the local girl-dog when she's in season. Nancy didn't have to ask for this attention, nor did she have to exude any special aroma. It was just there, owing to what nature had been either generous or mischievous enough to give her.

I shared my first kiss with Nancy. Lucky me. The late Johnny Carson, when he was a young GI during WWII,  once got to dance with Betty Grable at a USO event. I know how he felt. I got to kiss Nancy Layton. I know exactly how Johnny must have felt.

My family moved back to California about a year later, and I only saw Nancy one more time after that. From a distance: I returned to Spokane for a summer vacation visit with my old school chum Tom Caulton in the summer of 1971. He and I had ridden downtown on our bicycles, and on our way home, as we were cycling up the long hill of Monroe Street back to the north side of town, I glimpsed Nancy, who would have been maybe 15 by then, walking up Monroe Street with some guy, her head on his shoulder.

I didn't stop and say hello; in fact I didn't stop at all. I just rode on by and kept going.

I have every confidence that Nancy was probably pregnant by age 18 if not sooner. By the time she hit 40 she was probably a grandmother. Sex does that.

But on the afternoon of June 28, 1969, Nancy was barely 13 and despite appearances, probably still a virgin; eighth-grade boys, or even ninth, were more talk than conquest in those days.

She came to our house on Lynn's invitation. They were sixth-grade classmates at Loma Verde Elementary School, which, when Carla and I returned to the old neighborhood in 2004 after scattering Lynn's ashes in the Spokane River, we found to have vanished. Only a park remained where the school had once stood.

Our home at 6204 North Alberta Street in Spokane had a big backyard in 1969, with a pool. It was a small pool, maybe ten feet square and four feet deep, with a deck and a fence surrounding it. It took ten hours to fill the pool with a garden hose. It had no heating or filter; when the pool was filled late in the spring with water from the garden hose, it would be far too cold to swim in; we would have to wait a couple of days, letting the sun shine on the water all day until it became merely cold, not icy.

It was too small a pool for real swimming of course, but on a 92-degree July day, the splashing-around we were able to do in it was both refreshing and fun.

Nancy came over to our house that day, on Lynn's invitation, to go in the pool.  Nancy wore a one-piece swimsuit, dark blue, and memory might not be serving me correctly, but I somehow recall that her swimsuit also had a little skirt-ruffle around the waist; swimsuits sometimes did in those days. Anyway, Nancy, Lynn and I all went out to the pool.

I would turn 14 that fall. I was a more-or-less normal boy for that age, as horny as all of my friends were, and every bit as susceptible as they to Nancy's charms, but shy, fighting acne and probably more than a little self-conscious owing to, among other things, that idiotic first name my mother had given me which, until I quit using it halfway through my sophomore year of high school, always made me feel somewhat set apart from the other kids. A freak of sorts. And I was morbidly sensitive. In short, I was as shy and unsure of myself at age 13, confronting Nancy Layton, as I would be 17 years later with another girl, Holly Brayton, who resembled Nancy in some other ways besides the fact that their last names rhymed.

Somehow, that afternoon, probably in a half-joking way aimed at protecting my hurt pride should I be rebuffed, (again, much the same way I would approach Holly in 1986) I managed to make Nancy understand that I would like to kiss her. Nancy was no stranger to that situation. She let me kiss her. A real kiss, on the lips, deep enough, though I'm sure not "French." It was my first real kiss with a girl. And of course it was intoxicating, magical. Kissing is, by its nature. That's why it's been so popular for about 10,000 years. Goethe, no monk himself, held kissing in higher regard than the sex act itself, owing to its spiritual overtones as opposed to the more "animalistic" character of the other. I don't know as I would go that far, but there is a good reason why the poets, Goethe included, have for all these centuries rhapsodized about the magic of a kiss.

13 year-old Nancy with her 18 year-old body knew all about kissing, and was more than willing to share her erudition with a shy boy who just happened to be almost a year older than she.

As boys will, I kept count of the number of kisses Nancy and I shared that afternoon in and around the pool. And being already a journal-keeper at going-on-14, I duly recorded the experience in my little blue notebook: "Nancy Layton came over to swim, and I kissed her 28 times in the afternoon."

Later, when I saw the film Summer of '42, there was a moment in the movie that rang familiar bells. In a movie-within-a-movie moment, the two boys in the film, Hermie and Oscy, accompany two girls, Miriam and Aggie, into a theater to see Now, Voyager starring Bette Davis and Paul Henreid. The boys are of course looking to put the moves on the girls. In the darkened theater Hermie begins caressing and squeezing what he thinks is his date's breast, only his hand has taken a wrong turn in the groping and he's actually squeezing her arm. Oscy looks over and notices his friend's mistake in the semi-darkness of the theater, and tries to silently correct his pal, but Hermie doesn't get the message, shoots him a dirty look and goes on squeezing.

After the movie, as the boys are on their way home, Hermie boasts of having squeezed and caressed Aggie's breast "for fourteen minutes." A "record," he says. Oscy needles him: "Are you sure it wasn't an arm?"

They haggle over this detail. Oscy insists it was an arm Hermie was squeezing, not a breast.  "Make sure you know what the hell it is you're squeezing, Hermie," he finally shouts, "especially if you're puttin' a CLOCK on it and goin' for RECORDS!"

They wind up laughing all the way home. I guess teenage boys didn't change much between 1942 and 1969. And probably haven't changed much since, come to think of it, although technology has certainly enabled their concupiscence to an extent far beyond what was available to us boys of the 1960s and '70s, who were restricted to sneaking a peek at Playboy when we sought initiation into The Mysteries. Nowadays teenage boys are so marinated with cyber-porn and late-night video that first kisses probably don't carry quite the throw-weight in a boy's memory that they once did. And first kisses are, or were, so very important,  At least mine was.

Of course there was a fallout: I was more like Hermie in the film than I was like Oscy. Hermie was the romantic dreamer, Oscy the lusty boy who just wanted to "get laid." I couldn't kiss a girl like Nancy, or many years later, like Holly, and then simply file the experience away and move on to the next thrill. I had a bad crush on Nancy for the first few months of my ninth-grade year at Salk, just as, years later, I could never get Holly completely off my mind, right through X number of relationships and even two marriages. What might have happened if Holly had bestowed my first kiss upon me, rather than Nancy?

But oh, that couldn't have happened. We were kids, and kid-dom is a world unto itself. A couple of years' difference in age, no big deal when you and your date are both in your forties, are a very big deal when the years and the perspective are still short: when I was 13, Holly was only seven. No, it couldn't have happened, even if I had lived in Athens, Greece, where Holly lived at that age. She was in the second grade when I was in the eighth. An ocean of time, then.

Still, if I had to pick my two all-time most memorable, and most significant, moments with girls, they would be June 28, 1969, the day Nancy granted me my first real kiss, and February 13, 1986, the night sweet Holly opened her arms to my sorry, beaten-up ass.

God bless them both. Each was in her own way an angel, and neither knew it.