Eugene Bardach

 

We're talkin' seventy years. Wow! When I was a kid I was friendly with a genius named Eugene Bardach who told me he never did any homework, and I believed him. I, of course, failed repeatedly, and Gene, of course, got into Princeton at 16, locked in his ph.d at 22. Theoretical physics. Something like that. Quarks and black holes. A real supernova, this kid, Eugene. Gene was another kid my mother wished were hers.

Why am I memorializing Eugene Bardach, a guy in my thoughts for some reason although I doubt I am in his? Why would I be? And why is he?

Now, in our corner of the woods, we are quickly approaching the peak of this Fall season. The experts say we are 70% there. I don’t know from numbers, but it's dazzling. I envision hundreds of thousands of kneeling colonial militiamen armed with muskets, firing great puffs of multi-colored smoke out from the hills. I am taken by St. Anne’s Peak across the way. Yesterday it was Summer, and yesterday it was green. Now, it’s Autumn, just a day later, it’s Autumn, and the hills are more alive to me now than when they were truly prime and vibrant, when they proudly puffed out their great, green, gunny sergeant chests. Now, we have red and bronze and yellow and orange - puff, puff, puff - volley upon volley - they detonate and push their colors . Green shimmers. Colors dance.

The hills. The hills and Eugene Bardach. Eugene and I would ride our bikes to this store that sold chemicals where we’d buy a bunch of powders like cyanide (blue), sulphur (yellow), magnesium (white), ferrous oxide (red). We’d go back to my house, make a small packet out of newspaper for each chemical, wrap the mix in a large sheet of newspaper, and set it on fire in the driveway. Vshoom! Shoom! With a great hissing sound, a circus of colors shot up in all directions as the burning newspaper triggered chemical explosions - one after another, two at once, vshoom, vshoom vshoom, two more, each packet flaming its true, pure color. The rush we felt when that little fury was unleashed was exhilarating. It was pure mischief, pure anarchism but no more so than St. Anne’s Peak right now. So, the "wondrous strange" sight of St. Anne's leaves triggers the memories of a multi-colored chem bomb built by crew cut, pre-teens in the 50's. Strange the thoughts we have and when we have them, yeah?

 

Aging (More Thoughts On)

 I’ve said it before: the displeasure of aging is that I cannot do much of what I used to. The pleasure of aging is that I’m still trying with zero plans to wave the white flag anytime soon. I realize I’m fortunate to have escaped most of the ravages suffered by others, until this year, that is. One subdural hematoma leading to one set of seizures leading to one triple bypass, and currently one broken foot have brought me into the fold. Back surgery is a few weeks away. Still, I’m brisk. I feel great. People guess my age at twenty years younger. I hear and see just fine. My brain is usually not muddled - in other words, I’m aging well. But, tell me this: just what is aging well? Am I aging well because I’m not bent over and still have my teeth and still have my hair? Or am I aging well because I can still quote T.S.Eliot? (“I grow old, I grow old, I wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”) Or am I aging well because my  heart is still filled with wonder at the sounds and sights and smells around me or because I have a grandson who is four…AND…because I have a grandson who is four. Take your pick. 

Writing helps me sort it all out. 

When folks ask me, what’s my secret, I tell them, “Immaturity”. And I am serious. Immaturity is my saving grace. My emotions are generally unabated. Fortunately, I am amused more often than I am angry, more bemused than wrathful. I still retain that sense of wonder that seems to see everything for the first time. They say that inside every elderly person is a young person wondering what the hell ever happened? Yes, there’s that wonder, too, but it’s not the wonder that predominates.The wonder that predominates these days is the high sun on orange leaves, a a tiny black bear cub, no bigger than a cocker spaniel,scampering up the hill, an eight pointer ready for the rut,the Fall crop of acorn squash and carola potatoes from RSK Farms…so many things as the air goes crispy…so many things but none so wonderful as four years of new life raring to go.I show him things and he sees them and then I see them again. I tell him things, and the telling is always new. He is so much but he isn’t all.

Here’s what else is exciting about life these days. I am not reliving the past so much as wondering over it, as in sense of wonder, sense of wow, sense of I did that? Really? No shit? I trekked across Alaska? I gave a sperm whale a noogie? I lived in Italy? I married an actress? I’m still married to an actress? The same one even! I am re-discovering the excitement of my life, that so much of it was what I dreamed it would be when I read those adventure chronicles as a child splayed out on the carpet surrounded by books - The Occident and The Orient was a favorite. Stephen of Arabia. Stephen of Khartoum. Stephen of Babylon. Stephen of Borneo. Head hunters. Smugglers. Cattle wranglers. Prophets. Pirates. Whalers. Mercenaries. They were all out there, stories waiting to be told, aching to be told if only I could get to them. I was single digits sitting on the floor in brown corduroy short pants looking at pictures of whirling dervishes and camels and shrunken heads and scimitars, charging horsemen and near naked hunters painted blue with bones in their beards, wild animals and rugged terrain, and I wanted to be there. Where? Down that river. Over that rise. Anywhere exotic, anywhere, and I often didn’t realize the danger ‘til I was in the midst of it. It’s not that I’ve been drawn to danger per se, but to places and activities that entailed a certain amount of risk. However, the risk was not the point; the action was, the place was, the people were.The stories I tell are the stories they told me, both implicitly, around the fire, and explicitly, those stories you get by just tuning in. Be warned. Expect that anything you say around a writer might be fodder.

So, what happens when you get to the age where every step you take hazards a break that takes more time to heal than you might have? The risks can no longer be physical ones. Accept it. That leaves The Brain. How to break new ground at this stage? For example, I wonder what it would be like to stay nice all day, regardless of who or what would normally piss me off, to pass no judgment, to offer no criticism? Can I keep my mouth shut when I normally would not? Can I resist MSNBC for twenty-four hours? Can I possibly skip that really important podcast? Would my blood pressure erupt or simply pleasantly burble? Wait. Maybe there’s another way to look at it. Why feel the pressure to take any more risks at all? There’s the hook. Let yourself off it. Dues have been paid. Next. Perhaps peace and quiet aren't so boring after all.

THOSE CHAMPIONSHIP ROUNDS - 12/23/2022

I am drawn to controlled violence, men who have trained themselves way deep into muscle memory where instinctive movements are designed to both dispatch and protect when triggered.I find Mixed Martial Arts brutal, artless, ugly,  awful to watch. You may feel the same way about boxing, but where you see a brutal artlessness, I see grace and tactics, footwork, astonishing resilience, interior strength, superb  conditioning, incredible courage.To do in the ring what it is harder, often forbidden, to do outside of it - to fight back, to pull it up from the floor and go for it because the alternative is to give in and that is no longer an alternative. It's the heart, not the organ but the soul of the person, his spiritual guts. In the ring to compromise is to lose.

Boxing is a passion of mine, about the only sport I follow, probably because it was something I shared with my father. Back in the fifties, from St. Nicholas arena, Gillette blue blades brought you the Friday night fights in living black and white TV, whooping at Carmen Basilio, an otherwise dogged fighter, who "blocked with his face." Other names from that time - all legends - Kid Gavilan, Sugar Ray Robinson, La Motta, Two Ton Tony Gillento, Emile Griffith (who beat an opponent to death in the ring because the guy, a Frenchman, called him a faggot)-so many guys out there half naked fighting their hearts out."You can run but you cannot hide", said the great Joe Louis. That's the part: you cannot hide. Everything you've got and haven't got is out there for the world to see. There is no one to help you. You either fight your heart out or you quit, and you do not quit. There is no time out. My favorite movie line comes from DiNiro as LaMotta after he's been beaten to a pulp by Sugar Ray Robinson. He's bleeding and barely able to stand, still up but hanging on the ropes. Barely able to speak but still defiant, "I'm still standin', Ray. Ray, I'm still standin'."

So.

Those Championship Rounds.

The final two of any prize fight: rounds eleven and twelve at the elite level. Dig in to the end. Fight with everything you've got. Leave it in the ring. Of course, there's that knockout punch, the one you don't see coming, but isn't there always?

I watched a prize fight recently - heavyweight championship - Usyk vs Joshua. Good fight. Why? Because it came down to the championship rounds, the final two, the two that need you to dig down deeper than you've ever dug before, the two where fights are won or lost. The bell has wrung. Round eleven. 

Stephen Howard Foreman has been blessed. He's made it to the championship rounds. He's taken a licking but kept on ticking. Broke his nose. Got knocked out. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune - bring 'em on! Brought 'em on. To paraphrase the lady when she sang out loud, "He's still here." Yogi Berra chimes in, "It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings." Foreman has two rounds left. So, now, what does he do? His physical powers have faded, but it's never really been about the physical, has it? 

These are my championship rounds. What do I need to do? 

The most overwhelming thing in my life these days is my feeling for my grandson, four years old, and, of course, never has there been another so bright and so beautiful.It isn't that this feeling is more intense than any I've had for my wife and children. Certainly, Jamie pole axed me the instant she walked through the door. My children have had me mesmerized since before birth. But love for Dorian is unencumbered in a way those never were. You meet the woman you will marry, and you hope she loves you back. Your children are born into this world, and their cries tell you how much they need you. But, an innocence attends my grandson. I only need to love him. 

I see this awakening at this point of my life - this encounter with innocence - as a blessing. To feel so much that is so pure and good is an extraordinary thing, as much a miracle as any I know this side of the supernatural. That sense of wonder! At four score and nearly two years, I am reluctant to feel otherwise. So I focus on the moment, focus on the feeling when it's there, transfuse it, pack it away but not too far, able to retrieve it at a nanosecond's notice. Is this love, what it really is? If I could take this feeling and wrap it around all the things of my day - and keep it there - oh,the peace and exultation that would bring. To feel what I feel when I watch him sleep would mean that I had won. 

        

Me 'n' Marlon

One night way some time back when my career had taken a serious dive, I came quick aroused in the middle of the night, straight from the depths of a dream,  and had to wake up Jamie right then and there to share the incredible news.  An epiphany: I'd missed my calling. I should have been an actor. I'd just had a dream wherein I was more brilliant than Brando in "On The Waterfront". "I coulda been a contender..." brought tears to my eyes. Jamie had to see this. "Wake up, J! You gotta see this!" So, Jamie shakes herself awake and glares at me like "this better be good".

    "Listen to me, J. Just listen to me."

I had her undivided attention and launched into that famous speech certain I was once again about to out Brando Brando. The look on J's face was pure horror as she realized her husband, always threateningly close to the edge, had now truly passed over it. 

    "I coulda been a contender..."

    "Stop it."

    "It was you, Charlie, it was..."

    "Stop it!"

    "The extra cash wouldn't hurt."

    "You're not serious."

    "You could coach me."

    "Good night, Gracie."

That was a good couple of decades ago. I haven't acted since, and my career, while not exactly booming, is no longer on life support. 

PS:

Just for the record. Way back in 1973, Shirley Rich, a well known casting director, was casting my first national drama for PBS - The Resolution of Mossie Wax. She offered to send me out on acting calls. Pass. I told her, "Uh, uh. I'm having too much trouble learning how to be me let alone trying to figure out how to be somebody else."

My First French Kiss

That tongue. That tongue. That tongue. The way it slipped through my lips and sluiced into my mouth, wrapped itself around my own, then danced me one way and t'other. Oh, my God! My fifteen year old body exploded with the slippery sweetness of it. I'd felt pain and pleasure before but nothing like this. It was as if an unbearably sweet charge began in my mouth and traveled down my spine like Jacob's ladder. Zapadee-Zapadee-Zapadee-ZZZZZZapppp, like biting into a juicy fruit when the juice trickles down your throat and chin and neck and chest. It obliterated the rest of the world. Who did this to me? Her name was Suzanne. She did this to me. 

Back story.

She was nineteen and a student nurse. I was fifteen and an orderly.

Suzanne. A small town girl from Cumberland, Maryland. In later years I thought of Leonard Cohen. Remember, "Suzanne by the river..."?

Further back story.

Illusions die hard. Imagine this happening today. Spring,1956. I was fifteen years old and certain I wanted to be a doctor. One day I was driving with my mother. As we passed Lutheran Hospital I asked her to stop. I'd taken it into my skull that I was going to ask them for a job. Which I did. And got it. I told them I wanted to be a doctor and proposed to work as an orderly part-time while I was in high school. They gave me the job. Again, imagine this happening today. A fifteen year old just off the street emptying bedpans on the med-surg floor of an urban hospital. Furthermore, get this:  I was promoted to the emergency ward and then to surgery: gunshot wounds, car accidents, stabbings, miscarriages, autopsies - I was there for them all. I even worked my little sister's emergency appendectomy. Of course, the fact that I failed math, chemistry, Latin and physics didn't help with my med career. It's taken me years to ferret that one out.

Three score and seven years later she lingers like a fog at sunset and snuggles into my past like a sweet nap, although at the time, it was damn near unbearable. As far as Suzanne was concerned, my brains were eggs to be scrambled, a runny sunny side up on a good day. What she would do was touch my arm as she passed me. Once she actually drew the fingers of her hand gently across my midsection. She might as well have disemboweled me. As you can see, that was it for life. Every time she was near me I stopped breathing. When she looked at my face she saw me. Her green eyes triggered my damp and immature heart. All I wanted was to be with her, whatever that might be, wherever that might be, however that might be, whenever...I was barely treading water. I had no clue. 

One day...One afternoon...One morning...Damn, who knows what time of day, but we found ourselves in a deserted stairwell. I never saw it coming but suddenly there it was - Suzanne's mouth on mine, Suzanne's tongue on mine, Suzanne's breasts under that starched white bib the student nurses  wore. My memory has the kiss lasting a nanosecond then Suzanne tearing herself away from me and disappearing up the stairs. 

A couple of years later, she was still on my goodbye list. Just prior to shipping out for Parris Island, I went to visit her, illegally, after hours, in the hospital. "I really did a number on you, didn't I?" she asked, fully aware that she had done just that. I remember her manner as apologetic, but I can't remember anything else. Boot Camp obliterated  the rest of it.