jan 8 The Marriage Tribunal

Jeremy, I though what it was like in the Heartbreak hotel: where to begin. Well, first off, the reason you're so creative is that you never watched tv. I would not allow in the house.

Well, it was the upstairs apartment.

Sure, we had music. That was a given. We had R n R. Grace Slick and Jefferson Starship. I remember how it was when she had a small child on the cover. And then, a few years removed, there she was, in the back of my limousine Town Car for a trip to JFK.

We had two cars: the opal and the Volkswagen. The VW, after sometime, required a new engine. The honeymoon was the Colorado Rockies. I think I drove down the interstate, barely able to see.

And I think Kerry once drove it off the road.

And, bein' a Whole Earth kinda guy, I bought fix your VW easy as pie. But there was just no way. I'd open the back of it and here would be this little engine. And I'd stare at it and wonder about it. Then time to get another engine and that didn't work that good either.

The little engines that couldn't.

Well, I'll have to dig out some more chapters of Monday and I'm Working. How about my mentor that got me started so long ago, moving onto the Creighton U's campus, full of wild ideas and energy?

Aquarius Let's the Sun Shine in
Blazing across the literary sky like a cool meteor, Norman Mailer, super nova, who cast sharp blue eyes over American culture for more than half a century, inspired untold millions to take pen to paper, an existential recorder of life events.
Many of us hoped to hitch on to this Mailer Meteor, recording, like him, a country innocent and sophisticated by turns, jumping into the ring with Mailer, in a fighter's crouch, ever and always looking into what makes this nation tick.
Like many impressionable youth of the late 60's and early 70's—out to change the world, even if we had no idea how, yet caught up in the wild imaginings of space exploration—we were Aquarius, the alter-ego Mailer used covering
Apollo 11 moon landings in his book, “Of a Fire on the Moon.” Stepping into New Frontiers, the possibilities seemed endless.
Suddenly, no longer were we observers but active participants, cub reportage be damned. Like Mailer, we'd put ourselves smack dab into the meat of the story, observer and participant. Like Mailer recording Ali and Frazier—arm wrestling Ali pre-fight—we'd also step out to capture human drama at its apex.
And, then, like many who stumbled upon the huge boulder that is Mailer, I started reading voraciously any and everything he wrote, early 70's, in what seems to be a young and less-sophisticated pre iPod, wired America—where now millions communicate every nano second yet manage to say next-to-nothing.
Yes to write like Mailer—if only one could. If anyone could be so quickly, like Mailer, echoing self-doubts yet rising above literary ashes in the end. Well, millions try. Yet, looking at the voluminous tomes, the wild essays and books that touched on so many parts of American life, the virtual sweep of the land, suddenly any and all attempts at writing that well, writing that prolific, a quest to step out on the Moon's rocky terrain of reportage, daring to go where no one had gone before, is a realization how tough it really is to write that much, that well, for so long—we lesson our aim.
And of course, perhaps like many, because I read a criticism of the Godfather of all American Writer's, Ernest Hemingway that Mailer hadn't established the right coordinates of the battle field and thus waved him away, I too, mistakenly I see now, waved Mailer away. Punch drunk; too many clouts to the noggin. Even though I delighted in reading the latest dust up. I was too smug to read brilliant reportage, following Gary Gillmore to Utah, I saw how I'd missed Mailer's internal flame, shining and bright and burning in the heavens. By this time, jaded by academia and pop culture, realizing I had neither the talent or the discipline, I didn't try to re-ignite the flame.
No, I'd forgotten that Mailer kept on a writing, kept on a going, readying how, in his first book, he's write by candlelight beneath a tent. I also had to occasion to wait on Rip Torn when I was a waiter in an East Village bar/restaurant, Phoebe's, and even then, looking at Torn and trying to see which ear Mailer had bitten a chunk out of.
So in the days of sound bites and infomercials—communication reduced to a few grunts and unintelligle groans—I will go back and pick up Armies of the Night and then, like Mailer, walk through an American landscape, now seen as an ineffectual biosphere of a million voices with no real devotion to the craft, with a skipping of details and commercials run longer than news cast, a general dumbing down of America, I know it's time to study a great writer.
So, I will return to the pre-Blosphere world, the world before all the tools that allows mankind to communicate so well, yet we communicate less than ever, our eyes feasting on the spectacular, the terrific, the outlandish, the flavor of the moment—Mailer and other great writers and artists buried in bookstores behind the latest scandal sheet and tabloid. Deep thought denied.
Aquarius—let the sun shine in: on a nation, like the song says, “Turns it's lonely heart to you.”


And I'm tryin' to read your book on conventions. That might be suitable for a take on this year's elections.

Well James Jeremy, my reluctant recalcitrant suitor, it all started at the heart break hotel.