Christmas Memory

I'm not a summer person and I never really was. I don't look forward to summer anymore. I look forward to winter. Summer is too hot and too humid and too noisy for me, especially now that I'm older. My favorite season is fall — and it always was — and then winter, and some of my favorite cold-weather memories are about Christmas.

There hasn't been anything under my Christmas tree except the tree stand for the past five or six years but Christmas presents are not the reasons I still put up a tree every year in the den, right in front of the big sliding-glass door that opens onto the big back "patio/porch".

The biggest reason for putting up a Christmas tree is to share the experience of looking at it with someone you care about and who needs to feel happy and cheerful about beautiful bright lights and a warm, safe home. And I get to do that every year. That's my Christmas present. Sharing the cheerful bright tree lights and feeling good about the most beautiful holiday of the year. That's why I never watch the Hallmark Channel. I like to be happy at Christmas. Not sad.

And, no, this isn't a painting by Edvard Munch. And this is not the way my hometown really looked when they strung all those big colored light bulbs back and forth across the main street downtown, when I was just a boy. This is how it looks whenever I try to remember it. The best Christmas is always the present one and then the next one.

A Rainy Night in the City through the Windshield

Sometimes a work of art is about something. I've held this childhood memory in my mind's eye for half a century. Today I finally painted it so you could see what I saw from the back seat of my parents' car. Or it might have been from the back seat of my maternal grandparents' car, if the "city" was York or Lewistown, PA. Where this was or when it was, I'm not sure. My guess is that the city might have been Cleveland or Detroit but then I would have been eleven or twelve and remembered more.

But it could have been just a late shopping trip a bigger Pennsylvania town like Bellefonte, State College, Philipsburg, Clearfield or Lewistown or a small city like Lock Haven, Williamsport, Tyrone, Altoona or Dubois. I can't recall. All I remember is being a kid and being awed by bright, wet colors and the wonder of seeing a rainy night in the city through the windshield.

Manhattan Memory

I actually lived in New York City once for a single day. Back in the late 1970s my girlfriend at that time and I rented an apartment on Morton Street in Greenwich Village, sight unseen, over the phone. It was right off Bleecker Street and I was excited about living in the the Village and just being where a lot of artists, musicians and writers hung out.

The apartment turned out to be a real dump, though. One room with a bed, a table and two chairs, and a kitchenette. I'd never been in an apartment before where the shower stall stood between the gas range and the kitchen sink.

Across the street sat one of the biggest and most attractive townhouses I'd ever seen. It was supposed to belong to this big-time Syndicate boss but I thought it was just bullshit until a big Lincoln coupe with dark windows pulled up unexpectedly and sat double-parked with the engine running while we unloaded our meager belongings from the trunk. Then it took off, the driver apparently satisfied that we weren't hit men from Cleveland or the "heat" setting up a stake-out.

When we asked the landlady for the rent check back the next day she didn't even bat an eye. She just stuck in it a sandwich bag and lowered it on a string three flights down to the lobby of her building (a much nicer place) where my girlfriend stood dumbfounded and wide-eyed as I waited in the car.

After that, I was ready to put The Big Apple in my rearview mirror once and for all. That was 1978 and I haven't been back since. And this is a strange but, unfortunately, true story.

Ghost of a Chance

I used to wonder what would have happened if I had not turned down the job offer from Time Magazine in 1978. It wasn't much off an offer, just being a stringer. A stringer is a writer who does on-call reporting without his or her name appearing on the story. It's the proverbial "foot in the door" and who knows what might have happened to me afterward?

At the time, I was living in a studio apartment on the tenth floor of The Howell House on Peachtree Street NW in Atlanta, Georgia, a half a block from the famous Fox Theater. Time Magazine's Atlanta Bureau Chief, Rudolph Rauch III, had called my answering service a few days after I'd met with him without an appointment at his office at the Time Magazine Atlanta Bureau Headquarters in one of the Gaslight Towers.

I called him back and he offered me the job. I accepted his gracious offer and made a quick trip to Pennsylvania where I'd flown to tell my family the news and to see my four-year-old son who had been living with his mother since our divorce. He didn't even know who I was and I'd only been gone a couple of months. That did it for me.

I flew back to Atlanta where I called Rudolph Rauch III and told him I wouldn't be able to take the stringer job after all. Then I packed my bags for Pennsylvania for the last time. Mr. Rauch probably thought I was crazy or something after the way I'd so brazenly pitched myself and my writing ability to him. But, I had my priorities, and making my writing career the biggest reason for my being alive wasn't my top priority.

When I look back on my missed opportunity to write for Time Magazine, I see myself trapped in a roving wormhole that opened briefly to spit me back out before it haphazardly attached itself again to another point in the space-time continuum. Trying to remember it as anything else would be a fruitless search for a past that never existed.

FBI Hijinks

"Click on me for another FBI story".

Whenever I create fictional FBI agents as characters in my novels I always give the Federal Bureau of Investigation better "lip service" than I would ever give it in real life, and certainly a better deal than they're getting from Hollywood. I don't know why I do this. My own brief encounter with the FBI in 1995 was enough to make me want to write an entire book about their bumbling ways. But I didn't.

Anyway, ten years ago, two agents from the FBI office in Harrisburg, PA knocked on my Dauphin County door and wanted to ask me questions about a bank robbery in State College, PA. I thought it was either a prank or a very big mistake. Well, it turned out to be both.

It took me about a half hour to pull the truth out of the two agents and they confessed that they had gotten their "tip" from a TV show that was "something like America's Most Wanted", they said. Imagine being so hard up to solve a case that you mezz-out in front of the tube for your leads. Hollywood is right. The FBI is full of shitheads who don't know their asses from a hole in the ground. What a waste of our tax dollars.

Apparently, some hateful, hideous, malicious, coward at the bank I used to work for in State College (Mellon Bank) hated me enough to pull a stunt like that. Imagine pulling an unconscionable prank like that just for the hell of it. I've been in in a lot of places in my life, from Maine to Georgia and from New York City to Chicago, but the most hateful people I've ever encountered have been in State College and Snow Shoe, PA. And there are more men-hating women in Happy Valley" than anywhere I've ever been. You sick witches. How diabolical. I never disliked anybody enough in my entire life to commit a shameful, criminal act like that and I never will. If I knew who this person was, a civil or even criminal lawsuit would certainly be in the works. At the very least, I'd sue your malicious, lying ass to Kingdom Goddamn Come. If this world of ours was a just world — instead of a dog-eat-dog world that always rewards ruthlessness — your worthless, criminal ass would be mine.

I'm not very happy with the TV show people either (let's not beat around the bush, you FBI assholes, it was America's Most Wanted and you damn well know it). In a just world, I'd have your stupid show cancelled and your limelight-loving asses run out of town on a rail. But, this is the real world, a world where justice never triumphs for long — if at all — an evil planet where I have to be content to let their own karma hunt them down and deal with them accordingly before they die. But, if I ever see any of you in the afterlife, you'd better run and hide.

This was just after my father had died and I had moved in with my mother, who doesn't drive, to help her out and ready their house for the real estate market. I was in no mood for FBI hijinks or any other tomfoolery. I even had to prove to the FBI where I was the day of the alleged bank robbery and that meant having my employer verify that I was at work in Harrisburg that day. Where else?

Now that went over real well at the office. Eventually, I convinced Heckle and Jeckle that I was not the bank robber and those FBI morons finally left me alone, with my anger and my memories. I'll never forget your bumbling incompetence, you worthless shits. Only on Earth, I tell myself, only on planet Earth. No wonder the real powers-that-be kicked us off the moon in 1972.