Morgan State and The Superstition Wilderness

I graduated from Morgan fifty years ago. I recently found a photograph taken of my entire graduating class in caps and gowns on bleachers in the football stadium. As I remember, there were about three hundred and fifty of us. Find me. I can't even find myself. It makes me remember what it was like crossing the quad during class changes. Whoa! Negroes! 360 degrees of Negroes! Total surround. Two thousand students. Various hues. All Negro! But not me. I was the only one like me. I'm trying to remember what I was feeling at the time, what I was thinking, or whether I was just rushing to class like everyone else?

Wait a minute! Wait a minute! There's another memory fighting for space. It does have bearing. I think. Not sure. I'm gonna go with it.

A good forty years ago I was somewhere in the desert surrounding the Superstition Wilderness in Apache Junction, Arizona. What it is today is not what it was then.. I remember Main Street in Apache Junction as maybe four, wooden, sand blasted, decrepit shops, one of them a custom shoemaker who made me a set of moccasins. Now, it's a destination. Superstition Mountain, a rugged fortress of rock pillars and twisted canyons, repository of myths and demons, loomed in the background. It wasn't a national monument then, so anybody who could withstand the rigors of the trek and the remorseless sun could go in there. Mostly nobody did, and those who did were mostly prospectors looking for the fabled Lost Dutchman Gold Mine: an eponymous site rumored to be on the burial grounds of the local Apache Thunder God Himself. Which is how I wound up in Apache Junction myself. I'd been hired to write a movie, so I went to see what treasures I could find.

The desert does strange things to people when they spend their daily lives under that sun. It cooks their brains, turning all those dendrites and ganglia into a gelatinous mush you need to eat with a spoon, like Jello or brains. Folks will rave at the drop of a hat -- true believers -- often exasperating but never boring. "Me? A desert rat? Damn tootin'!" -- "Proud to be, by Jesus, yessir!" -- after which you'll hear for sure some fervent monologue, part myth, part opinion. Mostly the myths were "true stories" of death and disaster in the Supe. Prospectors snuck up on and mysteriously beheaded, mysteriously disappeared. Had they gotten too close to the Thunder God's lair? Had some claim jumper bushwhacked and murdered them? Had they gone mad and died of thirst? Had they been sucked up by extra-terrestrials? Very dramatic stuff. If a man didn't get them what ghost or demon did? It was fraught with danger. If you weren't ready for it, you dasn't  go there. Mostly, people didn't, not back then, anyway.

But I met a man who'd been in and out of the Superstition countless times. He was eighty-seven when I met him and barely able to walk from having spent a life time in the saddle. Fella could've been the Marlboro man's grandfather. Early on in the 20th century, he led the first search and rescue mission into the desert wilderness and did the same most of his life. I don't remember how I got to him or what his name was, but, we spoke before I went in, and, as we spoke, he braided a set of leather reins and barely looked up. His opinion came quick and clean. "Ain't nothin' gonna hurt you out there. That mountain does to you what you bring to it." Yes, he did, yes, he carried a pistol, a .22 loaded with snake shot being as the only thing he intended to worry about was a rattlesnake. He told me make sure to shake out your boots before you put them on in the morning. Scorpions. Nasty. He spat. So what's the moral here? Ain't nothin' gonna hurt you out there? The mountain does to you what you bring to it? What does this have to do with crossing the quad at change of class?

Bear with me while I work this out.

It was I think ten years after I graduated Morgan that I first went into the Superstition Wilderness. I went in a second time by myself, and a third time with the woman who would become my wife, but this first time I packed in on horseback with a local guide, a hard core desert dweller: prickly. If he's still alive today I'd bet he'd have that "Don't tread on me" flag tattooed over his heart. He believed in one thing only -- the existence of the Lost Dutchman gold mine -- no ghosts or goblins, no demented desert rats, no Indian curse, -- and he was working a claim to prove it. The point is: my guide brought nothing to the mountain except perhaps greed, no fear, no hesitation, just lust for gold, and I brought nothing to the mountain except my story radar (Stories being my own particular  nuggets). We -- my guide and I -- came to the same place. Treasure, too, is in the eyes of the beholder.

I don't remember what I brought with me that first day on Morgan's campus. I know for sure it didn't feel anything like Custer's last stand. After the initial shock of recognition I just hurried on to class with the rest of the students. The books I was carrying -- an early English novel, "Tristram Shandy", Sarte's "Being and Nothingness", ancient history -- not a math book anywhere close, no atomic table in the vicinity -- these books were like gold nuggets to me then, like the crumbs of bread that helped Hansel and Gretel find their way back home, a path to a mother lode which, of course, I will never see in my lifetime, though I've been tracking it all along.

Sumbitch Was Too Miserable to Die, And Hell Wouldn't Have Him, Anyway

If the man had lived in Texas this is what the good ol' boys would've said of him: "Sumbitch was too miserable to die, and Hell wouldn't have him anyway." Asshole is the operative word here. He'd miraculously survived some mighty illness only to re-enter the work force more arrogant than ever, as if it were proof that he was divinely selected. The man, a white man, was my instructor in music appreciation at Morgan State College, my least favorite teacher in the entire school, three of the eighteen credits I was carrying. It was my last semester at Morgan, and I wanted to go out with a 4.0 average, a goal which had eluded me although I'd come close many times, close enough to warrant magna but never summa. In retrospect I understand why, but that is for another time.

The man had a monstrous maw of an ego. When I picture him from this distance his head appears the size and shape of an alien's, light bulb like. He was also at the time the conductor of a small town orchestra. One class turned into a rant about how awful was every existing orchestral version of the "Star Spangled Banner" except for his. As proof he played it for the class, and it did, it sounded terrific. I wanted to hate it but didn't and couldn't. I think it only made me hate the man more. My contempt would cost me dearly.

As we say in the movie business, fade to black and come in seventeen years earlier when I was five years old. I might have been four. Somewhere in there my mother enrolled me in a percussion class at the local music conservatory, a class taught by this same man. I remember her taking me into this big studio type room -- it must have been an orchestral space -- with lots of drums. Kids were already there, and when once our mothers left us this man launched into a persnicketty recital of his rules. I only remember one: the first. "Do not touch those drums or those drumsticks unless I say so. Am I clear?" At that instant an evil impulse impounded a nearby set of drum sticks and beat them on the kettle drum in front of me. BawoomBawoomBawoomBawoom. "Am I clear?", I seemed to be saying. BawoomBawoomBawoomBawoom. Well, children, the guy went beserk. He bellowed for me to get my mother and tossed me out of his class. Dissolve to seventeen years later, and I am in the man's classroom one more time, seventeen years later and feeling exactly the same. I could not bear him. It wasn't the music -- that was fine when he played it -- it was his pontificating in extremis. I was five years old again, a tot with a strong sense of smell. If a drum had been in front of me I'm sure I would have pounded it. I'm not defending this impulse, only reporting it, although in some ways I think I still may be pounding that same damned drum. Picture me pounding on that drum at the same time I'm shooting myself in the foot. That had to be worth at least a bronze. I lost by a smirk. Music appreciation, the easiest course ever invented, cost me a perfect 4.0.  You'd think by then I would have learned something? You'd think by now...?

The Death of Ruby Tire

1963. It's this year that I'm trying to remember, that and the first half of 1964. '63 began with the production of my first play, continued with the death of my father, ended with the assassination of JFK. January of '64 would be my final semester at Morgan. It's this period of time -- January, 1963 through June, 1964 -- that I'm trying to retrieve. This was the last period of my life spent in the town of my birth. I didn't know where I was going, but, believe me, I was most ways there and had been since my early teens. "Dad," I said. (I was fifteen.) "When I graduate high school I'm leaving and not coming back". He scoffed, but I was serious. Joining the Marines was what really got me out of there. Small price to pay. I may have written this someplace before (and I may again):my first week on Parris Island my drill instructor, Staff Sergeant Smith, pulled me aside, got smack up in my face, and bellowed, "What're you doin' in my Marine Corps, turd?" "Sir," I answered, "Sir, because it's safer than being at home, Sir." It was the first but not the last time his utter disdain was unleashed on me.

I give June of '64 as the end date of this memoir because that was my graduation from Morgan, but, really, it was back in May that the end came. Maybe April. Ruby Tire had died a long time ago, only now it was official. Like it's said of a Hollywood career: "It's dead six months before you know it."

Reuben Henry Foreman was his whole name. Ruby Tire was the name of his business, or, as we used to pronounce it in Baltimore, "Rooby Tar". It was a small retreading plant with a tire outlet in front. Ruby, my father, was in business with my Uncle Frank. Ruby ran the shop. Frank was the outside man, hustling and servicing accounts, mostly filling stations and auto dealerships. Uncle Frank's legendary moment came when he was on the train heading for a business trip in Ohio. Instead, Frank got off the train midway when he realized he didn't have his toothbrush, and hopped the next one back to Baltimore. You'd never accuse either my father or my uncle of having heads for business -- titans they were not -- however, the actual demise of the business was done by plotting elegant in its simplicity and oozing with classic machiavellian intent.

There wasn't much to divvy up. The two brothers had a legal agreement stating that if one died the surviving brother and partner would see that his brother's family got their fair share. Except that's not what happened. Shortly after becoming sole proprietor, Frank informed my mother that there would be no more money coming her way. Business was down and not looking up. He barely had enough for his family and none for his brother Ruby's.  My mother appealed to Uncle Will, the patriarch of the Foreman clan. "Blood is thicker than water," he said, meaning Frank was his brother and my mother was merely a sister-in-law. He shrugged her off. "I can't help." Can't help. Won't help. Didn't help. And more!

Yes, there's more, a plot both diabolical and, in its way, brilliant.

Uncle Frank's in-laws were a tribe of first generation bandits, proto typical slum lords, late of Eastern Europe, mini-minded, and troll like, in particular, that angry one who lived under the bridge. The one named Anna had no teeth but wore diamonds the size of jelly beans on damn near every digit. The rings dug into the flesh of her fingers. She sat with her feet planted far apart. Her accent was thick, and it was hard not to look at her gums. I think she spit when she talked, but that might have been some of the other ones, or all of them, the ones about whom all I remember was that they were short. When my father died, they smelled blood in the water, and the following came to pass. My uncle would never have thought of it on his own. The man was a putz but not a thief.

With the exception of the war years in the forties when retreading tires was a bustling industry, Ruby Tire struggled to get by. The advent of a brand new tire for less than the price of a retread drove a stake through the failing heart of the business, yet this same business continued to eke out enough to support two families until my father's death. Those four words are key -- "until my father's death" -- because the day he died -- the body was still warm -- they began answering the phone, "Foreman Tires". A business which formerly served two familiies suddenly brought in barely enough for one, suddenly could no longer pay its debts, suddenly found itself in bankruptcy. So what was the plot? That was it: deliberately drive Ruby Tire into bankruptcy so your slum lord in-laws can buy it dirt cheap at auction then hand the business back to you with no debt attached. Ruby who?

It was even announced in the papers: auction...building plus equipment...such and such time and date. My mother's brother, Milton, a cherished uncle who often visited us from New York, happened to be in Baltimore at the time. He suggested we go watch. I didn't want to do it, felt like I'd be watching my father's funeral all over again, but I did it. I went, and, yes, it was like watching my father's funeral all over again.

The auction took place in an alley that ran beside the building. The auctioneer was above the crowd, but I don't remember what he stood on -- a box? the roof of a station wagon? the bed of a truck? Uncle Frank wasn't there, but three of his brothers-in-law were. Their suits were drab and disheveled, their bellies big, their faces pasty like dumplings. Breakfast was still on their ties. Other than a smattering of on-lookers, me and Uncle Milton, the three brothers-in-law were it.

The auctioneer got the pack's attention. He described the building and its contents, instructed us that the sale would be for the entire package which had been appraised at $3,000. That sum, paltry even by the standards of the day, is where the man began the auction. "Do I hear thirty five hundred dollars, three five zero zero?" What the man heard was nothing. I'd like to say all that was heard was a Tasty Cake wrapper scuttling down the alley in a dandy breeze. Nice image. Except it wasn't true. What was true was the silence. Not one word. Not one sound. There were always people on the street. Traffic must have been passing by. I just don't remember any sound at all. Uncle Milton leaned into me and asked, "Do you want it?" Did I want it? It never  occurred to me that I could want it. "I'll give you the money," said Milton.

I'd have the money to buy the business and fire my uncle -- a favorite fantasy at the time.

"Three thousand dollars," barked one of the brothers-in-law.

"Do you want it?" asked Milton.

"I have three thousand. Do I hear four? Do I hear thirty five hundred?"

"Three thousand," repeated Frank's in-law.

"I have three thousand, three thousand dollars,"cried the auctioneer. "Three thousand going once."

"Do you want it?"

"Three thousand going twice."

"Do you want it?"

I didn't know what I wanted, but I knew what I didn't want. What I didn't want was to remain in Baltimore one day longer than necessary. What I didn't want was to be a slave to a business, any business, but certainly not the tire business.

My uncle nudged me. I choked on my words.

When I was small my father literally dandled me on his knee as he sang, "How y'gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree...?" I hadn't yet seen "Paree" but I'd seen enough.

"Do you want it?"

"Three thousand three times..."

My father worked there six days a week from six to six. Was I going to simply roll over and let that man's hard work go? Ingrate! Down the toilet! The conscience of a Hitler!

I couldn't get a word out.

"Sold!"

My heart took a hit.

The troll wearing the baggiest suit stepped forward and counted three thousand cash into the auctioneer's hand.

Foreman Tires opened the next day. That June I graduated from Morgan. Soon I was gone.

Memory Loss, or Huh?

I have a friend who's a very funny guy. We went to different high schools but still knew each other well. We were Jewish kids in Baltimore, circa the mid fifties, and every Jewish kid knew every other Jewish kid, plus the fact that we were, for a time, pledged to the same college fraternity. I didn't get "brotherhood". He did. He wound up in the Peace Corps. I wound up reading poetry in smoky coffeehouses, and, of course, we drifted apart. We rarely see each other and never talk on the phone, but every so often we exchange e-mails, and he's one of those people I know I could joke around with instantly no matter how long it had been. OK. So we're both the same age, and recently got to swapping details on memory loss. I confessed that sometimes my brain seems to be minus sixteen minutes like Nixon's secret tape. Another thing: I access google in order to look something up, then I forget what I wanted to look up. Happens a lot. Very frustrating. But, soldier on. Another friend of mine, long gone, used to say was that his father's best advice was, "It's a good life if you don't weaken." My first friend, the Jewish kid from Baltimore -- you know who you are, Kenny -- said that nowadays when someone asks him what restaurant he ate in or what movie he just saw or where he's going on his vacation, when anyone asks him such things, he says, "How soon do you need to know?"

This was too good not to pass on.

Hold the fort, amigo!

Old friends. Nothin' like 'em.

Morgan & Muhammad Ali

My life seems to have divided itself into two major periods: before Morgan and after Morgan, and then there was everything in between. Those years shaped me as much as any others. Morgan was there when no other school would touch me. I don't blame the ones who turned me down. Anybody judging me at that time would have labelled me a bad bet. But Morgan said yes, and I had the good sense to stay there. Did I ever feel out of place? You'd think I would, right? But, nope, wait, possibly once: the first time I crossed the quad when classes were changing. Suddenly, Negroes were everywhere, 360 degrees of Negroes, wall to wall Negroes, and not a one of me.  In trying to retrieve the feelings I had then the one that seems most appropriate is bemusement. I remember smiling to myself and thinking, so that's what it's like. Then I went to class, and I don't recall ever feeling isolated at all. OK, maybe when I went out for the wrestling team. And surely when I took Judy Brown to the Lyric Theatre to see Dick Gregory, and we were the only white folks in the audience. One of the jokes he told was that it was easy to stop smoking cigarettes because it was easy to put down anything white. Judy and I laughed along with everyone else, something I'd never do today. Couldn't everybody tell I was a fellow of good will? Apparently not, but I didn't yet notice it. I would only come to realize it years later, what Wordsworth meant when he said poetry was emotion recollected in tranquility. The single time somebody told me point blank that I was racist she was a good friend, a coed, very bright, future prom queen, named Jackie. We took some classes together. German was one of them. Ali was still calling himself Cassius Clay when he fought Sonny Liston for the title. Liston was a brooding, murderous looking beast who had in fact served time for murder. Clay was a loudmouthed upstart. Most white fans wanted Liston to pulverize Clay. You got it. I was one of them which is what I told Jackie when she asked me who I was for? She told me the only reason I wanted Liston was because I was a racist. I, of course, ranted against this assertion. We stood in front of the language arts building and swapped arguments. For God's sake, I was a student at Morgan! What racist? We were laughing but each of us was serious. I was dumbfounded. She was dogged. Jackie wouldn't back down, and I kept peppering her with examples of my lack of racism. It was never a heated argument. We parted friends, however, for many years now I have thought a lot about what she said. It was a cold day. I remember that, too.

I don't remember when -- I think it was way after I graduated Morgan -- but I finally got it. Now, don't be smug from the vantage point of contemporary time and place. We're talking a half century's difference. I hadn't yet grasped the subtler versions of racism. I knew big things. I knew my parents sent me to school the first day that Negro students were allowed in white schools. My brother and I braved the gauntlet of screaming racists that lined both sides of the sidewalk. It was a goddamn lynch mob! It was a terrifying time, every step, one hundred yards.  A gauntlet of rabid goyim (That's what we said then). Jesus Christ, don't let them figure out I'm Jewish! Still, my brother and I made the door before bottles began flying. If we'd been Black, we'd have been dead. This was not the kind of racism Jackie talked about. It was the kind that programs us to be unaware, to accept versions of the story without question, to call down judgment, the kind of thing that seeps  into your brain while you sleep. Sonny Liston was a white man's Negro, a man who fit the stereotype --- surly, mumbly, shambling, and very dark. Cassius Clay was an uppity colored guy. Light skin. Big mouth. That damn fool was a whole lot of terrible things -- loud, opinionated, in your face, disrespectful, taunting -- everything any sensible man would hate, right? And so I hated him without understanding how programmed I'd been, not by my family, just by growing up in Baltimore and breathing the air. For the record, I came to regard Muhamud Ali as a bonafide American hero. He literally put his money where his mouth was. He was forced to give up the way he earned a living. He was stripped of his title. He literally risked five years in prison. Still, he stayed true to his principles in the face of extraordinary hatred. "No Vietnamese ever called me a nigger," he said. How many of us have the fortitude to walk that walk? And do we know if that strength will be there when we need it? Is that what it means to have faith?

I met the man. It was during the period of time in which he was stripped of his title. I was teaching in West Virginia when he came to the campus to speak. Even without his title Ali was already a legend. Bundini Brown, his longtime friend and bodyguard, was with him. "Hold me back! Hold me back!" the champ yelled when he saw me coming to shake his hand. Muhammad Ali lunged forward as if to grab me. Bundini held him back. Another bodyguard held onto him from the other side. "Hold me back! Hold me back!" It only took me a second to figure out he was kidding, but I tell you true: in that one second my life passed before my eyes. The era of behemoth athletes was still a long way away, but when we shook hands my hand disappeared within his. Ali was the biggest man I had ever seen. He crackled with unbridled energy, like he existed within a force field of his own making. But there was an edge to him, a sense of unpredictability and danger. My life has afforded me many opportunities to meet and work with high end personalities, and that includes a president of the United States (smack inside the White House, too), but to this day I have never met anyone -- movie star, politician, or athlete -- who could electrify a room like that man could.

There is a story about a conversation a father once had with his son. The son came to his father and asked what sport he should play. He was trying to choose between playing football or boxing. "Football," his father said, "Because boxers don't play."

My Mountain

Well, it's not exactly mine -- it's mortgaged -- but the name on the deed is mine and has been for the past three decades now, plus the fact that it begins at the foundation of our house in the northern Catskills and rises gently to its peak a couple of thousand feet later, more. I'm somewhere on that mountain all the time, so, for all intents and purposes, it's mine. If I don't want you to find me you won't. My rough estimate is that I've climbed my mountain in the neighborhood of six thousand times, probably more, not always six thousand to the top but always some place on its slopes. I know my mountain well. Often, when I'm not on it, I make believe I am, and, when I am on it, I pinch myself and feel grateful, not always but often. There is constant discovery, always something seen that wasn't seen before, and, when that something catches my attention, I can stop and stare and allow it to sink in. Where is there new growth? What are the colors? Breathe in the scent. Has an animal been here? A turkey? A white tail? What's that in the dirt? A scratch? A track? Is the grass pressed down? In this space of time I am only what I am and nothing more. I would come here if there were a tragedy in my life. I would come here to keep from losing my mind. Some other mountain really doesn't interest me. I've never had the desire to climb the seven highest. I've never even had the desire to climb all the peaks in the Catskills. What I want is to know my mountain well, to take on its delight and its wonder. For a mountain to come to life you must be there. I've watched it grow dark, and I've watched it grow light, always enthralled, always entranced, always with my senses at their peak. I am alive, and at any instant something miraculous might happen! That bear? You know, the one who's out there but you've never seen him, seen sign but not him? You still might. But, you won't know until the bear shows himself, and, if he shows himself, he doesn't know you're there, which is exactly where you'd need to be.

Foreman's Birthday 12-23-1940

Sometime in the 50’s, probably around the time I failed high school for the 3^rd time, my father said to me, “Son, one of these days you’re going to find yourself, and, when you do, you’re going to be awfully disappointed.” I think he was joking. But the facts were it didn’t seem as if I’d ever get through school, and I was floundering around like a three legged pig in a cess pool.  Eventually I did graduate but not before doing penance in summer school where I was the only Jew on a gentile campus in a foreign neighborhood. I took to wearing a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes folded into the short sleeve of a white t-shirt in an attempt to pass. This cigarette/t-shirt mode belonged to gentile guys who went to vocational school, sported ducktail haircuts, and lived in dangerous neighborhoods, places like Pig Town, where only a few years earlier pigs still ran through the streets to the slaughterhouse, or Sparrows Point where the steel mills stood. At that time in Baltimore, Maryland, a Jewish kid wouldn’t have been caught dead in anything but an oxford button down shirt, preferably blue but white would do. If I had worn that get-up to summer school, along with the khaki trousers, weejun loafers, and argyle socks that defined the rest of the uniform, I might as well have hung a sign on my back that screamed: “You’re right. I did it. I killed Him.”

The previous paragraph is in darkened italics because I don't know what to do with it. Memoir is much on my mind these days, today especially as it's my birthday, so obviously that's where the paragraph belongs. Beginning? Somewhere in there? Or nowhere at all? More importantly, if you were cruising through a bookstore skimming first paragraphs, would you go on to the second? OK. Try this.

In January of 1963 all things seemed possible. Kennedy was still alive. So was my father. Civil Rights were simmering, but Black Power was not yet a battle cry. “We Shall Overcome” was our anthem. Those of us who sang it did so with our arms around each other and rocked gently. Alcatraz closed down, and Martin Luther King wrote his letter from a Birmingham jail. Sam Cooke sang, “A Change Is Gonna Come”. Dylan wrote, “Blowin’ In The Wind”. At the time, I was a student at Morgan State College in Baltimore, Maryland, an all Black school, where I was the only white male. I had been born and raised here in a city as southern as any other, yet Morgan’s student body could not be classified as radical, nor could I. Those kids were there to get a piece of the American pie, as was I. The coeds wore pillbox hats a la Jackie Kennedy, kid gloves, and carried proper purses. The men wore sport coats and ties, wool sweaters, and carried very professional looking briefcases. I continued to carry my books tucked under my arm, Hardy Boy’s style. Students spoke of “Martin” and “Malcolm” as if they were familiars, and early in 1963 came the time Morgan joined the movement and proper students risked jail time in order to integrate a whites only movie theatre just off campus, a theatre that was, coincidentally, owned by the father of a friend of mine, wealthy Jews who lived in the Golden Ghetto of North West Baltimore. My family lived on the northernmost fringe of that ghetto, not rich but certainly Jewish.

Which paragraph would coax you into reading more? This is not a trick question. It doesn't need an answer.

So, my birthday. If I were an octopus I couldn't wrap my arms around the fact that it's been sixty years since my Bar Mitzvah. Three score years! Do the math. I've already lived more years than I'm going to live. There's the math for you! (I can hear Lewis Black angrily yelling those last four words.) "There's the math for you!" I feel I should have something wise to say at this juncture, something profound, maybe even poetic. Really, I'm just glad to still be here. I'm not yet finished growing into myself.

A story.

Years ago, I mean, years ago, I sold my first screenplay to a man named Jennings Lang, a major great white shark of that era. That script, "The Hunting of Pink Mountain Tinney", never got made but it did get me a three picture deal, and thus began my career in this business. At some point after the deal was made Jennings and I were having lunch ("doing" lunch, I know), and I thought he was complementing me on the action sequences, and the man got me feeling like I was a big time screenwriter. I said something to that effect -- some dumb shit brag about my ability to do action -- something to that effect -- and when I shut up Jennings said to me, "I didn't buy your script for the action sequences. I bought it for the love story."

Some lessons y'gotta keep on learning.