Listen to a recording of this story here.

A SHORT STORY

“Poor and content is rich, and rich enough.” William Shakespeare

WALKING HARRY

“Summer of love, my ass.”

Brit tears at the silver paper, and jerking her body sideways to protect her spotless white bellbottoms, angles a softened Hershey bar into her mouth. She readjusts the strap on her shoulder bag. It is big yellow leather thing, a Salvation Army find, buttery soft and nothing like she has ever owned. It carries all she holds dear: lined notebook—black cover, red binding, spiral-bound sketchbook, favorite pens—her precious Mont Blanc, and a few felt tip markers. Slotted inside, at least two of the many books she has on the go at any time. Joan Didion’s, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and Revolution For the Hell of It, by the self-professed ‘nosy Jew-boy’, Abbie Hoffman. Some days she leans toward the cool, spare non-judgmental tone of Didion. On others she faces life raw-knuckled and ready for a fight. That’s when Abbie steps into the ring. Not so much a referee as promoter. At the bottom of her bag is a green and gold pack of menthols. In among the cigarettes she can hardly afford, a freshly rolled joint.

An image of her soon-to-be-ex slithering nearly naked in acres of mud at some hippie fest upstate, getting up to god-knows-what, makes her laugh out loud. An old woman looks up bewildered and Brit shrugs her shoulders in an I-can’t-help-it kind of way.

 Seth is more likely one of the hundreds stuck in traffic on a freeway going nowhere, arced like a jockey over the steering wheel of a platinum-colored El Dorado, that too-big car his father had leased for them. Seth, in his ratty navy blue Lacoste polo, collar cocked with purpose. His clip-on sunglasses flipped like cartoon eyebrows.

That car had been an embarrassment, conspicuously nosing through uptown streets on a hunt for dime bags. The magic gas-guzzler will look ridiculous alongside psychedelic VW busses and the anti-establishment parade of laboring pickup trucks heading for Woodstock.

Seth missed the whole summer of love thing. He told her the festival was a last fling before he settled into grown-up life. His old ethical buddies from Fieldston had gone along for the ride. They’ll be gorging on sliders from White Castle, littering the dashboard and floor with grease-stained paper sacks and the sticky aftermath of spilled sodas. The interior of the car will be well seasoned with the aroma of fried onions, greasy burgers and marijuana.

It is August, still early in the month with plenty of dog days ahead. Brit tolerates the heat and walking suits her. She screws her nose to the already exhausted early morning air. It reeks of rotting vegetables packed into metal trashcans awaiting pick up outside the markets on upper Broadway, where she has a small sublet near Columbia University. Her bare arms glisten with perspiration. Already New Yorkers are bitching about the demand for exact change on busses that will come at the end of the month. But whenever she can save a couple of dimes, she walks. She’s already spent half the fare on the chocolate.

Brit strides with purpose, avoiding the odorous proof that dogs have left in the street. She is on her way to the East Side to pick up Harry. He is a very wealthy man who requires a walker. She is the walker.

Brit looks good. Real good. High cheekbones support a sleepy gaze. She has long naturally blonde hair and a headlight smile when she bothers to turn it on. Her favorite tight-fitting bellbottoms cling to her slender hips. A bright yellow and red sleeveless tie-dyed t-shirt tucks loosely into a wide patent leather belt. As soon as Brit leaves Harry, the hem of her loose shirt will be gathered and knotted tightly, exposing her tanned midriff. Bangs that come to her fine eyebrows stick to her satiny forehead. But her ponytail defies humidity and swings jauntily in step with her determined pace.

“You look like Joni Mitchell,” Seth had said—wistfully—before asking for her keys to their apartment on the Upper East Side.

She is twenty-five and senses a symbolic re-awakening; the first steps out of the dark marital cave to stand upright and squinting into the anticipatory glare of starting over. She just needs to follow those hand stencils out of the cave and toward her future.

That Sunday she’d been rescued from a weekend of recrimination, mostly self-directed. Her friend Hugh, whom she’d met at the Art Students League, had not deserted her when she married Seth. It did not stop him from telling her what an idiot she was. Hugh never lets her forget that she is an artist. Brit knows his heart is in the right place, beating for her. When she moaned about missing out on Woodstock—this could be history in the making—he’d set her straight. “That’s rich white hippie shit,” he told her.

He’d packed her into the crowd in a ragged rectangle of a Harlem park ringed by Black Panthers, with thousands of others who ignored the heat and disproved the cops’ prediction of another Newark, another Detroit. Instead of rioting, the laid back crowd sucked on fat joints and grooved to Nina Simone. From the stage the singer demanded: “Are you ready Black people?” The crowd whooped their assent. Hugh’s unaffected grin beamed like a pearly crescent in a dark sky. He’d squeezed Brit’s eager white hand. She’d tightened her grip on his.

Hugh had been the unwitting matchmaker for Brit and Seth. ’63 was her introduction to soul food and jazz. He introduced her to a new restaurant in Harlem called Sylvia’s. They’d gorged on fried chicken, BBQ ribs, grits, collard greens and black-eyed peas.

After dinner he’d walked her to the Lenox Lounge to see a modern jazz quartet. Brit was new to the genre and fell quickly in love with the furious beat that both shocked and hypnotized her. The antics of a pack of over stimulated white college boys seated near them distracted her. She’d leaned over to one who bore the bespectacled look of a mad scientist atop a footballer’s physique and, ever so politely, told them to shut the fuck up. Seth was smitten. He’d abandoned his friends at the bar, followed Brit into the street after the gig and—ignoring Hugh—pleaded for her phone number.

They were a bad fit from the start, but the foreshocks only became apparent in hindsight, when their marriage crumbled from the earthquake it turned out to be. Enamored of their differences—his wealth, and for her the paucity of it—their brief, drug-fueled affair resulted in pregnancy. The live-in maid for the family of a friend of Seth’s, who enjoyed comfortable radicalism in ten rooms on Central Park West, came to Brit’s rescue. She arranged the abortion, much to Seth’s relief. Afterward, Brit’s demeanor was wrongly interpreted. She’d mourned something, but could not put her finger on what that something was.

Brit married Seth in Baltimore, Maryland. They had not waited for very long near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel before they’d hitched a ride south. The driver, in an undisguised effort to out them as a modern day Bonnie and Clyde, immediately revealed that he was armed. Brit had bolted from the car to the curb again. The man waved her back. Said the gun was in the glove compartment and was not loaded. Seth urged her back into the car, annoyed. The driver leaned across Seth. The glove compartment flipped open. “Take a look at that College Boy,” he said.

Perched in the back seat, like a watchful film extra, Brit held her breath as Seth extracted a handgun from the glove compartment. He palmed it under the driver’s watchful eye.

Brit was directed to a cardboard carton filled with sawdust. At the driver’s urging she’d picked out a delicate bisque figurine. It was a miniature nude the man called a ‘naughty’. Its skin was the color of peach ice cream. She’d brought the 6-inch figure closer for inspection. Its enigmatic expression defied cute.

The man bellowed above traffic as they’d sped southward: “Can you all believe that was shocking?”

“It’s beautiful,” Brit had murmured.

“She’s an innerestin’ collectible. Cheap in her time, but could be worth a lottuh money.”

Seth had gingerly replaced the handgun.

“She’s a real beaut that,” the man crowed, nodding to Seth.

Brit discovered soon afterward that she’d lost the marriage license on the bus ride home. Five years later the marriage lost her.

At 86^th and Broadway, Brit veers east. She enters the park along the transverse, picking up speed. She loves Central Park and misses the closer proximity when she’d lived on the Upper East Side with Seth. Breakfasting on black coffee and cheap chocolate keeps her alert and she slows her pace, enjoying the summer day. She has more than enough time to get to Harry’s apartment on Park Avenue.

He is doing well. In the past couple of months they have walked more often at his request. Apart from a few mystifying tremors he was calm. Harry is rediscovering speech. They are able to hold conversations, many abstract conversations and a few closer to home. His gait is steadier than it had been on the first outing.

Brit thinks the man he must have been once is remerging. Tall, and though slightly stooped to ingratiate himself and put one off guard, she is sure he is a man who had been used to running the show, whatever that show was. Harry might have been a flirt—surely a kibitzer.

She doesn’t often get beyond the front hall, the foiyay, as his wife calls it. She’d answered an ad in the Village Voice. At her interview, in the well appointed, if dated, living room, she’d been offered a cup of tea, which she’d accepted from the platinum-haired, carefully dressed woman who’d kept her eye on her husband. Harry had stood near the grand piano, trembling slightly, staring straight ahead. Brit guessed from the black and white photos framed in gaudy silver frames and displayed like awards across the grand piano, that Harry had been in entertainment. Harry’s doctor, the psychiatrist, had asked Brit if she felt she could handle Harry.

Brit had smiled at the twitching man holding onto the piano. She’d stood up and taken Harry’s arm.

“I think we’ll do just fine,” she’d said.

The doctor and Harry’s wife had exchanged glances. “You’re hired,” the doctor said. Brit had shuddered a little at the mirthless grin buried in a dense walrus mustache.

After a few sessions with Harry, Brit ruminated on how detached Harry’s wife was from her husband. She’d talk about him, not to him. He was less of a husband and more like a ward. And then sometimes she stepped out of the character of a well-dressed manikin and displayed a fawning affection for Harry that made Brit uneasy.

Brit collected her pay at the psychiatrist’s office a few blocks further north from Harry’s building. The doctor had no receptionist, which struck Brit as strange. She rang and he buzzed her into a windowless outer room. A deep pile carpet, the color of sand, covered the floor of the nearly bare room. The walls matched the carpet. One large abstract print in desert pastels hung on the wall behind the lone chair in the room. If the doctor was unable to see her he left a check in an envelope on the seat of the leather wing chair.

She was always relieved when he was too busy to engage her. She felt shy and skittish around him, more so since the incident with Harry when she’d taken him to see Roman Polanski’s new film, Rosemary’s Baby.

It was a stupid thing to do. She had been walking Harry for only a few weeks. When asked how their day went Brit usually mustered a cheery reply. “Fine,” or “Great!” Truthfully, she’d very nearly quit Harry after the first week. He shouted convulsively when she had least expected it. Sometimes he’d stop dead in the street, fearful of crossing some invisible line and Brit had to learn to wait patiently for Harry’s motor to shift gears. She mostly gravitated to Central Park with him and spent as much of the time sitting on a park bench. Children were frightened of him. She’d watch Harry as he trembled a hot dog into his mouth, sauerkraut raining onto his lap. Once they had visited the Central Park Zoo. They were both sad after that.

But on a dreary day, just after a rainstorm in early spring, Brit had been at a loss. Park benches were pooled with rain. In just a few weeks they’d exhausted the museums closer to home. Everyone was talking about the new Polanski film. If they sat in the balcony for an early afternoon screening perhaps they would disturb no one. Harry might even fall asleep.

As it turned out the doctor in the film who terrorized Mia Farrow’s character shared Harry’s psychiatrist’s surname. Harry grew visibly more agitated whenever Ralph Bellamy appeared onscreen in the role of malevolent obstetrician. Brit had finally abandoned the film when she’d offered popcorn and he’d flailed his arms like a pinwheel in a storm and began shouting unintelligibly.

Outside of the theater she’d picked salty white buds from her hair. The rain had stopped and a glimmer of sunshine made her hustle him past the Plaza Hotel and into the park at 59^th Street. Brit had prodded an agitated Harry to an empty bench near the pond and tried to calm him down.

“Sapisfucking…tryna…fuck…fucking…trynakill—,” Harry bawled.

At a loss, Brit had shouted at him: “Stop it Harry. Stop it now!”

Like a mechanical toy at the end of its wind, he’d collapsed into silence beside her. “Harry,” she soothed, “The doctor is trying to help you. Your wife loves you. I’m here, Harry. No one is going to hurt you.”

She’s kept quiet about their failed expedition and Harry’s outburst. Brit had been warned not to overtax him, to keep to the park, stay off public transportation. Take a taxi if they had to, but best to stay close to home. She’d held his hand in the cab. Harry was steadier by the time she’d dropped him off, almost tranquil. “Let sleeping dogs lie,” Brit reasoned.

After that, when she picked up her pay at his office, Brit noticed the doctor’s brass plaque was missing from the front of the building. She waited while he wrote out the check.

“Somebody steal your plaque?” she asked, making small talk.

He’d looked startled at first and then that expansive off-putting laughter, brimful of evil: “It’s a very interesting story actually. That film? Rosemary’s Baby?” He advised her not to see it. Brit blushed deeply and shook her head. “It’s rather gruesome, not for a young woman like yourself.”

“Have you seen it?” she asked.

No, it wasn’t his thing.

Brit had fidgeted nervously, anxious to leave and cash her check.

“I’m telling you this in confidence, okay?”

“Okay,” Brit replied. She’d listened restively as he told her about his odd connection to the Polanski film.

“The author of that book had a gripe against me. I’ve decided to drop my lawsuit. Better for my patients. Seems I was treating his girlfriend—at the time—I don’t know if he is still with her. She’s no longer a patient.”

He stopped to gauge Brit’s reaction. She remained politely poker-faced.

“Anyway, he called me, livid with accusation. I was trying to drive her insane. I would kill her. I was evil. I had to be stopped….”

The doctor, seated at his desk, drifted off. His eyelids lowered. His head was thrown back. A silent minute passed, compounding Brit’s unease. Just as Brit was about to speak, to tell him she had somewhere else to be, he jerked forward.

“This character, this doctor in the movie, is his revenge.” He reached across the desk, her check in his outstretched hand. “Pathetic.”

She did not have to work, at least not for a while. Not until she’d sorted herself out with a real job. Seth’s family was loaded.

Her father-in-law was a corporate attorney who had done well. A lucrative sideline in pork belly futures gave his wife free rein with her hobbies, most of which was spending money. A disenthralled line of underachievers and hapless dreamers in Brit’s family had come before her and her girlhood in the Jacob Riis Projects on the Lower East Side. Seth had never worked outside of his private schooling and had enjoyed an indulged youth growing up in a sprawling apartment on Fifth Avenue. Brit had always held some kind of job during and after high school. He went to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She skipped college and embraced the artist’s hardscrabble life. When they married Brit left her tenement flat on East 9^th Street and moved in with Seth to a brightly lit one-bedroom in a doorman building on the Upper East Side, close to the hospital where Seth would begin his doctoral work. His father paid for the apartment. She worked part time selling art supplies at NY Central Art Supply and returned to the Art Students League at night. Her parents had long since divorced and fled New York—her mother to relatives in Lowell, Massachusetts and her father to Hartford, Connecticut to sell insurance and drown his sorrows in the bowels of the Shipwreck Lounge on Farmington Avenue.

Brit strove for independence. Her husband had let her have it for her lack of feeling, her callousness toward him. “You’re just emphasizing the differences,” he’d say when she complained that his family looked down on her. She’d quit her part time job at Seth’s urging. She stopped going to the Art Students League. Very soon after she was looking in the Village Voice classifieds for something, well, different. Seth was disconcerted. “You don’t have to do this. Who is this guy Harry? Paint or something, or I don’t know, those woodcuts.”

It was true. She had retreated from a creative life. She had allowed herself to be callously tossed, an object of curiosity, among Seth’s family, his disapproving mother and her social circle, the girl from the projects, the outsider.

Seth accused her of overreacting. Who balks at having money? You marry a rich guy—well, a guy from a rich family—and you are suddenly shot of who you are. Who are you? Well, to start with, not rich. When she’d been introduced to Harry, Brit immediately recognized a head-shakey attitude toward life.

Brit exits the park onto Fifth Avenue. The Metropolitan Museum stretches downtown. She isn’t sure what’s on special exhibit, but they can wander the period rooms, have a bite in the cafeteria. She loves eating off a tray at the little tables surrounding the reflecting pool. At the far end stand the smiling Etruscans. She and Harry guess at punch lines to the sculpture’s ancient jokes.

They have not been back since the spring. That an extensive exhibition like Harlem On My Mind was too much for Harry had been a possibility, though it merely tired him. Throughout he’d been alert and communicative, especially in the rooms devoted to the 30s. He paused at practically every photograph, scrutinizing as if for clues. They had stood silently and watched a video of a former slave who lived in Harlem. Harry had not taken his eyes off the woman.

When they’d returned, Harry’s wife was incredulous. “Why would you take him there?” she’d asked.

Harry had stuttered a retort for the first time since they’d begun their outings. “I-I-I wanted to go.”

“But it’s awful,” she’d said nonplussed. “What he’s done to the façade. It looks like a fire sale, that ridiculous sheet hanging there.” His wife nervously patted Harry’s arm and called for the maid. “Tom’s up to his old tricks, I fear.” She’d spoken of Thomas Hoving like he was a friend, which he probably was. “It’s too confrontational,” she’d sniffed. Brit had read the newspaper article calling the exhibition irrelevant. Calling Negroes irrelevant. She didn’t understand.

Harry responded as he’d been led away, catching her off guard. “It’s s-s-supposed to be.” Brit had registered something like shock creeping into his wife’s expression.

Brit crosses Fifth Avenue. Harry’s apartment building is just up ahead on 83^rd at Park Avenue. She looks forward to seeing Harry in his now customary seersucker suit, always with a club tie and a pastel-colored shirt. He’s started wearing a yellowed straw hat with a broad brown grosgrain ribbon that he tips at a rakish angle.

His wife fussed when it had first appeared. “That old thing.”

The doorman at Harry’s building greets her, calling her ‘Miss’. She is early and knows not to show up before the appointed hour. “I’ll just sit for a few minutes,” she says and breezes into the elegant floral bedecked lobby that stretched like one of the great halls in the Metropolitan Museum. She settles onto an upholstered bench near the elevators. Her flushed appearance draws another smile from the white-gloved elevator operator who knows the routine.

Brit fans the pages of Abbie Hoffman’s book. She feels a wave of unease. Maybe it’s the gory details being played out in the tabloids about the Manson murders, the whole Polanski thing all over again. Maybe it’s too damned hot. Nowadays Harry is ready and waiting for her no matter the weather. They used to go to Soup Burg on Madison, which Harry likes but his wife disapproves of what she calls greasy spoons. “You’ve seen p-p-plenty,” Harry had said. His wife had checked her expression and responded blithely: “Well, as you can see Brit, he’s still got his imagination intact,” effectively making the cozy diner off-limits.

Maybe they’ll take a cab to Serendipity. Apple pie for Harry; she’ll order a Chef’s Salad and a frozen hot chocolate. Then they can still catch a movie. The Odd Couple was sure to be harmless fare. Her job is getting easier, the perks growing.

 Harry had asked if she liked walking with him. Of course she did. Then he told her that he pretended to be crazy at home just to keep up the walks with her. Brit had been terribly moved by that. She wonders how long before she can get Harry on the Staten Island Ferry. How long it will be before he tells her about himself, his past. How long before they can step out of the still constrictive present.

 The week before Brit had ventured to ask the doctor how she was doing. She had long-range dreams, how it will be when things got better.

“Good,” he’d said. And then, inexplicably, he’d added: “A little too good.” Only he was kidding her he’d said.

The first thing Brit notices in Harry’s apartment is the light. Until that morning the living room is nearly always shrouded in heavy dark green velvet drapery. Massive oak furniture disappeared in the darkened room. Now the room glows with sunlight from bare windows. The walls have been stripped of paint. The claret colored carpet has been removed from the foyer, exposing a veined white marble floor. There are paint samples in shades of ivory and beige taped to the walls. Brit sees the piano covered in plastic, the photographs removed. She waits in the foyer as the maid instructs until Harry’s doctor appears.

“We won’t be needing you any longer,” he says. He hands her a check. “Thank you for everything. You’ve been most helpful.”

“Harry…?” she manages. Brit’s confusion only exacerbates when he prods her to the front door.

“Unfortunate,” is all he says. “Most unfortunate.”

She stands for a moment in front of Harry’s building. “Well, that was weird,” she mutters. The doorman stares straight ahead.

What next, she wonders.

Hugh would say: “No excuses now girl.” She can finally lay siege to her life in cartons. Liberate her few possessions once and for all. Seth had let her take the stereo. He was getting a new one anyway. He’d said that in the offhand manner he’d affected since they had agreed to divorce. There is a new album Hugh had given her called Karma, by some way out sax player named Pharaoh Sanders. There is a joint in her bag. When she gets back to the sublet she’ll dig out her woodcutting tools. She’ll sharpen them slowly and carefully on a whetstone while ideas ruminate. With a brush loaded with India ink, she’ll commit those ideas to paper. When she is satisfied she will transfer the ink drawing. Then she will ravage a clean block of pine with chisels and Japanese knives until the image it bears resembles her pain.

Brit starts back across the park. Walking suits her. She is not a collectible.

WALKING HARRY is an original short story by Linda Danz.

STORIES ON THE AMERICAN FRIEND Writers Guild of America, East #R28299

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business organizations, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. The use of names of actual persons, places, and events is incidental to the plot, and is not intended to change the entirely fictional character of the work. © May 2011 Revised April 2015.

CHANGE YOUR LIFE.

GIVE ANOTHER A LIFE BACK.

For some time now I have been corresponding with a young man on death row, Robert G. Will. My stance on the death penalty is that it should be abolished in any case, Rob's innocence notwithstanding. Life In Prison Without Parole (LWOP) should also never again see the light of day. I came to this cause out of a life long abhorrence to revenge murder, which is the only way to describe capital punishment in this country. I attended talks given by Abolitionists like Angela Davis, Bishop Desmond Tutu, and David Kacynynski from New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty.

A few years ago I joined the monthly book club of the Campaign To End the Death Penalty's Manhattan chapter in order to better educate myself about the history of legal lynching in this country and the current horrendous conditions of our prisons. I was put in touch with a supporter of Rob's who was looking for someone to volunteer as typist for Rob's updates from death row on the Polunsky Unit in Livingstone Texas. Rob and I have since become friends through our personal letter writing. You can find out about this inspiring young man on his fb page and on his website.

I have met so many people from across this country and all over the world who stand against this system some in our country so wrongly champion. Every single person I have met and correspond with inspires me every day. We are not alone. We are growing in number. We will prevail.

Get Involved!

It will change your life and it could give back a life.

DEATH ROW DIARY

From the writings of Robert Will, an innocent young man on death row

in Livingston, Texas.

SOLIDARITY FAST

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Right now I’m feeling quite…spaced out—I’m on the third day of a hunger strike or what might be more properly called a solidarity fast. A few days ago a guy here proposed the idea of a hunger strike. I barely know him and have never known him to be political at all, but I’m always down to support any positive action.

His neighbor asked me for information on Gandhi when I was in the dayroom recently—and I of course gave an impromptu talk on Gandhi—so perhaps they have been over there on the other side of the pod reading some Gandhi or something, I don’t exactly know. One thing is for sure: this idea for a hunger strike came about as a result of the rapid and absolutely outrageous rise of oppression that has been going on around here the last few months. Note for the annals of history: the rise of ultra right-wing mentality is even affecting this place. Flashback: 1994 when Clinton was president and Republicans gained control of the Senate following mid-term elections—some of the absolute most oppressive policies concerning criminal justice and prison in modern U.S. history were enacted as a result of the anti-Clinton, anti-everything progressive mania that swept across the U.S.

The last few months have been crazy. For the first time in the history of Texas Death Row they used a Concussion Weapon on someone. I’m not sure what it is exactly called but it’s a riot control rifle that shoots some type of extremely dangerous projectile. The guy was shot in the face with it and immediately knocked unconscious. Also for the first time in the history of Texas death Row a guy was beaten with metal riot batons during a Use Of Force. They’ve never even used batons during A UOF before. They’ve been playing with mail and giving people absurd, ridiculously petty disciplinary cases. Even the case lady—and there is no such thing as an even somewhat nice case lady in TDCJ—mentioned to another officer that the dramatic rise in absurd disciplinary cases seems stupid. Actually, most officers do not like what all has been going on. Most of the imbecilic new policies are coming from people who never (or rarely) even come on the Death Row pods.

Of course, some of us are contesting these things in various ways. I say “Solidarity Fast” because I am not going to push myself to the point of emaciation. It is very hard to remain healthy in this environment. I remember when some attorneys and organizations first got some of my UOF tapes and they were circulated, one of my ex-girlfriends mentioned to me that I sure looked out of shape in them. (I actually had to negate my ego a bit in order to show them! Ah, but for the struggle…).

On disciplinary status one can’t even get vitamins or any commissary food and when a person gets put on food loaf rapid muscle deterioration occurs. Food loaf is basically a big blob of dough and grease. You rapidly lose muscle but basically gain some fat around the stomach from the grease and nasty doughy substance. Well, I work out daily and I’m in some seriously good shape now—I do Yoga, Jujitsu, “weight” (homemade weight bag) training, Shaolin, Qi Gong and just all types of working out! My body is very well sculpted and it will continue to get more and more so. There are only a small number of guys participating and I don’t know how long they’re planning on going. I have a certain status in this environment, so I feel compelled to show a certain Solidarity. I’m not going to emaciate my Self unless I feel it will be a very strong strategic endeavor that will greatly benefit the struggle.

This place is insane, quite Kafka-Huxley-Orwellian-esque as I often say: earlier shakedown team officers were doing immediate forced moves to disciplinary status behind these nonsense cases they’ve been giving people. At the same time myself and another guy are discussing and comparing painting, drawing and craftwork techniques (a bit of an Artistic teach-in!). Two guys are scream-talking in the next section. We get word on how a dude on another pod was assaulted with a military-grade riot control grenade. Someone listening to the news hollers out the latest on why Cleve Foster—who everyone knows is completely innocent—received a stay and wasn’t executed yesterday. Chaos. Bedlam. Insanity. And this is how it is every single day here.

But I thrive and continue to grow and Create. My vision is getting a bit blurry, my hands are shaking a bit and I’m feeling rather dizzy. (Common effects of not easting). I’m about to delve off into the realm of Yoga…

In the Spirit of Satyagraha

Rob Will

PHOTO ABOVE COURTESY OF BRIT SCHULTE

DEATH ROW DIARY

From the writings of Robert Will, an innocent young man on death row

in Livingston, Texas.

Klimt, Mahler, Nietzche, and Anti-Semitism

Letter To a Friend In France

Compañero Henri:

An embrace of Strength and Solidarity! Our most excellent Austrian compañero Heinz shared with me the song by Gustave Mahler you recently posted. I love Mahler. I believe it was Richard Strauss who said that no other composer had so eleoquently expressed the human condition through music the way that Mahler did. Are you familiar with the Austrian artist Gustave Klimt? I adore Klimt with a mad passion! Klimt actually painted Mahler into one of his pieces—he is the “Knight” in Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze! There’s quite an interesting story behind this. As part of a Vienna Secession exhibition —the art movement Klimt was a part of—which included Max Klinger’s Monument To Beethoven, Klimt did his Beethoven Frieze. At the time Gustave Mahler was the director of the Vienna Opera and this was highly “controversial” because Mahler was Jewish and anti-Semitism permeated through the realm of the Austrian intelligentsia of the day like some putrid infectious disease. (I find anti-Semitism particulalrly abhorrent, by the way.)

Remember, at the time the intellectual elites of the German speaking world—and really Europe as a whole—were actually having quite obscene debates which cenetered around questions such as “Should Jews be allowed to teach at universities?” Can you imagine such a thing, Henri? Well, perhaps such sickness isn’t too hard to fathom—it wasn’t long ago that academica in the U.S. were debating such questions concerning black folks. And remember it was only about 10 years before the Secession exhibition when Neitzsche expressed his disgust with the rise of anti-Jewish sentiment amongst German “intellectuals.” I’m essentially in a war-zone Compañero and in such a situationmy battle-axes stay ever-ready and ever-sharp. I do indeed keep my sharpening implements within reaching distance—I have my Nietzsche on my desk and I can’t resist sharing with you something he wrote to his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, in1887 that is very relevant to this discussion:

You have committed one of the greatest stupidities—for yourself and for me! Your association with an anti-Semitic chief expresses a foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me again and again with ire or melancholy…It is a matter of honour with me to be absolutely clean and unequivocal in relation to anti-Semitism, namely, opposed to it, as I am in my writings. I have recently been persecuted with letters and Anti-Semitic Correspondence Sheets. My disgust with this party (which would like the benefit of my name only too well!) is as pronounced as possible, but the relation to Förster [Nietzsche’s sister’s husband], as well as the aftereffects of my former publisher, the anti-Semitic Schmeitzner, always brings the adherents of this disagreeable party back to the idea that I must belong to them after all. It arouses mistrust against my character, as if publicly I condemned something which I have favored secretly—and that I am unable to do anything against it, that the name of Zarathustra is used in every Anti-Semitic Correspondence Sheet, has almost made me sick several times…”

Yes indeed anti-Semitism was terribly present in the German speaking world around the time of the 19^th century. So, Gustave Mahler reorchestrated the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth for wind and brass and actually conducted it with the Vienna Opera in front of Klinger’s statue and Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze on the opening day of the exhibit. Can you imagine Henri? The anti-Semites of the Germanic “intellectual” world are in an uproar because Mahler is going to perform a re-orchestration of their beloved Beethoven’s Ninth at the exhibition. A scandal! And what does Klimt do? What does this brilliant Paganini of the Viennese art scene who was constantly being denounced as “improper, too sensual,” “too unconventional” do? He actually paints Gustave Mahler into his Beethoven Frieze as a Knight I armor! In one of his last letters Nietzsche—in his typically brilliant sarcastic manner—remarked that he was “just out having all of the anti-Semites shot.” Indeed, Klimt unleashed a mighty war blow to the consciousness of the pompous anti-Semitic and traditionalist art critics of the day with his Betthoven’s Frieze.

I love such things! I love historical examples of people challenging oppressive ideology (and actions!) through Art, Creativity and all forms of struggle. I live in this tradition. I thought that since you brought the text of the Mahler piece to my attention I would perhaps recommend a few pieces of music to you: Hayden’s symphony no.59, the Fire Symphony. I don’t believe I’ve written about this much but my art comes from visions I experience while mediatating. The Cyclical Mindtrip paintings I did are manifestations of a particular form of depth meditation. At one point I was listening to Hayden’s Fire Symphony while working on the Cyclical Mindtrip I piece. While listening to the music I imagine a beautiful fire dance, a sensual dance, the flames licking the night sky reaching up to the stars, to the Cosmos. Check the symphony out Henri, it’s sensual yet playful and I think you might enjoy it.

Another piece of music I listened to while working on Cyclical Mindtrip I is “King Queen” by the Nels Cline Singers. It’s a kind of Jazz-Funk piece that is just brilliant. Well, Compañero, I could discuss musuc and art and such things all day, but there is much work to do. Because of where my case is at our organizing efforts must be stepped up and we must push forward with a renewed vigor. We must indeed sieze the time. I’m hoping to gain more actice support form France—Abondance de biens ne nuit pas!*—and I hope this is something you can help with. In the spirit of challenging the status quo, in the spirit of Free-Thought I’ll sign off with warm vibes of:

Peace, Strength & Solidarity

Rob

*English translation: There’s no harm in having too much.

Rob's writings and background information on his case can be found on his supporter's website and facebook. Please visit and visit often. Support an innocent man on death row.

ABOVE: Detail, Gustave Klimt Beethoven Frieze

“Patience: A minor form of despair disguised as a virtue.” Ambrose Bierce

THE ODYSSEY TO UNPLANNED CRONEHOOD:

What are we afraid of?

It takes a lot of patience, getting older. One can’t go off half-cocked at the latest insult from the rant-filled right wing talking fat heads. Patience is required when being lectured by those who won’t abide being lectured and instead take another to task for having an opposing view. Attending a rally for the rights of one people does not automatically make me hateful of the people who live under the government that practices the apartheid I protest. Those younger males who laugh at Sarah Palin’s ‘antics’ demand my patience as well. After all, they weren’t around in the Dark Ages when young women like me were making furtive plans with the unknown to have an illegal abortion. I have to patiently calm the cynic in me who has seen what flowery political campaign speeches turn to strangling weeds in the cold light of post-election.

One has to choose one’s battles.

I went to the Planned Parenthood rally/demo/protest/political grandstanding last Saturday afternoon with Rennie, Beatrice, Christina, and The Mister. While others were pleased with the turnout, I thought it only a fair showing. Maybe it was because Manhattan is a bastion of Liberalism anyway. We have avuncular Chuck Schumer cheerleading the troops. Kathleen Turner offered up her ashtray voice for Planned Parenthood to a giddy crowd of admirers, older admirers that is. All spoke in the shadow of a 60-ft, black granite sculpture called Triumph Of the Human Spirit by Lorenzo Pace. It’s meant to represent an abstract female form and serves as a monument to honor all Africans brought to America. Surrounded as it is by government buildings I can also imagine it as a great big ‘up yours’ from said human spirit.

The Mister, as usual, cautions me not to get arrested. At this stage it’s a long-standing joke. I heed the cops who direct me to the freedom of speech pens blocks away from a perfectly empty area of the rally. I bite my tongue. A lot. Though I did indulge my inner Pollybollocks and shouted to the cops flanking the peaceful parade of demonstrators. I cheer and tell them, “This is about all of us, this right to our bodies, our selves. We are marching for you, too.” All smiled and nodded in return. Except for a lone female cop. She was kinda on the short side, it has to be said, and remained stoically grim-faced.

The cops may have been more at ease in their skin on Saturday. It was, after all, a bunch of women, but any change, any perceived threat to their authority and you’d be closed in so fast you wouldn’t know which way the tear gas was blowing.

Perhaps what got any decent-sized crowd out at all was the recent move on the part of the anti-abortion group, Life Always, which is based in Texas. They had a news conference in Manhattan last week to discuss the opening of an advertising campaign intended to reach black women. This misfired on a grand scale when New Yorkers spied a huge billboard above a Mexican restaurant, located a half-mile from a Planned Parenthood center in SOHO. It showed a young black girl in a pink dress and the words “the most dangerous place for an African-American is in the womb.”

Really? Did they seriously expect New Yorkers NOT to react? This city is thriving with enough educated, righteously indignant Black women alone to have given them pause. The billboard was taken down within days. In keeping with the ‘blame game’ the reason given for the retreat was that employees of the restaurant were being threatened, their lives were in danger, of course. What still exists are the advertisements, with a similar message of intolerance from the same group, on the outside of city busses.

Ah, but I was talking about patience and fear. What don’t I have patience for? What do I fear?

Friends responded to my query with humor—“I think of the consequences of not responding to your request!!!”—and seriousness— “Being strangled, restrained by anxiety and weighed down.” Some expressed the fear of death, or of missing out on something, which will certainly happen after death. “Fear; being trapped…in any sense of the word—physically, psychologically, emotionally. Panic attacks are the worst.” I was relieved to see this friend had added: “Mine are all gone.”

I can always rely on the cheeky retorts of my Leicester Friend: “Being trapped in a room with 20 beautiful young ladies for a week. At my time of life I don't think I would come out alive !!!” Or the wry commentary I have come to expect from Noozeguy: “When I think of fear, I think of getting emails that ask me what I think of fear.”

Isabel, who is a journalist and a writer in Barcelona echoed some of my own fears, things we have discussed: “Fear to be sick, fear to be subjugated to the medical system, fear of dying because of their shamanic death sentence, fear to be homeless, fear to become crazy, mad before the injustice, fear that the world becomes more and more subjugated, that critical people are eliminated...” Kalev, too, anticipates a great suffering, “…which, after all, is what fear is.”

“When I think of fear,” Julie wrote, “I think of holding my breath—not feeling comfortable to exist.”

Missy’s definitive assertion suits her relentless optimism: “Fear is the greatest sin and the biggest roadblock to progress. Mine or a nation’s or whoever’s.” While fear of the unknown and dwindling prospects causes a sleepless night for another.

“Cool, great question,” Lexie wrote, “but requires maybe three sentences.”

“There are two types of fear, one is useful, and the other is not. The first kind is essential and alerts us to danger, it’s animalistic, and it kicks in when you know, without knowing why, that you’re in a dangerous situation and something must be done NOW to avert a bad thing from happening. I like to call this the lizard brain and it's in our DNA we can choose to take action, which is usually wise, or not (at the risk of appearing foolish) to our own detriment.”

“The other kind of fear is usually self imposed and serves no purpose at all other than to keep us in a status quo, unable to move forward or reach for a dream for fear of losing whatever it is that we think we have. This is the fear of failure or success and it is completely pointless and debilitating.”

“Ok there's a third kind of fear that governments and the media instill in us, equally useless but it keeps us in our place. Either by continuing to buy and consume or by allowing atrocities in the name of safety, I know I don't have to elaborate on this one. So, what do YOU think of when you think of fear?”

Well, pretty much what has already been described? Ill health, the prospect of hospitalization sends me into that sphere of anxiety that tightens my chest like a vise. Close friends have recently ended their days in hospital beds. I fear the surrender a doctor demands from the patient. I fear capitulating to that demand.

I fear the complacency on the part of Americans, and what nefarious use powerful, greedy, soulless individuals will make of that complacency. I fear the patience I have been striving to achieve will be undermined by inaction, that I will continue to go to protests, but that I will capitulate to complacency and allow myself to be penned in these new-age freedom of speech zones. I fear that I might not make the best traveler on my own odyssey, that I might not get to complete a self-examination that will strip away the fear and replace that with courage to bolster my convictions, no matter how others might react.

And, while I am trying my best not to, I fear encroaching age for a myriad of useless reasons. Rob Will is a young man I know on death row. He has every reason to be fearful and yet he ploughs through his fears with activism behind bars in a world that I am gradually learning more about. A world that is really the culmination of all of our fears; the Kafkaesque rabbit hole any one of us can fall into and never crawl out of; a place so dire and soul crushing.

I have to learn not to mistake patience for complacency. I have no patience for the feel-good-soft-focused-within-an-inch-of-their-screen-lives moments.

Terrorism is all smoke and mirrors, dangerous smoke and mirrors to be sure, but we have to wrench that smoky curtain aside and see just who or what is running the smoke machine and installing all those mirrors.

Rob’s incarcerated youth is my mirror as I age. He shows me what I must value, where my priorities must lie.

I went with friends to another rally some weeks ago, where even fewer demonstrators were in attendance. This one was in support of the peace activists in the Midwest who have been hounded and arrested by the FBI. The case before the Grand Jury is a fishing expedition and could very well be thrown out of court. But the government has very long poles and plenty of them and they will keep fishing until the fish are too exhausted to fight.

“Stop the subpoena!

Stop the raid!

We are here and not afraid!”

As I chanted with my friends Christopher and Tom in that moderate-sized clutch of demonstrators, so much older than the ones we saw at the Planned Parenthood rally, I felt the familiar surge of, if not fearlessness, then, at least, willingness.

A very tiny and elderly white-haired lady scrambled to the podium toward the end of that rally. “This is what happens when you become part of a movement,” she cried, “if you’re small you stand tall.”

And when you are aging, you will be young again.

"Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy." Dale Carnegie, American lecturer, author, 1888-1955