August 2005

--e*I*21- (Vol. 4 No. 4) August 2005, is published and © 2005 by Earl Kemp. All rights reserved.
It is produced and distributed bi-monthly through http://efanzines.com by Bill Burns in an e-edition only.

Contents -- eI21 -- August 2005

…Return to sender, address unknown….13 [eI letter column], by Earl Kemp

Will Eisner – The Spirit Is Strong, by Ted White

Living With Burroughs, by Stephen J. Gertz

Confessions of a Book-Cadger, by Richard Lupoff

Walking Down Dave Van Ronk Street, by Charles Freudenthal

Into the Abyss, by Thomas P. Ramirez

Odd Man Out…., by Earl Kemp

The Meaning of Sleaze, by Brittany A. Daley

Curious Couplings 3, by Earl Kemp

Tellers of stories with ink on paper, not that they matter any more, have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn't work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they're done they're done.

              -- Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

THIS ISSUE OFeI is in memory of Dave Van Ronk, his mind and his music.

In the world of science fiction, this issue of eI is also in memory of dear old friends Evan Hunter and Art Rapp.

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As always, everything in this issue of eI beneath my byline is part of my in-progress rough-draft memoirs. As such, I would appreciate any corrections, revisions, extensions, anecdotes, photographs, jpegs, or what have you sent to me at earlkemp@citlink.net and thank you in advance for all your help.

Bill Burns is jefe around here. If it wasn’t for him, nothing would get done. He inspires activity. He deserves some really great rewards. It is a privilege and a pleasure to have him working with me to make eI whatever it is.

Other than Bill Burns, Dave Locke, and Robert Lichtman, these are the people who made this issue of eI possible: Robert Bonfils, Bruce Brenner, Brittany A. Daley, Stephen J. Gertz, Elaine Kemp Harris, Lee Hoffman, Miriam Linna, Richard Lupoff, Thomas P. Ramirez, Robert Speray, Ted White, and Joe Zinnato.

ARTWORK: This issue of eI features recycled artwork by William Rotsler.

I always had trouble ending short stories in ways that would satisfy a general public. In real life ... people don't change, don't learn anything from their mistakes, and don't apologize. In a short story they have to do at least two out of three of those things, or you might as well throw it away in the lidless wire trash receptacle chained and padlocked to the fire hydrant in front of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

-- Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

…Return to sender, address unknown…. 13
The Official eI Letters to the Editor Column
Artwork recycled William Rotsler

By Earl Kemp

We get letters. Some parts of some of them are printable. Your letter of comment is most wanted via email to earlkemp@citlink.net or by snail mail to P.O. Box 6642, Kingman, AZ 86402-6642 and thank you.

Also, please note, I observe DNQs and make arbitrary and capricious deletions from these letters in order to remain on topic.

This is the official Letter Column of eI, and following are a few quotes from a few of those letters concerning the last issue of eI. All this in an effort to get you to write letters of comment to eI so you can look for them when they appear here.

Friday May 20, 2005:

Let me take this opportunity to say some fannish things about your work on eFanzines. We have been buying and selling a LOT of Parliament, including original artwork from the book covers and magazine articles. Your eFanzine articles have really been helping bring the whole picture together for me, as the major players, the artists and writers, the types of materials, make ever more sense. And, of course, Sin-a-Rama.

Maybe I'll be able to provide an article for your fanzine?  Perhaps when I'm done with my PhD dissertation, which is about sex devices, photographs of sex devices, fantasies about sex devices, over the last 100 or so years. With an especial focus on sex dolls and artificial vaginas. Do you know anything about that?

               --Cynde Moya

Wednesday June 8, 2005:

Thanks, Earl. At some point when I have the time I'll answer all those charges of bondage and fetishism in Wonder Woman -- even the charges of Lesbianism. Meanwhile thanks for including me along with the Wonder Women in your dedication.

               --Trina Robbins

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Well, well, well, another issue comes and I've barely finished Victor Banis' amazing book (thanks for lettin' us know about it and I couldn't put it down from second one of reading it)

Growing up in the Bay Area in the 1980s (hey, I'm only 30), I was exposed to a lot of what has been called "gay culture" since birth. The Male Exotic Dancer was one of those things that were always associated with the gay community around here, especially since there were always a great many places where they regularly danced in and around The City. My mom would go to see male strippers once in a while, it was the ‘80s after all, and it was very normal in my house for her to admit that, even to her mom. In 2004, while attending the Sonoma Valley Film Festival, I saw a great documentary about male strippers called American Dancer. It's a piece of verity that made me think and presented many of the same issues that Dan Andrews brought up in his story. The business has changed over the years, but there are still the issues with having relationships, with drugs, with dancing to make it through school and having the years determine when you're done with the business.

Must get a copy of Silent Siren. Must, must, must.

Ah, The Stones. My generation has a strange view of them. Those between 21 and 30 see them almost as the cartoon character versions of Rock Stars. No one around my age or younger sees them as legitimate sex symbols, merely as men who have managed to retain fame well beyond the reasonable expiration date. Still, I have discovered some of their albums, other than the ones like Steel Wheels that really sucked in the 1980s, are great. I still refer to many albums that are downers as "Too much 'Wild Horses' nor nearly enough 'Brown Sugar.’” “She Comes in Colours” is a song that will always bring me up to a higher place. Then again, Sticky Fingers is a fun album.

I knew Bruce Gillespie was a genius. His take on House of the Rising Sun was dead-on. It's become one of the songs that define what good rock 'n roll is to me: impossible to disregard while at the same time nothing to get hung about. The organ solo is one of the best in the history of rock, right up there with Yes' Roundabout and anytime Ray Manzerak put his fingers to a keyboard.

Wonder Woman wasn't my choice for comics when I was a kid, but there was a giant Wonder Woman statue at St. James Infirmary in Mountain View, CA, just a few blocks away from the Computer History Museum. When the place burned down (1998, I think), the only photo of the place I could find was one of the 30-foot-tall Wonder Woman in the fashion of an up-skirt shot. I can remember going and the seats there were right under Wonder Woman were always taken. I had been in Boston when it burnt and didn't find out until the day I tried to go there for lunch after one of my early days at the Museum.

Lynda Carter had a profound effect on those folks who were a little older than me. I loved the show, I watched it every week, but she never drew me in. She's the hero of my favorite actress to work with, Kate Kelton. She wants nothing more than to play Princess Diana in that Whedon flick. She could pull it off too, since she has the bod for it.

Another great issue, Earl.

               --Chris Garcia

Thursday June 9, 2005:

What’s Firefly?  And where can I get a disc or whatever of it?  I assume you’ve seen Kinsey.  Great movie, with a tragic ending.

I was in love with Lena Horne when you were in love with the more talented Josephine Baker.  Much later, I was so genuinely in love with a black girl named Larnell Crawford that near the end of our ten-year affair I asked her to marry me.  She wisely refused.  She was almost paralyzed with dread when I took her to the movies in Hollywood or dinner on Sunset strip, and much preferred me to take her to clubs in South LA, where people like Redd Foxx and Scatman Crothers performed. Dearest Larnell, she still stars in my sexual reminiscences.

Gosh, you went to a lot of exotic places.  Like Tangier.  And your memories of them are more vivid than mine of Saudi Arabia.

Good article by Gary.  He’s a better writer than either of us put together.

               --Jerry Murray

#

Jeez, man! Great story about nixing Mick from the Worldcon!!! Way to go!

Really dug the down under ballyhoo '72... I thought Nik Cohn was the coolest with Awopbopa... when it first came out. That and Charlie Gillette's SOUND OF THE CITY kinda gave a leg up to rock n' roll... not that it ever needed to have the blessing of any semblance of literati.. ain't that the truth? Better the pocket-liner crowd STAY AWAY. Your scribbler there has a point when he says the earliest efforts are pure heart & soul, that by the time the hinterland hepsters hit the big towns with managers and money men, the smoothing and creaming begins... so true with everything. When they tell you what to do, what'll sell, what you're doing wrong... and when you follow their instructions, brother, you pay with your diluted deluded old self down the pike when you look back and go, "aw, maaaan!"

                --Miriam Linna

WOW Earl!

Great job on the newest issue of eI. And thanks for putting in those LOC's. I just spent the last few hours reading the issue and enjoyed it very much. I never knew you were the "Tin" man editor in prison, and the pieces on Wonder Woman were just great.  

               --L. Truman Douglas

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el20 was as wonderful as ever. I sat down on my way out the door to run some major errands, meaning to take just a peek, and needless to say, sat until I had devoured every crumb. I particularly enjoyed your piece about your holiday on Terminal Island. Oddly, I too had childhood fantasies about Wonder Woman. I say oddly because I was never into drag and, unlike many gay men, never had any desire to be a woman (or certainly none that I consciously recognized); I was always quite content to be a man, albeit a gay one. There's probably some connection there to the fact that throughout my life, most of my close male friends have been straight, but I'll let someone else analyze that. Anyway, what I do remember is that when very young, at play, I would fantasize being Wonder Woman. I don't recall any other female incarnations, excepting the occasional generic wicked witch, but bear in mind that I was the strange little boy who watched The Wizard of Oz and rooted for Margaret Hamilton. I never cared for girls in pigtails and the little dog looked ratty. Anyway, I don't know what all that says about anything, and I had quite forgotten those tomboy fantasies until I read your piece. I hope this doesn't trigger any more peculiar memories. I did like those underwater ballets of Esther Williams, though, and I would certainly have taken a few laps with Ricardo Montalban.

               --Victor J. Banis

Wednesday July 6, 2005:

Hey, it's time to do the eI thing again, to see if I can scrape some creativity off what few brain cells avail themselves, and to etch them in phosphor and electricity. Or, I'll have diarrhea of the fingertips, whatever comes first. Here's a loc on eI20.

I remember years ago, Mike Glyer complained that he didn't want File 770 to become an obitzine, and I believe Charlie Brown started putting photographs on the cover of the glossy Locus because any news that was on the cover usually included a black banner. These days, with so many good and busy fans passing away, every zine becomes an obitzine, whether its editor likes it or not. We lose so many good friends, so we must remember them as we make new friends, and try to bring other people into the happy asylum that is fandom, gentle hint.…

Broadcast bloopers are always lots of fun. Probably the best known in Canada was on the good ol' CBC back in the ‘60s, when announcer Leon Mangoff gave the hourly network identification, and announced that we were watching "The Canadian Broadcorping Castration. Whoof!", which was Mangoff's reaction to what he'd just said, and the mike being cut off in mid-reaction.

Last week was historic in Canada, for gay men and women. The Canadian parliament made gay marriage legal, to reinforce gay marriage which is legal in eight of 10 Canadian provinces. I may be attending a few of these marriages in the near future; with this federal decision, some of our gay friends will be making the big decision shortly. Some couples will not get married, but they campaigned for this because they felt that having marriage as an option was another move towards equality for both sexual orientations.

I'd read that Mick Jagger was a fan, and that there's any number of famous types who don't like the fact they read SF get out, for fear it would hurt their careers being labeled a Trekkie or space cadet by the ignorant press. Jagger was smart enough to get his education before the Stones exploded into cultural icons, so I'm not surprised he enjoys SF. If the Stones looked ugly back then, I can only imagine how they look now. Last time they were in Toronto, and they're here fairly often, someone mentioned that their combined years totaled more than 300, and IMHO, Keith Richards looks like he's been dead for three years; no one's told the body it can lie down now… As good as the Stones are, I’ve had the feeling they’ve been coasting. “Hey, no sweat, we’re the Stones,” and they prance on the stage, wail away, and the people scream.

               --Lloyd Penney

"Artists," he said, "are people who say, 'I can't fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!'"
               -- Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

Will Eisner -- The Spirit Is Strong

By Ted White

This short (originally 1,130 words) piece was written for The Collecting Channel (dot com), as a daily feature article in early 1999. It was supposed to be only 1,000 words.

I met Will Eisner in the summer of 1980, while I was editing Heavy Metal, and Will came up to my office for a meeting and an interview. Like everyone I knew in the comics industry, I’d grown up on and revered The Spirit, and I had a healthy appreciation of Eisner’s talents and accomplishments. When I met the man I found him to be spry and lively despite his age, and a delight to listen to. (My interview with him appeared in Heavy Metal in 1981.)

In the late ‘80s I went to a local Florida convention, Tropicon, and to my surprise found Eisner also there. It seems that he’d been a Guest of Honor at a previous Tropicon, and enjoyed the convention so much that he’d come back. It was close to ten years since we’d previously met, but he remembered me and spoke to me from the stage when he was on a program item. Still sharp as a pin.

There is less discussion of what Eisner did with The Spirit in the piece which follows, and there is no mention of the strip’s appearances (as reprints) in Quality comics of the ‘40s, but, hey – I still ran over by 130 words.

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One of the niftiest features of Sunday comics in the 1940s was Will Eisner’s The Spirit. It wasn’t just that, as older readers realized, the storytelling and art were so darned good. It was the form of the Sunday comic. It came as a miniature comic book. Some newspapers published it already bound – glued – as a separate comic book. Others published the pages as part of their regular Sunday comics, giving kids the opportunity to cut and fold and assemble their own comic books. (And a few papers published the pages blown up to Sunday tabloid comics size.) This difference in formats made The Spirit stand out uniquely, and makes it uniquely collectible – since each newspaper, which carried it, published it slightly differently, and all put their own logo on the “cover.” Had Will Eisner done nothing else, this alone would ensure his place in comics history. But Eisner has done much more – and his legacy has been an enduring one.

Will Eisner is one of comics’ foremost influences, and for good reason – the man has been producing pioneering comics work since the very beginnings of the industry.

In the 1930s Eisner produced the strip “Hawks from the Sea” for the short-lived comic book Wow, where he made the acquaintance of Wow's editor, Jerry Iger. The comics field was then still in its infancy, and with Jerry and $35, he formed the very first comics production shop in New York City. This was a shrewd move and it gave many blossoming Golden Age comics luminaries their first breaks in the comics trade. (One was Jack Kirby. Artist Kirby collaborated with writer-designer Eisner to produce a comic strip version of The Count of Monte Cristo for the burgeoning foreign newspaper market.)

Deciding that the pulp magazine market was rapidly losing its momentum, Eisner and Iger saw a prime opportunity to expand their business by becoming active in packaging comic books for the independent publishers. By 1938 their shop employed around fifteen pencillers, inkers, and letterers who were turning out such noteworthy titles as Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. In 1939 the Register and Tribune Syndicate consulted with Eisner about the idea of developing a new concept: the “newspaper comic book,” a 16-page comics insert to be distributed by the major American newspapers.

While the idea died after only one issue, the experience helped to push Eisner toward his eventual goal and in 1940 he sold his share of the shop to Iger to begin work on a landmark in comics history, The Spirit. This developed into an incredibly atmospheric film noir-like comic strip featuring Denny Colt, the presumed-dead masked hero. Behind the mask he was simply a man who was pushed to the limits and beyond. Eisner created The Spirit for the new Sunday comics sections, which were running in many of the nation’s papers, and toward that end, he established his own shop of young comics professionals. This dynamic atmosphere helped to fuel the beginning careers of such important writers and artists as Wally Wood, Jules Feiffer, Lou Fine, Jerry Grandinetti, Alex Kotsky, and Bob Powell.

Never satisfied to stay in one place, Eisner began to expand the parameters of this new art form and his bold experiments with storytelling and content, lighting and composition, would be a significant influence on those who followed, including Harvey Kurtzman and Archie Goodwin.

The Spirit continued until 1951, when Eisner chose to devote his attention to the production of special comics – Army manuals and instructional aids for business and schools. During the ensuing 20 years he spent his time productively on a variety of projects. Eisner was always a canny businessman and he prospered at everything he put his hand to. But The Spirit was merely biding its time, awaiting its rediscovery by a new generation of comics aficionados, and in 1972 Denny Colt and Friends resurfaced in Warren Publishing's bimonthly The Spirit magazine. The reprinted stories had lost none of their impact over the years, and although the storyline was set in the 1940s, Eisner's powerful and dynamic style was still so strong that, unsurprisingly, The Spirit wasn't hopelessly dated, as so many of the other efforts from that period might appear to be.

Once again, Eisner served as an inspiring influence for a whole new crop of comics professionals who then began to push the envelope themselves when they realized the incredible potential of the comics field. But Eisner was not content to rest on his laurels; he moved into the field of graphic novels – and his were genuine graphic novels with the kind of stories and writing we expect of real novels. His graphic novels include A Contract with God, Buildings, Life on Another Planet, and a work rooted in the very beginnings of the comics trade, called The Dreamer. His definitive study of comics storytelling techniques, Comics and Sequential Art, is to be found on the shelf in virtually every comics professional's studio, and Kitchen Sink Press was reprinting The Spirit as a complete run.

Unfortunately, Kitchen Sink Press closed its doors on Friday 18 December 1998. This publisher, which had been publishing Will Eisner's work for the past 20 years (along with that of many other talented creators) will be sorely missed by both the industry and the fans. What this means for future reprints of The Spirit and Will Eisner's new work is unknown at this time -- hopefully a new publisher can be found.

Will has posted the following to the Will Eisner discussion group dealing with the question of the current situation with The Spirit and other projects: “I have not yet decided where to go with my properties. My relationship with Kitchen Sink has, I confess, spoiled me in that I have become used to a very close and personal relationship with my publisher. This is not easy to find in the present publishing trade environment. While I wait for the dust to settle I am still at work on three books of varied subject matter. As for the Spirit series I do not know yet which direction it will go. Clay Moore is doing a Spirit statuette... I don't think it is ‘an action figure’ but it should be out in August of this year [1999]. There has not yet been any discussion with any publishers about any continuation of the series of New Adventures[Spirit stories written and drawn by today’s creators] that Kitchen Sink started. I am trying to sort out, ah, the deleterious debris -- between trying to produce three new books that are work in progress and assessing a strategy for continuing publication of the Will Eisner Library, I have my hands full.”

Eisner continues as a creative force, and we are all his beneficiaries.

#

Well, that’s how the piece ended in 1999. Unfortunately, Will Eisner died on January 3rd, 2005 at the age of 87, following quadruple bypass heart surgery. Born in 1917, he lived a full and fruitful life.

In real life, as in Grand Opera, arias only make hopeless situations worse.

              --Kilgore Trout, in Kurt Vonnegut's Timequake

Living With Burroughs

By Stephen J. Gertz

Stephen Gertz and Earl Kemp. Courtesy Miriam Linna Collection. Mission Hills, CA, March 2005.

For one year I lived with the grandmaster of Beat literature, William S. Burroughs. I remember it well. It was 2002. Burroughs died in 1997. Though I have paranormal experiences quite often (generally confined to sexual encounters) this was not one of them. Although….

If the soul of an author resides within their text, their spirit haunts the manifestation of the text, the physical object that is the book itself. Handling and, I dare say, fondling the book can evoke the jinn within; the book as an Aladdin's lamp, the essence of a writer summoned forth with a caress.

I've had Marie Antoinette in my hands: I handled a set of beautifully bound volumes in full crimson morocco leather with elaborate gilt decoration and ornamentation with the armorial device of Antoinette; her copy, and I experienced an olfactory hallucination, her scent in my nostrils. I spent an afternoon with Mark Twain, examining and cataloging a copy of his A Dog's Tale with a particularly intimate and poignant inscription written in his hand; I felt he was at my side, whispering in my ear; we shared a cigar.

I've had many similar experiences but none more dramatic than the year I was surrounded by arguably the finest private collection of William Burroughs material in the world. Joe Zinnato, a friend and book dealer, had amassed the collection over a 30-year period but was now seeking capital to expand his holdings in another area of literary interest. We made a deal whereby Dailey Rare Books of Los Angeles, the rare book sanctuary I call home, would represent the collection's sale, an amalgamation of original manuscripts with corrections in Burroughs' hand; letters, scribbled scraps; the overwhelming majority of Burroughs' titles and editions found in Maynard & Miles' bibliography, many signed; over 150 magazines with Burroughs' contributions, all quite rare, many signed, with additional articles/stories of interest from other notable writers, including Charles Bukowski; Burroughs contributions to other books and anthologies; a great deal of ephemera including autograph post- and greeting cards, a boxful of private snapshots and more formal photographs all but one never published; LP records, videos, reel-to-reel and cassette tapes featuring Burroughs; original cover art by frequent collaborator, Brion Gysin; artwork by the literary artist himself; and a sheaf of letters from Paul Bowles to a third party discussing Burroughs, Tangier, Maurice Girodias, and more.

I was surrounded by 18 boxes representing not just the man's work but his life. And Burroughs' presence was palpable; El Hombre Invisible, the nickname bestowed upon him due to his tall, gaunt, ashen, spectral appearance--he looked like a hip undertaker; his life, indeed, a hip if painful undertaking--was in attendance. Like a kid in a candy store, I was in nirvana, Burroughs at my side as I examined each piece.

It isn't often that one has the opportunity to track a literary creation from conception, drafts, layouts, printing, publication and sales but here it was: the archive to Burroughs' TIME, one of his better "cut-ups."

Though Dadaist Tristan Tzara had experimented with the form, taking established text, deconstructing it by scissoring it into pieces and reassembling the scraps into a literary collage, it was Burroughs who fully explored and exploited the idea, one that began when artist and Burroughs' friend and frequent collaborator, Brion Gysin, accidentally cut through a newspaper he was using as under pad for an art piece he was cropping with a razor-knife. It was a natural extension to what Burroughs had done with Naked Lunch, which was written in pieces, scraps and shards of text over time, then typed into manuscript. The manuscript was then deliberately shuffled like a deck of cards; the text requiring a few shuffles before Girodias finally accepted it for publication. The shuffles were never random; this was not a chaotic, chance editorial exercise but rather the willful reorganization of text toward a determined, ordered end.

And so here was the original issue of Time Magazine Burroughs used with all the spaces where text had been cut-out; a 26-page signed, typed manuscript with corrections in his hand; another draft, a 14-page typed manuscript with autograph corrections; an 11-page typed manuscript/collage with title page; a 12-page photo-negative of the prior item with extra drawings and highlighting by Joe Brainard; a 32-page small mock-up of the book in ink by Brainard; the cover as prepared by Burroughs with art by Gysin; the publisher's ledger/account book with production costs, orders to whom and how many; and over 100 pieces of mail concerning ordering and publication, including the copyright certificate, and the complete list of where copies of the 1-10 edition and 1-100 edition were sold, providing a remarkable insight into the marketing of the book.

I have not been able to read Time Magazine since without reflexively juxtaposing text:

"J-Lo and Ben split over Weapons of Mass Destruction found in Martha Stewart Living With Alzheimer's Disease in the Sudan where civil war fought with box-office bomb Gigli poisoned well-water taints the oases bottom line Kofi Annan Lincoln's secret lover on Martha's 300-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets during K-Mart Blue-Light Special Forces operations in Afghanistan to flush Osama from movie theaters in Darfur where children are starving for entertainment the whole family can enjoy without retribution from death squads Martha claims ‘innocent!’”

Here's an 8x10 black and white photograph of Burroughs in Paris standing on rue Git-le-Coeur outside of the most famous fleabag-flophouse in literary history, the nameless joint otherwise known as The Beat Hotel by its eccentric guests, whom John De St Jorre in his history of the Olympia Press, Venus Bound, characterized as "a colorful collection of painters and prostitutes, jazz musicians and petty criminals, poets and hustlers, writers and junkies." Whoosh! I’m carried away on a magic carpet to my spiritual home; I've a room down the hall from Burroughs, picking goateed hipster lice in berets out of my hair while Burroughs, in the communal latrine, curses in his deadpan-ironic nasal monotone that octopus tentacles are strangling his bowels, that he'd give Jesus a blowjob for a decent shit, his cuckoo ca-ca clock clamorin' for constipation's end.

Another: Burroughs and Gysin superimposed over a section of Notre Dame cathedral taking their place as the stoned saints of Beat amongst the saints in stone bas-relief that adorn its façade.

And another, perhaps the most succinctly defining image of Burroughs ever, he at a construction site standing in front of a large sign: "DANGER."

I open the box of snapshots--over 60 color photos, many taken by Burroughs' bibliographer and friend, Barry Miles--and I'm immersed in Burroughs private life in Tangier as no other who didn't know him personally or view these photographs could be: WSB in a red bathing suit sunning himself on the roof of his apartment building--a startling image as he is almost always seen in his uniform: dark suit, white shirt and tie; Burroughs comfortably sitting between two of his Moroccan boy-toys, youngsters in full Arab drag with crossed swords in their belts, and Burroughs’s jinn whispers in my ear: "those junior janissaries of jism had Damascus steel in their shorts and lips made for mouthfuls of phallic mirth"; Burroughs sitting in front of his typewriter, caught in the act with Gysin standing at his side; and many, many others. I'm embarrassed yet thrilled by the intimacy; I'm a fly-on-the-wall spying into WSB's quotidian life.

I want to dive into the boxes of books but simple physics prevents me from jack-knifing into the library, so I take them out individually: a pristine copy of a first edition Naked Lunch in very fine dust jacket. Few realize that many of Girodias' Traveller's Companion paperbacks with their simple, uniformly designed printed green wrappers, were issued with djs. I pass my hand over the stylishly designed dj and, to my surprise and annoyance, Jack Kerouac shows up, dripping 100-proof ectoplasm. The guy needs to be seriously squeegeed. He’s a bloated, bleary wreck.

“What brings you here, Jack-o?” Bill politely asks.

“Stakin’ my claim, Bill, just stakin’ my claim.”

Apparently hung-over from a drinking session with Mom in the afterlife and desperate to shore-up his fading literary reputation, he starts riffing on his importance in the literary canon.

"On the Road is the archetype American novel, the quest for bountiful horizons, the car as modern-day horse galloping into flaming sunsets that never sink into the night, toward frontiers unfettered by geography, a road trip of the mind traveled on the double-laned mystic highway boundless and beautiful and fueled by Benzedrine; an American classic that captures--and continues to do so--the optimistic, fundamental American yearning for adventure, redemption and home that is just over the next hill if we have the courage to drive fast and forward. Hell, it so captured the American imagination that an early '60s T.V. show was based on it, Route 66 starring George Maharis and Martin Milner with a theme by Henry Mancini. Whad'ya think, Bill?"

"I'll let 'Unfortunately Straight Steve-arino' answer, ol' Jack." He gave me the nod.

"All you say is true," I began, "and On the Road certainly spawned a T.V. show but it was also responsible for every single piece-of-shit 'buddy' road movie ever made since to its eternal shame. What's more, methinks you a little too enamored by the sound of your own voice in print; you're the Thomas Wolfe of the Beat Generation, verbose 'til the reader wants to scream and I have bad news for you: like Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again. Your writing’s a combination of speed and Ex-Lax, projectile diarrhea of the mind. You weren't really a member of the Beat Generation, you were the prior generation’s last gasp, stuck in an idealized version of a bygone America, your Pre-WWII childhood tethering you unmercifully as you tried to break free of it and your mother.

"Billy-boy, in contrast, shucked all that. He rejected that America of down-home constipated consciousness, that childish yearning for a past that never was, that prolix, 19th century reminiscent novelistic style of yours out of time and out of gas for the Atomic Age. True, Naked Lunch is for many unreadable but so is James Joyce, for God's sake. As far as Naked Lunch never being adapted for television, that is all to it's credit. And while Cronenberg imaginatively adapted it for film, Naked Lunch has spawned not one idiotic movie after another as On the Road has. Billiam turned 20th century writing on its ear by sodomizing straight narrative up the Yazoo. Naked Lunch is not an American novel much less an American classic. It is, however, to its glory, a classic of world literature, transcending American parochialism to speak to the transnational, universal consciousness of the trickster renegade within us all that seeks to break the boundaries of the internal landscape. On theRoad is petroleum-fueled metal on wheels, a hip bumper-car that ultimately crashes into the walls of East and West Coast; Naked Lunch is a nuclear age powered rocket puncturing the sky, shooting into space to another world.

"You say you influenced pop-culture. True, but that was close to 50 years ago. Naked Lunch, as all great art--and the book is a work of art--though it made an immediate impact amongst the cognoscenti, had a delayed influence upon popular culture. Decades after its publication it would inspire the Punk movement, David Bowie, Kathy Acker, Philip K. Dick, Apple’s Steve Jobs, and many others; a who’s who list of poets, artists, novelists, filmmakers, etc. In 1972, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker named their new group Steely Dan, thereby becoming the first group, musical or otherwise, to be named after a dildo. Not just any dildo but the most famous dildo in all of world literature, Burroughs' keister-pleaser in Naked Lunch, and I chuckle every time I hear Steely Dan on the radio, wondering if station management has any awareness that their disc jockeys are announcing a song by the great dildo band, Fagen's lyrics archetypal examples of Burroughs' Dada-Dante-esque world.

"No one can read your Visions of Cody in its complete, posthumously issued edition without experiencing, to one degree or another, drooping eyelids. One may get nightmares, one may even experience nausea but no one, no way no how, can ever fall asleep reading Naked Lunch.

"But most of all, Jack, you commit the unpardonable sin of absolute humorlessness or at best humor without a trace of tangy, social bite. WSB's work, in contrast, overflows with tartly ironic, acid wit; this guy could do stand-up--certainly not in a typical Vegas lounge but in a nice, seedy roadhouse joint in purgatory, The Infernal Komedy Klub where over-the-top Dadaesque ironic burlesque routines are appreciated.

"I rest Bill's case."

"A little rough on ol' Jack, weren't you, Steve-o?" Burroughs dryly commented.

"He's dead, he can take it," I coolly replied. “The nerve of this uninvited juice-head, horning in on my literary séance!” I turned to Kerouac. “Hit the road, Jack.”

I swear I caught Kerouac posing in his mother's Maidenform bra swilling Jack Daniels before dematerializing in a puffy huff back to wherever he's now calling home.

Now another: one of only 90 copies of the giant, enclosed in custom wood portfolio edition of Seven Deadly Sins with 7 woodblock silkscreen prints 45X31 inches on white 2-ply museum board each signed and numbered, a few of which Joe had archivally mounted and framed. I've got them standing upright on the floor and the effect is as if Burroughs had a mini-cam implanted backward in his forehead and I'm watching streaming, screaming video of Bill's brain at work. I've got so much of this stuff around me, have become so well acquainted with Burroughs that we're now on a first name basis.

Christ! Here's a beautiful copy of the British "Digit" paperback edition of Junkie, a book that comes on the market about once every ten years and now fetches upward of $5K depending upon condition, an almost mythic edition that few have actually seen, the first edition "double Ace book" paperback almost common by comparison. Joe has wisely enclosed both editions in plastic sleeves; my salivary glands are in overdrive.

I open the boxes of magazines with WSB contributions, the overwhelming majority signed. I've never told Joe but I took all of them out of their meticulously organized order within the boxes and rolled in them: one of 50 copies of the offprint to Burroughs' Letter From A MasterDrug Addict to Dangerous Drugs; a copy of Big Table; Floating Bear; City Lights Journal; Cleft1, 2:4-7; Bulletin From Nothing; Insect Trust Gazette; Fruit Cup; Gay Sunshine; and hundreds more, including the rare Marijuana Newsletter 1:1,3.

OH, MY GOD! A 33-page original typed manuscript of his annotations to the catalogue of the Burroughs archive in Lawrence, Kansas--his hometown--containing inked corrections in his hand.

A Xerox typed manuscript of Port of Saints presented to Richard Aaron by Burroughs; unique because Burroughs never kept the original manuscript. Aaron provided a sworn, signed statement of provenance and circumstance to Joe. I'm looking the manuscript over and I realize that this is so radically different than the published edition that it constitutes an original unpublished manuscript. I’m one of maybe ten people in the world to have seen and read it.

There's a cryptic autograph scrawl of Burroughs' on Pennsylvania Railroad letterhead that reads: "At Prie Ricard [sic?] rooming with Indian boy--deformed genitals on the other (Gerard)--I was, perhaps, coming down with jaundice--any one can see suffering. Does he think I dislike him? Some one has come for the laundry. I can hardly drag myself around. Then I might put out the dog and the [?] that vowed to bite our [?] where we lay."

A Letter to the Editor of After Dark Magazine on Burroughs' letterhead that sets the record straight, as it were: "Correction: William Burroughs is not going straight [heterosexual]. He knows it. Wouldn't You?"

I'm touched by a Christmas card with a short, warm inscription signed "Bill”; odd evidence that Burroughs, for all his radical, kaleidoscopic prose and messenger from the underbelly persona, is at heart a nice, thoughtfully tender guy from the Midwest. An autograph postcard to a publisher passes through my hands.

Dig this: Veteran Sirens, a 17-1/2x23" painting by Bill. It's advanced primitive fingerpainting, and most would say, "I coulda done that," but they didn't. Burroughs did. Lookit! R. Crumb's Meet The Beats poster #2, one of five copies lettered A-E and signed by WSB. Listen! Original master 7" and 5" reel-to-reel tapes of Burroughs' audio collages, etc., including the master for the Call Me Burroughs LP; Bill's master audio cut-up of Dutch Schultz & Young Queer; Bill reciting Willie The Rat; the master of Bill reciting The Last Words of Hassan Sabha; much more to listen to--my ears are ringing!--not the least of which is a tape of Burroughs singing (!!!!!!!!) medleys of Marrakech music; he makes Yoko Ono sound like Barbra Streisand in comparison, and must be heard to be believed but believe it, I heard him.

I reach back into a box and take out The Cat Inside, one of 18 copies signed by Bill and Brion Gysin out of a total edition of 133 copies, and printed on fine Crisbrook paper, the entire book produced and published by the legendary Grenfell Press in 1986, the last collaboration between Burroughs and Gysin and certainly Burroughs' most sentimentally affecting work, written at a time when his personal and artistic maelstrom had somewhat settled and he could delight in the simple comfort of feline companionship and relate to the feline soul. Yet Burroughs was always--and remains, even after his death--the hippest cat on the scene. Bill's jinn leans over to me and whispers these words from the text, which can stand as a Beat Manifesto: "We are the cats inside. We are the cats who cannot walk alone, and for us there is only one place."

For Burroughs, that place, wherever it might have been in his head when he penned those lines, is in the literary firmament, his outlaw star burning through our polluted atmosphere to illuminate the post-modern human condition which may not be pretty but in the right light--Bill's light--can be seen in all its painfully dissonant beauty.

Epilogue

The dot.com bust pushed the big money into hiding, and institutions cried poverty. I couldn't sell the collection even at a dramatic discount to $225K. I packed it all back into the boxes, those corrugated cardboards filled with Aladdin's lamps. Joe has been selling the collection piecemeal over the last couple of years, and I often wonder if some lucky someone has taken any one of the items into their hands and lovingly rubbed it, thus releasing Bill's jinn for another one-on-one with El Hombre Invisible.

- - -

Special thanks to Joe Zinnato for help with this article; all Burroughs-related photography courtesy Joe Zinnato Collection.

On reading: "With my brains all fired up, I do the nearly impossible thing that you are doing now, dear reader. I make sense of idiosyncratic arrangements, in horizontal lines, of nothing but twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten Arabic numerals, and perhaps eight punctuation marks, on a sheet of bleached and flattened wood pulp!"

              --Kurt Vonnegut, intro to the collection Bagombo Snuff Box

Confessions of a Book-Cadger

By Richard Lupoff

Over the years, I’ve been a reviewer a lot of times. Originally in print—in various fanzines of the 1950s and ‘60s, later in professional magazines like Ramparts and Algol. I’ve reviewed books, fanzines, movies, and music. Somehow missed out on the restaurant and single-malt Scotch scenes, but I’d like to give one or both of those a whirl.

It’s surprisingly easy to get on reviewer lists. Hey, maybe I’m giving away a trade secret here. Don’t all jump on the bandwagon, kids. But if you write a letter on some kind of official-looking letterhead and ask to be added to the list of reviewers, most book publishers and record companies will accede. If in doubt, have your secretary, girl friend, boy friend, or unindicted co-conspirator call ‘em up for you. “This is Dennis Dinkelstein, administrative assistant to Ms. Estelle Hofmeyer here at KZQM in Tacoma. Ms. Hofmeyer is instituting a new book-review program. She is particularly interested in volumes devoted to gardening and snake breeding. Would you be so kind as to send her your recent titles Raising the Carnivorous Calla-Lily for Fun andProfit, and The Sex-Life of the Egyptian Hooded Cobra. Also, would you please send Ms. Hofmeyer all future volumes of similar nature.”

Not every time, but more often than not this works like magic. Sometimes they send catalogs of their forthcoming titles and reviewers’ checklists for you to send back. Sometimes they just send books. Same thing for records. Back in the LP era I got on a bunch of mailing lists. In a good week I would receive 150 albums of rock & roll, country-western, folk, classical, or show tunes. In a bad week I would receive more. Of course I got a lot of trash in the mail, but I got a lot of great stuff, too. In 1991 Pat and I decided to have our house renovated and had to raise a lot of cash to pay for the new plumbing, wiring, tiling, and so forth.

I sold my LP collection to a local record dealer, made a bunch of bucks that went into home repairs, and started over collecting CDs,

Long after I gave up reviewing music—too much work for too little pay—I would still receive those heavy corrugated cardboard packages in the mail. Once you get on the mailing list, it’s almost impossible to get off, but eventually they do purge their mailing lists and I don’t get music from ‘em any more. Alas.

Although I’ve cut way down on book reviewing, too—too much work for too little pay—I still do a little of the stuff, mostly on radio. And I still get books. Usually the ones I ask for, but occasionally something totally wonderful and totally unexpected will pop into my mailbox.

A recent example is The Mayor of MacDougal Street, by Dave Van Ronk with Elijah Wald. It’s Van Ronk’s autobiography, put together and polished by Wald after Van Ronk’s death. It is a wonderful book, amazingly like a fannish memoir.

This is not surprising. As Van Ronk points out, the overlap of science fiction fandom, radical politics, and the folk music revival was extensive. The book is full of people we knew and loved: Dick Ellington, Jock Root, Tom Condit, Lee Hoffman, Larry Shaw, Harlan Ellison, Chuck Freudenthal, etc. There’s even a lovely photo of Lee Hoffman with Van Ronk. It’s undated but it looks like 1957 to me.

I don’t think I ever met Van Ronk, which is really weird considering how many mutual acquaintances we had and how often we were in the same scene—but I guess never quite at the same moment. I’m really sorry I never met the guy. Or maybe I did in some busy scene and failed to take note. My loss. Lee Hoffman thinks I did meet Van Ronk, or at least that I probably did. There were a lot of fannish gatherings in the era Van Ronk writes about, and a lot of the folk clubs and coffee houses where he hung out and performed were also, at least occasionally, recognized as fannish dives. A lot of us spent a good deal of our time in a variety of chemically induced dazes in those days, too. So in all likelihood Lee is right. But if I met Van Ronk I failed to take note of the event.

What a pity. He seems like a fantastic person. And very, very much his own man. He was an unrepentant Trotskyite. Good Grief! When I was involved in East Coast fandom in the 1960s, John Boardman was known as The Last Surviving Stalinist in New York. There were assorted socialists, anarchists, Wobblies, and God-knows-what-else, but I never realized we still had at least one Trotskyite among us. As for science fiction, near the end of the book Van Ronk says something like, “Science fiction is brain-rot, but it‘s good brain-rot.”

The book starts, by the way, with a brief chapter on Van Ronk’s childhood—his absent father, hardscrabble Irish mother, and Catholic school miseducation. But the whole rest of the book concerns the 1950s and ‘60s. Van Ronk lived until 2002, but there’s nothing there after 1970. Wald suggests that Van Ronk felt the scene that interested him simply disappeared after 1970. He may have been right, but I wish he had continued. The guy had a great flair for words. Well, no surprise, he was a talented songwriter. And he had a great, fannish sensitivity and worldview. I wish he’d gone on and written about the 1970s, ‘80s, ‘90s, and the dawning of the glorious new millennium in which we presently dwell.

But I’m not going to dwell on what isn’t in the book. I’m talking about what is in it. Scene after scene and person after person whom you know, or whom you will feel you know after you’ve read it. By gum, this is the best book I’ve read in months if not years. Pick up a copy and settle in for a treat.

The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.

              --Kurt Vonnegut, Sirens of Titan

Walking Down Dave Van Ronk Street

By Charles Freudenthal

Introduction

After contributing some minor tidbits to Dave Van Ronk's autobiography, The Mayor of MacDougalStreet, coauthored by Elijah Wald and published after Dave's death, I remembered some anecdotes which were not in the book and which might entertain his friends and fans.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who knew Van Ronk or is interested in the great "folk music boom" of the fifties. (From the horse’s mouth!) Did you know that Peter, Paul and Mary were almost Peter, Dave and Mary? Read all about it!

There are many pages about Lee Hoffman and Caravan. (Blind Rafferty, a Caravan editorialist, was Dave Van Ronk.)

Van Ronk's Feud

The feud between Van Ronk and Dick Ellington was entirely one sided. It didn't exist as far as Ellington was concerned. It came about in this manner.

The Dive was a sort of Slan Shack on the corner of 103rd St. and Riverside Drive in Manhattan (circa 1955/56). We had a couch in the living room on which crashers used to sleep. The rule was a guest could stay three months and then move on to make room for another needy person. (I am not really sure of the time interval.)

Before he started making money as a jazz/folk musician, Dave lived very poor. He stayed three months and then Dick asked him to leave. Somehow Dave thought the rules shouldn't apply to him and he got very huffy. The upshot was he never forgave Dick which was unfair because it was a house rule.

Dave as Capo

This is a story Dave told us one night at the Dive when we were all passing the jug. (Does anybody remember 1950s Vino Rosso?)

Dave was 6 foot 2 inches tall. This gave him a certain status amongst his peers. I wouldn't say the Queens adolescents he hung out with were "ganged up," but let us say some of them began to contemplate activities of a more than recreational nature. When Dave found things getting a bit heavy, he sidled out of that company and discovered the Village. He never looked back. His history in the Village is narrated at great length in his autobiography, The Mayor of MacDougal Street.

Axel's Castle

Dave and Richie Fox (an abstract expressionist artist) rented a loft on Monroe Street, below what would become "the East Village". (The name Axel's Castle came from a story by Villiers de L'isle-Adam.) Later, I shared the rent to have a Manhattan pad. (I worked out on Long Island. No car.) Lofts at that time were much cheaper than apartments with the same area.

Lofts have a certain cache in New York. They represent the Bohemian life!

I have to my own satisfaction discredited the myth that this loft had once been occupied by Norman Mailer. He certainly had a loft of this type in mind when he wrote Advertisements For Myself.

The great electricity caper

I wasn't living in Axel's Castle very long before I discovered our electricity was being ripped off from a neighbor. I had become used to a raffish life, but this was going rather far.

The previous downstairs neighbor had let Dave and Richie tap their power from an outlet in his bedroom. (This outlet and the invasive tap were hidden by a curtain.) Nobody had informed the new tenant of this cozy arrangement. We began to worry about what would happen when the victim discovered he was paying for our juice too! What to do?

When the neighbor downstairs gave an open party, Richie inveigled his way in. (Dave was too huge and I was too chicken.) When no one was looking, Richie unplugged the cord and Dave rapidly reeled it up.

Dave Van Ronk

Sandwiched between two issues of Lee Hoffman’s music fanzine Caravan are Dave Van Ronk and Lee Hoffman, photographed in New York by Photo-Sound Associates in 1957. Photo courtesy Lee Hoffman Collection. Caravan cover scans courtesy Robert Lichtman Collection.

I will finish with a quote from Dave from p.63 of his autobiography:

"At that point (...i.e., the first appearance of Lee Hoffman's Caravan ...), there was a great deal of overlap between folk fans, the fringe left, and the science fiction crowd--all three offered new, interesting ways of looking at the world and a chance to mingle with like-minded souls who were equally frustrated with the monochrome oppressiveness of Eisenhower America."

- - -

Special thanks to Lee Hoffman, Robert Lichtman, and Richard Lupoff for help with this article.

I couldn't survive my own pessimism if I didn't have some kind of sunny little dream.

              -- Kurt Vonnegut

Into the Abyss
A Memoir

By Thomas P. Ramirez

I should have known the minute I got home late on that snowy December afternoon that something was up. My wife Fern’s expression – rapt and excited – was warning enough.

The year was 1960, and I was in the sixth year of my schoolmaster shtick, teaching grade 6 at Franklin School, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. I was returning to the little cubbyhole we called home, a house Fern and I had built with our own four little paddies.

“What’s up, kiddo?” I asked when she began jumping around, waving this letter at me.

“Wonderful news, honey,” she chirped, “the most wonderful news in the world.”

Well, hotcha , I thought, this has gotta be something.

The letter was from Scott Meredith, my literary agent at the time. I had been expecting a check for a sex yarn he’d placed with Rogue (the Hamling karma already unwittingly in place), so why all the commotion? Had some cluck clerk made a boo-boo and added some extra zeros?

And while Fern didn’t normally open my mail – The expected check. What kind of a hoopen-socker Christmas might we have in store? It would’ve definitely been Bob Cratchit if it was left up to my teacher’s salary.

“... After reading your last in which you expressed a desire to go full time,” Scott (AKA Joe Elder) wrote, “I placed a call to the Model editor out in Chicago (there was no Model, there was no Chicago, more code stuff in their keep-Ramirez-in-the-dark program), and we had a long discussion about your progress. I told him about your letter, and the upshot of all this is that he wants you to do a book a month for him. I told him that you were giving up a fairly lucrative job to go full time, and so I got him to up your rate to $1,000 per book — $800 on acceptance, $200 on publication. In short, a guaranteed $12,000 per year (not exactly correct – Scott took $100 commission) or possibly more, and that ain’t hay.”

Well. Wrens could have nested in my mouth. Twelve grand a year? Double my crummy teacher’s salary? Lord God Almighty!

I put my arms around Fern and we just hugged for a long while. Then we sat down for supper with the kids, both of them bewildered by the sappy, excited smiles on our faces. ”We’re gonna be rich, kids,” I told them. “Just wait and see.”

Later, after Vianne and Gregg were down for the night, we discussed the proposal hard and long. Did we really want to do this? I had some small equity in my teacher’s pension fund, did I want to lose that? Did I really, in my heart of hearts, want to turn my back on teaching? I’d been in the teaching harness for a long time; it would be one helluva drastic change. And what if I fizzled, what if I couldn’t turn out a book a month? Writer’s block? Even though that dread bugbear had never hit, there was always a first time. And what would we fall back on then?

And while I was relatively happy teaching and was well regarded by students and peers alike, I still had other fish to fry. Pounding my decrepit Remington weekends and evenings, I was writing/selling occasional short stories, even a couple of try-out sex books for Model, and the upcoming Monarch. But it wasn’t enough. I dreamed constantly of one day chucking it all and going full time.

During those ancient times teachers’ salaries were strictly starvation alley; it wasn’t until the mid-‘70s that they began creeping up. In fact, had I finished the 1960-61 school year, my yearly income would have zoomed to the princely sum of $5,800!

As for the homo novels, I sat in a bar one long evening with a couple gay friends and took pages of notes. Voila! Now I could write gay.

 

One of my favorite Greenleaf Classics titles was Barefoot Among the Virgins [by Steve Savage, GC346, 1968] that was actually based on one of Dylan Thomas’s besotted reading tours in the U.S. If Peter DeVries got away with it in Reuben, Reuben, why couldn’t I? I went nuts with this magnum opus, writing the archest of exposition, sentences that went around the block, pedantic conversation, and cutesy-cutesy fuck scenes. I even wrote Dylanistic poetry. (Great cover by Harry Bremner!) I thought it came off rather well. But, other than a check, nary a peep from the far west.

Strange turnabout with these masterpieces: for once the Nightstand title mangler used some of my own titles, Barefoot being the first. Others were In Search of Lust [by Steve Savage, GC418, 1969], The Daemon Lover [by Steve Savage, GC387, 1969], Puritan’s Progress [by Steve Savage, GC410, 1969], Night of The Voluptuaries [by Gage Carlin, LL827, 1970], and Loins for Loan [by Steve Savage, GC398, 1969]. Breakthrough!

Fast forward to June1965 and the FBI visit. Came a call from Scott Meredith to the effect that the feds were moving in, and to expect a visit soon. When they called, I was to tell them absolutely nothing – be polite, but answer no questions. I got the runs, but fast. What could they do to me? I was assured nothing would happen – Hamling had the best lawyers in the nation; they’d cover my ass big time.

Shot across the bow. Let the witch hunt begin!

#

Fern and Tom Ramirez with springoffs, Gregg and Vianne. Christmas 1965.

As predicted, I got ringy-dingy-number-one a week later. The FBI agent identified himself and told me he was calling from Milwaukee. He had a few questions to ask me.

 

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I have representation and have been advised not to answer any of your questions.”

The Fart, Belch, and Itch guy just about exploded. “You mean you’re refusing to talk to an agency of the U.S. government?”

Very courteously: “I most definitely am.”

“Well, we’ll just see about that,” he stormed. “I’m driving out to your house and I’ll have a tape recorder with me to take down your exact words as you refuse to answer my questions.”

“Fine, I’ll set up my recorder and get our conversation on tape also.”

He was at my door 30 minutes later. Milwaukee, hell; he was in the neighborhood all the time. Typical FBI; the agent might have caught me off guard had he suddenly appeared at my door. But his dumb phone call gave me time to gather my wits.

We sat in my huge, lovely, porno-paid-for living room, he in one chair, I in another. I had my reel-to-reel humming, a fresh tape at ready. But I never saw any trace of his recorder.

He was there perhaps ten minutes. He asked questions. I didn’t answer. He jotted in his notebook. Another question, no answer. Finally he got desperate, and get this – actually said, “Tell me, Mr. Ramirez, how would you describe yourself?”

Give me a break, Dad. “I’m sitting right here,” I said. “How would you describe me?” More frenzied jotting. He must have been paid by the word.

“How tall are you, how much do you weigh?”

No answer.

“Will you tell me about your schooling? High school? College?”

“I’m sure you have ways of uncovering that information.” My coolness amazed me. Had I not had advance warning, it would have been a different scenario completely.

No raised voice, no threats. Finally he picked up his briefcase, put away his notebook, and calmly said, “Good day, Mr. Ramirez.”

I escorted him out to our large circular drive. “If you head in toward the garage,” I offered, “then back up, you can drive out without any problem.” That was the sum total of the information I provided the FBI that day.

End of my first face-to-face with the FBI. I would have another some 20 years later, when I lived in Florida. Same thing. Stupid, stupid. And where did they find these ninnies? He even carried a bulging manila folder, which, I assumed, contained the Calvano files. I regret to this day that I didn’t ask if I might scan my rap sheets. I tend to be slow at times.

Mr. FBI had come to inquire about my telephone questions to the Jacksonville Naval Base, queries regarding underwater submarine escape tactics. This for a merc book I was writing at the time. “I’m a writer,” I told him. “I’m doing research for a novel.”

“Oh,” he said, and was almost immediately gone. That time a phone call would have sufficed. But no, waste government money by driving 200 miles to ask that single, dumb question. And we wonder how 9-11 came to pass.

Following the Wisconsin visit, there wasn’t repercussion one. I never had truck with Hoover’s stooges until a year later, and this only second-hand, behind the scenes in Houston.

In the meantime the books kept pouring out, one or two a month.

A year later, on July 5, 1966, the other shoe fell. I received two phone calls, one from Scott Meredith telling me that I would be receiving a call from a Los Angeles lawyer named Stanley Fleishman, who was with Nightstand. More than that he would not say. That afternoon Fleishman was on the phone. The gist of it: he wanted me to fly to Houston, Texas for a conference in regard to an obscenity trial involving some of my novels. Involved, hell! There were seven books cited, and four of them - Passion Carousel [SR543, 1965], Orgy Club [PB833, 1964], Swap Sect [NB1738, 1965 (don’t those titles just kill you?), and Shame Hunger [PB850, 1964] were mine.

All expenses would be paid and I would be away three days. What would the conference entail? Just a minor point – we’d like you to appear as a witness for the defense. Oh, golly gee, I do that every day! Terror didn’t take a holiday. I was assured that I did not have to testify, that decision would be left entirely to me. But that he and my publisher were hoping that I would. Sounded like a threat to me.

Panic time. However, Fleishman was most persuasive and I agreed to come to Houston.

I flew out of Oshkosh on August 7 th at 4 PM and arrived in Houston by 8 PM. As I got off the plane, and the Texas heat hit me, I got a quick descent-into-hell feeling. How could people exist in heat like this? A cab waiting, I was shortly deposited at the Rice Hotel (now gone), one of the city’s finest. I checked in, dumped my baggage, and immediately called Fleishman.

I was a bit surprised when I met Stanley downstairs. He was short – perhaps five feet tops – and though I never asked, must have suffered from polio or some such in his youth. He used a crutch under his right arm and moved with surprising agility. Stocky, with a large head, I couldn’t help but think gnome as we shook hands. He greeted me effusively in a deep, crackling voice, and I liked him from the start.

</

Fern and Tom Ramirez, Christmas 1966 in living room of the house that porn built. The Houston trial is only a bad memory.