CROSSING OVER
An ordinary life can be a disaster. You don't despise people any less for not being very much at all. They are people, and we all make errors, some of us, of course, more than others. If only they knew there were others making errors just like themselves they would be no less ordinary. But they are not our peers, or friends, just our brothers.
(CROSSING OVER, p. 3)
Early one April morning, in the year 1905, Herschl Schenkman, a soldier in the army of the Tsar, ran out from behind a thick clump of meadow grass onto the dirt country road between Pinsk and Brest-Litovsk. He stood for a moment blinking in the sun. The run from the meadow had been uphill, and Herschl felt exhausted when he was out on the road again. Only fifteen minutes before he had been walking hurriedly along that road, with his head bowed forward, but in looking up once he fixed his eyes upon a think column of men, moving around a bend in the turf, some five hundred yards ahead.
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PREFACE
"Disco Frito" is a work of fiction. Some of these stories were told to me and, perforce, became fiction in the act of retelling them. Some happened to me or my friends, and when I think of them again they are as fiction.
Fiction is one of the metaphors we have for experience. Except for certain public an historic figures mentioned herein, all the characters in this collection are fictional, including the principal narrator, Rik. Any resemblances to persons living or dead is strictly a coincidence.
TRAVIS GETS A JOB
This all started happening to me sems to me musta been a long time ago, in the winter, my first in New York City, maybe two years ago. More. There was still a war.
It was cold and snowy. Filth everywhere. Just like now. I didn't have any love in my life. To speak of. No love at all, and nobody to care for. Just very little self-respect.
Whatsoever.
Worse than my Christmas year before with the dog. When Junior and I didn't have any place to stay.
A tongue-in-cheek spy thriller set on the island of Jamaica.
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FABLE 1: The Show Must Go On
We played three or four neighborhoods in Brooklyn, a country house along the Jersey SHore, a number of relative parties, occasional requests from The Clients: Fredi & Shirl & The Kids. A family. Straight! Like a jab. Everybody on the block knew us. Some were more or less like us. Intimacies as crass as a grab, or a poke. A straight family type affair.
A miracle. Fredi & Shirl, Bennett & Richard, all the same flesh: a lawyer, a housewife, an older brother. Hey, what about me?
A Letter
"SIR:
"You write (have written?) to tell me that my late uncle, the former Belas Yagodah (changed to James) is my benefactor through his estate in Merton, Ohio, of which you, in New York (sic) are the principal executor.
