Angela Davis caused a UMass free speech controversy in the 70's.
Nationally respected free speech advocate Harvey Silvergate weighed in on the recent free speech controversy at UMass over the cancelled invitation of a leftist terrorist. Not surprisingly, Silvergate supports the free speech advocates, but also scolds campus liberals for their failure to defend free speech for non-leftists on those occasions in the past when they were shouted off the stage. As Silvergate says in the Boston Phoenix:
If free speech is what gives value to the campus "marketplace of ideas," UMass Amherst would long ago have gone bankrupt....
For freedom of speech to function, its supporters must be willing to apply it equally, especially to speech with which they disagree. Though the Levasseur incident saw faculty asserting its academic freedom rights — as the UMass administration kowtowed to outside pressure — it also exposed the professoriate as one-sided. Defending only controversial speech on one half of the political divide is a formula for hollowing out this time-tested constitutional guarantee and academic axiom.
In the late 1970s, Angela Davis, a Communist activist, was invited to speak at UMass. The administration — equally at odds with First Amendment freedoms as the current leadership, but leaning to the political right — forced Davis to pay for her own security. It's only a matter of time before what goes around comes around.
There is a certain irony, then, in seeing a faction of the UMass faculty appear to come to the rescue of free speech and academic freedom, knowing that the same faculty cannot be counted on when political speakers whose views they disapprove of are threatened. And so, when dealing with that hotbed of censorship known as UMass Amherst (faculty, administration, and even many students, alas), not to mention the governor and the US Parole Commission, all one can do is hearken back to Shakespeare, who succinctly observed (and we paraphrase): a pox on all their houses.
Never Forget
UMass put up this display to honor the anniversary of the fall of Germany's Berlin Wall.
It is a rare that we have a chance to test political theories with the same rigorous precision that is used in the hard sciences. However that opportunity emerged after World War II when Germany was divided into two nations, each with the identical history and culture, the only difference being that one half embraced free markets and the other embraced socialism. Forty years later, the capitalist half of Germany was one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations in the world, while the socialist half was a poverty stricken police state.
It's Coming
As it becomes increasingly apparent that the incompetence of the Republicans under Bush is only being surpassed by the incompetence of the Democrats under Obama, the disillusionment and disgust of the public with the two major parties is reaching historic levels. Hopefully we are hurtling towards the so-called "libertarian moment" when the American people will finally decide, "To hell with the liberals, to hell with the conservatives, let's choose freedom instead!" Predicting the arrival of this happy day is the hiply influential business magazine Fast Company:
If the two-party system is ever going to be seriously challenged, this is the moment. The GOP, the stall-tactic party, is reeling. The Democratic administration is struggling to turn around the economy. And across the country, creative, engaged folks are increasingly feeling politically homeless. More Americans consider themselves independents (39%) than Democrats (33%) or Republicans (22%) -- and the gap is widening.
Who will fill that void? The best third-party contender already exists. The Libertarians, like so many independents and disaffected Democrats and Republicans, are fiscal conservatives and social liberals -- and no one has yet built a lasting coalition out of this growing force....Seize the moment, Libertarians. You're not going to get a better one.
Around Amherst
Some tombstones make you wish you knew something about the lives behind the stones, such as this one in West Cemetery.
"She Went Out in a Blaze of Glory!"
Is there a reader of this blog who knows something about this person?
I can't believe I never saw this before! It's a list that Jack Kerouac once wrote of the "essentials" of writing which he called Belief and Technique for Modern Prose. Here's the list with my comments after each one based upon my own writing experiences.
Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
I used to keep notebooks and I agree they are essential to the beginning writer, even if you are writing only to yourself. I lost all my old notebooks, which is a shame.
Submissive to everything, open, listening.
Yes, especially listening. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to listen. Try never get drunk outside your own house.
He failed to follow this advice and so did I. Be in love with your life.
Absolutely essential. Something that you feel will find its own form.
I've often had the experience that I don't really have a clear idea of how I want something to turn out, but then discovered that it will find a form of its own if I will only begin.
Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind.
I'm not sure exactly what this means, but I agree.
Blow as deep as you want to blow.
Wise metaphor. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind.
Yes, go as deep as you can. The unspeakable visions of the individual.
Writing is a solitary activity and only you know what those visions are. No time for poetry but exactly what is.
Not true. You can tell what is and still take time to be poetic. Visionary tics shivering in the chest.
The only way to let them out is to write them out. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you.
Drugs will take you there, but then you don't feel like writing. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition.
No rules should restrain a first draft, but eventually words have to have structure and form. Like Proust be an old teahead of time.
Proust was a teahead? I think he means get into reflecting on your own past like it was a drug. Remember the past is the only pure resource you have. Telling the true story of the world in interior monologue.
We all have that monologue going in our heads - so write it out!
The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye.
Statements like this is what comes of hanging out with Dr. Leary. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.
Writing that doesn't please yourself won't please anybody else. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea.
More of Leary's mischief.
Accept loss forever.
Okay, but only if I can accept gain forever too! Believe in the holy contour of life.
There is a holiness to life, and you know what I'm talking about, even if you pretend to yourself that you don't. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind.
That's the challenge really, to get it on paper as good as it is in your head. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better.
Don't tell: Show. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in your morning.
It is worth remembering that every day is irreplaceable and unrepeatable. No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language and knowledge.
I write everything that is relevant to me, without holding back due to phony standards of propriety or cultural fear. An honest appraisal of reality is never shameful. Write for the world to read and see your exact pictures of it.
How exact the picture I create with words depends on my own inspiration and talent, but it's all out there for the world to read and judge. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form.
Be the hero of your own movie. For better or worse, I think America has made more great movies than great books. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness.
Alone in the dark our true character is all we have. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better.
Maybe not the crazier the better, but crazy is still good. You're a Genius all the time.
Thanks, but that attitude might not inspire the best revisions!
Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven.
I guess I'll write my earthly thought-movies and the angels can read what they will.
Crime Watch
Politicians are worse than thieves. At least when thieves take your money, they don't expect you to thank them for it. - Walter Williams
Tis the Season
I see they installed armrests on the benches in Northampton's Coolidge Park to prevent the homeless from sleeping on them.
I also see they're putting up the Christmas lights.
Well if you have no place to sleep at least you can admire the lights.
March On
Surfing around I stumbled upon how Amherst College went crazy photographing the Amherst 250th birthday parade that was held several weeks ago. I must admit it was a great day, despite the rain. Here's a sampling from their photo essay:
State Representative Ellen Story.
Congressman John Olver, who seems to be everywhere these days.
Amherst politicos Stephanie O'Keefe and Gerry Weiss.
I like it when someone sends me a picture from a concert I went to years ago. Here's Jack Cassady of Hot Tuna at the Music Inn in Lenox, Ma. on September 5, 1976.
I have to laugh over the details of the arrest last weekend of Springfield political villain Frankie Keough. He got busted for breaking into his former second home in Rhode Island (odd how so many "public servants" in Springfield can afford second homes) to reclaim furniture he said belonged to him. Actually the house and all of its contents had been sold to a buyer weeks earlier. As you would expect from anything involving Keough, there was a bizarre twist to the crime, as reported in the Springfield Republican:
A Charlestown police report states a U.S. Fish and Wildlife investigator spotted a pickup truck in front of the house with two men inside. When the official approached, one took off into the woods and never reappeared.
The police report states Keough offered a curious story: a black male whom he had never met appeared at the remotely located property and offered to help. However, Kelly said Keough told police the good Samaritan was a Narragansett Indian who lives in the woods nearby, an associate of another local named “Thunderbolt,” with whom police are acquainted
So was the lightfooted accomplice "a black male" or a Narragansett Indian? And why run for the woods in a panic if he was just a helpful stranger? Hmmm, how much do you wanna bet, were it ever to become known (which I doubt) that we would recognize the name of Keough's accomplice?
Funny how these former Springfield power players keep surfacing near the scenes of their crimes. Anthony Ardolino sightings have become commonplace around Springfield, and flower fans have been repeatedly startled to encounter Gerry Phillips. You would think considering how publicly humiliated they were, that they would relocate to an area where they are unknown. Yet it seems they are unable to avoid revisiting the scenes of their crimes. Once upon a time, none rode higher than Frankie Keough. In fact, people in a position to know have told me that what is commonly called "The Albano Era" would more accurately be called "The Keough Era" because it was really Keough who was calling most of the shots when Mike Albano was mayor. I'm told that hardly a morning went by when Keough did not stop into the mayor's office on his way to the homeless shelter he ran, according to the Feds, as a combination personal slush fund, free furniture store and slave labor pool. From what I've been told, Keough was not stopping in to see Albano for friendship's sake (although Frankie was the good friend of everyone who mattered in Springfield, from Richie Neal on down). Keough was there to set policy.
In the world Keough once occupied, all that mattered was who you knew, or as Frankie himself once put it, "it's all about the relationships." Now as a disgraced ex-con, he doesn't know anybody anymore, at least no one who will risk helping him publicly. In the old days, Keough could get away with just about anything, since those who were supposed to be serving as watchdogs either looked the other way or else wanted to get in on the action themselves. Keough must have thought it would never end, but thanks to the FBI, it did. Unfortunately, too many of his cohorts in city government made out like Thunderbolt the black Indian and never got caught.
But there is a rough kind of justice to the world, and a tendency for people to get what they deserve in the end. Someday everyone who destroyed Springfield will be exposed for what they are, and may that day come soon. But in Keough's case, it already has, since having lost his fake respectability, all that now remains of Frankie Keough is the essence of what he always was - a common thief.
Last Chance
Today was the last day to register to vote in the primary phase of the special election to replace Ted Kennedy, as seen on this UMass billboard.
Too bad there are no good candidates to vote for on the Democrat side.
Jack Frost Comes Calling
Oh no, time to get out the scraper!
Jack Frost works only in white, but always creates a delicate beauty.
For the few remaining green plants, Jack Frost's art brings the kiss of death.
Jack Frost by Gabriel Setoun
The door was shut, as doors should be, Before you went to bed last night; Yet Jack Frost has got in, you see, And left your window silver white.
He must have waited till you slept; And not a single word he spoke, But pencilled o'er the panes and crept Away again before you woke.
And now you cannot see the hills Nor fields that stretch beyond the lane; But there are fairer things than these His fingers traced on every pane.
Rocks and castles towering high; Hills and dales, and streams and fields; And knights in armor riding by, With nodding plumes and shining shields.
For, creeping softly underneath The door when all the lights are out, Jack Frost takes every breath you breathe, And knows the things you think about.
He paints them on the window-pane In fairy lines with frozen steam; And when you wake you see again The lovely things you saw in dream.
Okay people, just one more day of nostalgia as we look at these old reviews I wrote.
Pirates of the Caribbean.
I finally understand this current pirate craze thanks to seeing the Disney film Pirates of the Caribbean a few weeks ago. I saw it in an interesting setting too, the University of Massachusetts on Halloween.
The film was preceded by a quite entertaining costume contest. A controversy erupted when a couple arrived totally naked, intending to compete as Adam and Eve, but they were not allowed to be contestants. The judges ruled that since this was a costume contest, and the couple had arrived stark nude, they technically had shown up without a costume and were therefore disqualified. The female, who was carrying an apple, as all Eve's should, protested that the fruit constituted a costume. The judges disagreed, ruling that the apple was merely a prop, not a costume. On the other extreme a person showed up in a tuxedo, declaring himself to be a nudist on strike.
The worst costume was presented by a person who came onstage wearing nothing but a pair of pants and declared himself a "premature ejaculation" because "I just came in my pants." The audience booed, but with a grin on most faces as they did so. The winner of the grand prize (a color TV) was (surprise) someone dressed as a pirate. Second prize (a CD player) went to a football-player type in a black baby-doll teddy.
As for the movie itself I liked it like I was a little kid. After all the dreary nihilist dramas and frat-boy level farces that pass for entertainment out of Hollywood these days, it was refreshing to see something fun and exciting that had heroes you could cheer for and villains to sneer at. As for the fascinating performance of star Johnny Depp, I concur with the opinion of Roger Ebert who wrote of Depp that "his performance is original in its every atom. There has never been a pirate, or for that matter a human being, like this in any other movie." Of course I won't be participating in any "Talk Like a Pirate" days or any of the other cultish rituals that are forming around this film, but it certainly won me over and I suggest you go see it immediately. Especially if it's preceded by a costume contest.
Staind
Congratulations to the band Staind (above) whose members include people from Springfield, for having another number one album. Personally I'm mostly turned off by Staind's dreary music, which sounds to me as if it's geared to reflect the bitter feelings of the children of divorce, but hey, I like to see hometown boys do good in any field.
People used to say that the Grateful Dead were the ugliest looking rock band, but that title has definitely been taken by the guys of Staind, and despite the music industry's increasingly image centered ways, it doesn't seem to have hurt them any. In fact it may be part of their appeal, their ugliness makes them appear more "real" or something. Ironically, at the time Staind was struggling in the Valley music scene while trying to get started, few of the supposedly ultra-hip among the area scenesters recognized their potential. Just another example I guess of the fans trumping the critics.
Neil Young's Live Rust
Continuing to review albums over twenty years after their release, the hot disc in my CD player these days is Neal Young's Live Rust. Based on a San Francisco performance from late 1978, this record is about as good a live Neal Young greatest hits album as you could hope for. Nearly all the classics from Young's first ten years are here, representing an era of creativity that he was never quite able to match again.
Writers (and that means critics) tend to be drawn to Neal Young because of his great lyrics, which when they work are as poetic and emotionally effective as any songwriter around. Sometimes Neal overdoes the innocent kid pose (as on "I am a Child" or "Sugar Mountain") to the point where things can get a little sappy, but on the whole Young is a sophisticated and intelligent lyricist. Young's high-pitched voice can take some getting used to, but is very expressive. Pine Point's Jay Libardi had the best description of Neal Young's singing. He said his voice sounded "the way a cat would sing if it took up folk music."
There are sixteen cuts on this record, and not a dud among them (although the live versions of "Needle and the Damage Done" and "After the Goldrush" are less effective live than they were in the studio). The record offers the best version of the mystically powerful "Cortez the Killer," a highly romanticized depiction of the Incas which unexpectedly in the last line turns the destruction of that society into a metaphor for a failed romantic relationship. "Cinnamon Girl," the ultimate garage band rave-up, is suitably grungy live and the ironic "Sedan Delivery" is just perfect. "Powderfinger" is one of the best anti-war songs ever written.
Now in his late 50's, Neal Young keeps attracting new fans, as an unlimited supply of young people keep bumping up against and discovering his work all over again. His range of musical styles is so wide that there's a Neal Young song for everyone no matter what your tastes. To constantly reinvent yourself for a new generation as many times as Neal Young has done has caused him to be ranked among the top ranks of musical artists, and Live Rust is a pretty convincing sampler of why he deserves it.
Hot Tuna – Pair a Dice Found
This album is pretty good overall, yet in many ways is a missed opportunity. When the Hot Tuna boys rejoined their Jefferson Airplane brethren for a tour in 1989, both the Airplane and Tuna were offered the chance by CBS’s Epic Records to release CD’s of new material. The Airplane album was a big success, with a hit single in Marty Balin’s syrupy but sincere “Summer of Love.” The Tuna release, however, quickly fell into obscurity, although it is still available from places like Amazon.com.
The biggest problem with this CD is that for a Hot Tuna album, there is too little actual Hot Tuna. Jorma Kaukonen writes only three of the record's fourteen songs. Those three, “It’s All right With Me,” "Ken Takes a Lude,” and “Happy Turtle Song” are, not surprisingly, the best songs on the album. The other tunes, written by various other people, have some virtues, but are inconsistently successful. A cover of the bombastic political tune, “Eve of Destruction,” works better than you’d think, but it’s an odd inclusion considering that Jorma often said that one of the reasons he left the Airplane was because he grew tired of their political songs.
This disc is an unfortunate example of too many cooks ruining the soup. Epic Records or whoever was in charge of this project should have just let Jorma and crew loose in the studio to do their own thing. This record has signs all over it of an attempt to alter the band’s style in order to reach a wider audience. Such attempts usually fail with any band, and with Hot Tuna, failure was a certainty. Just the same, it is an interesting failure, especially if you’re a Hot Tuna fan to begin with. If so, then you probably agree that anything Jorma Kaukonen does is worth listening to.
Frank Zappa's Apostrophe'
I never expected to repurchase this silly album in CD format, but I guess I'm on some sort of nostalgia trip lately, buying up all the old albums I used to enjoy in my misspent youth. Frank Zappa is, to put it mildly, an acquired taste, and my taste for this album was acquired when I was in High School. Indeed, Zappa was almost a craze in my school, with everyone quoting catchy little phrases from his records ("Is that a real poncho, or is that a Sears poncho?") and feeling very much like a sophisticated insider compared to those who had never heard of Frank Zappa and the Mothers.
Listening to Apostrophe' today in my old age, I am at a loss as to what I thought was so cool about this record. Was it the sexual references? The toilet humor? The sheer stupidity of it all? Perhaps all of the above. To serious FZ fans, Apostrophe' is considered the beginning of a long artistic decline for Zappa. Many regard it as the end of his most creative period and the beginning of his self-destructive tendency to ruin his best and most sophisticated music by overlaying it with a lot of puerile humor best suited for immature 15 year olds (like me). Critics have long shook their heads sadly over Zappa's career, bemoaning that someone who was arguably a musical genius degraded his talent for nothing but cheap laughs and shallow rock stardom. And maybe in some ways they're right.
Dumb songs like "Stinkfoot" and "Yellow Snow" beg to be played once, laughed at, and then forgotten. Yet the fact remains that the musicianship, however low Zappa may have gone lyrically, is always first rate. In fact I find myself appreciating Apostrophe' from a purely musical perspective today in a way I never did or could have at the High School of Commerce. For all the insults thrown at him by the music critics, I believe that Zappa (who died tragically of cancer in 1993) is an artist whose reputation will only rise with the passage of time.
When Beatle George Harrison died I wrote this blurb on December 2, 2001.
I was actually a little too young to participate in Beatlemania. Yet the phenomenon was such that it permeated even the grammar school scene, and while I never had a Beatles lunchbox or anything, I still knew who the Beatles were and listened to their songs on WHYN, which was then the region’s premier Top 40 music station. Many of us fans whose age was in the single digits liked Paul best, perhaps because he looked the friendliest, or Ringo, because he was funny. When I got older I concluded that John was the real genius of the group, although Lennon's solo work suggested he needed Paul’s talent for melody to produce his best work.
As for George, I never really thought that much about him, although his All Things Must Pass album was playing in my house a lot by virtue of older siblings and cousins. When it came out in a deluxe reissue last year listening to it as an adult I was surprised by the depth of feeling it had. I even wrote a review, for which I received brickbats from a self-proclaimed liberal who said that as an alleged conservative (anyone who knows me personally laughs when I’m called that) indignantly declared that I couldn’t possibly understand the Beatles, who apparently can only be grasped in their supreme significance by the highly evolved Leftist mind. The sometimes stupidity of liberals I’ve learned to live with, but their arrogance I still can’t bear.
I think I speak for many people when I say I’m happy I have some fond Beatles memories, although apparently those memories come at a price. That price is to watch the real Beatles go, one by one, feeling older and sadder as each one dies. Rest easy, George. Hang in there, Paul and Ringo!
Silly Barney
I laughed to read in the Springfield Republican some of the foolish comments made by Massachusetts Congressman Barney last weekend in Holyoke while he was being honored by local Democrats, as shown in this Bill Dwight photo of Barney and his boyfriend sharing a glance during Rep. John Olver's speech.
Here is the most brazen display of hypocricy that evening as reported in the newspaper article by Sandra Constantine:
Being a member of a political party is the best way to get things done, he told his audience, decrying the fact that elections are often decided by citizens who are not enrolled in one.
"The election is often in the hands of people who don't know what they are talking about. ... They criticize candidates for positions they don't hold," Frank said, putting down the types of unenrolled people who are polled in focus groups....
The congressman went on to declare that capitalism works best in partnership with the public sector.
"In 41 years I have never seen a tax cut put out a fire," Frank said. "If you are an honest businessman you need laws to protect you from dishonest competitors."
Wait a minute, show me one person who is calling for a tax cut to put out a fire, or anyone advocating the repeal of the laws against dishonest business practices. The answer is no one, so the person criticizing people for "positions they don't hold" is none other than Barney Frank himself.
Budding actor/rapper/whatever Levi Johnston has failed to deliver with his Playgirl shoot, and the magazine will NOT feature any full frontal photos of the Alaskan.
The news breaks on the same day Sarah Palin mentioned his "aspiring porn career" on Oprah.
In a statement posted on Gawker, spokesman Daniel Nardicio said the following about Levi and his manager:
"He did not give 'full-frontal' as his manager Tank Jones reported he would. We're thrilled with the photos we got, and are confident people will love them. Although there may be glimpses, we did not get full on frontal nudity."
More Oldies
Back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth (or at least the concert stages) I was a misbehaving teenager attending acid rock shows in the Springfield area armed with a beautiful topshelf Yashica camera I got for a pittance from a B&E artist I knew (as in Breaking and Entering). In a bit of karmic justice, the camera was eventually stolen from me. Anyway, in that distant era they would let you bring cameras into concerts, these being the days before every moment of a rock and roll show became a copyrighted experience that no one can capture in any form unless somebody is being paid a royalty.
So I took a bunch of pictures at a lot of shows and put them in a photo album. Then in the course of relocating hither and yon somewhere along the way I thought I lost it. I always hoped it would turn up someday, but frankly I had no real expectation that it would. Then one day when I was going through some of the stuff in my late Mom's cellar, lo and behold there it was, the book of photos along with some other local music memoriabilia such as the Martian Highway flyer reproduced below.
Leave it to dear old Mom to always save the stuff I was careless about. As for Martian Highway, it was a popular local party band fronted by a cool spade named Carl Mayfield.
The following are pictures of the Jefferson Starship at the Springfield Civic Center, exact date unknown, but it was sometime in the late 70's. The earliest incarnations of the Jefferson Starship were more in the style of the revolutionary Airplane than the commercialized Top 40 hit machine they later became. My main memory of this show is how about a week before the concert, the aforementioned madman Carl Mayfield had some weird LSD-induced vision that the phrase "Bloated Oat a Goat Will Float," whose specific meaning he was never quite able to explain, must somehow be spread to the multitudes assembled and particularly to the Starship itself.
So he went about making stickers, signs, balloons and anything else he could think of to disperse to the crowd which had that statement (among other things) written on them. I think all eight thousand people who attended that show encountered that phrase multiple times; at the very least they heard it once when Grace Slick picked up something with the phrase written on it that was thrown on stage and asked, "Bloated oat a goat will float? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" Ah Grace, just another one of the cosmic mysteries that will never be solved!
Grace encountering a bloated oat.
Spacey Gracie the Acid Queen
The voice that launched a thousand trips.
Paul Kantner
Craig Chaquico and Kantner.
The late Pine Pointer "Fuji" Cardinal (center) and crew at the concert. His real first name was Dave, and he was best known as a Boston Road Cumberland Farms cashier who also sold weed that he kept hidden behind the counter. The place sold more lids than it did gallons of milk. He died in a highway accident about five years ago.
Boston Road Car Caper
Want even more Springfield oldies? Okay, here's a funny true life story my friend Jordan Williams (above right) sent me in an email years ago.
It all began when I stopped by that used car lot next to St. Michael's cemetary in Pine Point, Springfield:
At the time I was searching for a replacement for the RX-7. As I drove down Boston Road in Springfield at around 10 PM, I spotted a vehicle on the Pine Point lot that I thought might be the ticket. I pulled up onto the sidewalk in order to get out of the way of traffic and got out to check out the cars. I'm in the habit of leaving the car running for brief stops like this one for fear that the intermittent starting problem I've been having might arise once again. This despite having invested $542 during the prior week because of a bad door, a major tune-up and that starting situation.
A couple of minutes into the tire kicking, I noticed a guy walking down the street on the other side who seemed to be making an effort to get my attention. Waving his arms and yelling some sort of gibberish. I knew I didn't know him and just sort of waved him off. Well naturally he stumbled over to talk to me - in Spanish. I said "No espanol," and just hoped he would go away. He spoke English just fine though, and offering his hand in friendship his first sentence was this: "My name is Manuel, I am Puerto Rican, and I see, my friend, that you are looking for a car. This is a very good business - cars. It so happens that I will be receiving twenty three thousand dollars very soon because of this injury (points to unmarked portions of one arm and one leg) and I would like to invest in such a car business. Me and you can be partners. What do you think? Would you like to be with me in the car business?"
Hmm. I sized up my potential new business partner. On the plus side he appeared to be about 40, in good shape, bilingual and would soon have many thousands of dollars. On the minus he was shirtless, drunk, stoned, crazy and dirty. It was a close call and one that, sadly, went against poor Manuel. I said "Well, that is certainly something to think about." But I believe that I saw in Manuel's eyes a sadness. A sadness that said "I do not believe you want to be partners with Manuel."
He then informed me that he was late to work and asked if I would give him a ride. I declined. He then asked me for a dollar. "Sorry Manuel, all tapped out." "How about 50 cents?" "No can do." And the litany began again, starting with a ride, moving to a dollar and ending with 50 cents. No. No. No. And again. And again. He was also getting more belligerant. By now I was simply ignoring him and just looking at cars. He wouldn't leave though and I thought that maybe, just maybe, if I drifted away in the opposite direction that he'd eventually leave. It worked. He finally walked away.
I was now about 50 yards from my car. Manny was gone. Wrong. A few minutes later I realized that Manuel had doubled back, screened from me by a house, and suddenly reemerged near my car. He screamed out the question "50 cents man?" It was all crystal clear now. I shook my pockets wishing I had a couple of quarters. Nothing. "No Manuel . . . NO!" I hollerd. But I watched in horror as he jumped into the Mazda and, as I screamed "No, Manny don't do it!" Manuel floored it, bouncing off the road as he left the sidewalk onto the pavement and laying a fair amount of rubber. The Mazda was gone.
Or was it? Coincidence, or perhaps destiny, can be a remarkable thing though and a Springfield police cruiser came around the corner just moments after Manuel's betrayal. I ran into the street arms flailing away. The cruiser swerved slightly to avoid me and though I noticed the lone officer looking curiously into the rear view mirror, there was no change in speed as he crested and then disappeared over the same hill as Manuel. Indeed - the Mazda was truly gone.
12 hours later I was on my way to the Poconos and wouldn't get a police update until the next night: "Mr. Williams…that car is still stolen."
Actually, I never saw it again.
Around Amherst
If you don't offer this you can't stay in business.
The Jolly Rogers atop a UMass partyhouse.
I stopped in at Amherst's historic West Cemetery.
I wanted to check in on Miss Emily Dickinson. Status Update: Still dead.
Some of the stones have been damaged by vandals.
