Flamenco Fugues

By Ben Wright

Born with a silver knife in his back, Ben Wright's exploits and ordeals in his rites of passage toward self-discovery, range from the extreme to the bizarre. His adventures were enhanced and refined by extraordinary encounters with such Twentieth Century luminaries as John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Admiral Ruthven Libby, Jonas Salk, G. Gordon Liddy, Ray Charles, Paul Robeson, Colonel Robbie Reisner, Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, "Free-Wheeling" Frank Reynolds, Jim Morrison, Richard Brautigan, Michael McClure, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Graves, Juan Goytisolo, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Claribellle Alegria, and cunning Charlie Bludorn. To escape upper-middle class mind-numbing conformity and ennui, Ben joined the U.S. Navy after graduating with honors from an Ivy League university. He served his country as a commissioned line combat naval officer, was involved with the first SEAL team, and became a court martial, Intelligence officer in the Viet Nam era. Following military service, and after failing as an Episcopalian priest, Ben became a blue-water sailor, survived a North Sea mine-field Force 12, and also engaged in working as an archeologist/mythographer. He worked as an actor in American feature films, radio broadcaster and producer, but was redeemed to near bodhisattvahood in Tibetan Buddhism. He also served in prisons for forty-eight years as an alcohol and drug counselor (himself a recovered alcoholic of thirty-one years sobriety), founding Clarion Call, a foundation to end recidivism through education. So indulge yourself within these pages, savoring these true life adventures of this Twenty-first Century Renaissance Man, and you will be asking for more. Reserve the second volume, Authenticity: Inimitable Quintessential.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481752534

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© 2013 by Ben Wright. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 06/05/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-5254-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-5253-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013908837

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Passage One Surrealistic Pillow

Passage Two Ensaimadas to Tapas: Mallorca to Madrid—1966 and 1967

Passage Three Madrid; Marauders; Marian; Marriage!

Ben Wright: Profile

Homage

To Wharton Allen Cheesman who called Uncle Ben, the Jedi Warrior.

FRONTISPIECE

In Spanish, the word for tapestry (the woven craft of Flemish artisans) is flamenco. Flamenco also refers to the Andalusian music and dance which is a rich blending and interweaving of musical themes from Eastern and Western traditions, an exotic melodic mixture. The term, fugue, is a polyphonic musical composition in which themes presented successively enhance a primary theme against which they resound in counter-point; this same term in psychology describes one’s detachment or removal from reality, after which the subject may or may not remember the incident when returned to a normal state of consciousness [in jazz, the term, riff, can be employed to describe this variation on a main theme and in the sub-culture of hallucinogenic drugs (mescaline, cannabis, or L.S.D.), the user often speaks of tripping out, this being similar to the psychological aberration called fugue]. In my own life experiences, every departure I have made from the conventional formulation of the American reality into which I was born and within which I was nurtured and educated, has been like a different colored thread woven into the fabric that represents the tapestry displaying my life’s meaning. The portrait which appears as a distinctive and decipherable display is the result of the seemingly disparately varied strands of this skein of coagulated conglomerate of disordered knots and gnarls interwoven behind the composition that emerges as the representation and configuration which the viewer of the front of the fabric sees and can comprehend. The threads of my fugues finally are constellated and articulated so that the entire composition shows who I am.

Passage One

Surrealistic Pillow

When I arrived in New York to take my flight to Mallorca, Marian told me she was not going to accompany me. She had arrived on an earlier flight from her home in Los Angeles, and I was still fatigued from my trip from Oklahoma City, so I was at first unable to comprehend what this change of plans really meant, and I was at a loss as to how to convince her to reconsider her decision. She told me that her parents had said they would never allow her to travel with me as we had done the summer before. We had met in Amsterdam and hitch-hiked all over Germany, France and England and then met my best friend, Sam Coffing, to go aboard his yacht, Nachen II, when he and his crew docked in Port Hamble, Isle of Wight, after his tempestuous first crossing of the Atlantic from Florida. Our subsequent cruise through the English Channel, the North Sea, the Baltic (visiting Copenhagen and some other Scandinavian ports of call) and back along the coasts of France and the Netherlands, had been punctuated by an extraordinary storm (Buford Scale 11, gusting to 12) in the still intact World War Two minefields off the Frisian Islands, finally putting in to the refuge harbor of the island of Borkum, after eleven hours pitching and tossing and barely avoiding capsizing in the yawning and voracious troughs whose walls hollowed out by these fierce winds, dark liquid slabs measuring as high as a four story building, forty feet in height from trough to crest, of sleek, slashing hammering death to some twenty other boats caught in this unexpected blast. Marian became a veteran blue-water sailor in this encounter as she was slammed from bulkhead to bulkhead in the main saloon below, smashing her nose, grabbing ice to crush in a dish-towel held as a compress to staunch the pain and bleeding, revealing her ordeal only after we had made fast our mooring lines to the quay at Borkum. Susie, the only other woman aboard, had also stayed below with Marian, but had just clung to her berth whimpering with fright, hugging a pillow, while we men, Sam, David, and I, battled above decks in our harnesses secured to stanchions to anchor us from being swept overboard in the cascading waves.

As I now looked across the coffee table in the airport at Marian, noticing with a perverse pleasure the signature disfigurement of the bridge of her nose from our North Sea ordeal, I listened to her telling me that she had tried so hard to convince her parents that our trip to Mallorca was to be spent safely, on dry land, in the tourist town of Cala Ratjada, where I had a summer job managing the sailing school which David had established there before I proceeded to the University of Madrid to pursue my graduate studies in Comparative Literature in the doctoral program of University of California, San Diego, where I had been enrolled for the past two years. She had scrupulously avoided revealing to them that we had planned to be married at the end of the summer in Gibralter and that she would not be returning to fulfill any of their debutante-about-town plans for the Los Angeles social season whereby they planned to fetch the most eligible bachelor for their Marlborough [Girls’] School, Wellesley College, top-drawer elite daughter. I was not only divorced, but had been legally disowned by my own father, ironically a former business associate of her grandfather and her father, and this all mitigated toward their most vehemently out-spoken opposition to any further consorting with me. Marian told me that they had threatened to disinherit her and had warned that special agents would be employed to report from Mallorca regarding our activities there and especially to take measures if something as socially reprehensible, or as venal, as cohabitation should occur. Most certainly, any public displays of affection were to be noted and reported, probably to be extensively photographed, as well. Marian, flinched as she told me this, and twisted to look around the busy concourse to see if such surveillance were even then being enacted.

Apparently satisfied, then, that her parents’ private sleuths were not anywhere near, she then hunched her shoulders and began digging into the large handbag she carried like a rucksack. She then looked up at me, her face wreathed in smiles, holding an eight inch dagger which she had first shown me with much the same delight when we had begun our hitch-hiking. My reaction now was not much different than when I had first beheld this ugly weapon. "What in the hell is that for?

Protection, she replied then, as she had coyly remarked before, in Amsterdam.

When we had met in that town after my flight from Calfornia and her train ride over from Paris, where she had been a student at the Sorbonne, on leave of absence from Wellesley College, that summer before now, back in 1966, I had commented then that a knife like that was almost a joke, held in the fragile hand of a petite debutante who had rarely if ever manicured her own nails, much less cut into anything larger than a filet mignon or one of the ducks or pheasants served up by their cooking staff from her father’s high-priced hunting expeditions in Canada or Montana. At that time, I had briskly whisked the weapon from her grasp and held it in the manner prescribed by Lieutenant Max Bayer, the Scuba Harassment Officer of SEAL Team One, who had shown us how best to grip the K-Bar in order to cut enemy throats down to the spine, and I had said, Never threaten what you are not prepared and trained to carry through with.

I had then related to her the incident in my own childhood when my father had discovered that I had begun carrying a switch-blade knife, a lethal play-thing that somehow was becoming popular at that time with some of the boys at my Oklahoma public school. When my father asked me why I carried it, I blithely answered that it was for cleaning my finger-nails. He took me to his gun closet, pulled out a double barreled 12-gauge shotgun, and held it to my face saying, Then blow your nose with this!

He then stripped to the waist and showed me a jagged knife scar that ran from his wrist to his shoulder. He told me of the fight he had with another farm-boy in the Crossed Timbers section of what was then Indian Territory, later to be Oklahoma City, where he grew up. He had bested his opponent and had turned to walk away, when his assailant grabbed him and twisted him around to inflict this near mortal injury with a knife he had carried and only then had decided to use. Luckily a doctor was visiting other homesteaders in that region that day and was able to save my father’s life and stitch up the enormous wound.

Her reaction in Amsterdam was just as naive as it was now, intentionally missing the point of my story, oblivious to the hyperbole, to the melodramatic exaggeration essential to folkloric dramatic effect. Nobody blows their nose with a shotgun. That’s ridiculous. Just another one of your Okie tall tales.

And when I had embroidered my portrait for her of Max, the Scuba Harassment Officer with his behavior in the bars in Coronado off duty, where he ordered his drink, the Hemingway gin and tonic, and then chewed up and swallowed the glass after tossing back the liquid, she was certain that my vignettes were all tainted with exaggeration. Both incidents were true, but my father and Max were extraordinary individuals, and were so much larger than life that any references I ever made to them were rarely believed by most people who had never had the opportunity to know such characters.

You know how I feel about that sort of knife. Put it away. Why are you even carrying it with you? Somebody could easily take it away from you and hurt you. But she continued to hold it between us, sighting along its tip, her eyes crossing slightly over the abbreviated bridge of her nose [that scar tissue, ever so slight, reminding me of her courage in the savage North Sea storm], and her mouth assumed a demented grin

"I want you to have it. Take it with you as a sort of souvenir of our jaunt across Europe as hitch-hikers. Or, you might even feel so desperately lost without me that you do a kind of hari-kari, or a Roman-general-falling-on-short-sword testimony to our grand love. You are such a romantic fool!"

How many Valiums did you toss back with your double whiskeys on the flight here, Darling? I was usually alarmed at her dosages before flying, and a cross-country ordeal of this length would usually render her virtually comatose, so this sort of psychotic remark was probably to be expected from her current chemical state. Perhaps, I thought, if I could de-tox her in the next few hours, all the paranoia about her parents would also wash away, and we would soon be on our way, flying together to Mallorca.

You still have your ticket to Mallorca, don’t you?

She nodded in agreement, so I decided to proceed in my plan.

I have some really good friends from university who live here. I’d like for you to meet them, and I want to show off the future Mrs. Wright. How about it? I ‘ll just give them a ring.

John Grahame and I should have been closer friends in so far as we had both trained as naval officers in Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (N.R.O.T.C.) and had also been active in the ‘Mask and Wig’ theatrical productions throughout our undergraduate years at University of Pennsylvania, but there had always been a sort of reserve between us, and therefore, I would have described our relationship as merely a strong comradeship, that of fellow junior officers and college chums. John’s family were English and he always had maintained the sort of distance from intimacy that the British are famous for. However, we knew each other as well as any two young men could, although there had never been any sort of blood-brother ritualizing comitatus bonding, other than our having dedicated many drunken days and nights in ‘Smokey Joe’s’, the campus bar owned by Paul Ryan and made famous in the song ‘Smokey Joe’s Cafe’. Thus, I felt no reluctance in ringing John without having warned him I was coming to New York, and I casually opened the conversation by explaining that my not being in contact for the past few years was just the way things are in the lives of busy folk; only some six years had passed since we received our active duty orders upon commissioning in our dress whites [under our academic robes for the degree-awarding ritual, first] and ceremonial sabers on the same day we took our diplomas from University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. I had been ordered to report to United States Naval Training Center, San Diego, and John had been placed in a Top Secret Cryptographer’s bunker on the island of Guam, Communications Officer for that bleak Pacific outpost for his entire required two year term as Ensign and Lieutenant Junior Grade. We had exchanged calls on the Priority MARS patch line when I had done collateral duty as Cryptographer for the Commandant of the Eleventh Naval District, San Diego. Other than that, our chats had been altogether infrequent, but I had no reluctance in telephoning John to say I was in town and readily accepted an invitation to come to his apartment and meet his new girl-friend, most ironically, someone who had spent her Year Abroad from Vassar studying in Spain. I began to hope that I could` indeed de-tox Marian, and with John and his lady’s help, be able to renew our mutual commitment for traveling together in a pre-nuptial Mallorcan tour as planned.

The taxi delivered us and our bags—neither of us carried more than a single, carefully packed, easily managed kit [we had learned to do so in our hitch-hiking and sailing]—and we were soon being ushered into an unremarkable uptown two bedroom apartment that John and his girlfriend, Ruth, acclaimed as the find-of-the-year, a virtual mansion in comparison to some of the slum-land digs [John’s rhetoric—digs being the British student term for one’s low-cost accommodations, similar to an archaeological dig in caves and excavation trenches] they had endured in the two years they had lived together. Even with their combined salaries, John’s in the stock market and hers as a high-school teacher, this was just barely affordable. We had no sooner arrived than Ruth began reminiscing about Madrid, where she had been enrolled during her Vassar junior year, four years before. She had leased a three bedroom furnished apartment with another young woman in the Plaza Santanna area, on Lope de Vega Street, just above the Prado Museum, for about $50 a month. Most meals were taken in the local economica restaurants, for about fifty cents a meal: three courses, wine included. Ruth had traveled extensively, encouraged to do so as part of her studies by her Vassar director, and she declared that the Balearic Islands were the most miraculous discovery she had made. Ibiza had long been famous as a center for the most avant-garde artists and extreme life-styles, but Mallorca, which many experienced travelers dismissed as a jumble of beaches over-run by wine besotted suntan-lotioned tourists, for her had held delights and magical treasures rich beyond belief, once an adventurous pilgrim penetrated the mountains and small villages of the interior.

John politely entered the conversation, which was becoming a rhapsodic travel promotional pitch by Ruth, as none of us had offered anything other than eager nods to encourage her to proceed. Tell them about that old writer who lives up in the hills there. The one who claims he was the Emperor Claudius and that he sailed with Ulysses and Hercules. You know, the one that was so shell-shocked in the First World War, that his brain was scrambled and he kept flipping back and forth through millennial time zones in Greece, Rome, Egypt and whatever place he fancied.

"John is referring to Robert Graves, probably one of the greatest minds in this century and a mythographer without compare, not to mention, the author of Goodbye To All That which is the best piece of writing about being in war since Red Badge of Courage or All Silent on the Western Front."

The Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, John’s alma mater, was the premiere school of business in America but did not encourage liberal arts exposure for its graduates, so John’s remark was not as Philistine as it might have seemed to an audience less tolerant than us. I was familiar with I, Claudius and Claudius, the God and some of the other works of historical novels in which Graves expressed ideas that would only be available to a first-hand observer, and I had read some of the interviews [most notably appearing in a Christmas edition of Playboy] with the writer in which he declared that he had actually traveled back through time or had been in that historic dimension somehow; but I was not aware of the more contemporary war novel about his active duty in World War One.

Have you read any of his books. John? I asked.

Nah, he retorted gruffly. "Well, yeah. I tried to. I mean I read some of his stuff. There was one about Belisarius, a real dynamite general. Kind of a Patton of his time, if you know what I mean. Then there was one called King Jesus, supposed to be the true-life story, about the man who became the Christ. But that just bogged me down with a lot of stuff I couldn’t understand. And then, Goodbye To All That. Now, that might be one you could sink your teeth into. You were a preppy weren’t you? Some exclusive rich kids school you went to?"

Well. Sort of. Casady was a country-day school, private, an Episcopal…

"Yeah. Same as our C. of E. Church of England. Same outfit. What we call a public school in England. All started with Eton, College of Kings, for the elite, the aristocracy, the privileged, the rich. My family now, we all went to Grammar School, same as your public high-school. I grew up in Sussex, went to school in Godalming, same town that this Charterhouse is in, the public school Robert Graves attended before the Great War. He was an officer in no time flat. Class. Privilege. He was a captain commanding a bunch of grunts in his late teens. But how could I even begin to relate to all that? Sure, I became an officer in your Armed Forces. After my family moved here, I attended one of those country-day schools in Greenwich, Connecticut and had the S.A.T. scores to enter Penn. Got my American citizenship, did the R.O.T.C. same as you, and then was promoted from Midshipman, to Ensign, to Lieutenant Junior Grade Grahame, an officer and a gentleman, by Act of Congress… . your Congress, Mate, not mine. I’m still just a commoner, a Grammar School boy, like my old man and all our family. Working class. But now of the meritocracy. The highly mobile, fluid, classless American Dream. But I got news for you. It ain’t the same in old Blighty. Great Britain has her class system, and it won’t be changing any time soon."

But, John, Ruth interrupted, "Most of Graves’ acerbic critiques in his book are directed at just that issue. The very That he was saying goodbye to was the class system that forced men to serve in a war that made them into cannon fodder. He was calling on the world, not just England, to say goodbye to all these fixed ideas and accepted values based on outdated moral systems that were contrived to continue justifying men killing one another in any war."

John responded harshly, "Only, he is of that privileged class, entitled to the sort of education that allows one to discuss such issues; but his sort could never get down to the nitty-gritty of actually changing the conditions that create the class systems. He was nothing like the miners in the labor unions, or any of the wage-slaves who actually had to confront the bosses. He and his pal, T.E. Lawrence, after the War, were dawdling about their college rooms at Oxford…"

Marian blurted out suddenly, "I’ve read the Seven Pillars of Wisdom. And just about everything written about Lawrence. I’ve also read most of Graves. I’m particularly impressed by his treatments of mythology. And I think everyone should read The White Goddess. His own first goddess persona was an American poet, the only female member of the Vanderbilt University Fugitive Poets clicque, named Laura Riding. Although he never truly acknowledged her as such, she did become his muse, in fact. Together they established the ‘Seizin Press’ which was how all the First World War poets that we know about today, were ever published. And furthermore, most importantly, it was Lawrence who helped Graves to buy the printing press equipment, which was then transported to Mallorca, with royalty money derived from the first official biography of Lawrence which he tossed to Graves, his Oxford roomie."

Wellesley. Full scholarship. Perfect College Board scores. Above 95 average for her entire attendance at Marlborough Girls School, sister to Harvard Prep in L.A., I offered. Did I leave anything out, my Darlingest?

Magna Cum Laude, I didn’t receive. I had that nervous breakdown my junior year when you had to marry your commanding officer’s daughter—was that a shotgun wedding or a twenty-one gun barrage? A couple of years later, I was awarded an honors diploma by the Wellesley English Department for an essay on Vladimir Nabokov I wrote while attending the Sorbonne in Paris as a special student, my senior year, Marian replied saucily, and reached out to grip my hand and squeezed.

Wow! I’m certainly impressed, Ruth remarked. I’ve always wanted to know more about Lawrence of Arabia.

Well, one thing most people don’t know is where he gained all his special knowledge about the Arabic people. His passion as an undergraduate at Oxford was the Holy Crusades. He spent an entire summer holiday in tracking the course of their incursion into the Middle East and was particularly fascinated by their construction of fortifications along the road to Jerusalem, through what we now call Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and so on, Marian responded.

It was in exchanges such as these in which Marian truly came into her own. I could well imagine the sheet-lightning charges that had exploded in her contributions to Ivy League literature seminars. No wonder that she had been allowed a special Sorbonne project and paper to present as her senior year fulfillment for the Wellesley degree. I was reminded of the moment when we had first met. On behalf of my father, I had made a courtesy call at her family’s home in Los Angeles, Fremont Place, one of the original gated communities of that city… long before condominiums for the elderly rich affected that name: gated. One had to pass through imposing stone-walled gates monitored by round-the-clock uniformed security guards before entering the sprawl of the avenue encircling Fremont Place, just off the famed Wilshire Boulevard. The homes were massive, most with huge gardens and servants quarters behind: one or two even contained the family’s crypt or mausoleum and chapel. Outrageous wealth. The sort of conspicuous consumption Thorstein Weblen meant to describe in his landmark book on Economics, The Theory of the Leisure Class. Once shown into the main drawing room by what passed for a butler—called house-boy—in Southern California, I comfortably ensconced myself in front of the roaring Tudor fire-place and had begun sipping a Chivas Regal Scotch on the rocks. I was exchanging pleasantries with both mother and father, who at that time, during my active duty with the Navy, down south in San Diego, were still business associates of my father.

Then Marian entered the room. She was dressed in her Marlborough School uniform. Knee-length socks beneath pleated skirt and brass buttoned blazer with school crest on the left breast pocket. Her eyes danced and sparkled then as we looked at one another with a recognition that I had only read about, in the works of Dante Alighieri when he first beheld his muse and spiritual soul-mate Beatrice, inspiration for the entire Divine Comedy and Nuova Vitae, as well. As Marian drew closer, and conspicuously placed herself next to me on the couch, I was able to look more deeply into her eyes. She literally babbled about how she would love to know what I had read in my studies at University of Pennsylvania where I did admit to having been an Honors English major with a minor in Comparative World Literature. I could observe the fire growing in intensity in the radiance that flashed from her multi-colored irises. There were flakes of gold, green, brown and even what seemed silver floating and swimming above and within the corn-flower blue of the irises. Kaleidoscopic, I thought. And later when The Beatles’ song ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ was released with Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the girl with kaleidoscope eyes became a familiar phrase. My frame of reference at the time was purely literary. I was recalling Homer’s description of muddy-eyed Athena. By this phrase he meant—so I had been instructed by my literature professor—there were so many colors in the goddess’s eye, that a mortal could see, each one distinct but changing so rapidly the moment they were perceived, that what could in a later date be described as the effects induced by the kaleidoscope, but could only be expressed then by the poet Homer as muddy, what occurs on the painter’s pallet when all the primary colors are smeared together. Dazzling, was the word that I held in my mind at that moment of recognition of the person I was to come to believe to be my muse, my soul-mate, my true love. It was her father who suggested we have an evening out. After dinner which was served by staff in the formal dining room at long candle-lit table, her father suggested that as this was a Friday and Marian had no more classes, that she might show me one of the more colorful areas in their town, the Sunset Strip, where we would find some entertaining night clubs. As we were about to leave to go out to my car, he even tried to jam a wad of several hundred dollar bills [it looked like more than five] into my hand, whispering in my ear to have a good time.

This was at the time, before I had been disinherited, when he and my father were still business associates, and I was to later learn that it was hoped by both families that Marian and I would marry, thereby forging a merger between the family corporations that would corner a certain concession market in automotive and industrial parts and services for the entire Southwest portion of the United States. What if Marian’s father had been as straightforward as had been James Cameron, the president of Bethlehem Steel, in my senior year at Penn when he had made a most appealing plea in his Philadelphia Main-line home for me to marry his only daughter with a definite prize reward for the marriage? He had promised to buy out my own father’s companies to establish a multi-million dollar retirement package, to establish a trust in my own name to pay me double the salary that my father received from all his enterprises even then, to be paid me regardless of what I should choose to follow as a career, but to pay double that as a beginning salary to train in Bethlehem Steel toward becoming the eventual director of the entire company and to then hold major preferred stock as a family member and part owner. All this for marrying Muffy, his daughter who adored me, the one person who seemed most sympathetic to her affliction, what I had thought to be merely an exaggerated form of the dyslexia which I had suffered until the age of ten when, with special tutoring, I had finally learned to read and write. I had attempted to help Muffy on a few occasions to learn to read. She had visited me on campus and we had spent some time working on her problem which she had shared with me in a disarmingly innocent, sweetly naive way, so that I had offered to help her conquer this crippling and daunting problem as I myself had been helped. But Muffy was not able to profit from the special help. What I was to learn from her father, that night he begged me to marry her and to become truly a part of the family, was that Muffy had the mind of an eight year old child. Her Stanford Benet Intelligence Quotient was what was ranked as being well below what was then cruelly designated Moron, at 80, more than twenty points below the average score of 100. Even Forrest Gump would have surpassed her in any academic setting. In Philadelphia Main-line Society, perhaps she could pass as just a silly, distracted, and superficial sort of debutante, but sooner or later many would discover that she was hopelessly stupid and desperately ignorant, her illiteracy so profound she could not even decipher major street signs. I had been a kind friend and appeared to understand how to steer Muffy through several social encounters, and her father had paid for an exhaustive background investigation of me and my family, not just a Dunn and Bradstreet corporate profiling, but private investigators interviewing more people connected to me than the U.S. Navy and Federal Bureau of Investigation ever marshaled to survey my fitness for the Top Secret Presidential clearance I received for my work as Cryptographer and later as a trainee in Naval Intelligence.

Yes. I was a remarkable package of the fair-haired All-American W.A.S.P. boy at that time when I first met Marian as Ensign Ben Allen Wright, U.S.N.R. I was so desirable and eligible a bachelor as to be chosen by her family to be her escort to the private debutante ball they held in the Beverly Hills Hotel grand ballroom, hiring the entire ground floor of that building for the event. Oh, how we danced on that night when she was so radiant, beautiful, richly and sumptuously offered up to California Society as debutante! Yet her eyes shone even brighter when she spoke about the only treasures she really adored: the history of ideas. Ruth and John were startled and delighted by the authentic, elemental energy that pulsed from her as she spoke about Robert Graves, T.E. Lawrence and their contributions to our civilization.

So both of you guys are to the manor born, as it were, John almost snidely remarked. Both preppies, and Ivy League to boot, and then altogether useless liberal arts degrees in English and Comparative World Literature. Don’t need any practical market-wise skills to survive. Your trust fund officers handle all that crap, probably Wharton grads like me.

Except that somehow, before any trust fund money came my way, I managed to get myself disinherited, I answered. "And if Marian stays with me and we go on to get married in the next few months, then she stands a good chance of getting some of the same… or rather, all of it will be taken away from her as well. We’ll both be disenfranchised, nouveau poor. Discussing Melville, Malraux and Mailer as we stand and wait our turn in some unemployment benefits line, that is if we return to the States. I’m sure we can find some work as scribes in Indian or African villages, or tutoring the children of upwardly mobile Spanish or French families in conversational English as spoken by the American privileged, upper classes"

This is not an easy one for me to swallow, gibed John. "You will always rise to the top. I can’t imagine either of your families maintaining this so-called disinheritance down to the wire, so to speak. I think it’s most likely just a sort of temporary action to scold and whip you back into the ranks. I seem to remember a few examples of some rather prominent families attempting to enroll you in their inheritances when we were at Penn. There was that girl whose family was Bethlehem Steel, and then there was the Elkins Park heiress, and I seem to recall an incident when ‘Mask and Wig’ performed down in Wilmington, Delaware, and we were invited to a dance at the DuPont home, and you wandered off with one of the daughters and didn’t join the rest of the company when we boarded the bus for Philly."

The incident with Muffy Cameron was something I had kept secret and was startled to learn that John had even known about my involvement with her, but of course he would have seen us together at some social gatherings before the proposition was made by her father and I had then terminated all further encounters with her. My next involvement with a daughter of the super-rich was not a matter that I thought he ever came to know about however. That had been with Lynn Elkins . . . a most curious involvement. I had not connected her name with the section of Philadelphia known as Elkins Park until I had visited her home in the most prominent section of that suburb by that name; it only slowly dawned on me that she was indeed of the privileged old moneyed class. The original Stuart Gilbert portrait of George Washington, the exact image imprinted on the American One Dollar bill, was hanging above one of the fireplaces in her home, and a few Picasso sketches in several of the downstairs bathrooms should have clearly indicated to me that this was a family of some substance, although Lynn had seemed so shy and self-conscious about the scar and slight paralysis around the region of her left eye socket from a jumping accident that had occurred in one of the fox hunts her family participated in. I had gone out of my way to help her to feel comfortable at several of the activities where we had met on campus, just as I had with Muffy, one of her childhood friends. When I discovered Lynn’s pedigree and status, I backed off, as I was still smarting from the misunderstanding with Muffy’s family and I was beginning to think I might get the reputation of an adventurer, the nineteenth century literary term for a fortune hunter,a gold-digger, a gigolo, or worse.

So the DuPont incident was a result of being away from my home turf of Philadelphia’s University of Pennsylvania urban campus, in the DuPont territory in Delaware and had taken place after a ‘Mask and Wig’ performance, a sort of review of songs and dances, not a full show which we had delivered in Wilmington. Having drink taken as the stage Irish phrase puts it [actually I was quite loaded on lavish imbibing of champagne and Scotch whiskey], I was dancing in the country home, after the show, with a classically beautiful blonde whose patrician manner and enticing suggestions that we take some fresh air , even though the temperature outside was near freezing, delivered us into the shrubbery alongside the walls of this mansion where we indulged in what some refer to as heavy petting. Specifically, most of our clothes were off, and if there had been any convenient place to continue, I might have performed a nuptial consummation and even today, as a reward for my marital surrender, be residing now somewhere in Delaware and perhaps directing one of the DuPont enterprises. I was even at that moment proclaiming my undying affection and devotion to this regal moon maiden whose platinum blond tresses I watched flow out of my grasp as heavy hands locked onto my bare shoulders and wrenched me off her reclining form. I was rolled, twisted, trundled, bundled and planted in a bush several yards away by the brute guard whose associate even then was escorting the shivering, whimpering corpus of my lost love through the pollarded hedge back to the safety of the house under a massive cloak that had been thrown over her shoulders and covered that radiant silver crown of hair that I had only a moment before been pulling to my lips. I was allowed to put my clothes back on and was forcibly escorted to the main gates some hundred yards down the gravel drive. I was standing outside, just outside the massive gates on the approaching road as I watched my fellow company members of ‘Mask and Wig’ boarding our bus near the main building. I ran to join them. But I was too late. The driver did not see me as I raced toward the turning vehicle and I was left standing shivering in the billowing exhaust as he roared away. There was nothing I could do then but leave the hallowed DuPont estate and start hiking down that road outside.

I was not even holding out my hand to try to hitch a ride as I learned to do so many years later with Marian on our European summer’s idyll, but a car pulled alongside me and an attractive woman called to me. Get in. You’ll freeze out here.

She remarked further as I slid into the back seat behind her, Not exactly your standard issue vagrant, dressed in a tuxedo and dancing shoes trekking down from the DuPont domain. What happened? Were you disqualified for butler apprenticeship or are you some sad disinherited DuPont thrown out of the nest to learn to fly with the common folk? Without considering the Fast Forward irony in the retelling of this vignette, the result was a warm bed in the guest room of this couple’s apartment and breakfast next morning with scrambled eggs, toast, and a curious ingredient that I had to regard as more apocryphal irony from my hostess.

George, did you have to leave the window open while serving our guest breakfast. See now, he has ash all over his toast and it is that time of day when the crematorium pumps out their smoke and debris. See those tall chimneys over there? she nudged me and pointed, Just like Auschwitz or Buchenwald. We have a great view and low rent but we certainly pay the price in other ways.

That’s just one of DuPont factories. Don’t take her seriously. Her sense of humor, George shrugged.

The marmalade on my toast did taste rather odd, but then I was feeling uncomfortable anyway and asked that I be taken to the bus station to get back to Philadelphia. I never explained to John or any of my fellow ‘Mask and Wig’ members what had happened to me that night. John presumed I ended up in some romantic tryst with that blonde girl. My reputation as a romantic roustabout was always surprising to me, enhanced perhaps because I never told what I was doing or where I had been or with whom to any of my colleagues [curious, that word—originally meant to be members of the same college, now more in reference to those in the same profession—it could refer to fellow morticians—but then, it was more appropriate, as I was scrupulously diligent about maintaining my privacy amongst my schoolmates]. Although I did have one or two most trusted friends, such as Sam Coffing [his family name had been Coffin; many were famous whaling sea captains in New England, but the spelling of his surname had been altered to include the g when one of his ancestors had married a woman with the last name D’Eath, an ancient East Anglian, Cambridgeshire, England family transplanted to the new American colonies]. He and I had actually performed a blood-letting brotherhood ceremony. Silly as that sounds now, we were intensely serious about this ritual. That same week we had discovered that we were probably distant cousins. I had made a fleeting reference to my great-great-great grandfather, Dr. Henry Buck, the revolutionist (the term used for Revolutionary War volunteers in 1776) combat physician who had served with George Washington, establishing the medical clinics in Philadelphia and Valley Forge. Lynn Elkins was riding to hunt at that end of the Main-Line that weekend, and we had been invited to come for a cup of Pimms after, so I mentioned my own family’s connection to Valley Forge, and then also, I must admit, bragged about the Buck name given Buck’s County when my family arrived with William Penn to settle the Pennsylvania colony. Sam claimed to be a descendant of a Roger Nelson Buck who just so happened to be one of Dr. Henry Buck’s sons, a man who carried on the tradition of fighting the English in the War of 1812 [Dr. Henry Buck had remained on active duty after the end of the Revolutionary War, continuing to fight British insurgents in armed skirmishes throughout the Eastern colonies till his death in 1792]. So, we decided to consummate our familial discovery and re-establish blood relations by performing a razor slash of our forearms held fast to each other with a profound pledge of brotherhood forever. I confided in Sam about the Muffy Cameron episode, my relationship to Lynn Elkins, and the DuPont fiasco, but no-one else knew—or so I thought—till now, when John revealed his awareness of these affairs. I had also shared with Sam why I broke off my informal engagement, yet serious intention to marry, my Oklahoma sweetheart, Carolyn Coe.

I had met Carolyn after graduating from Casady, in a most unusual fashion. I had failed half of my courses, Math and Physics, and I would be the first senior to not receive a diploma having completed all but that fraction of the full six year’s enrollment in the school’s history. By some fortuitous happenstance, I had learned of a competitive examination for qualifying to enter the U.S. Naval Academy and had taken the tests, all concentrating in the areas of higher Mathematics and Physics. I had scored the highest marks in the Southwest states, guaranteeing me an automatic appointment to the Academy if all my personal character references should prove to be acceptable. Because a family friend I had trusted to write one of these references had heard about a high speed chase with the Highway Patrol which had involved my running a car-load of whiskey from Dallas to Oklahoma City, which still prohibited the sale of all alcoholic beverages until the law later changed, nullifying Prohibition of alcoholic sale in Oklahoma in 1959, this well-meaning citizen decided to mention this incident [I had not been caught; my evasive driving skills had earned me the nickname of Flash among certain criminally marginal individuals]. Edward Ruscha and Mason Williams were my rascal pals who, respectively, later gained fame as internationally acclaimed painter [Ruscha] and writer and performer [Williams] in the ‘The Smothers Brothers’ television series and the author of the ever popular hit ‘Classical Gas’—with whom I was imbibing illegal substances at that time—Ed Ruscha had actually been with me on the trip to Dallas, Texas, where we purchased the liquor and had ridden with me in the high-speed chase—and I was informed that I was therefore disqualified to attend the United Staters Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. However, I considered this high score to provide me ample opportunity to argue my failing grades with Shawn Kelly, the headmaster, to demand to know why there should be such a disparity between the opinions of the Naval Academy and his own instructors regarding my ability to comprehend Math and Physics. Also, my classmates had decided that I was to be their official commencement speaker and that the valedictorian, an over-achiever with an over 95 point (Grade of A) average appointed by the school staff, would not represent them; they also, as a block, with the one exception of the valedictorian, refused to accept their diplomas if I were not given the opportunity to take my final examinations again in Math and Physics. The headmaster did allow me to re-take the exams, and I was awarded a score of 59.6 in each: D—, a barely passing grade.

Carolyn attended that graduation ceremony with Dorthlynn Dent, the girl I had been dating at the time. The circumstances were intriguing for Carolyn, especially the political action my classmates had taken on my behalf and the Naval Academy event, things she had also told her father who was a retired U.S. Navy Reserve captain, wounded in combat in a Pacific battle of World War Two who was preparing at that time to run for governor of our state in the next election three years hence. As the events of that particular Commencement were reported in both Time and Newsweek, he had then asked his daughter to invite me to their home to meet him. I had become suspicious that something unusual was afoot before this graduation ceremony because when I had met with the headmaster to show him my proposed speech, which I considered radical, bombastic, iconoclastic and even revolutionary, he had endorsed it and complimented me on my stylistics and then gave me some advice about semiotics, that is, virtually how to play a pause and wave my fist and punch my points with raised poignarded index finger; was there some reference to Hitler’s stage presence? Surely he must have referred to Churchill.

It was only moments before I went on stage to present the speech, that my girl-friend introduced me to Carolyn… and I was smitten. I am now surprised that I had the presence of mind to carry on. She was virtually an identical twin of Grace Kelly,the movie star that I adored, and her father’s fame as a champion of the downtrodden and the Woody Guthrie dirt-farmer poor was not lost on me. My own father’s early I.W.W. [Eugene Debs’ Industrial Workers of the World] affiliation had been a matter of fascination for me, and a man such as her father, Bill Coe, a self-educated, sort of Lincolnesque backwoods agrarian politician, was my ideal. As I sat anxiously awaiting my call to speak, I remembered Huey Long’s fiery example on the campaign stump as portrayed by Robert Penn Warren in All the King’s Men. I recalled the example of particular Oklahoma orators: Coe’s mentor, Robert S. Kerr, and his political godfather, Alfalfa Bill Murray, all whom I had met and observed giving speeches. And there were some evangelical preachers I had seen in the tent meetings haranguing and invoking and converting and laying on their magical healing hands so that the devotees gibbered in tongues and roiled and thrashed about in spiritual orgasms. I also hearkened to the Indian pow-wows my father had taken me to and remembered reading that Thomas Jefferson claimed to have learned some of his most effective rhetorical techniques from the Cherokee in their long-house political debates which he attended as a teenager on the advice of his tutor, also a progenitor or mine, great-great-great—grandfather James Fontaine-Maury, whose academy in Virginia he attended when made an orphan at fourteen, where he later sent both Madison and Monroe, because he considered the training in essential philosophical principles by Fontaine-Maury to be quintessential in the development of his own political consciousness. These statements appear in Jefferson’s autobiography on the opening page. But my opening page in public speaking began that summer afternoon at Casady School, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in the heart of the Bible belt, the spiritual home of the Ku Klux Klan and only a few miles from Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, one of the staunchest fundamentalist Christian strongholds in America. It had been that very year (1956), that Look magazine had judged Oklahoma City to be the most corrupt and hypocritically