It Happens Every August

 

 

“‘Ya know what that smell is?” My stepson Matt asked me I while we walking through Central Park late in August, about fifteen years ago.  He thought he had me.  Matt was a young football player then.  I knew he knew, but he didn’t think I knew like kids don’t think their parents know anything.

     “Yeah, I know what it smells like…”

     “Ok, what?”  

     “It smells like football.” 

     Matt’s eyes opened wide and his mouth hung open.  He couldn’t believe it.

     “I played football, I know that smell,” I said. 

     End of August the earth is changing, the leaves are almost done with their work and are preparing to pack it in.  It’s a musky earth odor, with a tinge of sweet grassy hay.  As a football player you spend a fair amount of time on the ground with your face in the dirt.  You become a part of it.  Late August is when football practice starts.  The dreaded, “two-a-days,” two practice sessions in a day.  Killer.  In the heat and humidity.  Full pads, helmet.  Back then coaches didn’t let you drink water.  Water was for pussies.

     I loved football.  The fear I felt in my belly in the hours before a game is indescribable.  Butterflies?  Hardly.  We’re talking dragons.  Knowing how badly you could get hurt was what it was about for me. The thought of all that violence was much worse than the actual hitting and inevitable injuries.  Soon as you got on the field, though, it was great fun. 

     Games were one thing.  Practice was another matter.  There was only one thing I dreaded in all the sports I ever played.  It’s a drill known as, “head-on tackling.”  The pros called the, “nutcracker.”  Nice ring to it.  Those three words alone still stiffen my back and harden my neck.  It was a few weeks before ninth grade.  I was beginning my fourth season playing organized football.  We boys were older, stronger, faster, and angrier.  The physical contact was now at a level one could consider, serious.  The main commodity in football is pain and business was now brisk.  The kid stuff was pretty behind us.  Most of us had hair on our bodies, hormones were beginning to flow.  The boys wanted to strut their stuff.  

     This guy is a sadist.  My new coach, Mike Ward.  He was well known for being rough and tough.  His blue eyes bugged out of his red face.  He had a booming penetrating voice.  And he was pissed off, always.  As a player, you definitely feared Coach Ward.  I was one of the new boys on this squad and Coach Ward wanted to see what was what.    For some stupid reason I showed up this first day with full pads.  I was the only one wearing pads.  Why I didn’t take them off or one of the coaches tell me to, I’ll never know.  Fate was at work, I guess.  So when we ran sprints, I had on all this gear and could not keep up with other guys.  Mind you, up until this time in my life, no one could run faster than me, anywhere, ever.  But with pads I couldn’t run as fast, and a few of the other boys crossed the finish line before me.  This is not the way it’s supposed to be. Next thing you know a coach is directing me to practice with the lineman.  “I’m not a lineman, I’m a halfback or an end,” I pleaded.  I was told to shut up and go with the linemen.  That’s like asking Willie Nelson to sing opera. Things were getting off to a very bad start here.  

     The long hot two-a-days dragged on.  This was not the football fun I had experienced in the last three seasons.  No fun at all.  In fact, it sucked.  It all came to a head that final afternoon.  The ground smelled like football, it was hot and humid.  The nearest drop of water was at the grocery store a half mile away.   It went from worse to awful when Coach Ward blew a long whistle and bellowed those three words, “Head-on tacking!!!  Two lines!!!”  It occurred to me at that moment that starting a butterfly collection was sounding like a much better pursuit than football.  I knew I was in trouble. 

     One man gets the football ten yards away from you and he tries to run you over.  You try and tackle him in a head-on collision.  In game situations I had no fear in engaging in gridiron violence either being tackled or tackling.  Actual games provided me with all the adrenaline I needed to throw my body around like an implement of violence.  It was exciting, and a great high, actually.  But in practice, on this day, I wilted like a daisy.  No adrenaline.  And nowhere to hide.

     I was opposite Nathaniel Boyd, a strong and aggressive fullback I faced many times.  He was a power runner, I had tackled him many times in past games and he was definitely an animal.  I knew Nathaniel in school for years, he was a very nice quiet fellow.  But on the football field Nathaniel was all business.  You tackle Nathaniel Boyd and you will remember it the next day.   A year before Nathaniel once laid a hard slashing tackle on me after I intercepted a pass and was headed up field.  A clean hard hit on the sidelines that took out a few parents as well.   Nathaniel was a nice fellow but he was coming at me with the ball like a mad bull, head down and snarling.  I veered slightly to avoid Nathaniel, and a ride on a stretcher.  I tried to corral him with my arm, and of course he went through me like last year’s economy went through your 401K.  “Ok, what’s your name, son?”  Alpert, Coach.  “Get back in there and do it again.”  I was embarrassed in front of all the fellas.  The guys who knew me encouraged me to go get ‘em.  The guys who didn’t know me yelling for Nathaniel Boyd to break my head.

     Emotional rage works really in football.  I was a running back and pass catcher, and more interested in getting the ball and avoiding people by running quickly away from them.  I was fairly successful at these things and also took my share of brutally devastating hits at full speed.  A guy could get hurt playing this game. Nasty bloody scrapes, bone contusions from guys stepping on you, thigh bruises from tacklers spearing you – games were Sundays and Monday my whole body was sore, but by Wednesday you were usually okay.  After a while, you actually got used to it, I can say I even liked it, loved it.  I was not an angry football player; I was more interested in helping you miss me.  How would you be with eleven guys trying to maim you while you are carrying a hunk of leather.  Angry?  Hell no, you’d be scared out of your deodorant.   Catching a football sailing twenty or thirty yards in the air while running at full speed, looking over your shoulder while another guy is with you step for step trying to make you miss – that’s about focus, not anger.

     Not to say that didn’t occasionally enjoy the legalization of violence on the football field.  We were playing against a team whose quarterback thought he was hot stuff.  His father was the coach and they were both pretty smarmy about themselves.  In fact, father and son were both conceited jerks.  He dropped back to pass one time, and one of our linemen had him tied up, and I sprinted in from my safety position and hit him very hard at full speed in his chest and head.  I saw his eyes close involuntarily as I crashed into him.   Ref blew the whistle warning me not to hit so high.  But then how would I take his head off if I hit him low?

      Coach Ward stuck the ball in Nathaniel Boyd’s gut again and Nathaniel worked up a head of steam coming right for me.  The Bull.  Nostrils shooting out smoke.  He smacked me so hard that I rolled backward.  Everybody was yelling and screaming at the sound of the crack.  It sounded like a car crash test and I was the dummy.  “AGAIN!!!”  Please God!  Make Coach Ward die!   I had witnessed these scenes before with other guys, where one guy shrinks before our eyes as the angry mob calls for his annihilation – this was the first time this ever happened to me.  Coach, my mom said I had to be home at certain time, would it be okay if I left now?

I knew I was so screwed.  I could conjure no adrenaline.  Hey Nat, we’re buddies, remember?  Boyd the Bull got the ball in his gut and ran over me like a bus squishing a melon.   Demolished in every way, a nightmare I remember so well.

     I pedaled my bike the three miles home knowing I was done with football.  Coach Ward had weeded me out.  I weeded myself out.  I didn’t go back the next day or, ever.  I was done with football, it was done with me.  I was not cut out to be a rough and tumble high school football player.  That night I put the cleats in the closet and became just a plain old football fan.  Life suddenly and unexpectedly moves on.  Some regrets, I would miss the games, for sure.  A door closed, another about to open.  A new love awaited me, the 100 yard dash, but I didn’t know that yet. 

     My stepson became a wonderful football player, a quarterback, and played football in a church league and then all through high school eventually captaining the University of Chicago Maroons to a league title his junior year, breaking three school passing records along the way.  We were at most of all those games.  Matt is 27 now, an executive at a major investment bank.  Last August I sent Matt a text message, “Smells like football.”

Portrait of an Artist as a Boy

 

 

Boys are like a pack of wild dogs.  They can be ruthlessly cruel. The pack runs on instinct with the leader being the boy often with the loudest mouth and the gumption to be the most outrageous. They always know who is who among them.  The smartest, the funniest.  Who has the best throwing arm, the most accurate, and who is the best climber.  At any moment the pack is capable of turning on the weakest boy and casting him out, berating him when he screws up.  You suck!  They all know who is the best fielder — he plays shortstop — who is the best hitter — bats fourth.  The worst athlete is consistently embarrassed by getting picked last in a choose-up game — he plays right field or not at all.  YOU SUCK!  And the pack does not like outsiders.  You’re either in or out.  It was known I was the fastest.  Always.  I could run like a jackrabbit from a standing start.  Outrun all of them across the field, from here to there, anytime, anywhere.  Baseball, football, basketball, soccer.  Years later in high school I turned that into a fine varsity sprinting career.  But that’s another story for another time.

     The first time I was noticed by anyone outside my immediate family was a late summer afternoon when I was seven years old at Camp Nokomis, Mahopac, New York.   I was fortunate enough to be sent to summer camp for eight weeks, starting when I was six.  Good to be away parents who aren’t getting along.  My wife was appalled when I first told her I was shipped off to camp at that early age for eight whole weeks.  The youngest campers, ten little tykes in Bunk #1 were always known as the ice cream kids.  Had to make our own beds and have inspection every day.  

      Tryouts for swim team.  A hot sun-drenched afternoon in July.  Walked barefoot along the warm green grass to the pool.  A scrawny, quiet kid, I waited my turn, which was last.  All the other kids made their audition swim and returned to their cabins.  Only the two swim team counselors and me.  I was a confident swimmer; my mother made sure I could swim on my own by the time I was five.  I had no fear of the water.  The swim team coach told me to swim across the pool as fast as I could.  I dove in and skimmed along the surface like a gull taking off.  Nods of approval.  I stood dripping wet, chest heaving in oxygen debt, my skinny self draped in a huge white towel.  The guy counselor walked with me back to the cabins.  He said, “You got good potential.”  Wow.  I got good potential.  I have no idea what that means, I had never heard it before, but it sounds real good.  I like the sound of it, potential.  Sounds strong.  I got good potential.  Yeah, that’s cool.   Good potential.  I roll it over and over in my mind for days and weeks to come.  I got good potential.  

     Good for a boy to be noticed for something.  My father rarely took much notice of me, he was always busy, and my mother, she was warm and loving but of course you expect your mother to be that way.  Summer camp was a great boost for me.  I was one of the better athletes, and that was social currency among boys.  To get noticed by the older boys, if that happened, you were really cool.  It let me know that I could make it in the world on my own, somehow, a great gift for a young kid.

     This was the late 1950’s, the world was still very much post-war America.  We were kids from New York, Brooklyn, and the burbs.  All was right with the world.  As soon as you read those words, the you-know-what is about to hit the fan.  It did.

     My father lost his business and one summer after camp was over, I was taken to our new small apartment, across town. What? Where we going?  Oh, well, we’ve moved, I was told simply.  Whaddya mean we moved?  It was shocking.  All of a sudden all my pals in the neighborhood, my best friend Rich across the street, the huge woods that was our playground, Indian Rocks, The Moth Path, my beloved Roosevelt Elementary School — gone!    Traded all that in for a crummy apartment on the other side of town.  Dang!  My father was a cigar and pipe smoker, but in this period he smoked cigarettes, I knew things were raw.  He was scrambling.    

     I was the new boy in sixth grade.  Not a terrible thing, really. But, memorable for that year were two things.  The first was the incredible terror of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  I was a newshound even then and read the paper, watched TV news and listened to my transistor radio under the pillow every night.  One of those dark and memorable days I had to stay after class for arithmetic – oh man, not again – and when Miss Galloway was surrounded by other kids at her desk in the back, I scooted out — just in case the bombs dropped, no way was I gonna get nuked waiting to do friggin’ fractions.  If I’m gonna fry, it’s gonna be at home.  That whole week I kept looking out the window waiting for the flash of the  bomb.  We were only fifteen miles from Manhattan, a prime target, for sure.  Dang!

     The second thing – There was the group of jocks that I wanted to join.  They were a tight knit pack who wasn’t letting a new boy in so easy.  I could run faster and out-jump any of them, and they knew it, but I was still the outlier.  My athleticism was always my currency and I wanted in bad but had to wait it out at the pleasure of the pack. 

     They all had blue ski jackets.  How could I be one of them without a blue ski jacket?  I begged my mother for a blue ski jacket.  She wouldn’t go for it, money was tight.  My paper route  earnings didn’t make a dent.  Each day went by agonizingly slow with these guys hazing me was a pain in my butt.  They let me play with them, though, but even though I was one of the better athletes, I was always chosen last.  Just to make sure I knew my place as outsider.   As we went en masse to the deli for soda after the daily after school workout I was allowed to walk behind them, but not too close.  Dirty looks and snickering directed at me tested me to see how bad I wanted it.  It was brutal.  Finally, I wore my mother down, went to Alexander’s.  I hunted the racks.  There were blue ski jackets all over the place,  I had to pick just the right one.  This one here.  I slipped into it.  Good fit.  Nice blue color.  Smooth to the touch.  This should work.  A brand new blue ski jacket!  I’m in now, Baby!!!  Oh yeah!   They next day I was so excited, I wore that thing proudly on the short walk to school.  Nobody said anything.  You know what happens next…

       At the 3:15 bell the boys gather in the courtyard to work up the game of the day.  I stood fidgeting outside of the circle.  They ignore me, like always, but I hang in there at the periphery.  It was M, the meanest of them, and the ringleader because of his wise-ass manner.  M had the best jump shot, was always the high scorer at b-ball.  M could really dish it out and be in your face.  He did it to everybody, keeping everybody off balance.  That’s how he kept his power.  If M passed you the ball and you miss the shot, YOU SUCK!   All the boys sucked up to M, but they all got their turn at being ridiculed by M.  They were relieved when M went after the other guy, and they all sided with M. 

So we’re standing around outside, there I am with the blue ski jacket, just like all of them.   M looked at me directly, for the first time and pointed, calling attention to the fact that I now had a blue jacket.  He laughed right at me, and the boys started laughing, too.  All their jackets had a pleated pattern on the front  and back.   A detail I obviously missed.  The back of my jacket was plain, no pattern or stitching.  M called me, “Plainback!” and all the guys yelling and laughing, “Plainback! Plainback!   My name became, “Plainback.”  I laugh as I write this but I guarantee you I wasn’t laughing then.  I was mortified. Reduced to three inches tall.   Hey Mom, do you think we could exchange this jacket for another with something on the back?  That would not be happening.

     Winter became spring, and jackets were shed.  Plainback was a name that disappeared with the cold weather.  I was accepted into the pack, by pure persistence on my part, and well, I could out-run, jump and rebound any one of them.   I was in, I had an identity.  I was no longer chosen last when we chose sides.   We became the core of a rec league basketball team that went undefeated in the regular season two years running.  Our coach was former NY Knick, Dick Surhoff, father of future all-star baseball star, BJ Surhoff.  Coach Surhoff ran us into the ground every practice, and we ran all our opponents into the ground.  The pack of boys became the Jets, and yup, we got satin jackets that said, JETS on the back.  The color?  Blue, of course.

     Summer camp was coming.  Life was sweet again.  All was right with the world, still with the good potential in my back pocket.  I didn’t know what was coming next, but as soon as camp was over,  the you-know-what was about to hit the fan, again.  A rock ‘em sock ‘em trial by fire.  Football.

Portrait of My father Pt II

 

MEN are shaped by their fathers, for the most part, if their fathers are around enough to have an influence.  I have a friend of who’s father lived around the corner, but they never met.  He was born out of wedlock and was everybody’s dirty little secret.  There is a hole in this friend’s soul.  A yearning for acknowledgment from a father he never knew.  My friend is accomplished in his field.  How can a man have a son with his DNA and not want to know his son?  The father is still alive and I still hold hope that they re-connect for both their sakes.

            My father was a good provider for me and my mother despite his up and down entrepreneurial life.  At one point we did have to sell the house and move into a small apartment, that was a very hard bunch of years for him, and for everyone around him, too.  He was a difficult person.  I don’t think my mother even liked him that much.  My parents divorced when I was just about thirteen, a perilous enough time for a young fellow.  I lost myself in sports and music, certainly not in academics.  I was resourceful as I spent a lot of time by myself, and always a dog, thank goodness.  My mother was off trying to have a life for herself, I felt sorry for her, and I knew there was not much I could do for her, really.  And I knew she was not totally capable of fending for herself.  I never held that against her, I juts went my own way.  I learned to entertain myself one way or another.   I don’t really know what happened to them as a couple.  I think they were in love when they were very young, but my father was driven to move fast through life, not my mother.  She was an artist, with great talent but little business acumen.  My father was all business acumen.  Emotionally, their marriage was dead as long as I can remember masked by lots of parties with other young couples who had made their escape from Brooklyn or Queens to the new post-war suburbs.

     There was always rancor between my mother and father.  I won’t pretend to write post-marriage analysis, but I do know my mother, when I was five, got involved in an affair with a man she married a few decades later.   She checked out of the marriage, but who knows who really checked out first.  My father was on the road a lot and my mother and I would make the drive to pick him up at LaGuardia Airport.  The terminals were essentially hangars; drafty, cold, and dark.  You could stand behind the fence on the airfield – and at Idlewild, before it became JFK seemed more like a vast remote swamp next to the ocean.  I remember the dark and damp salty air out there.  On these frequent trips, I remember the deafening roar of the big prop jets, and the intoxicating aroma of the jet fuel as the smell of travel and adventure, translating to me as, escape!  My wanderlust was fed on these trips.  I wanted on one of those planes and get the hell out of Dodge.  The long line of men filed down the staircase from the hulking aircraft.   Smoking cigars and pipes, smelling of gin and Old Spice, wearing hats, coat and tie, well worn attaché cases with their initials engraved gold in the worn leather.  Returning from romantic destinations; Chicago, Cleveland, San Francisco.

            I never really knew where I fit into his life.  My father was not the Little League coach kind of guy.   There were many difficult times, mostly with him not taking much of an interest.  He was only interested in doing what he was doing.  So as a young man needing and wanting direction from a father figure, there was very little.  That just wasn’t his thing.  Too bad, I think now, I’ve gained much from my parenting days with my stepson.  George missed out on stuff that would have softened his heart a little.  His bitterness towards life raged unabated.   I don’t really know what it was about.  

            Fast forward to my teen years.  George made it real big for himself in the later years of his work life.  He dabbled in many things, photography for one.  He taught himself to become a very fine photographer, printing his own images and wound up running a non-profit photo gallery.  I learned much being around all those images early on.  Also on my father’s resume; breeding Arabian horses, publishing high quality art books for his artist friends, playing his music.  He made things happen.  A business associate of my father once said to me, “He is the kind of guy that makes the world go ‘round.”  I always remember that description.  He was that indeed, if nothing else.

            Through junior high and high school on Sundays I would hop the train from New Rochelle to his Grand Central, then take the Lexington Ave subway to Union Square to his studio apartment in Greenwich Village, very cool, I thought.  We’d watch football and order up deli sandwiches, then later maybe get up to Madison Square Garden for a Rangers game.  We did this for years, these were the best times for me and my dad.  He was relaxed, into his photography hobby big time, and we smoked cigars and had laughs.  Many years later George lived in Scottsdale and many Sundays we would watch an entire NFL game while on the phone.  It was our connection.  I flew out to Pheonix for a few Superbowls games so we could watch together.  He was in his big Barcalounger, and slept through many of them.

As an only both parents fed me their dirty laundry about the other.  That brewed real anger in me, anger I would carry for a long time.  I don’t know if they were campaigning for justification that each of them was right and not at fault for causing the marriage to fail.  In today’s terms, it was way too much information.

I put a lot of distance between my father and me as he was becoming seriously wealthy in a business venture, and took up with a woman who lived down the block, who had a little baby boy.  I was pushed out, and the anger in my belly enflamed quietly. 

     As became a young man the realtionship became difficult for both of us.   I thought at the time that I was being singled out for some reason as the recipient of his lack of approval, of hardly being in his life.  How many times over the years did he invite me to a social gathering of some sort only to have friends of his I had never met shake my hand asking me how I knew George,

     “My name is Steve, George is my father.”

      Turning to my father, “George, I didn’t know you had a son, you never said anything.”  Do you know how many times this happened?  I didn’t really exist.   But, of course I did exist and soldiered on.  The one great thing that I choose now to remember my father for was when I was twenty-seven and making my first film that would get me out of the editing room and into a career of producing, where I knew I belonged.  We had dinner one night at a restaurant on the Upper West Side near my place, the only time he ever came up there.  I explained the project, why it was important and how I planned on doing it.  He said he had a client who would invest in it and for me to start work.  I did. 

            It was underway, and went to have lunch at George’s office.  His client was not in for the project and my stomach fell on the floor as I was already way into it.  My father said he would match me dollar for dollar.  And he did.  The one time as a young  man when I really needed someone to get behind me, believe in me and write checks – he was there.  This is how I choose to remember my father now, the rest of it doesn’t really serve me.  Or him.  For all the hard times I was forced to endure, this one time he came through big-time.  As an entrepreneur himself he recognized this moment in time was  critical for me.   Even paid for a beautiful screening at swell screening room, where I invited two really nice crowds of people. 

            This was a most important time in my life, and there was no one else in the world who would have understood what that film meant to me or would have helped me in this way.  It changed my life, and my father was really the only one who had the understanding, inclination and wherewithal to boost me up at that time.  This is what I choose to focus on in my memory of my father.

             The day my father came to see the final cut of the film in my rented edit room on Bedford St in the West Village, he was deeply satisfied.  This man, my father, my harshest critic, everyone’s harshest critic, loved my little film.  I walked him onto the street in a pouring rain.  We talked about how great the music guy I worked with was and he looked up at me as he ducked his big self into the taxi and said, “Yeah, but what about the great Producer!”  The door slammed shut and off he went into the rain.  I stood for a moment, soaking in the rain and the glory of my father’s approval.  It was enough to last a lifetime.  To be honest, there was much more combat to be endured with this man until his death many years after that glorious rainy day, but it was the gift of a lifetime that he gave to me, screw all the other stuff.  And this is how I choose to remember my father.

            I got the phone call I was expecting that morning in August of 1998.  My father had died.  I had seen him the week before in the hospital in Scottsdale.  He was 76.  Diabetes and misery took him and he really had to go.  He was done.  I put the phone down, and it was as if a bag of cement was lifted off my shoulders.  Almost immediately after I place the phone down, I was confronted with a business partner who appeared in the doorway and a nasty argument ensued about something or other.   I should have parted ways with this guy long before.  I got out of there making a beeline to the nearest deli and ordered the same corned beef sandwich, fries and coleslaw I used to eat with my father when we watched football, washing it down with a Dr. Brown’s Black Cherry Soda.  As I sat there, I wondered again for the thousandth time, what was my father so angry about?  What was it he truly wanted?  Maybe it was an internal battle of wanting to be single and fancy free to be the artist that he never really allowed himself to be in full blossom.  He thrived on business, but some part of him became to truly hate it, I think. All the deceptions and game playing that is involved.  He was a master of the game, but I don’t think he enjoyed it.  I think he hated it. Eventually, it ate him up, maybe.  He was the ultimate crafty competitor.  And he was the serene artist.  I think he was not able to integrate the two parts of himself and he was angry as hell about it.  Given his druthers, I think he would have been perfectly satisfied playing his tuens on th epiano in a little lounge somewhere, and doin his photography.  I think he wanted a simple life, but no way was able to even think about creating that.  

     It is one of the reasons I became an artist, went for it all and walked away from everything else, all the stuff my father could not walk away from.  As much as I am like my father, I do not plan on ending up like him.  May he rest in peace.

Portrait of My Father Pt I

 

 

My father was many things, a roaring success, charming and funny on the outside yet deeply unhappy inside his suit.  His suit was a big one; he weighed in at 300lbs plus for much of his adult life.  Not sure what that is for people who choose to carry all that weight around for all those years, but I’ve come to think it is an armor, to keep people from getting too close, something like that.

     In the world my father was erratic, supremely talented in business, photography, music.  He read history and was interested in politics.  Totally absorbed in his various appetites, he was young at heart and had a wild sense of humor to match all the other excesses in his life.

     First generation Jew from parent who came to Russia in their youth, George grew up in Brooklyn, played sandlot football and ducked out of school to go hear Benny Goodman at the Paramount.  Uncle Sam sent my dad to man a WWII anti-aircraft gun in San Francisco for the duration where Pvt. First Class Alpert was assigned easy service and a Good Conduct Medal.  After the war, young George went to a number of colleges, but he never finished a degree and instead went out to seek his own American Dream working as a salesman and then became the entrepreneur he would become for the rest of his life, selling refrigerators, furniture touch-up applicators, a line of cosmetic and beauty products, a record company, and ultimately bartering hard goods for media.  His business acumen was sharp and he made himself and many others lots of money.  Only one of them was there at the memorial service eleven years ago.

     There was something that forever eluded him all his life.  Don’t know what it was.  As I sat next to his longtime buddy Herb Gluck, author of popular biography of Mickey Mantle, “The Mick.”  Herb studied lives of others and knew my Dad for sixty years. 

“What was it, Herb, what was it that made him so miserable, what was he trying to do that he was not able to, what was this madness about, why was he so angry at everybody?”

     Herb looked at me with a blank face, a man of words suddenly with none. After a long pause, “Stevie, I don’t know.”  My father was an utter mystery to all of us around him. Sadly enough. I think he was a mystery to himself.  A man capable of so much, yet not knowing himself.  Tragic, no?

     My father’s only serenity came from his photography, music and dogs.  I think what would have made him completely happy would have been to be the piano player in a nice hotel lounge.  He would steal moments at a piano wherever he could.  He knew lots of tunes but his ear was not really developed and those of us who knew him eventually felt like everything he played sounded the same.  It was his relaxation, he alone enjoyed it and he couldn’t give a crap what anyone else thought.  Ha!

     He was a charmer for sure and a great story teller and jokester.  His office phone number at one point was one digit different from the main number of the St. Regis Hotel, a block or so away in midtown Manhattan.  At the end of a long day, his office staff long gone home, he retrieved a call and answered in a little voiced with a British accent, “St. Regis Hotel, how many I be of service?”

     “I’d like to speak to Mr. Collins in room 612,” said a man.  My father had a live one.

     “He’s not here, Sir.”

     “Well, I just spoke with him two minutes ago.”

            “I’m sorry, Sir, he’s gone away.”

            “What do you mean he’s gone away?”

            “Yes, they’ve all gone away, Sir.  Health Department’s just been here, Sir.  Roaches and rats, Sir, they’ve closed us down.  Your man has gone away…”

            And on and on as long as the caller was willing to put up with the nonsense.  My father considered anyone who called at the office or a wrong number at home fair game for his own personal entertainment. 

              His appetite for fun was matched by his appetite for food.  His fridge contained everything imaginable.  Cheeses of every kind, smoked salmon filets from Scotland, sleeves of sliced deli meats wrapped and stacked in a drawer, olives, and on and on.  When you had dinner with my father, he ate normal portions.  The real fun for him was the 3am foray to the fridge.  I can imagine his bath robed hulk silhouetted against the bright interior refrigerator light inspecting this item and that, pulling out a mittful of sliced cheese and cold cuts.  Oh well, I guess we all have our guilty pleasures.  His killed him eventually.  God forbid you ever mentioned his weight and how he was killing himself.  When anyone crossed that line a price was paid in receiving s healthy serving of invective.

             Watching my father take a huge mouthful of ham and cheese and swish it all around with a sip of orangeade, you watched a man close his eyes in joy and heaven.  Funny how my father never cooked any of his own food, no interest in that.  He was not interested in cooking for himself or for others.  A man of great success and excess.

            I wrestled with having this man for a father.  There were many wonderful highs and terrible lows.  I am only now reconciling all of it for myself.  For his many gifts have been most wonderful for me.  Lucky for me I was not in his close orbit enough to be crippled, but we had our moments.  Very good and then not so much.

            A deeply complex man, an enigma to himself and everyone around him, I ask he rest in peace.

            Part two next week…

Moon in Transit

 

 

The other morning I lay in bed watching the Moon.  It was probably five a.m. very cold.   I normally sleep with the window at least cracked open a little, but the deep freeze we’ve been in lately has me a nocturnal shut-in.  The moon hung high like s shiny dime with the lower right hand corner in shadow.   The Earth cast this partial shadow and I attempted to grasp the position of the moon relative to the Sun and Earth, and I felt my mind expanding outward to understand the grand physics of it.  But, it was too soon from deep sleep to hang onto for very long.   Instead I chose a simpler notion –- watch the Moon move. The Moon headed inexorably toward a fold in the translucent cotton drape.  I closed one eye and kept my head stock still as I watched the moon slide into the fold and get swallowed, then growing out the other side of the fold.  It was a beautiful and graceful silent dance.  After a while my mind swam out into space and conjured the image of the Moon reflecting stark and brilliant sunlight in this cosmic dance of the three orbs.  I thought, this is happening all the time, while we are all down here on the surface of this planet doing our little things;  Iran making atomic bombs underground, people brushing their teeth, going to work, buying and cooking food, musicians playing music, fishermen fishing, people making love, soldiers making war.  People starving and wondering how they will  get through this next day and night.   As the Moon moved into the crease of the drape, the moonglow emanated through the other side of the fold.  Things are always changing.  Eevrything is always moving and changing.  Everything.  Always.  Even rocks.  It’s all happening as we wait for a red light to change to green, charge our cell phone, order sandwiches at the deli, tell someone we love them.  Someone takes a photo.  Dabs paint on a canvas.  Jumps off a bridge.  The Moon moves into the crease of drape material.  The tides are either coming in or going out, but they are forever changing.  Nothing stays the same, although sometimes we feel we get “stuck,” which of course is an illusion.  Everything is always changing, not necessarily when we want it to – it’s not about what we want all the time.  It’s just not set up that way.    

The men in George Washington’s army at Valley Forge in Winter 1777 did not have warm clothing, or nearly enough food.  They froze and starved.  Those men must have thought things would never change no matter how hard they prayed.  Many of us who had a difficult year last year felt like things might never change, much the same way we felt a few years ago when we were enjoying an economic high, when the biggest story in the news was a President who was having sex in the Oval Office.  Nine guys with box cutters hijacked three airplanes one bright morning as the sun radiated in the clearest of blue skies, and everything changed.  And, one day a friend of mine was feeling fine, the next day was diagnosed with cancer.  Brings to mind Samuel Beckett’s line from, “Waiting for Godot,”  ‘…one day you are born, and one day you die.’ One day Stephen Hubscher, my high school history teacher said, “The more things change, the more they remain the same.”  My fifteen-year-old brain heard that and repeated it over a few times until deep understanding took hold of the concept.  The Moon emerged from the crease in the drape and peeking through the other side.     

I remember being in my twenties, and how slow life seemed to go.  I was an apprentice film editor, learning my trade.  I was living in Miami, somehow escaping the magnetic orbit of my hometown, New York City, and I remember wondering what the hell was I doing there besides warming my bones after living in Ithaca, New York for four long arctic winters.  Life in my early twenties seemed slower than slow, like nothing would every change.  Of course, things did change.  My grandfather passed away, my mother re-married, and the gravitational pull of New York City reached out and pulled me back.  My grandmother always said, “This too, shall pass.”  My stepson Matt now uses the phrase.  The Moon emerges from the crease in the drape, my head still locked in position, my breathing not interfering with my sightline on the moving Moon. Yeah, Grandma, this too shall pass.  The pounds I put on in the holiday season are coming off now, only to be put back on again next November.  Someone who has been starving will be fed today.   Someone is being born right now, and someone’s life is ending as I write this.  Yesterday, a man who survived two nuclear bomb blasts died yesterday, at 93.  Mr. Tsutomu Yamaguchi left his home in Nagasaki on a business trip to Hiroshima in time for the first nuclear explosion.  He survived it and made it home to Nagasaki in time for the second blast.   Somehow he lived through both, until yesterday.     

This morning this was no Moon out my window.  Where did it go?  I tried to grasp the physics of it then said the hell with it and went back to sleep.

Good Riddance & Happy New Year

 

How I hate, “year ender” pieces.  Feels like just more disposable junk on TV.  Do I really need to go back to September 11 all over again?   It’s in my body forever.  I don’t ever need to see those smoking towers ever again.  It changed me, and all of us here in the US.  

              I used to work in the news business many moons ago, and this time of year the program execs would always crank up these tired retrospectives that tell us what we already know.  I guess people like to roam down memory lane this time of year.   What is valuable for me this time of year is to know that I am happy to kiss 2009 good-bye.  A bitter year for the most part, but ending up on a very sweet and optimistic note.  Looking to continue that through the dark & chilly January and February here in the Northeast.  

             2009 was certainly rough stuff, for me at least.  My art selling career took a dive off the cliff.  Felt like the floor fell out from under me.  It took me months and months to come to grips with the idea that I had to change my construct in how I viewed my painting business and career.  How would I sell art if the galleries are suffering so?  If you read the trade magazines, gallery owners are bearing up with stiff upper lips and giving good little bites of optimism — showing  courage in trying to figure out their place in the new economic world we are all dwelling in now.  I think they are masking their real feelings.  I hope I am wrong.

            A longtime gallery professional I know said to me recently, “I think the gallery business is over.  And it’s never going back.”  This person has ridden the crest of the gallery wave of success that ran for years and years.  Think about it.  What do you need to open an art gallery?   A lease on a space, hopefully a good location for foot traffic, a beautiful floor and walls, good lighting, a desk, a computer, some storage space.  The art on the walls comes from a constant stream of artists begging to show their work.  The gallery owner takes the work on consignment, opens the doors and start selling!  Of course, what you really need is an understanding and appreciation of what kind of art you are representing and why.  The rest takes care of itself, or at least used to.

         I have sold much work in many galleries all over the US.  Also, I’ve sold lots of work to buyers who don’t go to galleries for many reasons.  They feel, “less than knowledgeable” when they go to a gallery.  How many times have I heard the phrase, “Well, I don’t know art history, so I don’t know what’s good.”  To which my standard reply goes, “Duke Ellington said it best, ‘If it sounds good, it is good.”

            We are in times of sweeping change.  People want to buy things as always, but they want a different buying experience.  Case in point is the Kindle.  People who read a lot and buy a lot of books are taking to the Kindle.  My wife bought one for me for my birthday a month ago.  I love it.  Here’s the buzz from Kindle users; “I love it, I read faster, I read more.”  Is that exactly true?  I don’t know, but I do know that with that kind of perception the bookstore is doomed.  Only a matter of time.  Is same true about art galleries?  I don’t know, but I sat and watched my carefully and painstakingly built art career get swept out to sea in one ugly tsunami.  

            I was catatonic for a long time, but now am back in the game, selling to individuals the way I did before I found my way into the galleries.  People are having Tupperware parties again, jean parties, jewelry parties.  Anyone who has access to product is selling at wholesale prices.  People still want to buy things, but they want to buy them differently.  

            September 11, 2001 changed everything.  The Recession has changed everything, again.  We adapt or die.  If there is anything to learn by looking back is that we must change with the times.  I hate change for the most part.  But here’s the choice; change with the times or die.  Ok, now I’m saying, change is good.  I am totally optimistic about 1020.  Totally aspirational.  

            So, I will once again avoid those tedious, “year enders” in the media, and concentrate on what I have to do now, which is to adapt, be aware, and be flexible.  If you have enjoyed any of the 50+ pieces I’ve published in the last calendar year, I am glad.  Thank you for reading and sticking with me, I will work hard to try and bring you new posts that are provocative, stimulating and inspiring.  Happy New Year to you all.

Always from my heart,

Steve Alpert

At The Watering Hole

THIS POST IS A GIFT that will give you pleasure and relaxation for years to come.  I find it infinitely fascinating, usually during daylight hours — in Botswana– but nighttime can be surprising as well.  Anything can happen.  Earlier this afternoon I watched a huge elephant bathing leisurely bathing himself, gazelles hanging out behind him and birds all over the pond area.  The sound is equally alluring and transporting.  Interested?

It’s a live webcam in Botswana at the Mashatu Game Preserve.  A friend turned me on to this site months ago and it has become a great way to calm down at the end of the day.  So, without further ado, I invite you to visit Pete’s Pond…

               video.nationalgeographic.com/video/wildcamafrica/

Seems like there’s a lot of African stuff going on in my orbit, suddenly.  Friends just came back from Africa and brought with them beautiful photos, vast landscapes that are breathtaking.  Some of those photos will become paintings in the coming months, I think.

 I am not one to take technology for granted, this is amazing to me and Pete’s Pond has captured my imagination.  Late last night was early morning in Botswana, and two warthogs were taking their visit to the watering hole, more gazelles peacefully hanging out behind them.  The warthogs and gazelles seemed completely oblivious to each other.  Today’s elephant was the first elephant I’ve experienced at the pond…

     Anyway, enjoy Pete’s Pond.  Happy Holidays!

Fertile & Fallow

 

Think of your favorite performer, or your favorite athlete performing at their very best.  When they’re at their peak, they are all one small step away from disaster.  Nobody can stay at their peak indefinitely.  Peak performance would not be peak performance without valleys.  Peaks and valleys.  High tide and low tide.  We’ve recently experienced the pain of this in our collective economy.  The peak was fun, but unsustainable.  We’re down in the valley and now beginning to slog up the mountain again.

         I love the statement of the great John Wooden, coach of many national championship basketball teams at UCLA in the 1960’s.  Dating myself?   Coach Wooden said, “We don’t get real high after big wins and we don’t get real low after losses.”  All respect due to Coach Wooden, in his peak years he so happened to have collections of players that were simply phenomenal, but he was the grand master maestro who guided them to title after title with an even-handedness that is indeed rare.  Wooden was steady at the tiller, for sure.  

         Take a look at the careers of various artist in their fields.  Very few of them have peak production on a regular basis.  For the most part, now you see ‘em and then you don’t.  The athletes you see performing at their peak are always on the brink of disaster.  The marathon runners who gear themselves to a particular race meticulously plan their training schedule six months in advance so they will peak on race day.  Awesome concept.  The real artists always come back.  The comeback trail is well traveled.

     As a working artist, now working in multiple mediums – oil paint, documentary production and now with a new stage play in development, I am experiencing a run up the mountain.  The economy devastated my art sales more than a year ago, and I was knocked back, really thrown for a loss with no notion of what to do.  In the coming posts I will detail a little more about the steps I have taken to resurrect myself, but clearly it has been a tough year and I am happy to kiss 2009 a big good-bye.  SEE YA!

      And of course, it’s all in nature.  Plow a field every year and eventually you deplete the nutrients.  Let it lie fallow, allow the elements have its’ way and, voilla, it is ready to support a robust new season.  Amazing!

Making it Up

 

"Mt Haleakala" 30"x40" oil painting by Steve Alpert

Making it up as I go along.  This has been my theme song most of my life.  But, back in Summer of ‘72 in the hot bowels of the Grand Canyon, sun high, canteen contents low, pack heavy, legs tired…the first thing I did was realize how stupid I was to have just taken off without a map, a diagram, or someone else to go with who knew where to go.  Second, it was blazing hot in that canyon and the two mile jaunt to the beginning of the one mile ascent was okay, but it was the thought of trekking up that final vertical mile that was really weighing me down.  Third thing, my water supply was low and then the decision became easy.  Up and out was what had to happen and in that decision I knew I would rally have to physically pay.  And pay I did.

            One vertical mile of very steep switchbacks.  At about fifty feet per switchback, it amounted to about one hundred of ‘em.  In the heat, with the fifty-pound pack with very limited water.  All these years later I remember it vividly.  I began about 3pm.  The first five or six were not so bad, after that I had to stop and take off the pack after every switchback.  Chest heaving and gasping for oxygen I would have to rest for a few minutes every fifty feet.  Took three or fours hours to get to the top, and then, a four mile haul back to the campsite.  Dang.  

            It was a great lesson.  I’ve been often impulsive in my life and jumped into things figuring that my wits and intuition can take me through.  It has worked out well, sometimes, and sometimes not.  For me, this is precisely the spice of life.

            Much like staring at a blank canvas not knowing what it will be.  Most of the paintings on my website are unexpected works of improvisation.  What can I say?  This is who I am in this life. 

            This is my artist’s journey and when it’s time to go the Big Studio in the sky, I will look back with warm memories and not many regrets at all.  One of the best impulses was meeting a woman and realizing a half hour later that I wanted to marry her.  Dorothy.  I didn’t think it through, I just knew.  We didn’t run off and get married, it would be a year and three months after we met.  This is the person in my life who gave me the great gift of becoming an artist, offering to pay the bills while I make the transition.  It took longer than either of us thought and it has not always been easy.

            Another impulsive decision that worked out well in the best sense was meeting a man who became a great friend.  We were introduced at a lunch, and Arje Shaw had written a terrific play called, “The Gathering.”  Arje produced it as an Off-Broadway production where it did well and now was transitioning to Broadway.  I was very taken with this guy who was articulate, brilliant, and possessing a diabolical sense of humor.  After the lunch outside the restaurant I told Arje I wanted to invest in the show.  You might want to read the script, first, but I said that I was investing in him, and I would read the script, for sure.  I read the script, was knocked out by it,  and then called Arje and said I didn’t know what I was saying but that I wanted to raise money for the production.  I did and earned a producer credit.

            The show only lasted a heart-breaking four and half weeks, and then two years later I was one of the producers with another one of Arje’s plays, “Magic Hands Freddie.”  Freddie went for four and a half months.  Money lost, time invested, but a tremendous life experience.  And an enduring friendship that is special to both of us.  And as a result of the time energy and cash put into those two projects, a new project is beginning.  But this isn’t the trip down Hermit’s Trail this time.  This time I am assembling a seasoned team of talented professionals with track records.  Building this new project maturely so it has the best chance of living a long, healthy and profitable life.  And not oddly enough, the inspiration for this sweeping project begins with a painting I made a few years ago.  The project will begin as a play.  So much for now on that, it’s a hush-hush thing for now, but more in these pages as time goes on.  It all began with the creative impulse that told me to, “Go.”

     So, that trip down Hermit’s Trail would be a trip I would take many times in my life.  Many of those trails led to what we normally refer to as, success.  Who knows what can happen?  But I can tell you what will happen if you don’t take a chance.  Nothing.

Decision Time

 

 

 

Grand Canyon, June 1972.  It was a hippy happening at the South Rim campgrounds.  Along my hitchhiking trip I arrived with my two new buddies from U of Illinois I met at a campground in New Mexico, mentioned in the previous post on this blog.  Tom was a young party hardy dude and his buddy, whose name now eludes me were doing the cross country thing, joining the legions of long hairs who took to the road that summer.  We stayed in Las Vegas, New Mexico for a few days.  They had a pal just home from Vietnam and the party was on.  One night we went to a roadhouse honky-tonk out in the desert.  Tom offered a challenge to his army pal; bankroll the shots of tequila and Tom would down one a minute for fifteen minutes.  Seemed like a good idea at the time.  Tom got to number thirteen and then barely made it outside to purge himself of the poison.  A good time was had by all.  Funny, the more we drank, the better the band got.

            Couple of days later, the Grand Canyon.  About fifty fellow travelers of all shapes and sizes equipped with substances of all shapes and sizes gravitated to this one sprawling campsite.  The fire burned for days and nights, singing and reveling.  The smells of the Douglas Firs mixed with smoke from burning Pinion Pine and mesquite were intoxicating enough.  But of course, there were other intoxicants of the day.

            A few days in, a group headed out to a shangri-la spot somewhere in the depths of the canyon.  A big party deep in the recesses of a remote area of the Grand Canyon replete with crystal clear travertine pools, as turquoise as the Caribbean.  Sounded very good.  I was invited.  I said I would join them on the second day.  How do you get there, I asked.  Oh, go down Hermit’s trail and at the bottom there’s a fork in the path, go left and it will take you there.  Being nineteen I didn’t write anything down, just had a visual picture in my mind, such as it was.  I would find it.  Solo.

            The next day I managed a ride to the trailhead of Hermit’s Trail, a few miles west of the campground along the South Rim road.  I had my fifty-pound pack with me.  First but not last mistake.

            Down the steep and treacherous switchbacks for one mile to land on the first plateau.  A dome of deep smacking blue sky, cloudless.  Sun moving to the top, early summer heat radiating off the rocks.  Two hours in I reach a fresh water wellhead under an overhang of red rock, naturally hollowed out by eons of wind.  A well-worn fireplace next to it.  A good stopping place for a lunch of whatever I had.  It was quiet out there, God was it quiet.  Like you had the best headphones on kind of quiet.  All you could hear was quiet.  No wind.  The sun was really working now, heat waves blurring the narrow trail heading north toward the Colorado, still another few miles down. 

            Picked up the heavy pack and off I trudged looking for the fork in the trail.  Another hour or two passes and I am noticing how really alone I was, really deep in this canyon.  No fork, yet.  Arms and legs now covered in sweat and thin films of desert.  A fork!  Make a left.  They did say a left, didn’t they?

I took the left; only this left trail was going into a narrowing canyon.  Beautiful young Aspens all along shimmering in the sunshine, sending it’s light signals back to the sun.  Caves up on the cliffs.  I know this is not the correct way.  And then I heard it.  A sound I will remember forever.

            It was an animal, a big animal communicating to me that it was not pleased with my visit to its very own turf.  It was the roar of a big cat.  I’m not talking a Maine Coon kitty cat; I’m talking Mountain Lion, Puma, or some damn thing like that.  I never saw the beast and I chose not to investigate further but to take Leo up on his offer the get the hell out of Dodge.

            Decision time.  High noon.  Sun beating down.  Three choices. Continue on, try to find the trail that some stoned out hippie told me about?  Good luck. Backtrack and spend the night at the well, alone.  That seemed like a tough call.  There’s that big kitty cat out there, even though I knew the critter was probably more frightened of me than me of him.  Did I really want to be thinking about that through a night alone a mile away from Whiskers? Or, bag it — head up and out of the canyon, more than arduous at best, more like Herculean given the heat, fatigue and that freaking pack that seemed to weigh one hundred pounds and would have to haul it up one mile up those steep switchbacks in the late afternoon sun with the canyon heated enough to bake bread — oh Man!  And my depleted supply of water in my canteen.  There’s the real clincher.

            Interesting lesson.  To be so incredibly unprepared to just wander into a very wild place figuring I would just wing it.   To be young and stupid!

            Stay tuned…