The first “NO KINGS” day was on the Porcine Emperor’s 79th Birthday, when some five million Americans expressed love for Democracy, and disdain for Autocracy. Now, Trump reveals his naked hatred.
(The Emperor has no clothes, no brain, no allegiance to the US Constitution, no respect for democracy, no heart, no conscience & no soul. But he has spawned the largest pro-democracy, pro-America demonstrations in the nation’s 250 year history.)
For Donald Trump’s 77th birthday 2 years ago, he was given the gift of a 37-count criminal indictment, with 31 of those charges pertaining to blatant violations of the Espionage Act, including spilling Nuclear secrets.
His actions are similar to what former National Security Advisor John Bolton has just been charged with, and the 74-year old case that resulted in execution by electrocution of Ethel & Julius Rosenberg for violating the Espionage Act. It’s seems so serendipitous, and certainly poetic, that, in the end, the lives of Trump and the Rosenbergs are so intertwined.
Four years ago, on the anniversary of the arrest of Ethel Rosenberg for allegedly providing valuable, top-secret information to the Russians about nuclear weapons designs, radar, sonar and jet propulsion engines, the WashingtonPost broke an explosive story headlined: “FBI searched Trump’s home to look for nuclear documents and other items, sources say.”
Now that we have physical evidence that boxes and boxes of highly classified US secrets—including Nuclear plans, and plans of how best to attack the US—were left in Trump’s bathroom, in a public ballroom and strewn about in closets and storage rooms, Trump’s illegal violations of the Espionage Acts are veering into Ethel and Julius territory.
As we’ve witnessed everyday in Trump’s incessant Smash, Grab & Grift 2nd Administration’s frenzied fever to snort up every dollar and put EVERYTHING in the U.S. up for sale, the prospect of Trump selling highly classified nuclear documents to Vladimir Putin or the Saudis for billions of dollars—or of his recklessness of his mishandling top secret documents he should never have had–is entirely plausible. It adds an entirely new, and dangerous, dimension to Trump’s reign of terror, including the possibility that Russian spies or foreign agents from anywhere, could have photographed these top secret military documents, while using the bathroom at Mar-A-Lago, or that Trump is still monetizing similar top secret, classified information—even while he is President.
Like Trump’s friend, mentor, role-model and lawyer Roy Cohn—lionized in the movie, “The Apprentice,” as Trump’s primary tutor—I grew up thinking that only alleged “communists” or “communist sympathizers,” spilled nuclear secrets to the Russians, and our enemies, not Presidents. After all, it was Roy Cohn who sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair for violating the Espionage Act. My faith in the US Justice system has been shaken because Trump hasn’t been treated exactly the same way as Ethel & Julius. It is so unfair, as Trump himself would say. And, since the foreign asset Trump was not treated the same way the Rosenbergs were, as a Jew, I believe the actions vs. the Rosenbergs were blatantly Anti-Semitic. It’s eerily like Trump and his team of hatemongers using the term “Cultural Marxists,” a phrase popularized by Adolf Hitler do demonize progressive Jews.
After I devoured the brilliantly researched and written 49-page criminal indictment of Trump which lays out not only his continuing theft of top secret classified documents over two years, but his willful obstruction of the Justice Department’s efforts to retrieve them, visions of Ethel Rosenberg, played by Meryl Streep in the HBO production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, began dancing on my brain.
Quickly, I ran to get my printed and signed copy of Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize winning play.
I turned to the page where the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg shows up at Roy Cohn’s bedside, as he lay dying of AIDS. Cohn, who was Donald Trump’s personal role-model and fellow Studio 54 partier, as well as his attorney, had hounded Ethel and her husband Julius into electric-chair executions three years after her arrest in 1950.
ETHEL: They won, Roy. You’re not a lawyer anymore.
ROY: But am I dead?
ETHEL: No. They beat you. You lost.
(Pause)
ETHEL:
I decided to come here so I could see if I could forgive you. You who I have hated so terribly. I have borne my hatred for you up into the heavens and made a needlesharp little star in the sky out of it. It’s the star of Ethel Rosenberg’s Hatred, and it burns every year for one night only, June 19. (June 19, 1953, was the day Ethel and her husband Julius were executed. Ethel had to be electrocuted three times before she finallydied.) It burns acid green.
I came to forgive, but all I can do is take pleasure in your misery. Hoping I’d get to see you die more terrible than I did. And you are, ‘cause you’re dying in shit, Roy, defeated. And you could kill me, but you could never defeat me. You never won. And when you die all anyone will say is: better he had never lived at all.”
Will the same thing be said of Trump? Is Trump destined to become his own Roy Cohn? Will he die as Cohn did, in his own shit, and stripped of everything he ever knew?
The only President in all of American history to be twice impeached, twice indicted of crimes, and twice arrested (so far), Trump’s recklessness, and flagrant disregard for any and all laws, have surprised even those of us who have long pegged him as a criminal cipher, a con, a fraud, a liar, and a mob-boss wannabe. Is he capable of selling nuclear secrets to the Russians or the Saudis, the UAE, Qatar, or the highest bidder? Is he capable of forgiving the Qataris of funding the single biggest act of violece and terror vs. the U.S., and accept gilded planes, gifts and millions of dollars in bribes from them? Would he sell pardons to the highest bidders? White wash the most heinous sex crimes committed against children in U.S. history? Dangle a pardon for the female Sex Trafficker who facilitated and participated in those crimes in exchange for her silence about his involvement?
Perhaps, the only appropriate eulogy that could be given for Trump’s lawless, 50 + year temper tantrum and his unending drag show of distraction in public, is a variation on the theme expressed by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg—thrice electrocuted– over Roy Cohn’s deathbed: “Better he never had never lived a public life at all.”
The Emperor has no clothes, no brain, no heart, no allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, no respect for Democracy, no conscience, and no soul. Everything about him and his team of grifting thugs is revolting; showing up to defend the Rule of Law, democracy, the Bill of Rights, and the fundamental ideals of America itself, is an appropriate patriotic —and legal—response to the theft of a nation’s secrets, its’ substance, and its’ soul.
100 Years of hate and violence against Black and Brown people, and once again, the Government greenlights the cruel, grotesque, illegal and inhumane actions.
.
Black Hawk Helicopters in Chicago’s night sky;
BiPlanes dropping turpentine bombs,
Incinerating Greenwood, Tulsa.
Black families die.
Masked Men rappelling down, past one bedroom,
Kicking in windows of another, at random,
Ransacking, attacking
Coming for my mother, my mother, my mother…
Flash bombs, today’s turpentine torches,
Ignite terror in wide-eyed babies
Screaming for their mamas;
Clothing ripped from their tiny bodies;
Doll-like hands shackled with plastic ties
Made for tying trash bags together.
White-hot violence in the night,
Greenlighted by White authorities, out of sight;
Breaking laws, knocking down doors,
Tossing any nightshirts they find to the floor;
Some, still filled with the fragile bodies wearing them.
Night errors, night terrors come to life;
No Badges, no hearts, no conscience,
Only cruelty, cutting dark skin, like a knife.
Beyond the threatening faces these ghastly ghouls
Imagine they see through the slots in their mirror-faced shrouds;
They never ask if the demons they hunt are, instead,
My brother was a bagman for one of the country’s most notorious mobsters, and he did it with grace. Tom Homan, the notorious mobster Donald Trump’s Big Bad Border Czar, disgraced the calling.
(Fred Flintstone? Or, Trump Border Czar Tom Homan inhaling his latest bag of cash?)
My brother was a bagman for John Gotti and the Gambino Crime family for years.
He cut a very elegant figure for performing such a grubby job of shaking people down for money in exchange for “protection.”
Six-feet tall, with striking black hair when he was younger and glorious grey salt & pepper hair as he aged, he was the very model of a modern American mobster. He had a perfect petite nose, beautiful dark eyes, and a quick, warm, welcoming smile.
My brother modeled himself after the debonair Pat Eboli, my mother’s cousin by marriage, and the quiet, strong, model for Marlon Brando’s “Godfather “ character. My mother’s first cousin, Jean, was married to Pat Eboli—brother to the successor to Vito Genovese, Tommy Eboli. My mother’s other first cousin, was Alfred Lettieri, Jean’s brother, who went on to play “Solozzo the Turk,” in Francis Ford Coppola’s first “Godfather” movie. It was Al Lettieri, drug-doing friend of Al Pacino,’s who introduced Coppola, and Pacino and Brando to our cousin Pat Eboli, and the rest, as they say, was movie history.
Pat Eboli, was the apple of Lucky Luciano’s eye, and his Cary Grant-like good looks, made him more movie star than mobster. He was an ethereal force in our family, hovering over family-history like a God, paying in full for my Aunt Josephine’s—my mother’s older sister’s—50th Wedding Anniversary back in 1962.
The Anniversary Party was held at my parents home in North Babylon, Long Island, and was the first time since 1957’s Appalachin Mob Boss meeting in upstate New York, that leaders of the Genovese Crime Family and the Gambino Crime Family were together in the same location. The Gambino Crime family was represented by Carmine “Charlie Wagons” Fatico, another relative by marriage on my mother’s side, whom we affectionately referred to as “Uncle Charlie.” Ironically, ten years later, in 1972, Carlo Gambino, “Uncle Charlie’s” boss, would have Tommy Eboli murdered for failing to pay him a $4 million debt. It was that mob assassination, between the two prominent New York Crime families, that led our cosmopolitan cousin Pat Eboli to flee the US, and never be heard from again. Still, we worshipped him.
It was easy to see why my brother, the bagman, idolized Pat Eboli. Pat was reserved; he was elegant; he didn’t boast or brag, or talk in a steady stream of four-letter words. He listened; he looked at you; he was generous to all of the people he loved; he smiled at you, and he never expected anything in return. He was, in short, just like my brother, and my brother saw that you could be a very tough guy, without being a tough guy.
That may have been my brother’s role model, but with Pat Eboli’s disappearance went my brother’s chance to apprentice with him. Instead, it was “Uncle Charlie” who offered my brother a desperately needed entry-level position in the Gambino Crime Family, which my brother was forever grateful to secure.
My brother was a lover, not a killer, and Fatico, a shrewd judge of men, who was John Gotti’s real-life godfather into the Gambino Crime Family, saw that my brother was not a thug, but a gentleman. He appreciated my brother’s dapper looks, and kind demeanor, and knew he would make a perfect, professional, non-threatening bag man, who would leave no tracks or bruised feelings.
I remember walking into my brother’s office unannounced one day in the early 1980’s, before I started working for Mario Cuomo, and saw him counting piles of money sorted out on a huge wooden desk. I surprised him, and ever so gently, he asked me to give him a few minutes of privacy until he was done. He had just gotten back from his “morning rounds” of collections, and wanted to make sure the right amounts went to the right people.
But that was my brother’s style: to minimize what he was doing, to be discreet, to not make too big a deal out of anything. He would never have openly accepted $50,000 in a brown CAVA food bag, from people he didn’t know, the dumb way Trump’s Bagman, Border Czar Tom Homan did. So tacky; so cheap; so typical of Trump and his miscreant minions.
I communicated to my brother recently about this as we approached the 11th anniversary of his death by pancreatic cancer:
ME: Do you believe this guy? He’s in law enforcement for 40 years, and he falls for the most common sting operation in the FBI. It’s as if ABSCAM never happened, and those Congressmen never took briefcases full of cash, and “Mr. Law Enforcement—Honan—was not even aware of the scam?
My Brother (MB from here on out, which also abbreviates “My Bagman”:
MB: Predictable.
ME: How so?
MB: Look at where he grew up. West Carthage, wayyyyyy the fuck upstate New York. When the biggest City near you is Watertown, you know things are bad. He worked as a patrolman for the local Police Department, making what? $7500 a year? What kind of food could they possibly have in such a bumfuck place? I’m sure they ate tunafish sandwiches on Christmas Eve.
(To my brother, a gourmet chef, not having good food was a fate worse then prison. And Christmas eve, was, for someone with his culinary skills and growing up Italian, the equivalent of making it to Carnegie Hall. You were duty bound to give it all you had: seven fishes and then some. The biggest insult you could give to another family was to say that they ate tunafish sandwiches on Christmas Eve.)
ME: Yeah, but he got out. He quickly made a career for himself in Immigration. He moved up.
MB: (looking at me sideways) Are you serious? You ever been to a border town in Texas? Or Arizona? In the summer, when it’s 105 degrees everyday? You call that moving up? Only some kind of sick bastard would do that, and subject his family to it.
ME: Well, he is sort-of-a-sick bastard. He’s the Corporal Schultz, Nazi-look alike who bragged that it was his idea to separate children from their caregivers. Imagine being proud of ripping babies from their mothers breasts? And he claimed to be a devout Catholic, and boasted of disagreeing with Pope Francis on immigration.
MB: A phony piece of shit. Did you ever take a good look at his mannerisms? He talks tough, and he immediately looks down to make sure his fly is zipped. So insecure in who and where he is. He says a few more stupid things and then pulls his underwear to get it out of his butt crack. The mark of a real jadrool. “A cop’s cop,” he called himself. A dirty, smelly cop if you ask me.
ME: How much money do you think he’s worth today, from his lifetime in public service?
MB: Oh, I don’t have to guess; I know.
ME: How do you know?
MB:I’m dead, remember. I can see everything, even the Epstein files.
ME: So, you already know he’s worth some $10 million?
MB: Know? I watched him grift and grovel for it. He was barely out the door at Immigration when he was paid $150 K to lobby for Fisher Industries, a construction firm that ended up getting a $225 million contract with the State of Texas of to build a section of Trump’s border wall? You think the payoffs stopped there? They never saw that kind of money in West Carnage…
ME: Carthage. West Carthage.
MB: Carnage, Carthage. It’s all the same fucking thing. He wears a badge for a while, struts around like his shit doesn’t stink and rips working stiffs off for millions the moment he gets the opportunity, always hiding behind his sainted “career in law enforcement.” Two years before he joined the SECOND grifting gang to seize power with Trump, he was taking thousands of dollars in consulting fees from the GEO group—the largest prison operator in the US. Our crowd served a lot of time in a lot of their hellholes, and we knew about those pilfering fuckers.
ME: Did you also know they run for-profit prison systems AND build immigration detention centers?
MB: Sons-of-bitches. Well, they sure found the right bagman. The fuckin’ FBI didn’t have to try to catch him by stuffing hundred dollar bills into a cheap brown lunch bag and posing as greedy businessmen. Schultz the Nazi was already bought and sold a thousand times over by these corporate criminals. He found them all by himself.
(My brother had served 90 days in prison for income tax evasion, the typical charge that usually tripped up bagmen because they never claimed their illegal profits on their taxes. The feds pressured him to provide them evidence on John Gotti and the Gambino Crime Family and he refused)
MB: You know what stinks. Not that I went to jail. It was my choice to serve my time; I knew what I did was wrong, and I took my punishment like a man. I never whined like that garbage pail in the White House.
ME: Why do you call Trump that? I know you guys used to do business with him, lots of construction business in New York, providing him cement and drywall. I know that the Teamster Boss John Cody, your buddy, used to drive him crazy, and had Trump peeing in his pants so much, that he forced the flatulent fraud to give his mistress a fancy apartment in Trump Tower. But I heard it from you, from John Gotti, Jr., from every one of your Gambino colleagues who dealt with him: you all called Trump “The Garbage Pail.”
MB: (smiled a sly smile). Because that’s all that’s inside that piece of shit, Garbage; that’s all he holds, garbage; that’s all that comes out of his mouth— garbage.
ME: You were starting to say what you thought really stunk to high heaven about Homan?
MB: He’s a vulgarian. We mob guys got the reputation, but it was just an act we put on to scare people. Homan is a true vulgarian; he wears crappy-looking clothing; he carries himself like shit on a stick; he smirks, as he rips families apart. He hides behind his hollow, pompous poses of being a lawman or a holly roller or a television bullshitter, but he is the smug, self-satisfied face of true evil. He always looks like he just swallowed the evidence of his own guilt and the guilt of all of his accomplices. For me, I was just one of the boys, and when we got caught for doing stupid or mean or illegal things, we paid the price for what we did. Homan, the true vulgarian, and Trump, his criminal Capo, know they never will and that they’ll make more money off what they’re doing, and get away with it. That’s what stinks.
ME:(I paused to absorb the power of what my dead brother just told me) Now, who and what’s in the Epstein files?
MB: (My brother looked at me and winked) I’ll talk to you again in two weeks.
(And, with that, my brother disappeared into the night.)
RFK, Jr, who’s made million$$$ spreading lies linking Autism to anything his heroine-ravaged brain hallucinates, teams up with the Biggest Liar, Donald Trump, to threaten the lives of more children.
(The definitive scientific and historic “Bible” on Autism & Neurodiversity, “Neuro Tribes,” published in 2015, a New York Times Bestseller, is 548 pages long. Not once does it mention Tylenol or Acetaminophen. The words don’t appear in the book’s index. Not one word in this highly regarded and brilliant book links Tylenol or Acetaminophen to Autism. RFK, Jr., and Donald Trump are spreading yet another BIG LIE that will cause children to die.)
This dangerous lie and anti-scientific fiction linking Autism to Tylenol (or Acetaminophen) is easily crushed by going to the New York Times best-selling book on Autism & Neurodiversity, “ Neuro Tribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity,” by the brilliant Steve Silberman, published in 2015.
Autism was first identified at least a decade before both Acetoaminophen (1950) and Tylenol 1955) were discovered. From Silverman’s book, which is considered the “Bible” on Autism: (p. 5) “…this baffling condition was first discovered in 1943 by a child psychiatrist named Leo Kanner.” There was no Tylenol in existence then, nor Acetaminophen, but Autism was confirmed to exist.
“Neuro Tribes” continues: “Then a year later, (1944) in an apparent synchronicity, a Viennese clinician named Hans Asperger discovered four young patients of his own…displaying precocious abilities in science and math…He also called their condition “Autism”…
More ominously, and 6 years earlier–on October 3,1938–seven months after the Nazis invaded and annexed Austria and took over the University of Vienna– Asperger, according to Silberman (pages 127-139)–”gave the first public talk on Autism in world history at the University’s Medical School, “ then, the most prestigious medical school in Europe. Silberman devotes pages detailing Asperger’s work for the Nazis, identifying children “ not educable” or low functioning. Those children, were put to death by the Nazis. (p. 138).
Doth Donald Trump Protest too much over releasing the Epstein/Maxwell Files? Horrified of hearing from the victims of those vile crimes? If it were all just a “hoax,” would Trump be so terrified?
The great writer Rod Serling had an arresting opening for his Twilight Zone television series each week
“Imagine for a moment,” Serling would say, and as a viewer you knew you had to dig your nails into the arm of your chair very tightly, and hold on for dear life for what was about to come.
Has that time arrived in the Epstein/Maxwell/Trump saga?
Imagine, for a moment, that the Miss Teen USA Pageant that Donald Trump ran in the 1990’s was simply a showcase of young girls, not for a pageant prize, but for the top price they could fetch on the International Child Sex Trade Market?
Remember when Trump said about these pageant, that: “I’ll go backstage before a show and everyone’s getting dressed and ready and everything else. And you know, no men anywhere. And, I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the Pageant and I’m inspecting it.”
Was Trump inspecting the “Pageant”, or was he inspecting the young girls, for the ripest, prospective Child Sex Trade trinket for top-dollar purchasers, like Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, or perhaps for a Prince, a Premier, or a President of a global corporation or a country?
Now, imagine for a moment, that there were dozens, if not hundreds of child beauty pageants around the world, run by mega-wealthy, malign men and some female pimps like Ghislaine Maxwell, eager to fill the insatiable appetite of callous, sexually deranged customers around the world, who loved to watch young girls perform fellatio on them, lick their nipples, and then permit the penetration of those virgin vaginas, by men or women?
Imagine for a moment, that these child porn pageants were an integral part of a feeder-system into international modeling agencies, and later, other pageants for older girls, like the Miss Universe Pageant which Trump took to Moscow in 2013.
After tweeting the announcement of the the Moscow Miss Universe Pageant out around the globe on November 9, 2013, Trump followed up with another tweet: “Do you think Putin will be coming to the Miss Universe Pageant? If so, will he become my new best friend.” Did Trump mean “new best friend,” to replace Jeffrey Epstein, his other “new best friend?”
Imaginefor a moment, that Putin, too, had many such “new best friends,” around the world, who brought him young, lithe female favors in return for whatever payment or access or favors these moguls of the International Sex Trade Industry wanted?
Imagine, for a moment, that one way for some of these young girls to have a successful, public modeling career was to model privately for a wealthy, powerful group of customers, like Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, and perhaps for other powerfully connected people in the modeling, entertainment, government, or any other industry. You probably don’t have to imagine too much about what they were asked to do to lubricate their way toward lots of lucre.
Now, imagine, again for a moment, that big banks, investment houses and financiers from across the United States and around the world, and filthy rich Oilogarchs from Saudi Arabia, and newly rich Russian Mobstergarchs, wanted to get in on this throbbing business model, and provide seed money in exchange for access and a piece of the assets.
And, imagine, for a moment, such a sinister and vile circle of masturbating, monied men & Ghislaine “the Ghoul” Maxwell at work in Dante’s 10th Circle of Hell. Could those be the dark shadows lurking behind Donald Trump’s increasingly desperate denials of any knowledge of what’s in the Epstein files, who’s in the Epstein files, and why Jeffrey Esptein considered Trump HIS “new best friend,” for at least a decade, when they partied together, with lots of young women.?
“I wish her well,” Trump said of Maxwell, when she started her 20-year prison term for sex trafficking and sexually abusing young girls for years with Jeffrey Epstein.
Imagine, for a moment, that the phrase“wishing her well,” was code for “keep your mouth shut, and things will work out well for you,” and that Maxwell, whose own father Robert, jumped off his luxury yacht in 1991—appropriately named Lady Ghislaine— and allegedly killed himself, understood exactly what Trump meant.
And, then, IMAGINE, that a few dozen courageous women, who buried their abuse as young girls, children really, for decades, could no longer endure having their hellacious experiences being called a “hoax;”by Donald Trump, and his army of enabling eunuchs.
IMAGINE, again, the hot knife of shame and self-hate stabbed into them once more when they learned that one of them, Virginia Roberts Giuffre—hired as a teenager by Trump for his Spa at Mar-A-Lago before she was “stolen” by Maxwell and Epstein to become a sex slave for Epstein—could bear to suffer in silence no more, or have the never-ending nightmare she was dragged through called a “hoax,” and killed herself just a few short months ago.
Then, finally IMAGINE, if you would, that you are one of these young, abused, abandoned-by-justice women-and-humanity -girls, and you recoil in horror as Ghislaine “The Ghoul” Maxwell, lies her way through yet another interview with a fraudulent prosecutor, and gets rewarded for her lies, and her evil laughter, and her understanding of what being “wished well,” by the President of the United States means, when she is suddenly whisked out of the real prison where sexual predators, rapists, and child sex traffickers are locked away, and treated by the Trump team, to a Spa-like facility that could just as well be the Spa at Mar-A-Lago, where Maxwell recruited Virginia Roberts Giuffre to feed to another monster.
Just imagine, if you could, what you would do if you were Trump, or Maxwell or one of the powerful ,wealthy men apoplectic over being exposed for what grotesque, inhumane things you did to these young girls? Imagine what extreme measures you would take to have the truth killed, buried, suppressed or lobotomized in cushier jail?
Then, IMAGINE, if you were one of these hundreds of sexually abused or raped young girls and women—or if one of them was your daughter or sister or granddaughter— still frozen in time at the moment when their childhoods were ripped from their bodies, and left to die.
Cruel and random acts of violent madness, on the 30th Anniversary of Tobias Wolff’s masterpiece, in a country run by violent madmen, sowing violence & madness.
(This month, marks the 30th Anniversary of the publication of the writer Tobias Wolff’s extraordinary work of fiction “Bullet in the Brain,” in the New Yorker Magazine. The first time I came across the story was when it was read aloud to me and a few other classmates by my friend and fellow classmate Jefferson Spady in a screenwriting workshop in the Greenwich Village living room of our professor Loren Paul Caplin, just a few years after the piece was published. Wolff’s story transported me into the very setting where it occurred, and then stopped me cold by the sheer power of following the trajectory of the bullet which had been fired, at point blank, into the protagonist’s brain, stopping time and concentrating memory.
For decades, I have not been able to get this story out of my mind, and imagine what final thoughts might remain in my own brain during my fleeting nanoseconds of brain life. Lately, when violence and life have become more random and chaotic, Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain,” has grabbed me by the throat. Perhaps it’s because of the daily drumbeat of intentional violence against human beings in Gaza, in the homes of innocent immigrants looking for a peaceful life, and in the quiet catastrophes of children and adults dying for lack of food, or medical care, or available vaccinations, “Bullet in the Brain” is ever-present to me now.
In recent days, it will not let go. Each time I learn of another insane, anti-human action by Trump or the severely emotionally damaged Stephen Miller, or Trump’s HHS high (ex-heroine junkie) executioner Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, I think of each action as another bullet into the brain of Robert F. Kennedy, the father, who was assassinated by the gun pictured above. Only this time, the bullets are being fired by RFK’s own son, into his own father’s head and into each of ours, are aimed at killing any last second thoughts Robert F. Kennedy, the father, or we, might have had about the faces of the peoples’ lives he touched and helped; the same suffering humans Trump & RFK, Jr.s twisted public policies are intentionally murdering. This piece of mine is a tribute to the work of Tobias Wolfe who beseeched us to think about such things, and an attempt to write these daily bullets of cruelty out of my own brain.
In some places you’ll recognize some of the brilliant words and phrases of Wolff’s; if I did a half-way credible job, I hope you’ll recognize a similarity in style, and the same sound of a human being’s primal scream against madness.)
The line felt like it was endless, even though he had patiently waited his way up toward the front. Angelo Nessuna couldn’t get to his local Florida pharmacy until just before it closed and now he was stuck behind two big-haired, wrinkly-skinned White women whose loud, stupid conversation about Trump not possibly being a pedophile because he had so many children, put him in a foul mood. His wife, Rose was with him, sitting quietly in her wheelchair, hands folded in her lap.
A retired NYC cop, Angelo was rarely in the best of moods anyway following a career spent arresting petty criminals for stealing milk, or shoplifting cheap jewelry, and breaking up domestic disputes between frustrated men and the women they pulled down into their despair. He felt lucky having gotten out of the South Bronx neighborhood before street drugs laced with heroine moved in, littering the Grand Concourse with almost as many dead bodies in doorways as there were Yankee fans.
He moved to Florida when it was still affordable to get away from those fucking New York City winters. He hated walking his beat in the dead of winter, and he hated ice more than the perps he arrested. Every one else on the Force talked about “living the dream” in South Florida, and he wanted to have a taste of it while there was still some left.
So Angelo and his wife Rose bought a small single story house in Margate, in a community of other small, single story homes surrounded by crabgrass and palm trees. Rose spent her days kibbitzing and playing cards with her friends at the community’s pool and Angelo was content to keep in shape by working out everyday in the tiny gym inside the community’s clubhouse.
After a while, and he’s not too sure exactly how long it was, Rose’s sitting out in the hot Florida sun for hours gave her skin cancer. For years she had the mean-looking moles on her body biopsied and then removed, and would joke about them to friends by saying “we Italians are mole-ly people.” Still, she wanted to play cards in the sun with her friends because, well, because that’s what they did in Florida, living the dream.
On one visit to her Dermatologist, who had a six-month waiting list for appointments, Rose, with Angelo by her side, was told that her skin cancer had metastasized and spread into her bones. She began to lose weight, and hair, and Angelo, still strong and fit by working out every day, would pick her up and help her across the street to the community pool, where she met her friends to play cards and smoke cigarettes. More and more, now, they would play in the shady parts of the pool area, out of the sun.
Rose was able to keep functioning and laughing her raspy, smokers laugh thanks to a fancy new wheelchair, and a parade of pills prescribed by her oncologist, which Angelo sorted out for her every Sunday, placing them lovingly in a light-blue, 7-compartment pill container, each compartment bearing the first initial of that day of the week.
When the COVID pandemic hit, and vaccines became available, Rose, over age 65, and with a serious health condition, was at the top of the list for vaccinations, and later for the over-the-counter COVID controlling drug, Paxlovid.
The pharmacists at the local CVS drug store in Margate all knew Angelo Nessuna. He was there a few days a week filling the prescriptions on all his wife’s medications. He had terrific insurance and drug coverage from his decades of work as a public servant for the NYPD, and they all loved to help out an ex-cop who devoted his life to helping others. A few of the women who worked at the store liked to flirt with Angelo, admiring his biceps and broad chest that came from his years of working out, clearly visible through the light shirts he wore most days in the Florida heat and humidity. They told him he looked like George Clooney, and he flashed a glorious, shy smile at them.
The pharmacy had just posted a new sign in the window and a group of customers were gathered around it, chatting, The sign literally shouted its’ message: “HHS SECRETARY ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR, HAS ORDERED THE END OF THE PRODUCTION OF THE COVID VACCINE. We have very limited supplies left, and will distribute those on a high-need basis. Please be patient and courteous to your neighbors.”
Angelo spotted the sign the other day, but didn’t pay too much attention to it because he knew Rose was one of those high-risk patients, and that, besides, everybody at the Drug store knew him and liked him and knew about Rose’s condition. That night, worried about some crazy stories about vaccine shortages he saw on Fox News, he rushed into the local CVS right before they closed, pushing Rose in her wheelchair, who was having difficulty swallowing. He feared that she had already been hit with the new stubborn strain of COVID that attacked the throat first. All he could think about was getting her vaccinated, getting her medication and getting her home.
One man toward the middle of the line, a few rows behind him, started shouting.
“They’re gonna run out before we get to the counter,” the chubby, wild-haired, heavily tattooed man was repeating at the top of his voice to everyone around him.
The two loud women in front of Angelo at the beginning of the line suddenly got silent, and looked nervously at the overweight man, sweating and breathing heavily, as he got out of the long line and moved around people toward them, in the front.
Angelo, saw the expressions change on the faces of the two women, and turned to see the heavy, sweating man coming at them.
“I’m fucking tired of waiting,” he was shouting, his eyes crazed with rage.
Angelo had years of training as a NYC cop diffusing tense situations, and he knew that the best approach was to slow rising tempers down, and allow everyone to catch a breath. He turned around, and stepped out of the line, right in front of the approaching, and agitated, man.
“Calm down,” Angelo said in a strong, controlled voice. “We’ll all get our turn. I’m sure they wouldn’t have let all of us in the store if they didn’t have enough vaccines and medication to go around.”
The heavy-set, heavily tattooed man challenged Angelo.
“Oh, yeah. How the fuck do you know? Did you pay somebody off in here? “
Angelo, stood his ground, didn’t flinch one muscle of his tight body, and responded: “Look. We’re all in this together. We just have to be patient and civil to one another, and this will all work out.”
The wild-haired man shook his head violently.
“Easy for you to say, asshole. You’re pushing a woman in a wheelchair. You’re probably doing that just to get special treatment,” he said, motioning to the wheelchair.
Angelo’s eyes widened as he glared at the man. He took a deep breath, turned around, and gently pushed Rose’s wheelchair up right next to the counter, whispering to her, “wait here, I’ll be right back.” Everyone else in the line was silent. Angelo started to turn around.
The overweight, sweating, wild-eyed man had charged up behind Angelo quickly, pulling out a handgun from his cargo pants pocket and pointed it up against Angelo’s smooth silver-grey hair. Florida, was, afterall, a place where anyone could carry a weapon anywhere, and conceal it anyway at all.
Trying to defuse the dangerous turn of events, Angelo raised his two hands to signal surrender.
“Okay, okay, I get that you’re upset, “Angelo said. “Let’s just calm down so we can all be reasonable here. Capisce?
“Oh, I capisce,” the wild-haired, wild-eyed man said, and before Angelo could say another word, he fired one shot into Angelo’s left temple, splattering blood and brain matter all over everyone around him, including Rose, still sitting with her hands folded in her wheelchair, and the two big-haired wrinkly skinned White women who were sure Trump could not be a pedophile.
Precisely as Tobias Wolff described in his original story, Bullet in the Brian, published in the New Yorker, September 17, 1995, here’s what happened when the bullet entered the skull:
“The bullet smashed Anders (Angelo’s) skull and plowed through his brain and exited behind his right ear, scattering shards of bone into the cerebral cortex, the corpus callosum, back toward the basal ganglia, and down into the thalamus. But before all this occurred, the first appearance of the bullet in the cerebrum set off a crackling chain of ion transports and neurotransmissions. Because of their peculiar origin, these traced a peculiar pattern, flukishly calling to life a summer afternoon some forty years past, and long since lost to memory. After striking the cranium, the bullet was moving at nine hundred feet per second, a pathetically sluggish, glacial pace compared with the synaptic lightning that flashed around it. Once in the brain, that is, the bullet came under the mediation of brain time, which gave Anders (Angelo) plenty of leisure to contemplate the scene that, in a phrase he would have abhorred, “passed before his eyes.”
It is astonishing that Angelo did not remember, given what he did remember. He did not remember his first lover, Carol, or what he had most madly loved about her—her unembarrassed carnality, and unabashed joy of sex. He didn’t remember how his parents, who barely spoke English, ragged on about this “Jewish girl, with loose morals.”
Angelo did not remember his wife, Rose, whom he had also loved (as did his parents) before she exhausted him with her regimentation and predictability, and incessant smoking, which made him take long walks and stay out of the house just to get some fresh and his own precious space.
He did not remember Rudy Giuliani’s smug, self-satisfied face, as he and other Cops in his precinct walked past the then-Mayor just for show, nor did he remember the sea of faces—one face now— of the people whose petty arrests he made, nor the endless sameness of all the bodegas along the all same blocks he patrolled for years.
Angelo did not remember the complete text of every one of the Bill of Rights, which he had committed to memory in his youth so that he could make his parents proud, while also letting them know that his life would not be anything like theirs. He did not remember the night his mother stood, huge breasts heaving with each breath, in front of his father frothing with rage, waving a shotgun and threatening to kill the “son-of-a bitch” who made his sister pregnant.
He did not remember 9-11, nor how he was off-duty that beautiful, blue-sky day, and he spent days of his own time sifting through the piles of stone and ash and metal, alongside Cops and Firefighter and civilians, searching for a bone, or a finger, or a photograph of a child that sat on someone’s desk.
Nor did Angelo remember seeing a woman leap to her death from the sixth floor of a burning Bronx tenement building just days after his only son was born, or his shouting “Jesus Fucking Christ have some fucking mercy,” when her dark brown body, clad in a housedress just like his mother wore, crumbling hard into the ground, snapping her neck.
Angelo did not remember when his son deliberately crashed his car into a tree, or got his ribs kicked in by unidentified masked ICE agents, pretending to be policemen, at a rally for immigrants rights, or bailing his son out of jail, time after time after time, in cities and towns across the country.
This is what he Angelo remembered: (first paragraph entirely from Tobias Wolff; the rest paraphrased with poetic license)
“Heat. A baseball field. Yellow grass, the whirr of insects, himself leaning against a tree as the boys of the neighborhood gather for a pickup game. The captains, precociously large boys named Burns and Darsch, argue the relative genius of Mantle and Mays.”
He did remember when the last two boys arrived for the sandlot game, Frankie Testagrossa, his best friend, and Eddie Cruz, a wiry brown kid from across the street, who had moved to the Bronx from Puerto Rico. Angelo never met Eddie Cruz before, but had seen him watching this group of white boys, mostly Italian and Irish kids, play ball for hours on one of the few empty lots around.
Angelo did remember Eddie saying hi and flashing a big, bright grin, and remembers being immediately attracted to him, and picking him for his own team because he saw something special in this kid, despite Frankie complaining that he “don’t want to play with no Spics.”
“You play with him or you don’t play with me,” Angelo remembers telling Frankie, and nobody said another word until they finished choosing sides, and Angelo asked Eddie Cruz what position he wanted to play.
“Pitcher,” Eddie Cruz says. “Pitcher. El Corazon. The heart,” and he tapped his chest, and flashed his beautiful, guileless smile.
Angelo stared at Eddie Cruz, and noticed his large brown, bright almond eyes, and long graceful eyelashes. He wanted to hear him repeat what he’s just said, but he knew better than to ask. The others will think he’s being a jerk, or worse, was sweet on him. But that was’t it. Angelo is strangely aroused, elated, and made lighter, by those final two words “El Corazon;” their pure unexpectedness and their lilting music. Angelo took the field in a trance, repeating those words to himself.
The bullet is already in the brain; it won’t be outrun forever, or charmed to a halt. In the end, it will do its work and leave the shattered skull behind, dragging its comet’s tail of memory and hope and talent and love onto the cheap tile floor of a CVS drug story in Margate, Florida. That can’t be helped. But for now, Angelo can still make time. Time for the shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for to look up at the clear blue cloudless sky, time for Eddie Cruz in go into his wind-up, and to softly chant, El Corazon, El Corazon.”
(NB: No AI (artificial intelligence) was used in this updating and paraphrasing of Tobias Wolff’s work. The author does not know how to use it, nor care to. Only natural intelligence and humanity were used.)
