Up In The Air

A novel I thought I would write many years ago culminated with a human wave of Arabs coming at Israel, shoulder to shoulder, row upon row, trance-like and unstoppable. It was fiction.

Last Sunday, thousands of Arab protesters, chiefly Palestinians, marched on Israel's borders from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the Egypt-Gaza line and the West Bank. We can bank on their doing it again. The Arabs have learned from Madison Avenue.

Lesson One: if you can’t sell the product, change the label. Case in point: Mad Ave legend has it that Procter & Gamble, intending to capitalize on its success with “Drene,” a shampoo, and “Dreft,” a detergent, was about to mass-market a product called “Dreck” when they discovered the word was a Yiddish vulgarism for excrement. So they changed the product’s name to “Breck.” A worldly colleague, wise in the ways of both western marketing and eastern geopolitics, contends the Arabs, unable to sell despotism or monarchy to the free world, changed the labels to “freedom” and “democracy” to bask in the media-coined “Arab Spring.” Similarly, Mad-Ave-savvy Palestinians have come to recognize that “Intifada” works better for them than “terrorist attack” and “freedom fighter” beats “suicide bomber.” By a lot.

The masses in the fictional human wave I envisioned were stoic and silent, not the mob with nary a vision for tomorrow that we behold today. For all the media hero-hailing of those who brought down Egypt’s Hosni Mubarek, I’ll remind you there are swarms of others committing un-freedom-loving acts like forcibly detaining, beating and sexually assaulting an American journalist, CBS correspondent Lara Logan; freeing criminals by facilitating jail-breaks, blatantly and crudely, while Egyptian police forces cower on the sidelines in fear of them; looting, vandalizing, downing and stripping telephone lines for copper. At what price, democracy? Freedom to what? you might ask.

I was in the Soviet Union when its head of state, Mikhail Gorbachev, gave his people a gift—two gifts!—they couldn’t dream of receiving in their lifetime: glasnost and perestroika, both of which added up to newfound freedom. And what did they do with the precious “freedom” bestowed on them? Spewed venom, blamed others for their failures, did everything but endeavor to build better lives for themselves. I observed that the gift they seized hungrily without a thank you in return was the “freedom to hate,” which gifted me with the title of the documentary I was making about them.

What I see in the “Arab Spring” is the unleashing of unrestricted forces of seething resentment and long-nurtured hatred. What I don’t see—anymore—is the spontaneity that initially had us rooting for the youthful demonstrators without judgment. I fear that those braving the blows for liberation are being cynically manipulated.

Lesson Two: apply the crafty rules of game theory, in which one individual or group does better at another's expense, conscience be damned. Brush up your Machiavelli. He who flexes the most power wins.

So, let’s see, a dictator wins until the mob displaces him. The mob thinks its winning until a mob boss emerges from the mob and takes control, leaving the mob in the dirt. It’s only a matter of time until the mob boss is replaced by another boss or emerging authoritarian. It’s a round-robin game where power unvaryingly corrupts and nobody ultimately wins. The Iranian revolutionaries overthrew the Shah and got Khomeini and the rule of the Ayatollahs. We have no idea what’s in store for Egypt, but what’s far more alarming, no one in Egypt appears to know what’s in store for Egypt. What’s in store for the region, the Middle East, the rest of the world?

Lesson three: false advertising. Since there is no oversight and no accountability, lie.

The chairman of the PLO/ president of the Palestine National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, who gradually managed to gain the respect of outsiders, some Israelis included, just lost mine. Several weeks ago, Abbas, who convincingly professed to be a man of peace, committed himself and his political party, Fatah, to joining forces with his arch-rival, Hamas, a self-described “armed resistance” faction sworn to destroy Israel. The unimaginable reconciliation was mediated by the headless leadership of Egypt! Then, only several days ago, Abbas published an op-ed piece in the New York Times that was pure—or more accurately, impure—fiction: stating his claim for the Palestinian people, he blatantly made up his own history for them. Maybe he should be writing a novel.

If leaders deceive their people; if they manipulate them; if they calculatingly play to win at any expense, the cheap cost of lives—others lives, of course—being the winning point; if they lie without impunity; then what is to prevent them from driving their followers, like sheep, into a ravine, or wall, or fence?

Last Sunday, the occasion for thousands of Arabs to storm Israel’s borders from five sides was the “nakba,” Arabic for "catastrophe." “Nakba” is the term they use to describe the founding of the State of Israel, or their defeat in the war on Israel, launched by five Arab nations, that immediately followed Israel's founding, or their displacement in the war—or merely the continuing existence of Israel. The Huffington Post reported, “…activists were bused in from Palestinian refugee camps throughout Syria. Many of them held European passports and told interrogators they had been flown in from abroad for the march.” And, “Many came from the 12 crowded refugee camps in Lebanon where some 400,000 Palestinian refugees live.” Clearly, the spontaneous demonstration was well organized.

What happens if “the spontaneous demonstration” is organized to become a human wave? How many lives on both sides will it take? What Abbas had to say about the Palestinian side was, "Their precious blood will not be wasted. It was spilled for the sake of our nation's freedom." That word again, freedom, used so freely it threatens to become meaningless.

As for the novel I didn’t write? I intended to leave the ending—with its relentlessly-advancing human wave—up in the air. That’s the indisputably awesome point I fear we are at in the Middle East with, but in no way limited to, the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate. Up in the air.

The Sidewalks of New York, Part Two

Overheard—a dialogue between two street people as they walked:

First man: We’re all separate individuals.
Second man: I respect that.

My ears went up when I heard “separate individuals.” The sidewalks of New York are heating up again. Not thermally, not just yet, but intrinsically, by nature of the people who drum their rhythms of life from them.

In the initial “Sidewalks of New York,” I wrote, “Everybody has a story” and told a scant few of a New Yorker’s slew of them. “A Distant Admirer” commented, “You don't have to be a New Yorker to love these stories, or your special New York. More, please?”

I didn’t have to be asked more than once. But then, curious, I couldn’t resist asking for “more” from my readers as well. Captured audiences we wry New Yorkers are, time-tested troupers of the serendipitous and the screwy dutifully reporting from the trenches, here’s the scoop:

This one starts like “The Ancient Mariner” and ends like a Quentin Tarantino film. A bedraggled fellow with a cheerful expression on his face approached Stuart Bardin. As Stuart tried not to be distracted by the pirate hat plopped on the man’s head and the stuffed parrot perched on his shoulder, he politely asked if Stuart had a minute to hear his tale of woe. Ever the gentleman, Stuart couldn’t say no, at least not fast enough. The less-than-ancient mariner proceeded to tell him that his ship had run aground in Central Park Lake and he was trying to raise enough money to "buy his crew some rum." He was awarded $10 for his creative fabrications—or, as Stuart puts it, for “the best laugh I ever had on the Sidewalks of NY.”

Overheard outside a Broadway theater:

I don’t understand what happened to this show. They loved it in Boston.

Celebrity-sighting in New York is a celebrity slighting the natives do well. You can read it directly from their five-borough body language: Who does he think he is that I should notice him? So the art of the game is to spot the illustrious one and then deliberately ignore him or her. Bernard Fox (no relation) relates the exception to the rule where his children’s godmother was concerned:

“She had just parked at a meter. She dug into her purse for quarters and found she had only large bills. Thinking for a moment about rushing to a nearby store to get change and then rushing back before her car was ticketed or towed, she spotted Woody Allen walking down the street. He was walking with a fisherman-like hat pulled way down over his head, his collar up, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. She stood in his path and said, “I have no change for my meter, and unless you give me a quarter, I’m going to shout ‘THERE’S WOODY ALLEN!’" He gave her the quarter. And a smile.

Overheard:

Hey, lady, you got a hundred bucks? I wanna get out of the city.

The following happened to me. Almost twice:

On a sunny day on the cobblestone sidewalk along Central Park West, a neatly-dressed, light-skinned African-American man seemingly in his twenties approached from the opposite direction, greeting me with a happy-to-see-you smile and a warm hello. While I scrutinized his face quickly, trying to recognize him, he said, “You know my mother.” It’s not a line you can walk away from. As I stood trying to place him, trying to find the face of the woman “I knew” in his, he asked, “Who’s the black woman you know best?” My mind flashed on Blanche, a woman who helped my mother raise me when I was a child, a woman I dearly loved many years ago. Perhaps it was emotion, perhaps it was the incredibility of the situation: I barely uttered her name. It didn’t matter—he didn’t need to hear it. “I’m her son,” he said.” The incredibility of the situation predominated. “Is your mother still alive?” I inquired. He assured me she was—old, but fine, he indicated with a proud, confirming nod. I was in no position to do the math, but now I could walk away and was ready to. Careful not to repeat her name, I pointedly told him, “If she were still alive, she’d have to be over a hundred.” With another nod, he said, “Let’s step over here and discuss it.” Stepping back and saying we had nothing to discuss, I departed quickly, feeling a little foolish and a little sad—I hadn’t thought about Blanche for years, and if there were any chance she… no, impossible. My melancholy quickly turned to begrudging admiration for the young man—he was good! I wondered how many people he took in per day, per week, and how much he asked for, for money surely was his object. I thought of reporting the incident to the proper authorities, but I know New York detectives, and, in addition to the serious pursuit of more dangerous men, they have bigger fishy people to fry. Continuing on my way, I couldn’t help smiling.

I said, “almost twice.” Less than a month ago, a man coming toward me on Broadway smiled and greeted me. It was the same neatly-dressed man, and he looked none the worse for the years that had passed, five by my count. Before he could say, “You know…” I told him, “I’ve already heard your hustle.” He smiled and said, “Good to see you again,” and moved on without breaking stride.

Overheard:

Could you tell me how to get to Times Square, or should I just go f#!* myself?

Elizabeth Taylor's Nine Lives

Years ago, when a million dollars could last you a very comfortable lifetime, a mega-major literary agent offered to get me a million dollars for a biography of Elizabeth Taylor. It was an offer I knew he could back up and in all likelihood already had. He was, he professed, enamored with her. I wasn’t. I had just come back from a distant trip with her that felt even longer than it was; had weathered and survived the traveling circus that was Elizabeth and Co., the center ring steadily drawing in fast-shrinking concentric circles of fans and gawkers who threatened to suffocate us in every airport, hotel lobby and public space we entered; and I was refreshing myself in the anonymous air of my New York. In one of those lucid moments when your life passes before you, in this case the future, I couldn’t see myself spending the time on her life it would take to write a book about her. Still, my lunch host had just put a million dollar offer on the table at, where else?, the Russian Tea Room. I told him I’d been invited to be her house guest in L.A. next week and said, “I’ll ask her.”

I related the agent’s offer to Elizabeth, thinking she’d have visions of sugarplum-shaped diamonds dancing in her head and foresee many more lavender dresses and shawls hanging in her vast dress closet. After musing momentarily about it, she said, “I don’t think I’ve lived my life yet.” I laughed and said, “The way I see it, you’ve lived at least eight of them.”

It was a relief for me to come up with an alternate plan. I had come to know Elizabeth as a wonderful story teller. After we were both injured in a car accident and consequently relegated to gorging ourselves on marzipan in the presidential suite at The Tel Aviv Hilton while we recovered, I managed, with simple prompting, to get her to tell me what seemed like every story she had in her. Our afternoons were like biopics: in addition to The Mike Todd Story, The Richard Burton Story and The (briefer) Eddie Fisher Story, her cast of characters and foibles included her friendships with Montgomery Clift, Rock Hudson, royalty and roués and, get this, Anwar Sadat. Telling her I was concerned about her inevitably losing track of pertinent details of her truly singular stories, I suggested she tell me any that occurred to her I hadn’t yet heard and I would write them up. We would keep them in a drawer in her house until the time came when she was ready to tell The Elizabeth Taylor Story. She welcomed the idea. Unfortunately, her life in L.A. and mine in N.Y. being what they were, we never got to another story.

In her ninth life, she befriended Michael Jackson and stuck by him when he most needed a friend. She distinguished herself by becoming an early and leading advocate and fund-raiser for AIDS research. A genuinely good person, she used her celebrity to become an effective activist wherever she believed she could help.

Wherever she is, I’m confident she’s already embarking on life number ten.

With Gratitude

To all who have been so loving and supportive over the past six months, to all who have expressed their concern: your prayers and good wishes, heartfelt by me, have immeasurably helped medical science do what it did to heal me. Yesterday, my neck and throat were pronounced “absolutely clear” by my one-of-a-kind oncologist, Dr. Louis Harrison of Beth Israel Hospital.

To each and every one of you, THANK YOU. I wish I could have responded to you individually, but my condition at the time and your generous outpouring overwhelmed me.

Once again, my deepest thanks to you.

Gratefully,

Ray

A Man With Daughters

There's no medicine like your children.

I have a younger daughter who calls me every morning to make sure I’ve had breakfast—I have little appetite and less memory these days—and threatens to have food delivered to me if I have not. I have an older daughter who ardently wants to prepare healthy dinners for me, but a healthy cuisine to her is raw food, so thus far I decline. It’s the love that counts.

Some days you question what you are hanging around for. Then you drop into any one of your two daughters’ three “Alice’s Tea Cup” restaurants and ease past the people waiting in line to behold a room full of the cozily-seated—or a patron exiting with a copy of your published daughters’ "Alice's Tea Cup" Cookbook (HarperCollins). Some days, down but not out, you brave the cold not as well as you braved radiation en route to a daughter’s opening night, and before the day is over, you’re basking in the glow of a rave review for her—the very same Lauren Fox!—in The New York Times. And, on some dark days, cerebrally scalped and emotionally threadbare, you ask yourself: is it worth it? And then your grandchildren burst through the door.

I vividly remember my mother, holding and rocking our firstborn, looking up at me as I entered the room and, with a beatific half-smile on her lips, telling me, “They say, ‘Your children’s children are twice your children.’” I don’t know who “they” are: I’ve never been able to find the saying or the source of it. But, for the first time I, a young father, came as close to understanding what the hitherto inexplicable (to me) ecstasy of grandparenthood was as I could ever come—until now.

I’ve learned what keeps us going is wanting to see how it all comes out. I’m beginning to see it. It’s a given and a gift that my wife is my best friend, but our daughters’ metamorphosis from children I blissfully squired around town to my two unconditional best friends was magical. The full measure of it is that there is nothing we can’t say to each other; we unwittingly shock others. It isn’t just love that conquers all, it’s love and respect, and it flows in both directions.

How it all comes out. I know what my youngest daughter Haley is going to be—she became it. She would have made a wonderful film director, but she wanted more to become a great mother and she became one of the best. Best of all, her children know it.

Lauren had to do it the hard way, the long, winding way—like everything else she’s done, in her own time. But her time is now. (And what timely medicine for me!)

A friend who hadn’t seen her since she was mugged and injured last June called me after he’d seen her show to say how distressed he was during it. The character Lauren created in “Hillbilly Women” had a crooked mouth and unevenly hunched shoulders and she maintained those distorting physical effects without let-up. She even took her first bow in character, so it wasn’t until her second bow—when she came out as herself, broad smile and relaxed body posture—that he was assured all was right in the Fox world.

For sure, what keeps us going is wanting to see how it all comes out. All is, or presently seems, right again.

When Henry Kissinger tried to fend off then-Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s entreaties with, “I’m an American first, Secretary of State second, and a Jew third,” she responded, “That’s all right. Here we read from right to left.” My answer is “I am a man with daughters.”

Blissful Ignorance

I deliberately remained ignorant of sickness and disease all my life. I thought if I was really quiet about it I could, in the course of (ample) time, slip up to and past the finish line without them. Knowing anything about illness scared me because by knowing it I might catch it. The slightest whiff could hurt me.

Not knowing almost killed me.

I missed all the signs. Blocked history and an earlier warning. Heeded the wrong advice. I listened to what I wanted to hear. If it let me off the hook, it was all I had to hear.

On the other hand, little to nothing shocks or surprises me. So when the bad news came, I took it in stride. Apparently too much stride: after the doctor told me I had a cancerous tumor in my throat, “a sizeable one,” he scrutinized me and said, “You’re taking this awfully well.” I‘ve since wondered how others take it. I explained to him that I’m not an alarmist, never have been. What is, is. In deference to him, I waited a respectful amount of silence, seconds, to ask, “So what’s next?”

For some of us, the further ahead of the pack we think we’ve inched in life, i.e., the healthier, happier, the better off we are… the easier we may have it, the more we privately angst about being unmerited—and getting our inevitable comeuppance, our just desserts, the divine leveler. Getting our due! We live on the edge of dreading-but-waiting for it. When it finally hits, we quiescently utter or imperceptibly exhale an “ah-ha”… “So here it is!”

What was next for me was that I was about to become a first-hand authority on one man’s cancer. Mine. Whoever said life changes on a dime shortchanged it. I found myself at that critical turning point in life when you see so much more of what you’ve left behind than what lies ahead. Nevertheless, I gave little, if any, thought to the life and death aspects of it. I concentrated on getting through it.

I’m not going to drown you in a litany of dreadful ill-, side-, or after-effects. But if you stop me on the street and ask about me, and I sense you’re sincerely interested, I’m going to give you an earful. Someone should go public with what having throat cancer really means, because so few have any clue.

There’s no reason you would think to ask me this, but I’ll confide in you. Sickness takes away your confidence. I watched mine diminish, as resultantly I diminished, quietly and distressingly. One of my closest friends, a man facing sudden, unaccustomed illness, told me he wasn’t worried, nor should I, his body had never failed him. And then it did. That immutable truth and loss haunts me.

What I learned and can share with you is that love—whom you love and who loves you—comes first and only. It starts with family, extends to friends, flows to and from well-wishers. Love, and loving support. I further learned that that loving support can (and in my case, blessedly did) come from the people whose hands your life is in everyday—the oncologists, nurses, radiologists and staff. On the grimmest of days, a receptionist’s warm smile goes right to your heart. When your doctor puts his arm around you and says, “I know how difficult it is for you,” you live for the next day.

No one should ever have go it alone, and I wonder, can someone? If my heart went out to anyone during any of my worst, this-is-about-me days, it was to the occasional patient who seemed to have no one at his or her side.

“The child is father of the man,” one of my favorite lines from one of my favorite poets, Wordsworth, became my reality. My two daughters opened doors and held them for me, gathered my belongings and shepherded me through corridors and crowds. I became my wife’s ward as well, the “little woman” becoming bigger in my eyes every day. In my second childhood I became gratefully dependent on three women, diligently taking instructions from them and earnestly asking them not only for advice, but what I was supposed to do “now.”

For “now,” I’m in the post radiation/chemo stage, “hell” weeks, as nurses accurately forewarned me. If, as another English poet, Thomas Grey had it, “ignorance is bliss,” is my newly-acquired knowledge that “hell”? At the medical offices, they commend me for being “ahead of the curve.” If you collar me on the street, I’d have to level with you by telling you that unable to see the curve, or any others on it, I derive little consolation from it. My hell weeks coincide with the season of joy.

One of the wisest of all the doctors I met ended our meeting by saying, “We’re all going to die. We’re here to see to it that you die from something else.” Looks like that’s the way it’s going to be. Grateful as I am, I just wish he’d added, “much later.”

Pain Humbles

I had no idea when I wrote this that one day I would confirm it.

PAIN HUMBLES

WHILE YOU ENDURE A STABBING PAIN

AND DOCTORS SEEK THE GERM GERMANE,

ALAS, IN VAIN, YOUR SPIRIT PLAINLY CRUMBLES.

PAIN HUMBLES.

YOU DISREGARD THAT YOU ARE ILL,

A PILLAR IN YOUR OWN MIND STILL.

BUT THERE'S NO PILL FOR WHEN A PILLAR TUMBLES.

PAIN HUMBLES.

YOU'RE OVERWEIGHT, THEY OPERATE;

YOU DEVIATE, THEY OPERATE;

YOU PALPITATE, THEY OPERATE.

YOU BET YOU…

THEY GET YOU.

‘THO YOU INSIST YOU'RE GETTING STRONG,

THE DOCTOR SAYS, “IT WON’T BE LONG"

‘CAUSE "W-WHAT WENT WRONG WENT R-REALLY WRONG!", HE FUMBLES.

PAIN HUMBLES.

PAIN HUMBLES...

PAIN HUMBLES.

IN SPITE OF ALL HIS HIGH IDEALS

A MAN IS ONLY HOW HE FEELS,

AND WHEN HE FEELS ON HIS LAST HEELS, HE GRUMBLES.

PAIN HUMBLES.

A RICH MAN MAY LUXURIATE

UNTIL HIS HEART BEATS FLUCTUATE,

THEN AT THE GATE OF HIS ESTATE HE STUMBLES.

PAIN HUMBLES.

WITHOUT A CURE, A MAN IS POOR;

THE CURE OBSCURE, A MAN IS POOR.

A TEMPERATURE, A MAN IS POOR.

YOU ADD IT –

YOU’VE HAD IT!

FROM ALL THAT CAKE, YOU'RE LEFT A CRUMB;

YOU NIBBLE IT AND DOWN YOU COME!

YOUR TEETH GO NUMB AND LO! YOUR STOMACH RUMBLES.

PAIN HUMBLES.

PAIN HUMBLES...

PAIN HUMBLES.

SO IF IT'S GOUT THAT GETS YOUR GOAT,

OR IF YOU'RE SMOTE BY STOMACH BLOAT,

FOR EVERY DOTE THERE'S AN ANTI-DOTE!

YOU FEEL IT,

I’LL HEAL IT!

I'LL MAKE THIS CLAIM AND MAKE IT STICK –

WHAT HURTS YOU HURTS ME TO THE QUICK!

I WRITHE WHEN SICK WITH PAIN A VICTIM MUMBLES

PAIN HUMBLES.

PAIN HUMBLES…

PAIN HUMBLES.

© FOXBOROUGH JR. MUSIC (ASCAP)

From "The Confidence Man," Music by Jim Steinman, Lyric by Ray Errol Fox.

Performed by Norbert Leo Butz. Original Cast Records. Pain_Humbles.mp3

I Am Not Michael Douglas

I wrote the following as an op-ed piece, but faced with the reality that I’ll be unable to write anything else for awhile, I’ve decided to post it here.


I’m not on the cover of “People.” You won’t see me on “The Letterman Show.” No one will create a “We all want you to make it, and beat the dam disease” fan page for me on “Facebook.” (Whew!)

I am not Michael Douglas, but I am faced with the same health threat, treatment and odds of success he is—I, and 25,000 new cases of head and neck cancer in The United States (as of 2009) and a growing number of people being treated for throat cancer.

Michael Douglas chose to go public, very public, with his disease. I have no issue with that. What he is doing is bold and informative. He will be the Rock Hudson of his day, doing for throat cancer awareness what Hudson did for AIDS and other high-profile people are doing to destigmatize breast cancer, testicular cancer, Parkinson’s Disease and Alzheimer’s. If it takes an actor to build public awareness, so be it. It might be the most genuinely productive thing to come out of Hollywood since “Birth of a Nation.”

I have wrestled for weeks with how to deal with this unexpected turning point of my life. By initial instinct, the last thing I wanted to do was to go public, and for me, publishing on this page is as public as it gets. Good news about me isn’t on anyone’s lips, blog or newsstand—I don’t have a film, play, book or really anything new to herald or promote—but any routinely random greeting these days uncomfortably reminds me how fast bad news travels, and I worry about mine catching up with me.

Everyday questions take on new meaning. “How are you?” and “How are you feeling?” have me puzzling for an answer, wondering: Does he know? Does she really want to know? Should I tell a friend what my doorman already knows? The auto-bounce-back, “Fine,” is not a viable answer.

What came to my lips at first was, “I’ve been better,” deluding myself I could ease past the moment and on to something else—the ever-handy weather, last night’s Yankee game, you!... let’s talk about you! Contrary to being a game-changer or a stopper, I learned “I’ve been better” opened more doors than it closed. Someone would let me off the hook only to wait until I was out of earshot to ask my wife or daughters what was up.

Several days ago, my reply became, “I’m all right, thank you,” followed by my walking away feeling false and awful, all the while concerned that my unsteadiness (self-perceived) would give me away and I would stumble over my own falsehood. The deceit wears on me. Doctors, advice-givers and well-wishers keep telling me how important it is for me to relax, to avoid stress, to live in the moment. But until this cathartic account, I’ve been finding the pressure of whom to tell, and when to tell if I tell, mounting and onerous. No doctor, advice-giver or well-wisher thus far has been able to tell me how “this” is done.

I haven’t made it easier on myself by demanding it be done tastefully, tactfully and (most improbably of all) sotto voce. I tell one friend not to tell anybody for now, another to let so-and-so know, please, still another that I trust his good judgment. At the end of the day, I don’t remember who knows what, and don’t care.

If Michael Douglas is a public role model, it’s fair for me to ask how he is playing this role I’m still grappling with. Is the hero of this story outwardly plucky-but-humbled, while inwardly as frightened as anyone with cancer? Did he, too, have to tell a grandchild what Poppy has is not catching? Does he have to convince more than those who know and truly love him, “I’m going to beat this!”?

Those who learn about my condition say much the same thing to me Letterman said to Douglas—“But you look great, and you don’t sound like you have throat cancer.” Only one of us could answer, “Because I am on stage,” and follow it by flashing that unmistakable Douglas father/son smile. I would have to say: Dave, I didn’t live like Michael Douglas, I didn’t smoke (for four decades), ever drink to excess, or take drugs. I would lean closer to Dave and softly add: And I didn’t have all his women.

How am I? When I was a child, I read an old saying that put life in lifelong perspective for me, its words so profound they made it impossible for me ever to feel sorry for myself: I cried because I had no shoes; then I saw a man who had no feet. Michael Douglas, 25,000 other throat cancer patients and I can beat this! Those who put a face on conditions like these make it easier for me and others to talk about it.

Autumn in New York

It’s supposed to be autumn in New York, but signs of it, if evident, are few. Days drift from sultry to balmy to lamely breezy at best, rendering evenings occasionally cool only by comparison. As seasons go, it’s no season at all. It’s too early for nature’s best show: that shocking change of indescribable colors that slips into town for a limited engagement, but too-hastily doffs its fiery bonnet and unceremoniously skips out with let’s-blow-this-town indifference.

Soon, it will be too cold for the lone street-corner sax player—whose thin, labored musical strains I hear every day well before I emerge through the arch of my building— to occupy the wee circle of prime sidewalk real estate he lays squatter’s rights to, to play, tirelessly, (tiresomely for me), the only song he apparently knows, “As Time Goes By.”

A block south of me, a man lives on the street with his dog, his cell phone, and his journals, which he has been observed to pour through, under one of those open-air phone booths mounted on a post. The wife of one well-known New Yorker routinely stops with her dog, crouches down and lingers to chat at length with him. He doesn’t lack guests to his blanketed oasis—yesterday, he was host to a young woman who stroked his disinterested dog as the two parties softly discussed... what? Assured that New Yorkers are not as indifferent as they are perceived to be, not by a long shot, I’m hoping to catch sight of whom among them will offer the man and his dog, inseparable, shelter for the winter. It has to be the best reality show going.

Nothing against man and dog, but truer to character, my heart goes out to the lonely man with a horn. In my mind, I offer him solace. But only on condition of his learning to play a new song. And, if it’s “Autumn in New York,” I readily foot the bills for every lesson for as long as it takes.

Fall is a foolish name to call a season so glorious, and, as the song says, “so inviting.” It’s autumn—in New York or anywhere else. Wikipedia says the word comes from the Old French autompne, automne in modern French, but doesn’t state what it meant or came to mean in old or new French. That may explain why autumn gained disproportionate popularity as fall. Wikipedia also tells us, “Since 1997, Autumn has been one of the top 100 names for girls in the United States.” But I’ve never met a girl named Autumn. Or Fall. So much for Wikipedia this season.

Autumns in New York may no longer spell “the thrill of first-nighting.” Not when substantially discounted preview tickets are available. But reliably, on every Halloween every autumn, every brownstone on West 69th Street in the two-block stretch between Central Park West and Broadway becomes a story-book haunted house full of thrills and treats for children of all ages. And for the 84th Thanksgiving morning, Central Park West and 7th Avenue (in lieu of Broadway) will become the Main Streets of Anytown for the locals, who gather hours earlier to view and to cheer on the footsloggers and float-squatters of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Autumn is the season for The New York Film Festival and The New York City Ballet; for this season, the overdue arrival of the longed-for Upper West Side Trader Joe’s and, painfully, the imminent departure of the community-prized Lincoln Square Barnes and Noble; the Yankees’ post-season and Christopher Columbus’ Day; plus so much more that is distinctly New York. The season and occasion for a love song to New York that sings to all. All the more poignant, then, to know that “Autumn in New York” was the inspiration of a Russian-born composer, Vladimir Aleksandrovich Dukelsky, who became, in New York, the great American songwriter, Vernon Duke.

Autumn in New York,
It's good to live it again.

Listen to what Ella and Satch do with it.

I Believe

With my holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur, less than a day away, and my happiest season of the year, autumn in New York, only a week away, it’s that introspective time of year for me when I start asking myself again what I believe.

With all respect to God, Torah and the Ten Commandments, I have discovered that what I most believe in is Respect For All. That doesn’t necessarily mean I personally respect all people, it means I show respect for all.

High up on my two tablets is “Character is destiny.” Because I consider plagiarism a sin (against man) I’ll be quick to tell you that “Character is destiny” is not my line,* it’s Heraclitus’s, a 6th century Greek philosopher. I resolutely hold that “Character is destiny”—for good or ill. Abraham Lincoln’s life exemplified it. Gandhi’s embodied it. We learn it as children, but improvidently put it aside with “childish things.”** Pinocchio personifies the ancient adage, conversely and dramatically, as his nose grows longer with every lie he tells.

Heraclitus, as quotable as the prophets, Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde, may also have said, “Know thyself.” Knowing a good aphorism when he saw one, Socrates prescribed it. The Oracle of Delphi billboarded it. I wish it on others like a blessing or a curse. We know he didn’t know much, but if George W. Bush had only known himself he might have applied himself. He would have made a fine baseball commissioner. If a sober Mel Gibson would come face to face with himself, it’s likely as not he’d either cut out his tongue or his heart.

Some time ago, I was surprised to discover in retrospect that every screenplay I’d written during my misspent Hollywood tenure had a theme in common: “power corrupts” (credit to Lord Acton). How did I fail to recognize in time that every person in a powerful position in Hollywood necessary to deal with was corrupted by power? If “character is destiny,” irrefutably, I know where every executive and producer in Hollywood is bound in the afterlife.

In the absence of the aggregate—respect for all, “character is destiny,” “know thyself” and “power corrupts”—what we get is unavoidably whom we get, and that is the antithesis of what I believe, the exemplarily bereft George W. I have always thought of people as rudimentary empty vessels you can fill with good or evil. The danger resides in their sheer emptiness: who pours what into the void, and to what purpose. W’s trouble auto-started at the top—his empty head filled his shallow heart with comfy platitudes. That left far too much room in his heart for the snake in his garden, Dick Cheney, to ply it with poison.

Is that all I believe? Not in the least. I believe in helping others when I can. I believe in always trying to see the other side. I believe in recognizing what’s more important to someone than it is to me. A legacy from my father, I believe in giving the other guy just a little more to make sure he feels he has half. I believe, with all my heart, in the words of Thomas Campbell, “To live in the hearts we leave behind is not to die.”

Finally this day, my cardinal “commandment” is an imploration to myself and one and all always to think. Think before you act, think before you speak. Before you do anything, pause… to think. So many of the world’s problems, so many of our personal ones, could be averted by just a little prior thought.

Time to atone.

- - -

Footnotes:
*Nor is it John McCain’s, who used it for a title, but not only didn’t put it in quotes, but also gave credit for chapter-by-chapter aspects of it to everyone from Joan of Arc to Wilma Rudolph, from Gandhi to Mark Twain, from Darwin to Mother Teresa—but never, it appears, to Heraclitus, the man who said it. How’s that for character?

**Paul of Tarsus.

Measuring the Golden Rule

Here it is Rosh Hashanah and I’m thinking Confucius and Jesus.

Between the time God created the world and man created the Internet, prophets and pundits created The Golden Rule. They didn’t call it The Golden Rule, in all likelihood because they didn’t recognize its potential mileage. That coinage would evolve from visionary spinners.

Competing religions pounced on it, bequeathing history one of the earliest recorded instances of plagiarism. Notwithstanding, it’s a 24K maxim, an “ethic of reciprocity,” as it’s been called. You can see why “ethic of reciprocity” never caught on.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you is the “to be or not to be” of maxims. Screw up any one of six or seven key words and you’re in danger of altering the meaning—and the effective cadence.

If you’re an English-speaking Confucian, you believe his words are, "Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you." If you’re a Buddhist, the words you would use are, “Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.” Since both expressions preceded the Christian Era by six centuries, copyright law does not apply. A good thing too, since Ancient Greeks, Ancient Egyptians, Bahá'ís, Brahmans, Jainists, Hindus, Muslims, Catholics and Jews all have their very own rhetorically-mnemonic versions, so subtly varying that the host of do-not-dos begin to sound like doobie-dos. (And there’s scant evidence Sinatra ever had an ethic of reciprocity in mind.)

I think of the Golden Rule on this day of my new year because during this period of reflection it saddens me that the only person I can identify as living by it completely is my seven-year-old grandson. In this, the 21st century of the not-so-good-Christian era, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you has become Do unto others as you would have them do unto others, or, Do unto others before they do unto you. I’m not just playing with words:

Consider that everyone and most action today is motivated by greed, which has its own “golden rule,” pontificated by that contemporary fictional “prophet,” Gordon Gekko, in the 1987 film “Wall Street,” the egocentric justifying, “Greed… is good.” And we see the results of what Wall Street did “unto others” with that carte blanche.

Consider that our country is run by men and women who seem to lose sleep only by virtue of plotting how to undermine each other’s efforts to do something for, i.e., “unto others,” i.e., for, our country.

Consider that in our xenophobia we attack from fear of being attacked, breed hatred because we’re hated because we breed hatred, discriminate indiscriminately out of blind ignorance cynically-fueled. We perpetuate the worst in ourselves to preserve what we mistakenly cling to as our past national, individual and collective, best.

The Talmud states, "What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man. This is the law: all the rest is commentary." I rest my case.

Dodger, the Joint-Custody Dog

When a day starts with the New York Times declaring, “Today, record-challenging heat…” no good can come from adding more heat to it. So, I’m eschewing all public and personal reflections for another week and extending the Dog Days.

Just when you think you think you can’t bear to wipe your wet brow one more time, a cooling breeze wafts across your forehead in the form of—what else?—a lovely story. Since Dodger, pictured above, is not shaggy, and his story, so far as we know it, is not long, this is anything but a shaggy dog story. Dodger, rescued from a pound, is a survivor in joint custody.

Adrienne Albert is a contemporary American composer who loved and lost a dog named Mahler. Mahler, a fawn-colored greyhound, used to sit—cross-legged—on Adrienne’s sofa without budging an inch to make room for anyone else on it. We’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but I didn’t approve of Mahler’s manners. He could tell, and could be quite surly about it.

Adrienne longed for, more accurately pined for, a new dog. Her neighbor, Stephanie Burns, rescues dogs and finds homes for them. Stephanie, a truly devoted “dog person” in Adrienne’s admiring eyes, found Dodger at the pound, and not a moment too soon, because he was slated to be put down the next day.

Stephanie did what Stephanie habitually does—brought him home with her to place him with a good family. But Dodger, as you will see, has a way with women. After spending just a wee bit of time with him, Stephanie fell in love, so in love she couldn’t bear to part with him. She decided she would keep him.

Stephanie has two other dogs, one she’s unable to find a home for because he, Buster, has a personality disorder, no doubt from being a dog who needed rescuing, the other, a wonderful beagle named Molly.

Scheduled to be away from home for a month and knowing how Adrienne craved another dog, Stephanie asked Adrienne if she would like to take Dodger for part of the time. Would she! In the time it took Adrienne to say “Yes!” twice, she fell in love with him.

In the course of her bliss-time, Adrienne, aware Stephanie was coming home, asked if Dodger could spend the night. (This begins to sound like a French film.) Stephanie, a modern woman, said she’d already sent Adrienne an e-mail to that effect, namely, suggesting they could share Dodger. They assumed Dodger’s swagger-the-tail complicity.

The result: the two women have the doggonedest of all worlds. Joint custody of Dodger. By day, he lives with Adrienne, who composes at home and often goes out at night. By night, he’s Stephanie’s, whose schedule is the reverse. At the beginning of every week, Adrienne sends her 7-day schedule to Stephanie, who comes to pick Dodger up for several hours each day and brings him back before his bedtime, which is substantially earlier than Adrienne’s, but Dodger is either none the wiser or very cool about it. Before long, conversely, when Adrienne will be traveling, Stephanie will be spending more quality daytime with the happily bi-domiciled Dodger.

It’s all in a Dog’s Day and it’s happening in Los Angeles. Stephanie hopes it will spur additional ways for people to adopt dogs. Citing an existing “huge” animal overpopulation problem, she emphasizes, “If people can work out a joint custody situation, then more dogs can be saved.” Now doesn’t that warm your heart and cool your brow at the same time?

Treading the Last Waters of August

In Ancient Rome, the Dog Days extended from July 24 through August 24, still the case, according to Wikipedia, “in many European cultures.” Not many Romans in sight these days, but maybe it’s purely cultural that so many French, Italians and Germans come to New York to suffer weather New Yorkers flee to France and Italy (but not Germany) to avoid.

No one in his or her right mind would have opted for the stifling, roasting summer of 2010 here. If the French had a word for it, it was yuch. On this day after the Dog Days, I recall sweltering in better New York circumstances….

I was ten minutes away from meeting a friend at “Alice's Tea Cup" (one of my two daughters’ three restaurants, I relate with pride) on a late August afternoon when my elevator went dark and came to a standstill. I used the light on my cell phone, its battery already low, to find the alarm on the panel. I hoped to let someone know I was trapped, but the alarm was as dead as the lights and the fan. The air in the elevator grew stifling. I began to peel off one layer of clothing at a time, folding and stacking each new article neatly beside me on the elevator’s leather bench, where I had resignedly seated myself in darkness, envisioning being discovered, eventually, flashlights shining on my dank, naked body. I imagined the woman waiting for me—an Ambassador, to make me feel worse—thinking I’d knavishly stood her up. I mused over a scene from “Sweet Charity” where Charity and her high-strung beau are trapped in a stopped elevator, and he reads a sign that says, “Capacity: 2000 pounds” and, in a panic, cries, “I weigh 163, how much do you weigh?!”

Trying to preserve my battery for an ultimate emergency, I sporadically dialed and finally reached our doorman, just long enough to learn from him that it wasn’t the elevator alone, nor the building, lacking electrical power—it looked like it could be Manhattan’s entire Upper West Side, possibly the East Coast, that was effected. It was more than plausible; I’d been through this East-Coast-blackout-thing before (which reminds me of another, salacious, only-in-New York story I don’t know you well enough to tell—yet.)

Hours later, I heard voices calling to me. My rescue squad had arrived; I didn’t care what took them so long. “Can you find…” and they described two locks or latches on the elevator doors. I used the scintilla of battery power remaining to search, grope… and find them, as the phone-light dimmed and died. Following shouted instructions, I released the contraptions and… is this madness?... opened the doors! Into pitch darkness. “You have to jump,” a voice instructed, adding—sadistically, I thought—“from the elevator.”

Now I have to interrupt myself to tell you that many years ago an actress-friend was downtown at a city building stepping off an elevator when it abruptly moved, and she was cut in half. The memory, when I allow myself to have it, haunts me. “Jump?” “Yes!” Into a black hole. I took a deep breath, braced myself… and, ready to absorb the painful shock that would shoot through my legs when I landed… jumped! And landed softly, immediately, less than a foot below. I stood there stupidly, not knowing what came next. A door opened, the only door on the floor, and a housekeeper stood waiting for me to enter. Sting’s housekeeper. Sting’s apartment. Behind her, an anxious doorman and super. We passed through Sting’s apartment, past his row of mounted guitars—which, I have to say here, I’ve seen in a better light. The rear, service staircase being the only entree by stairs to our apartments at present, I exited Sting’s back door and slowly climbed the five unlit flights to mine—this was so distinctly unglamorous, so mundane now—and knocked at my back door. My wife, Jean, monitoring news of the blackout by portable radio in a kitchen lit dimly by a battery-operated lamp, opened the door, surprised to see me. She had no idea that I had been in our building—been in our elevator—no more than 75 feet away the entire time.

Unshakeable

I’ll be frank. I’m a Jew and I’m not looking to take an Arab to lunch.

My wide circle of friends doesn’t include one Muslim. I had a Pakistani doorman I got along with so well I would jokingly inform him we were keeping an eye on him, warn him I could have him deported faster than he could say Allah akbar and offer him a cupcake at noon “to celebrate the first day of Ramadan.”

I’ve rubbed shoulders with Muslims throughout the Middle East and at the UN, and rubbed the PLO’s most prominent Palestinian in America, Edward Said, the wrong way. I’ve had better relations with Baha’is, Buddhists and Coptics.

So, when I support the right and the propriety of Muslims to create and maintain a place for prayer, i.e., a mosque, anywhere in The United States, it’s not for them—it’s for us.

I do so with some reserve, even with trepidation. Conceivably, a mosque could be a mask for ill. But we have to take that chance. Not to do so would be tantamount to treason for all we stand for. All we profess to stand for.

That would start and end with freedom. Not freedom in the abstract, not freedom in slogan or song, not even freedom as our bromidic birthright—but the freedom we uniquely enjoy as citizens of The United States, freedom we are granted, freedom we are remarkably entitled to—by right and by law, by tradition, precedent and practice—specifically by the First and Fourteenth Amendments of The Constitution of The United States.

Setting The Constitution, the flag and apple pie aside for a few minutes, let’s examine this polarizing, complex state of affairs in simple English, a language that pols, pundits and some plain fools are cynically unwilling and seemingly unable to speak.

The mosque at Ground Zero that everyone is so emotionally-charged about is only one facet of a 13-story community center containing a mosque. It will also include offices, meeting rooms, a gym, swimming pool and basketball court, facilities for lectures, forums and weddings, and a performing arts center.

Simple. A community center. Not on Ground Zero, but two blocks from Ground Zero. Two blocks from the “hallowed land” self-righteous and self-serving knee-jerks-with-opinions have self-hallowed. Land only the families of the 3,000 victims (victims, not “martyrs”), not politicians or pundits, have any right to sanctify, and, unless they’re entitled to wear vestments, only totemically at that. Not to overlook that in Manhattan, two blocks away is a good distance from anything.

Ten blocks from Ground Zero is a narrow, two-story mosque that has yet to alarm or rile anybody. It was founded 25 years ago by Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Imam whose American Society for Muslim Advancement intends to build the disputed community center. Even closer, a mere four blocks from Ground Zero, is a basement-level mosque founded 40 years ago. Not only do both mosques predate 9/11 by a great many years, but also, the latter preceded the Twin Towers by several.

Not so simple in the hearts and minds of demagogues and dogmatists. “A mosque steps from Ground Zero,” according to the topography of The New York Daily News. Forewarns The New York Post “…where there are mosques, there are Muslims, and where there are Muslims, there are problems."

An opportunity for an opportunist to weigh in. House Minority Leader John Boehner said the decision to build the mosque wasn't an issue of law, “whether religious freedom or local zoning,” but a matter of respect. So, a man sworn to uphold the Constitution of The United States of America puts “respect for a tragic moment” before law or the Constitution—in an election year.

Not to be out-voiced (in an election year), national Tea Party leader Mark Williams objected to the mosque by declaring that Muslims worship "the terrorists' monkey god." Does anyone care what manqué 2012 GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich had to say? Just as I thought.

Article I, Section 3 of The Constitution of The State of New York declares: “The free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship, without discrimination or preference, shall forever be allowed in this state to all humankind…” That is in addition to the inalienable rights guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution of The United States. We have the categorical manifesto of the President of The United States: “This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable.”

I don’t believe you stand for any policy or principle in part. You either stand for something or you don’t. The men who wrote The Constitution put religious freedom first among The Amendments for a reason. It might not coincide with my choice, if given one, but I’ll stand by it confidently, and, come to think of it, proudly.

With similar logic, and passion, I feel I have no choice but to support the right of The American Society for Muslim Advancement to build its mosque where it chooses—in spite of doubts that it may be ill-advised. “This is America…”

"Unshakable" is absolutely right; it can be no other way.

The Sidewalks of New York

Rutted and cracked, stained with gum and takeout and tears, pounded by wayfarers, dancers and do-nothings, still, something in our pavements glitters—not with gold, as myth would have it, but with essence, as New York theology would confirm. Eau d’ ordeal, tincture of rush, elixir of anecdote. The Sidewalks of New York.

Everybody has a story. A scam, a mugging, a hustle. And, unsurprisingly, every story has a punch line. Why squander a good misadventure?

An elderly Jewish woman told me of exiting El Morocco years ago when an armed man emerging from the shadows warned her, in her words, “I have here such a big gun.” My daughter’s friend, Clement Hill, reacted to news of Lauren’s mugging by commenting on Facebook that he “didn't realize that mugging was still ‘a thing’… seems so 1980s,” then added, “I hope you told him he was being very passe." (That’s two punch lines!) Another friend, screenwriter Richard Potter followed with, "I barely touched you. You fell on your own."

I reported a new hustle weeks ago by a man who no doubt retrieved a container of food from a trash basket and worked his way up the street with it, deliberately running into people as if they weren’t looking where they were going, letting his ever-dwindling portion of food thud to the ground and then guilting his victims into compensating him with cash for a new meal.

Muggers aren’t noted for their humor, but scammers—you bet! Just last week, a perfectly average-looking man in his 30s, gesturing toward a nail salon with a quickie massage table visible through its storefront window, asked me from ten feet away, “Can you pay for me to get a massage in here?” When I shook him off, he called, “I’ll let you watch the expression on my face while I get it.”

My friend, raconteur Herb Graff, would have given him $10 for that line. That’s what Herb gave a panhandler who asked for $10 for “A down-payment on my co-op.” That’s what he gave the one soliciting money for “The United Negro Pizza Fund.”

Writer Tom Bisky describes a scammer who was, “and still is, in a class by himself. Ten years ago, on a corner of Rockefeller Plaza, he somehow managed to sell me a ‘free’ baseball cap for $10. I don't remember a single detail of his spiel. I just recall thinking that ten bucks didn't seem all that much for a sturdy-seeming baseball cap. Plus, I really wanted to get away from the guy, so it amounted to ‘hush’ money I was glad to pay. Today, if I were put in charge of giving a lifetime achievement award to New York's most brazen, balls-out scammer, he would win hands-down. From time to time, I pass the same Rock Plaza corner—and he's still there, with his baseball caps in hand. For at least a decade, he's been scamming royally at one of the nerve centers of New York tourism. In fact, he's a ‘nerve’ center unto himself, because he's never more than a few yards from one (or more) of New York's Finest. So, if any of us ever really gets this guy's number, we should retire it. Among Gotham's major-league scam artistes, he's like Ruth and DiMaggio rolled into one.”

Perhaps a sociologist could explain why crowds in our city dependably make a story better. Cindy Bigras relates that she was pick-pocketed on Madison Avenue during her lunch hour. When she caught the culprit and seized her wallet back, passersby “started bitching at me” for slowing down the foot traffic.

Linda Amiel Burns drew a better-natured crowd. “In the days when Bloomingdale’s had revolving doors, a man with a green raincoat pushed himself into my section, and in a split second I could feel that my handbag was lighter, reached into it and found my wallet was gone. The mugger had a partner who tried to steer me in another direction, but I saw the green raincoat and ran after the guy like an obsessed maniac. A crowd began to follow me as I kept screaming, "Give me back my wallet!" It did occur to me that he could turn around and shoot me, but nothing was going to deter me at this point. This guy represented every man who had ‘done me wrong,’ and I was crazed and kept running after him. Suddenly, he turned around, threw the wallet at me, and ran off. And the crowd cheered and applauded.”

And why not? It’s street theater. On the Sidewalks of New York.