Oscar Wilde, Straits of Juan de Fuqua, Being a Bronx Jew

Camp Hayden

'Feshbach, with soldiers like you it's no wonder that we're losing this fucking war', the First Sergeant spat out at me.

He didn't think much of me. Being a Jew didn't help. Being a New York Jew made me even worse. How did he know that I was a Jew? It was easy. Anti Semitism was so prevalent in the army that in order to protect myself from listening to the slurs I wore a Jewish chip on my shoulder. The occasional slur did lead to an occasional fist fight.

The son of a bitch of a First Sergeant detested me before I left for radio operators school and after I returned as well. He was Regular Army and hard as nails. Regular Army guys came from tough environments. They signed up for the Army in the thirties to get jobs. Three squares a day and $21 a month and they were in hog heaven.

Watch from Here to Eternity to get a real sense of those hard ass pricks who thought that we, the newbies, were worthless...and treated us that way. Asshole was our title.

Fort Worden was the home of the 14th Coast Artillery Regiment. I always had thought that regiments had horses. No horses, but there were massive cannons facing the Straits of Juan de Fuqua. While it was a really beautiful place (It is now a National Park.) Fort Worden was colder than a whore’s heart for reveille in particular and it seemed like it was always fucking raining…cold, bone chilling, fucking rain. We wore overcoats for reveille, shirt sleeves later in the day.

About the time of my return to Fort Worden from radio operator's school, they opened an outpost, Camp Hayden, near Port Angeles, further up the coast. It was created for about 150 of us G I's to 'watch' the Straits of Juan de Fuqua.

My 'friend', the prick of a First Sergeant, shipped my ass there, giving me hardly any time after my return to Fort Worden to move my clothes from the duffel bag to the foot locker. He thought that he was burying me alive but I loved it.

We were on duty at odd hours so when the reveille bugle blew (no recording) there were no early morning formations and no KP for me: a technician, a radio operator, a big shot. And with a First Sergeant who didn't know me from Adam's odd ox and hadn't yet discovered that I could be, for him, an abrasive Bronx Jew. An enormous pain in the ass, always bitching about something.

Camp Hayden was Hog Heaven. Because I knew how to drive, which was uncommon in those days, I got to drive the jeep to our 'observing' installation which was on a hill top. It overlooked Crescent Beach with a spectacular view of the Straits. With little to do, I had time to learn how to type, use a bug (side to side rather than up and down with a radio operator's key) and became a High Speed Radio operator, 35 words a minute. We checked in every hour with Headquarters and did drills with other radio installations on the West Coast.

Yeah, I became so good at it that the Lieutenant wanted to promote me to PFC. I turned the opportunity down. Told the Lt. that I was the Ranking Private at Camp Hayden and didn't want to lose that distinction. Also told him to give the fucking raise of $4 a month to someone who needed it, plus I'd been a private for over a year and didn't want to be part of the mob. Really pissed him off, a lot.

After my PFC turndown the transfer I'd requested to an outfit that was going to go overseas was, very, very quick in coming. Before you could say that Feshbach is a pain in the ass, I was on the way to the 241st Signal Corps Battalion in Fort Lewis preparing to go to the Pacific Theatre and, as it turned out, Okinawa.

As Oscar Wilde prophesied, “The real disasters in life begin when you get what you want."

Wired For Sound: ‘You Can Check Out Anytime But You Can Never Leave': Non Sequiturs

In the 70's on a flight from L.A. to SFO there was a kid, about 15, sitting next to me. She had a mouthful of iron and was eating candy like there was no tomorrow. I commented to her that all the candy would 'rot her teeth and curl her soul'. She looked at me like the proverbial bull with a bastard calf and gave me that 'fuck off, asshole' look. I then popped my lower denture out of mouth while telling her that eating candy was one reason for my no teeth set of gums. (The uppers were in too tight to spit them out). The kid screamed to her mother who was sitting behind us,' Mommy, Mommy make him stop. 'The kid is about 60 now, probably with dentures.

•  

 Whipped on my lower case, bronx, jewish ass, after 20 miles of 'trotting' (aka 'a forced, 20 mile march') in 105 degree heat. The countryside had that hot dry heat smell to it. A weird sensation for a city guy like me; more used to that awful city summer stink.

Often absolutely collapsed, on an army cot, in a low, tar roofed barrack that had previously been a Japanese detention center. Camp Kohler, July 1945, Sacramento, Ca., going to radio operator's school. We wondered, stretched out and drenched in sweat in our boxer shorts, how the hell the Japanese folks and their kids survived, living in that unreal, body straining environment. No easy come, easy go in Sacramento in July. It was like living in a sauna.

We dressed for a cool Canadian day on brutally hot Saturday afternoons for 20 mile forced marches. We wore shoes that weighed a fucking ton, carrying an old 1930's rifle that weighed even more while wearing fatigues which felt like you were wearing the whole fucking world on your back.(When we were issued carbines, well after radio school, a weight was truly lifted off of our bodies.) Breathing like a stuck hog bleeds if you were placed a little bit back of the front of the march because you were always catching up. It felt like you were running the whole God damn 20 miles.

Pissin' and groaning were the order of the day for all of us GI's. The city guys, who thought that they were tough, weren’t so tough trotting in that heat. It was not like a stroll in the park and no one told me that all that walking/trotting, was building bone strength. At 19 years old, who even thought about bone strength much less cared about it? The only bone you cared about was the one that sometimes (not often enough) sprouted between your legs. And walking/hiking didn't help produce that wonderful bone of that now distant, fond memory. Anyhow, sex thoughts in that hot, fucking California Valley sun just didn't happen.

'You can check out anytime, but you can never leave'...The Eagles, Hotel California. You can get discharged from the service but in your head, you never leave. There is no such thing as an ex-Marine. My few years in the Army are part of my soul. As time wears on, the worst of times become the funniest of times.

•  

Getting an overnight pass and going to work at the Crown Zellerbach Paper plant to make $1.00 an hour, paid in silver dollars, was big time. One time I worked in a huge fucking room. Breaks in the paper stream would cause big quantities of the paper to fall into the room.With a long pole that had a long 'needle ' at the end I would drag the sheets of paper to a water mill which would grind the paper up and back into the process that stuff would go.

That constant contact with those great big sheets of paper falling through the 'ceiling' was turning me into 160 pounds of static electricity. I couldn't touch anything without getting a slight jolt. I felt wired for sound. Like I could light the city of Philadelphia, which until recent years was one boring fucking place. Its biggest claims to fame were the Liberty Bell and the pleasant train ride to and from the Big Apple. Hell you couldn't even buy booze or get a drink on Sunday. Very bad place for serious drinkers (aka alcoholics) of which I was one.

~And the term G.I. was, I believe, invented in WWII and stands for General Issue

Googling Constipation, Kvetches, TAVR, Social Worker, Being Jewish

Stanford Hospital

 90 and still pissin' into the wind.  'Thinking The Impossible'..

You become, when you're in your eighties, a borderline hypochondriac. Growing old was downright pleasant compared with being old. Being old ain't for sissies or wimps. One of the best things of old age however, to paraphrase Dean Martin, is that you know that when you get out of bed in the morning that you're feeling as bad as you’re going to feel all day.

When you're old you think that every kvetch could be life threatening. Google became a big pain in the ass because it allowed me to constantly check on my fucking kvetches. I have Googled everything from constipation to aortic valve stenosis.

Bowl movements at 90 can be difficult. Straining to have a bowl movement became a way of life so I Googled 'constipation' and up popped stuff suggesting prunes, prunes, more fiber and more prunes. So I start every day with a boring fucking breakfast of a fresh fruit smoothie and three cups of coffee topped off with six nausea threatening prunes. Fiber is now part of a way of life for me. Plus, thanks to Google I no longer think that I'm going to get cancer because I can't take a shit.

At age 87 I cycled some 4,500 miles on an Eddy Merckx road bike thinking that I looked cool doing it. Yeah, everybody who knew me or of me thought that I was a fucking maniacal freak and maybe I was.

At 88, two really bad bike crashes put me in ICU twice. Macho me had to go out, the second time, not feeling good, with apparently a driving need to prove to the world that I really was a dumb schmuck. (Since 'schmuck' is Yiddish for penis it is impossible, by definition, to be a smart schmuck).

My first crash resulted in a 'visit' to the Stanford Hospital which is loaded with fucking 30 year old, know it all doctors. They introduced me to 'aortic valve stenosis'. What I thought was my 'heart murmur' for 30 years, was really 'aortic valve stenosis' and death was hovering over me, just around the corner. 

I needed to get an aortic valve replacement RIGHT NOW...As soon as possible. A TAVR (Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement) procedure was a right away, must do.

'Minimally invasive procedure' were the buzzwords of the geniuses. Realizing that God created cardiologists, orthopods and urologists to perform procedures and knowing that a 'minor operation' is an operation that someone else has, I was as nervous about the whole thing as a Rabbi in a stone quiet Buddhist temple.

Minimally invasive? What a fucking joke. At 88, minimally invasive translates to death defying. The various pre-procedure tests for the TAVR were mind boggling. Shoving a catheter in your groin to run color dyes through your veins ain't like spending a day at the beach. You have to spend 3 hours post procedure in the hospital to be sure you are really okay. No problem for the doctors, big problem for me. I could see myself needing three weeks to a month to recover from that fucking minimally invasive pre-procedure, procedure assuming that I was still alive.

An angiogram, another necessary pre-TAVR procedure, is a pushover for younger folks. Not so much for an old dog like me. But the TAVR itself takes the 'risk free' cake.

This is where they replace the aortic valve by running a catheter from your groin into your heart with a balloon containing the new valve. The balloon goes into your heart and somehow the new valve is installed. Putting a new clutch in a stick shift car sounds more appealing and less dangerous. And then you're 'out of commission' for 4 weeks at least, after this so called 'minimally invasive' procedure. A phrase I grew to hate and still do. What bullshit.

The pay off came when I had to go see a social worker to discuss what happens to my body and my assets, such as they are, in the event that I kicked off while being 'minimally invaded'.

This wannabe shrink was pompous and loaded with 'what ifs'. She took me out of worrying about bowl movements, incontinence, fitful sleeping and just being old, to thinking only of death. Just like the old days. I might just as well have been living again with the Princess.

No way was a return visit to the social worker with documentation on my agenda.

If I want to feel like shit, I can do it all by myself. I don't need any help from a social worker or anyone else for that matter. When you're Jewish and guilty, feeling like shit comes naturally.

With Jews 'Something is terribly wrong if everything was alright'...Yossarian, Catch 22

Israel, Golda Meir, Zvi Dinstein, Leon Uris

'Two Israelis in a room and you have an argument. Three Israelis in a room and you have a fucking riot.'

After my Army discharge in 1946 and with Hitler's anti-Semitic crusade and the '67 Israeli/Arab War still very fresh in my mind, I became a Zionist. Meeting and spending time with Leon Uris, at Gardiner's Tennis Ranch in the 60's, reinforced my feelings about Jews needing a national homeland. Uris wrote “Exodus’, an historical novel and a best seller, all about the travails of Jews going to and settling in Israel post WWII.

Having lived through the German Bund, Yorkville (a center of anti-Semitism in New York City), the virulently anti-Semitic Father Coughlin and having fist fights as a kid because I was a Jew during the 30's pushed me into becoming a Zionist. In order to become Israel knowledgeable, I read some of the most boring, fucking books about Israel known to man. Great sleeping pills they were. Most Jews of my vintage believe that knowledge conquers all. I even tried that approach when farming…

It didn't work worth a shit for me when farming in Iowa, becoming easily the best read, really ignorant, jackass Jewish farmer in the Western world. After constantly going through the Federal Agriculture Dept. publications like shit through a tin horn, all that book learning didn't seem to help when sticking my hand into a birthing sow trying to help her to spit out pigs on a bitterly cold night in a February in Iowa. Colder than a whore's heart.

I was huge on theory but a fucking dummy in the real world of slopping hogs, milking cows, feeding cattle, riding a tractor, breeding sheep and just a schmuck generally trying to be a successful farmer.
If there was a mistake to be made, I made it. Trying to make an Iowa farmer out of a Bronx Jew was truly like pissin' into the wind or trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. It was all bad capped off by the overwhelming boredom of plowing corn, going up and down rows of corn for hours at a time. Thank God at the time for Scotch whiskey. Survival nectar.

By 1971 I had evolved, in this order, from the Army into being a furrier, dress salesman, farmer, to promoting a wholesale automobile auction, selling advertising specialties, very successful car salesman and stock broker/security analyst, VC partner and an oversized pain in the ass to my suffering in luxury first ex-wife. Her notion of telling me of her love for me was to say 'Hello Bern'…

Moses turning right instead of left gave the Arabs the oil; Jews the fucking desert. The Israeli's had one small declining oil field producing all of 3,000 barrels of oil a day near Ashdod. The Israeli's claim to oil fame was a deal with Iran in which Israel was a big trans-shipper of Iranian oil. At the time, cooperation between Iran and Israel, was both unmentionable and a 'BIG SECRET'. But then if I, a dumb Jew living in Palo Alto knew it, what the hell kind of secret could it be?!



In about 1970 in a moment of 'genius', I decided to raise a private equity fund to drill for oil and/or gas in Israel. Talk about pissing into the wind. It was so ludicrous that a standup comic could do wonders with it. First I tried to contact someone, anyone, in the Israeli Energy Dept. 

After months of being shoved around like a whore in church, I grew so frustrated that I literally phoned Golda Meir, the Prime Minister of Israel. Being half in the bag made making the phone call easy. It was midnight in Palo Alto; 10:00 in the morning in Jerusalem and the booze had wired me for sound. Everyone knows that an alcoholic with a telephone can be one huge pain in the ass.

Never did speak with Golda Meir but that experience became my first lesson in Israeli bureaucracy which was one tough mother to overcome. Unloading responsibility was the then cornerstone of Israeli governmental bureaucracy.

A few weeks after my phone call, Mrs. Meir's office passed me to off to the Israeli Energy Minister, Zvi Dinstein, who gave me my second lesson in how to deal with Israeli bureaucracy. You have to have the patience of Job because it was wait, wait, wait. 

Mr Dinstein, after a few weeks of my waiting, passed me off to the head of the Israeli Oil Co. who was a bright, nice guy and a survivor of Israel's War of Independence. It is interesting to me that the names of assholes can come to my mind easily but nice people's names not so easily and I can't recall his name.

He came with his attorney to visit me in the States. The Princess was having multiple orgasms at the prospect of hosting a dinner for two Israelis. It was only one of two times that my JAP approved of the deal. The other time was when the Princess came with me on one of my 7, in 13 months, insane trips to Israel. She loved it. I was busy promoting. She was busy sightseeing without me. The Princess was the ultimate travel freak, particularly when not with me. But she was dead right about the deal.

The deal, after spending tens of thousands on travel and entertainment of my own money (hangovers and me were intimate) was a total fucking failure. The rich Jews, potential investors, looked at me like I was a bull with a bastard calf. That whole story for another time.

You can be sure that the Princess gloried in 'I told you so.' Suffice it to say that while the money was gone my testicles, to the dismay of the Princess, were still there if barely.