Jerry Kleiner & Richard Basham

Jerry Kleiner

          During the summer of 1965 I started hanging out with a guy named Jerry Kleiner, who I’d met mostly from just Being Around, moving in the same general scene.

          Kleiner was funny and droll and given to odd interests, such as late-50s Connecticut black a cappella groups and playing the commodities futures market. He had long blonde hair, was a philosophy major, had a motorcycle, and was much more successful with girls than I was. There was one girl in particular who caught my fancy, but became his girlfriend, a brainy Scandinavian type from California with long, straight blonde hair named Karen. He was also a pot-smoker. He lived in a fairly large apartment in a roach-infested old building on G Street, where I started to hang out a bit. Both his parents were psychiatrists from somewhere around Woodstock, New York. It amused him that they thought he was going through a phase.

          We used to go for late lunch once a week or so at a French restaurant called Bonat’s, me riding behind him on his Yamaha. There was always a special on Saturdays on the full t-bone steak meal, which included a wonderful mushroom sauce, for those ordering after 2 pm. Real cheap. Kleiner had been doing it for a while, and had a friendly relationship with the waiter who was always on duty then, an old African-American man who preached on Sundays and who Kleiner called “Reverend” and referred to as “the Rev.” The Rev doted on us paternally. We were his special customers. He called us “my students”.

          Kleiner went out to San Francisco during the Summer of 1966 to check out the scene. He came back to school in September with stories and insights about what the dope-and-music scene people in the burgeoning dance-hall culture were up to, and what they were thinking. He was particularly scathing about Timothy Leary and the Oh, wow! school of mindless hippies, a point of view I shared despite not having his eyewitness experience. It seemed to us that all that crowd was doing was alienating a wider public whom we preferred would ignore us: “bringing the heat down,” as he put it. The Leary trip was not for cynics.

Soon after school started that year, Kleiner and Karen, a friend of his named Harry Wilker, and Harry’s girlfriend Donna (who was a champion target-shooter), and my girlfriend Pessie and I started getting together one weekend evening a week at the somewhat more standard, but still funky, apartment he’d moved into. We got hard-to-stand-up stoned, sometimes do things like make little films of inanimate objects with Kleiner’s 8mm camera, eat unusual flavours of ice cream and other munchies, and listen to Head Music, taking turns on the headphones. Often, late in the evening, when we were all just about too stoned to move, Kleiner would get up and roll one more joint, steadying his hands on the top of the refrigerator. The rest of us had a little song: “Oh, Christ, Kleiner’s at it again!”

          I must say that listening to the Mothers’ Freak Out! album under these conditions was one of the more powerful aesthetic experiences of my life up to that point.

          In late 1966 or early 1967 Kleiner moved into a different and more squalid apartment, broke up with Karen, and took up with a young soon-to-be-divorcée named Christina. They started taking pornographic pictures of themselves. He made a good deal of money in cotton futures, and they got a dog, of all creatures to keep in a place like that, which they named Cotton. Then he lost some money on pork bellies, although he was relieved when he unloaded them and wasn’t stuck with boxcar loads of the actual, tangible hog carcasses himself.

          He went off to do graduate school at the University of Texas in Austin. I stopped by to see him a couple of times while en route driving between Coasts. We got smashed together. Somewhere along the line he left graduate school and went into the printing business.

          In March, 1976 I got married for the second time. The wedding was in San Antonio, and Kleiner, who was still living in Austin, drove down for the event. Only he got there a little late. His passion at that time had become snakes, and he hadn’t been able to resist stopping at the roadside-attraction snake farms off Interstate 35 outside of New Braunfels. He brought a snakeskin garter — not from a snake killed for that purpose; Kleiner loved snakes — as a wedding present.

          After the wedding I never saw him again, we lost touch with each other, and I had no luck finding him on the internet. Then, in November 2004, he found me via the internet. He wrote me:

          “Caught in the Belly of the Beast, just like the old days. Only more dangerous.

          “Living in Middletown, when's the last time we talked? left Texas in '82 to take care of my mom, (at first it was gonna be for a week, then 2) she died in '01, we're still here. (My wife, Barbara, she moved up from Texas, we got married in '84).

          “Barbara has old friends in New Zealand, we thought of going but since the rebirth of the ‘ugly American’ buying up huge tracks of exclusive choice NZ real estate, I don't think American émigrés are quite as welcome ...

          “I get up in the afternoon, like always ...

          “Man, you got out while the getting was good. There's not a long list of places to go. Barbara grew up in Venezuela and lived out of the country for years (Indonesia, Singapore, Libya, England, Mexico, etc). Her dad was with Mobil Oil. So she'd be comfortable lots of places. Me, I had years of French and no foreign language ability, and only ever been to Canada, which is too cold for her. Hell, NY is too cold for her. I'm just so parochial, but maybe it's time ...

          “I'm still in printing, sort of. I work at the local newspaper doing halftones and separations and occasionally I take some pictures. I took about a 50% pay drop from commercial printing 11 years ago because I had to be closer to home as my mom got worse. We're still trying to climb out of debt. My son, Justin, is in NYC, just got married in March. We were out of touch for about 8 years, (he was out of touch) still don't know why, don't think he does either, really, but it doesn't matter. We've always been available and clueless, but my mom never understood, they had been so close, she always just said ‘as long as he's happy.’ His wife is Japanese, took her a while to get back in the US after they got married, but I'm not sure they wont end up living in Japan.”

          I haven’t been able to contact him via facebook, but it seems as if he got himself elected as an alderman on the Middletown City Council and has been doing his bit to help people and his community and to oppose the local right wing.

Richard Basham

          In early 1966 I fell in with a guy named Dick Basham. He started showing up at my History of Latin America class about midway through the semester, usually about midway through the class, munching on a candy bar. Strung out on junk. But he got over it. That and his recent divorce.

          Basham was from Georgia, which is where his parents moved when his father got blacklisted from working in Hollywood during the McCarthy shit back in the early fifties. And, as he told it, his parents were indeed atheist leftist Jews. He was an anthropology major, and through carousing with him I got to know some people in the Anthropology Department, and they were all cool.

          He had already done some cultural-anthropology fieldwork, with Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest. I remember him telling me how odd it was for him, coming from Georgia, to hear the rednecks in Washington state refer to the local tribe of their area’s original inhabitants as “niggers”.

          Basham was physically somewhat like me, only more so — a bit bigger, his beard a bit bushier, definitely more openly and cheerfully political. Maybe not louder. We both felt pot-smoking should be discreet, and usually toked up in the bathroom to be far from the front door and so we could dispose of the evidence quickly. We liked Donovan’s dope songs and the Byrds and Patrick Sky’s two albums that were out at the time.

          He had interesting friends. One of them, Patrick Gallagher, was the head of the Anthropology at GW. Patrick wasn’t that old at the time — maybe forty, give or take five years. He was tall and lean and had a red beard. He was enormously popular as a lecturer. I only saw him in action once, when he was covering for my anthropology teacher when he was sick one week. Patrick was amazing, bursting with energy. Leaping up onto a desk and mimicking a Great Ape, and so forth.

          On the day of the first big DC Human Be-in in Rock Creek Park, which was about a half-block from my apartment, Patrick came by to have some weed in late afternoon. Some of my friends were already there. I forget how Patrick knew where to go, but I felt honoured.

          Patrick’s problem was that his freshman course, Man, Culture, & Society, was so popular that he had to teach it in two groups of, if I remember correctly, about 500 each. Of course, he had graduate assistants to grade the tests and so on, but he read and graded all the final exams himself. Until the year after I left GW, or so I was told, by Basham and by my then sort-ex-girlfriend, with whom he’d had an affair — when at the end of the year he marked half of the final exams A, the other half F, and then checked into a mental institution for some assistance in regaining his composure. I don’t know if this is accurate, but it’s what they told me.

          After graduating from GW, I drove around the country for a couple of months before starting grad school in southern California. This was the Summer of Love, so I stopped off in San Francisco, where I ran into Basham. He was on his way to graduate school in anthropology at Berkeley. We went to the Fillmore and the Avalon — the famous hippie ballrooms. I remember falling asleep while Cream was playing, and waking up to Mike Bloomfield’s American Flag. What does that say? Later, on Haight Street, some stranger came up to us and asked, “How does it feel to be beatniks in the land of the hippies?” I guess it showed.

          I went up to Berkeley to visit once or twice while I was at grad school in Claremont — which wasn’t that long a time — and then gradually we fell out of contact. I knew he’d gone to Montreal to do field work studying the culture of urban French-Canadians.

In 2001, I ran a Google search on him and discovered that he was Head of Anthropology at the University of Sydney. ’Strahlia, maite! He also seemed to be much-quoted in the Sydney press as an expert on Triads and Asian crime in general. I emailed him and he filled me in on events since 1968.

          An email he sent back said, in part:

          In outline, after last seeing you, I did fieldwork in Quebec for my Ph.D. on the French-English problem, took a one year Asst. Prof. at SUNY, Stony Brook, and wrote it up. Then I went to U of Colorado, Boulder, for a year, went off to teach in Malaysia (73-74) at the Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, got interested in Thailand and started studying Thai (I've done fieldwork there ever since, mostly living in Bangkok and Chiang Mai), went back to Boulder and taught for three years, before taking a job a the University of Sydney in January '78. I've been here since, with many long periods in Thailand for fieldwork, and in the U.S. on sabbatical (Berkeley, Atlanta, D.C., and, most recently, 1 1/2 years in San Francisco).

          My wife's Thai. We've been together for 27 years and have a 21 year-old daughter who's at Berkeley. Needless to say, there is much more to tell, but I'll flesh that out later.
          Teaching is still ok. Most of what I teach has to do with Southeast Asia; most of what I do has to do with crime, Asian and otherwise. Since I've come back from sabbatical at the end of January, I've gotten stuck back into policing and crime in a big way, although these days I tend to run more with dissident cops (I was once on our version of the Police Board, if you can believe that). If you saw the guys I hang out with, you'd see the journey isn't as far as it might seem.
          The past few days, I've gotten up at 5:30 am to do 7 am media interviews, so I'm really beginning to run down. For the past 30+ years I've been working out regularly, these days — for the past 10 years — I swim 1½ kms 4-5X/ week and work out at the gym, as well, so I'm reasonably fit. The endorphins are really beginning to run out from today's swim, so I'm going home for a beer, a quick meal and an early crash.

          Over the following year, according to the Sydney Morning Herald and other sources available over the internet, Basham was busy. He “helped run a campaign that toppled a police commissioner.”

          “Dr Richard Basham,” according to the Herald, “is not your average academic. The University of Sydney anthropologist is neck deep in the murky politics of the NSW police, embroiled in an endless, behind-the-scenes fight between what he sees as the forces of good and evil. He knows people, too, and he's got influence.”

          The article talks about his nearly 30 years of studying Asian crime, his “ten years of consultancy work with the NSW police and Australian Federal Police, including psychological profiling during the backpacker murders investigation,” and the lectures about Asian crime he delivers “to members of the AFP and to police overseas.”

          They quote him as saying, “‘I really wish the Government would explain to the public ... why the police commissioner was dismissed. I feel really foolish because I have made promises not to break confidence with conversations I've had, say, with the Police Minister. But ... they have an obligation to step forward and explain why ... and I'm beginning to get a little impatient.’

          “Most academics,” the Herald continued, “could expect to be ignored when using such ominous language. Not Basham. With broadcaster Alan Jones” (the “7 am media interviews” he emailed me about) “and former and departing police officers Jeff Schuberg and Tim Priest, Basham was in the engine-room of a triumphant public campaign last year to put the heat on Ryan and the then police minister, Paul Whelan.”

          The article says that Basham and one of his police allies are “finishing a book ... on their whole campaign”, and that, “For a seemingly mild-mannered man, Basham has a capacity for personal vilification of public figures that has left academic and criminological colleagues dazed.”

          He has publicly expressed “strong views on a broad spread of policing matters, from gangs to bureaucratic structures, from corruption to crime statistics.”

          So of course there are those who don’t dig his act, including the head of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, a University of NSW law professor, and “crime academics”, such as the deputy director of the Institute of Criminology at the University of Sydney. He was even attacked in a “radical independent” Australian website.

          He seems to be more or less retired now and living in a tiny Outback town in the far Northwest part of New South Wales, and not on facebook.

Chico

 Chico

          Now, I’m going to refer to this person by an ubiquitous nickname, and not his real nickname, because if he reads this he might not like it, and I am genuinely afraid of him. He was Colgin’s roommate our first year at George Washington University. Here I’ll call him Chico.

          Chico was an ethnic Sicilian from Jersey City. He’d been an active member of a hard-core street gang until a year or two before, but he had a remarkably powerful mind and the determination to succeed at education. His nickname in the gang, called The Golden Guineas, had been ‘Brain.’ Still, his idea of sartorial splendour — stingy-brim hat, razor-creased sharkskin trousers worn up high and tapered from 16½ inches (42 cm) at the knee to 15½ inches (39 cm) at the cuff, sleeveless white undershirt (which he called a bonjee, but which would later be called a tank-top, and in New Zealand a singlet), and a three-quarter-length black leather coat — came from the lawnless streets of northern New Jersey.

          He had a round, pinkish face with a somewhat embarrassed-looking smile. He was fairly short, but was also a serious, bulked-up iron-pumper at a time (1964) when such an obsession was far less common than it became later. I thought his iron-pumpers’ magazines, which sometimes featured photos of a teen-aged Arnie, particularly bizarre. And he boxed. Which I thought was cool, although I didn’t envy him his facial bruises. And he was street-tough mentally — cynical and sceptical and fond of laughing at human cultural foolishness, including his own. He and Colgin and I developed a code language for classifying people, which included several different categories of ass-holes: screamers (screaming ass-holes), gapers, bleeders, flamers, and so on. We had a little gesture with two hands, denoting the use of an imaginary water-hose, which we aimed toward flamers. And so on.

          Although Chico had as much scorn for beatniks (which he called boe-heems) as for any other type, as a Golden Guinea he was far from unfamiliar with dope. “Look cool. Walk cool. Be cool. And that means dope,” was one of his primary gang maxims. That year at least, though, if he brought pot back down to school from trips home to Jersey City he didn’t share any with me. What he did do was teach me about robo — codeine cough syrup. What kinds I could get at pharmacies. How to get it. How to drink it (in one gulp, then quickly washed down with hot tea to suppress the nauseating flavour). He also taught me about other legally-obtainable opiates, and how to get compliant doctors to prescribe them. And the G.W. school clinic’s doctor turned out to be enormously compliant.

          Chico, much to my surprise and horror, joined the second-snobbiest fraternity at GW. Being Jewish, I could have joined the GW chapter of the Jewish fraternity, AEΠ, a bunch of rich New York and Miami Jews with flashy cars. I didn’t feel like trying to identify with them.

          Chico and I had decided to share an apartment for our junior year, and since I spent the summer of 1965 in DC working and going to summer school, and he was summering in Jersey City, it was my job to find a place for us. I finally got a place through a real-estate management company run by Jeane Dixon, the famous fortune-teller. Her husband, F.W., was the nominal owner, but she ran it. He was apparently too busy as head of the DC John Philip Sousa Society, or something.

          I didn’t deal directly with Mrs Dixon, anyway; I dealt with an underling on her payroll. I rented apartments from them that year and the next, and I only met the Great Lady once. The underling, a crisp, youngish, bobbed-hair, business-suited Becky from Indiana named Connie Crigler, led me with some ceremony into the exalted presence. The renowned psychic looked up at me from her desk, smiled, and said, “You know, you’d be a nice-looking young man if you’d shave off that beard.” So much for my fortune.

          The apartment Chico and I shared was in the basement of a three-story town house on Riggs Place off 18th St NW, fringing on a down-market black neighbourhood about a mile or so north of GW. It had two rooms separated by a hallway shared by everybody in the building. The building’s trash room was also off the basement hallway. Our front room had two single beds and exposed pipes running along the ceiling. The back room had a closet, kitchen facilities in one corner, a bathroom off another corner, a sink along a wall in another part of the room, a table and some chairs, and a sofa-sleeper.

          Probably the most inconvenient thing about that residence, though, was having the apartment directly overhead occupied by five queer dudes who danced thumpingly into the wee hours a couple nights a week. At least.

          When Chico returned from his first weekend home a couple of weeks later, he brought with him my first nickel bag. If you remember nickel bags you must be an old fart from the East Coast like me. For those of you born after 1953, or who lived somewhere else in the 60s, a nickel bag was a $5 measure of sifted pot (maybe four or five grams), often cut with some neutral vegetable substance such as oregano, and usually folded up in a brown paper envelope such as banks used to give you change in before they changed to plastic zip-locks. Chico also had some Zig-Zags for me and showed me how to roll a joint (something I never got particularly good at). Then he showed me how to smoke it (something I did get particularly good at).

          Then I went for a walk. The sidewalk, the traffic, the air — everything seemed different. And better. More beautiful, sharper, clearer. People have written plenty of books about it. I went back to the apartment and put on a record. Even better still. I knew that all those years I’d pictured myself as a pot-smoking beatnik I’d been right.

          Chico and I started telling each other bedtime stories. The characters in the stories were glorified depictions of the teller and gently mocking depictions of the listener. We also invented a professional German sexual dominator called Count von Whiplash, and started calling each other “Count”. I treated the sexual domination thing as extreme satire without meaningful relevance to the real world, but then I was hopelessly naïve. I have no idea how aware Chico was of the real thing.

          Sometime during the year I got a girlfriend, a friend of whose Chico screwed one night. She later reported to me that he’d just pulled his trousers down to his ankles and hadn’t taken them off at all – which she found to be incredibly gauche. Then Chico got a girlfriend, too, an ultra-Catholic girl from Guam, of all the bizarre places. I became a witness to noisy recrimination sessions on Saturday afternoons after she’d come over after confessing to priests about spending Friday nights on the fold-out bed in the back room. I’d be in the front room reading or listening to music, the row in the back room would reach a peak, then I’d see her storming through the basement hallway past my open door, on her way to the stairs leading to the street. Chico would follow behind at a more leisurely pace, stopping long enough to direct an embarrassed grin and a shrug of his bulked-up shoulders at me before following his lady-love up the stairs. It helped to keep things interesting.

          We both studied hard that year and got good grades. Chico was in pre-law. He was in a bit of turmoil over the conflict in values from his hardass gang background, the educated world of his intellect, and the snob fraternity he was in.      We kept in touch during our senior year, but we didn’t room together. A couple of years later I returned to live for a while in Delaware after living in California for a year and a half, and I got in touch with Chico in DC. This was in January, 1969. He was at GW Law School, and loving it. He and his Guamanian former-girlfriend-now-wife came up to visit. He was getting very straight. Cynical, but straight. He wasn’t interested in becoming a lawyer for the capo who ran his home turf in Jersey City, who went by the name of Uncle Joe. He rather fancied a career with Uncle Sam, instead.

          Chico and I had somehow managed to keep in touch over the years. He’d been a lawyer on Guam. I’d received baby pictures in the mail. He’d gone on from boxing into serious martial arts. By the mid 80s I’d been living in San Antonio, Texas for about a dozen years and looking to use my newly achieved teacher’s certification as a passport to travel. I read about a teacher shortage on Guam. I talked on the phone to Chico about it.

          Somewhere along the line, there in the 80s, Chico had started to get vague about what he was up to. He worked for the Army. He lived on an Army base outside Washington, DC, and had an officer’s commission, but he wasn’t actually in the Army. He talked about his “job”, as in, “I was in San Antonio on my job last month, but I couldn’t get in touch with you, Count; Great city,” but he never said what his job was. Once when I began to reminisce about the Good Old Days he told me to watch what I said — “They have my permission to tap my phone.”

          He didn’t say who ‘they’ were, but he was clearly a spook of some sort. Obviously. Maybe DIA. Maybe CIA. I don’t know and I don’t care. But I don’t want him mad at me. Which is why I’m calling him by a bogus name here.

          Anyway, I asked him about Guam and he was positive about it.

          After moving to Guam in the summer (actually, the rainy season) of 1986, I wrote to Chico to convey a mass of my earliest impressions of the place, but he didn’t seem like he wanted to hear it.

          And then, in April or May of 1988, I saw Chico’s name in a story in the Pacific Daily News. It had something to do with his job as an investigator with some Guam government department. Bureaucratic investigator? On Guam? I phoned him at his department. When I got through to him his response was, “Well, Count, it looks like you’ve found me.”

          Now, I asked myself, what kind of a response is that? This guy was once more or less my best friend. We’d kept in touch for over 20 years. We’d spoken to each other less than two years before. He’d clearly been back on Guam himself for some time without getting in touch with me. What was this shit — were we playing hide and seek? Why? How come I hadn’t known that we were? What a bunch of crap.

          We didn’t talk for long, and he kept it vague. He didn’t suggest that we meet for lunch, let alone invite my wife and me over for dinner. And I didn’t suggest or invite, either. He gave me the phone number of his desk’s direct line, so if I wanted to call him again I wouldn’t have to go through the departmental switchboard. Big fucken deal. I didn’t have any idea what he was up to and I didn’t want to find out. I confess that when we’d finished our little chat and hung up our phones I felt creepy and frightened.

Siebo Friesenborg & Isabel Knuth-Winterfeldt

Siebo Friesenborg

          For a while, when I was at the U of D, I hung out in the evenings in a lounge at the Student Center where people either read or played cards. I learned to play whist and cribbage. I no longer remember how to play whist, but I still played cribbage until recently with my kids. For a while in my early sixties I was seeing a woman with whom I was badly mismatched, but who was keen on cribbage.

          One of the students with whom I played cards fairly often at the Student Center was an guy who was two or three years older than I was named Siebo Friesenborg.

          Siebo was particularly fond of cribbage. While playing he would sometimes tell about how “the old Swedes down by the docks” would spend their days playing cribbage, and chant, “fifteen-two, fifteen-four, and a pair is six,” in a sing-song Swedish accent.

          Siebo had a girlfriend who went to a college in the midwest. Her name was Heather Hope Hornstein. Once he let me listen on another phone when he called her person-to-person, collect, from Siebo Friesenborg to Heather Hope Hornstein, just to hear the operators struggle with the names. It was a hoot.

          A few years later I related this story to my then-girlfriend in another city and she said, “Heather Hornstein! I know her! We went to high school together. We were kinda friends.”

Isabel Knuth-Winterfeldt

          When my stepfather Howard sent my brother and me on a vacation to the Caribbean in December 1963, we spent about five days on St Croix in the Virgin Islands and about the same amount of time in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

          On St Croix there is (or, at least was) a Christmas tradition called ‘stomping’, which involved drunken night-time dancing parades with steel bands through the streets of Christiansted. A couple of nights after arriving there I was standing at the corner watching one of the parades go by when I decided to join in. Everyone seemed to be drinking unwise amounts of raw local rum, and I joined in on that, too. I remember at one point someone taking up a collection to buy more. A fifth (757 ml) of the stuff cost something like 60¢. Someone had a bunch of little, one-ounce paper cups — the kind that dentists used to provide to rinse out with. I remember someone pouring too much rum into my cup (Now, how did that happen?), and the stuff that splashed onto my hand evaporated instantly into the humid tropical evening, cooling my flesh.

          And someone who, I supposed, wanted to concentrate primarily on drinking put his steel drum around my neck, and I hammered away at it, making who knows what sounds. Then I gave the drum to someone else, and I found myself dancing alongside two burly, middle-aged Cruzan men who had a short, round-faced blonde girl with acne about my age dancing between them, one arm over each of their shoulders, all three facing forward. And then, some time later, the four of us staggered into a narrow, crowded bar.

          The girl was a Dane named Isabel Knuth-Winterfeldt. Her father, Count Knuth-Winterfeldt, was the Danish ambassador to the US, and the two Cruzans were bodyguards from the St Croix police. One was especially convivial, and made me feel as if I belonged there. Isabel and I became pretty good friends, in a boozy, non-romantic sort of way. We exchanged mailing addresses and kept in touch.

          The following school year, when I transferred to college in DC, I looked Isabel up at the embassy. We started hanging out together from time to time there. I have a particularly fond memory of us raiding the embassy kitchen together the afternoon before some big diplomatic do. Isabel was surprised that I called the smoked salmon ‘lox’, which I thought was a Yiddish word and she thought was a Danish word. She said, real surprise if not remonstrance in her voice,” Americans always call it salmon!” Great food. Great beer (Tuborg and Carlsberg). Fine company.

She was learning to play the accordion, which I thought was a weird thing to be learning to play in rock-and-roll 1964. Nobody played accordion on the Beatles’ albums.

          I also went to one young-people’s party at the embassy. Linda Johnson, the President’s daughter, was there. She and Isabel were clearly old friends. Isabel helped me feel comfortable in the company of the clearly privileged. I definitely drank too much, but then, so did just about everyone else. I made a fool of myself belching and then discoursing on the difference between the taste of Danish and American beers the second time around, but Isabel didn’t care. She thought it was funny. I got a ride back to my dormitory with a new friend I never saw again, a guy named Andreas who was in the family of somebody at, I think, the Greek embassy. Andreas had a flashy, expensive car with DPL (diplomatic) licence plates, which meant that he couldn’t be arrested. Thoroughly drunk, he drove fast and recklessly, but somehow we didn’t crash and die. I counted myself lucky to get back to my university dormitory in one piece.

          By the next summer, though, Isabel’s dad got transferred to the embassy in Paris, and she started going to an agriculture school in Denmark so that she could manage the family spread outside Fachse, where they brewed a beer called Fachse Towers, or so she told me, and we lost touch. After Isabel moved back to Europe, none of the DPL people I knew knew me any more.

          Isabel and I met again on facebook. She was by then a kontessa herself and a grandmother several times over. She ran a riding academy called Finca Krimalina, in the mountains of Andalusia in southern Spain. In her photos she seemed to have a life enriched by several dogs as well as by horses with girls riding them. A healthy, outdoorsy way of life.

          We somehow picked up on our old simpático, despite our radically different lives, and exchanged information and jokes regularly and comfortably. I was about to send her some smart-arse comment as a greeting for her sixty-sixth birthday when one of her daughters posted the news on her page that her mother Isabel had died the night before. She gave no reason for the cause of death, requesting only that nobody send flowers, as they’d wilt on impact with the hot Andalusian summer air, and that people instead make donations to a refuge for injured wildlife in Kenya, a nonprofit of which Isabel was particularly fond.

          At least the dateline had saved me the fuckup of sending my planned cheeky birthday greetings.

          Her family, I suppose it was them, has removed all images of her from the internet, although such images were plentiful when she was alive.

Jackie Fassette

Jackie Fassette

          The real friend I made during my nine months at the University of Delaware in 1963-64 was Jackie Fassett. Then he pronounced it FASSit; years later he shifted it to fasSETT, spelled Fassette. Anyway, we were both freshmen, but he was four years older, having had a hiatus from formal education for some reason. He was an African-American (then called black) guy from Wilmington’s old East Side ghetto, certainly a better student than I was, and an outstanding athlete. He got me to challenge some of my assumptions about Art and Music and things like that. He knew some neighbour of mine from Green Acres through being in the Civil Air Patrol.

          I should point out that in 1963, the U of D had only recently been desegregated, smart black kids having traditionally been directed to all-black Delaware State College. Even in 1963, it seemed that most of the black kids at the U of D were football players.

          Jackie’s specialty, athletically, was the decathlon (his best decathlon event was the hurdles), but he was at U of D on a football scholarship. He was a running back. Now, Delaware was very much a football school. Its team, called (get this) the Blue Hens, had been undefeated for some absurd number of years, and was more often than not ranked the number-one small-college team in the whole USA, so a football scholarship to Delaware carried a lot of baggage.

          Delaware’s head football coach, Dave Nelson — known as The Admiral — had invented an offensive system called the Wing-T, a cross between the old single and double wing formations and the old T formation. I mean, he’d written books about it. Had it copyrighted, I think. He was also something of a tough, my-way-or-the-highway sort of coach (The Admiral). After all, his way had won an awful lot of football games.

          Anyway, during a scrimmage in Spring Practice, toward the end of the school year, Jackie was called to carry the ball on the Admiral’s famous ‘Criss-Cross Counter’ play — sort of a double-reverse with pulling guards and blocking wingbacks and all sorts of intricate bells and whistles. And some blocker had missed his assignment, or had just been overpowered, and standing in the opening that Jackie was supposed to run through was Herbie Slattery, an all-something-or-other defensive tackle. Now, Herbie lived on my floor at the dormitory, and he may have been a gentle neighbour with an almost child-like fondness for sweet baked goods, but I can testify that he was also undeniably enormous. Much larger than my old friend Crazy John.

          So Jackie did a sidestep, reversed his direction, found an opening, and ran 70-some yards for a touchdown. The Admiral, Jackie told me that evening, was more than a little pissed off. He had invented the system, which was a team system, and members of his team, if they wanted to be on his team, ran his plays the way he had designed them, as team plays. Jackie pointed out that if he’d run in the required direction he would have lost yardage, and — not a minor concern — been seriously splattered.

          That, according to Jackie, was it. The Admiral was not about to be talked back to by any player, and certainly not by some uppity nigger. Jackie was off the team, and within a week or two had had his football scholarship revoked, and, because it was toward the end of the school year, was told that without football he could forget about returning to the U of D the next year, and that arrangements had been made to see to it that he would be drafted and sent to Vietnam as soon as possible after his last class was over. Jackie quickly used his connections with the Civil Air Patrol to join the Air Force and quit school. This wasn’t the last time that being uppity would get Jackie in trouble.

          We kept in touch for a fairly long time. I received letters of Jackie’s exploits in the military, most of them sexual. He was an extremely handsome man with plenty of charm.

          In 1971 I was living in Los Angeles, and drove East to visit family in Delaware. While I was there I went to Jackie’s wedding. It was Catholic. Jackie’s bride, Mary, was a pleasant, blonde Irish-American woman. After the wedding they had a fairly big do in what I think was a Knights of Columbus hall. A standard-issue plastic bride-and-groom stood on top of the wedding cake, only the groom’s face had been somewhat crudely blacked in. It struck me as both tacky and touching. Jackie, clearly in no mood for negatives, treated it as a joke.

          A month or so later I moved from L.A. to live for a short while with a young woman in Oxford, Pennsylvania. Jackie was living just across the state line in Newark, only about a 20-minute drive away, working on a Masters degree in economics at Delaware. He was living in a little box of an apartment in a newish building not far from campus, where he kept his bottles of spirits in the fridge, which was something I’d never done but seemed like a good idea. I remember going to one or two parties there, which were okay, but just parties. “Maggie May” was popular, and somebody played Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”, which I thought was pompous and dumb. It was obvious to me that the Revolution, if it ever came, would most certainly be televised. With taped highlights at 11.

          I moved back to California just after New Year’s, and, after a couple more dislocations, back to Wilmington in the Spring of 1973. Jackie by then was living in a 1950s-era tract house outside Newark and had a big job at one of the big banks in Wilmington. I went to see him at his office once. There he was in his pinstripe power suit, talking into two telephones at the same time, speaking multimillion-dollar deal stuff into both of them, giving me a smile and a bit of a wink as he did so. A year or so later, right after I’d left Delaware for the last time, Jackie got busted big time — front-page news stuff in Delaware, apparently.

          What I know of it comes from letters Jackie wrote me. The bank had been left exposed by the economic turmoil following out from the oil shocks. The bank’s senior management had all quit or got fired or fled or something, and it had fallen to Jackie, 31 years old and barely out of graduate school, to save the bank. And he had. But in doing so he had employed some creative financial footwork involving setting up dummy accounts, and moving large clots of money too rapidly for it to be located, and other practices that would have probably earned him a knighthood in New Zealand in the 1980s but be considered too timid by the banksters of the 21st century. But when the shit had settled and the bank had been saved, and the auditors had settled onto it like flies, he’d been busted for playing too fast and loose with the banking laws. There was never any suggestion that he had misdirected any money for his own personal financial benefit.

          And the judge had given him six months. Jackie was outraged. He wrote me that he had stood up and challenged the judge over whether race had had anything to do with the sentence — whether he was actually getting six months for being an uppity nigger with a white wife. And the judge had said that he had committed a technical violation of the banking law. And Jackie had said something like, “Kiting a check is a technical violation of the banking laws, your honour! Are you going to tell me that you’ve never kited a check?”

          For those unfamiliar with the term, ‘kiting a check’ refers to the practice of paying for something by cheque the evening before the funds to cover it, such as a paycheque, are due to be deposited.

          For those unfamiliar with the US justice system, to the best of my knowledge no banker with all-European ancestry has ever gone to jail, no matter how egregious the crime or how much they personally were able to stash in the Cayman Islands.

          So he’d done six months at Lewisberg, a minimum security place. He came out, he told me, in better physical condition (he still did Masters 400-metre hurdles well into old age), and with having learned from his mafia fellow-inmates (1) how to cook some excellent Sicilian dishes and (2) a considerable amount about the nuances of crime and money-laundering. He didn’t go back into banking when he got out. I heard that he’d gone to work for the Delaware state welfare department. Then we lost touch.

          In 2001 I tracked him down via the internet. He told me he’d been with the State of Delaware since 1978 running a computer network and had a son and a daughter, one granddaughter, and a couple of cats. Mellowing comfortably into old age.