(NOTE: I wrote this piece for Terry Ross’s Black Lamb in 2008) I graduated from Yale University in 1964, and in an election year in which both candidates are Yalies who were members of Skull and Bones, some of my friends who think of Yale as a training-ground for Elite Eastern Snobs (which it certainly
Hurricane Carol hit Cape Cod at the end of August, 1954, when I was eleven. It was a bad storm, but our family’s big shingle-style house in Quissett had been built in the 1880s by my great-grandfather, using local carpenters who doubled as boatwrights and took bad weather as the norm. And unlike the last
True Colors We white folks aren’t white. We’re pink, shading into beet red when we’re angry or drunk or both, tan when we’ve spent some time in the sun, gray when we’re dying, and olive drab when we’ve been dead for awhile. Only Vladimir Putin is really white, but he’s a vampire, not a human
Not too long ago, for the first time in awhile, I got called in for jury duty. I used to be summonsed about every two years, ever since I settled permanently in Manhattan back in 1972, because I was self-employed and Da System assumed I didn’t have a real job. My long break came about
Takahashi felt a twinge in his aging back as he raked the sand in the rock garden. It was midmorning, and he had been up since sunrise, first doing zazen in his cell for an hour, then eating a frugal breakfast of rice balls and cold tea in the refectory before going into the forest
I was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1965, and after training, I spent eighteen months on an eerie little post in the much-trampled Palatinate area of West Germany, near the French border. I was an MP assigned to a company whose motto was “Serving Proudly on Freedom’s Frontier”. Its mission was to provide security
GOLDEN BULLSHIT In the late 1960s, one of my best friends from prep school and college turned out to be living near me and my then-wife Louise, on New York’s Upper West Side. He had been an extremely talented painter with an interest in Biblical subjects, which he treated in a crypto-Cubist style entirely of
A HERETICAL PROPOSAL This piece first appeared in Black Lamb in 2006 Americans, as usual, are facing a religious crisis. Between 75% and 90% of us, depending on which unreliable poll you read, believe there’s a divinity which shapes our ends (thank you, WS). But our various systems for approaching that divinity seem to have
GROWING UP RACIST I wrote this piece while Barack Obama was President. Now the White House is infested with Donald Trump. Faulkner was right. -May, 2018 I’m a good ol’ Rebel soldier And that’s just what I am. For this fair land of freedom I do not give a damn. I hate the Yankee nation
The Pig Who Ate Too Well That summer we were living on the rez-de-chaussée of an old building in Montparnasse. The building was four storeys high, with one apartment on each floor and a fifth in the basement, where the elderly landlady, Madame Chaumier, lived with her Vietnamese pot-bellied pig Rémy. The black pig was