Johnny’s Manifesto
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Censored Text from The Projection Booth
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First Flight, or the Super Con
Just about every routine conversation between my parents Lilo and Janos eventually evolved into a shouting match. This was especially true in the time that plans were being made to move permanently from Brazil to the United States. Major change, major fights. Every issue was reason for raising the heat and noise, and the level…
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The Projection Booth
Much of my undergraduate career at Yale College was spent inside the film projection booth at 101 Linsley-Chittenden Hall on the Old Campus. The classroom-turned-screening room was the headquarters of the Yale Film Society, of which I was a member, factotum and primary projectionist. We ran screenings of films on an almost daily basis, films…
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Prom Night in San Rafael
You might say Annette was my first girlfriend, since we went to a prom together, sealing the deal. We were both seniors nearing graduation, and it must have been her high school prom. I hadn’t paid much attention to girls until then, except in slick magazines, since I attended an all-boys Catholic school in San…
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The Black Hole of COVID and Other Distractions
Where have we been all this time? I’ll tell you. Got a minute? I’ll start with your note of December 9 in which you take on my pleonastic Class Book essay. OK, OK, you’re right. I larded it on (and only overshot the 500-word limit by a little), with delirious and overwrought descriptors. I failed…
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Papa, thank you for everything
It’s what he said to me, inside the emergency room. He got it right away. He understood. In the midst of the controlled chaos of the emergency room, my son, my baby, looked at me with his bruised and battered face, and said, “Papa, thank you for everything.” As I crushed his hand in mine,…
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My Philadelphia Dumpster
An urban story of a young couple renovating a dilapidated Philadelphia row house, and finding that the entire neighborhood made good use of it. Manya and I had just arrived at that age when the urge to create our own space became overwhelming. That is to say, we had to act on something, anything. There…
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Girl Meets Boy in São Paulo
When Johnny lived in São Paulo in the early 1950’s, he couldn’t speak Portuguese, so he didn’t talk very much. He had come from somewhere else, far away; he was very white, with long, blond curly hair. His folks had fled the European War, and here they were. Once, coming back from the ice cream…
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Aka George Kaplan
In Process In Process Who the heck is George Kaplan? Back to Land’s End Stories: Contents Page
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São Paulo, Brasil
Notes: Eva and I bring home a dog…
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Fernie Who Came to Live
A baby infant deer was found under the ferns; so she came to live. She was called Fern; Fernie to her intimates. She believed the humans, the cats, the dogs, were all her family. What did she know? She slept in bed with her family. Slowly she grew up until she nearly hit the ceiling….
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Max The Cat from Philly
Max Unfortunately, he was killed by our negligence.
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The Wandering Girl
Story about this girl who loves to read, anytime, anywhere. The last time we saw her, she was wandering around the house, deep in communion with a book. Every few minutes she passed by the windows in the room where we were sitting. We don’t know how many times she went around the house.
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Polo at the Gare de Lyon – Scenario
Polo lives at the Train Bleu Restaurant inside the cavernous Gare de Lyon. From there Polo explores the neighborhood and meets many of its residents. And sometimes he actually catches a ride on the real Train Bleu, the once-famous overnight train to the Riviera. Polo is a cat. The story opens with an assortment of…
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Bande à Part on Land’s End
A trio of young friends living on the edge of Point Lobos in San Francisco find love and friendship in a breathtakingly dramatic setting. Coming of age are Johnny, Gary and Denise. Back to Land’s End Stories: Contents Page
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The Whore of Mensa—Parody of a Parody?
Work in Progress THE CRIME? Well, there was a crime, but as is not unusual, we can’t figure out what it is. The only crime here is Benny Frisco’s wisecracks. Assume a crime, then. THE INVESTIGATION Heck, let’s just assume there was an investigation, too. You know how cops make stuff up. There are are…
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São Paulo, Brasil
Because it has a tilde over the A and an S instead of the Z. That’s just the way it is. ❖ Long before coming to Land’s End, my family had to pass through Brasil for ten years or so after leaving Budapest, where I was born in 1947, after the War and the arrival…
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The Boy and His Barn – Manuscript
JUST OUTSIDE A LITTLE TOWN…………………….BEHIND A LONG STONE WALL, LIVED A LITTLE BOY IN A QUIET OLD HOUSE………………………… THAT WAS ONCE A FARM, NOT LONG AGO. AND BEHIND THE HOUSE, SAT A BIG RED BARN, JUST AS OLD. “YOUR MAMA BOUGHT THE HOUSE, AND I BOUGHT THE BARN,” LAUGHED THE BOY’S FATHER. THE BARN WAS…
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The Boy and His Barn
The Boy and His Barn One. (double page) JUST OUTSIDE A LITTLE TOWN……………………..BEHIND A LONG STONE WALL Long shot of New England style town (church steeples, town square, with a little farm away on the side: a white clapboard house with a red barn behind it, trees, fields, gravel road, stone walls, stone arch…
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The Barn and Her Boy
(The boy with the long, curly red hair is in almost every illustration, growing from little boy into young manhood) 1 I live just outside a little town, behind a long stone wall and under three heavy maple trees. 2 My latest family lives in the old, old house that was once a farm, not…
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Afternoon at the Park
NICOSay, Alec, you know we’re really not supposed to be here in this playground. ALECOh, yeah? Why not? NICOWell, we’ve been coming here for sixty years, and just because our appearance hasn’t changed doesn’t mean we have to come here all the time. Somebody’s gonna figure it out one of these days. We oughta be…
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The Two-Million-Dollar Soup Tureen
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The Repo Men
On most days the sun burns off the fog covering Land’s End by mid-morning. But on that day in 1961, it lingered and thinned, diffusing the sun’s light to a dazzling thick haze. Even the normally gloomy woods of brooding Monterey cypresses that cover the land on the Point were surprisingly bright. The light appeared…
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The Priest and the Petty Thief
Edward entered the crowded Art Deco lobby of the landmark New York City building, pushed along by the rush, through the revolving doors. Once inside, he weaved back and forth, in a kind of embarassed paranoia, avoiding the people that raced past him in all directions. He was an old-fashioned-looking man, short, stocky, wearing a…
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The Confession Line
The shopworn airplane was packed, every seat was occupied. While the Delta flight from Paris went smoothly enough, everything else about it was a disaster: cheap cramped seats, non-working entertainment system, smelly bathrooms, and food that no one should eat. On arrival in New York, we barged our way off the plane, and raced through…
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Manya’s Soufflé
“It’s red!” I shouted in the delivery room, startling everyone in the place. Dr. Goldstein, looking down and then up at me, surprised, then glancing over to my wife Manya, who mumbled curses at us in her delirium, joked lamely about a milkman. We both looked down again at the round wet dome between her…
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The Riviera Café
It is not true that Manya and I never connected. We did, many years later. We made children, and created a family and a home. Wow! My first encounter with Manya represented some form of recognition. No, alas, not a hunger, really, but something more inevitable, something that could be satisfied, that harmoniously fell into…
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The Window Washers
If you have ever come rolling off the West Side Highway at around 56th Street, and had the bad luck to get stopped by a red light, then you are familiar with what we are about to tell you. You’ve already guessed from the title. [more]
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The Killing of the Dove
He stayed behind in the garage/basement of that grim, brightly painted San Francisco box house, rooted in place, trembling and terrified by her anger, until she had climbed the inside stairs, and closed the door of her mother’s apartment, turning off the lights as she went. In the darkness, he could hear her angry steps…
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The Snot-nosed Boy
Brasil, early to midfifties, on the sixth floor of a newish apartment building in São Paulo. Lilo brings a boy my age, same complexion, into the apartment. He was probably some Hungarian kid, the son of one of their numerous fellow Hungarian refugees. She was probably just taking care of it, as a favor to…
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Terminus
This is it, the end of the line, as far west as you can go on this continent, at the western terminus of the #2 Clement Street bus line of the San Francisco Muni Railway. Do they still call it that? He returned to Land’s End, finally, from a long and uneventful exile, drawn back…
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Epilogue – The Daughter’s Review
my Papa From: Rachel To: The King of Jesters Hey my Papa, I know what a tough time you’re going through right now, and I wish I could be there to give you love and cheer and distract you by asking you political questions that get you all riled up. I can’t give you hugs…
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The Curse of the Jesuit
Draft Back to Land’s End Stories: Contents Page Saint Ignatius High School Stories: Charles Henry, S.J. To this day, nearly fifty years after the event, Father Henry’s gratuitous act of spiritual violence still astonishes me. Out of nowhere, he served up one fantastic moment of revelation: that a priest could be so casually…
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The Landlady’s Daughter
He lingered, motionless, for a while longer, watching Gary disappear into his house, not knowing what he would do next, just staring, but once again feeling the pull of the amniotic sea beyond the edge of the land. The result of the game they had played had startled him. While he felt good about his…
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The G.I. Practice (or, The New Medicine)
March 2013 I went to my GI doctor today to see about my third colonoscopy. Pretty routine stuff by now: I’ve survived two already. I’ve been going to his practice since forever. Once he fixed my H. Pilori and twice got rid of polyps on my colon. I’m sixty-six now. We joke around a…
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End of the Line
The fog was like gray cotton, suffocating. I knew the sunlight was up there somewhere and the dark ocean somewhere below, but all around me everything was gray. I could see the ground around me, of course, and the nearby trees, but the light was muted, and the sound was dimmed; it was all…
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Hunger III
We still talk occasionally, though it is now several decades later. Our children know each other, having attended some of the same schools over the years, and the same social gatherings of various acquaintances. Yet, to this day, I’ve never mentioned it; neither has she. I’m not really sure it ever happened. It still saddens…
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My First Car
I used to drive a Ford Pinto. I even boasted about its road-handling abilities. And about how its two-liter engine block had a high nickel content, though I wasn’t sure what that meant. And how I was going to bore it out, and put a four-barrel Weber carburetor on it. And torsion bars on the…
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Hunger II
I live just a couple of blocks away from Manya now, in a two-bedroom apartment above the Riviera Cafe. Each bedroom is barely larger the bed in it, so there is no need to buy any other furnishings. At night, the rattle of the train underneath Seventh Avenue is muffled by the noise of the…
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Hunger
It was on one of those fall men’s college weekends that I first met her. I did not know then that the course of a life could change forever, in the briefest of instants, though the change didn’t become fact until many years later. The light from the sun came at sharp angles, making long…
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Party Animal
Chapter Seven I had by now come to dread every occasion when Manya’s work required me to appear at some function, a cocktail party or a dinner, as the trailing spouse. Dread, as in full-blown, dry mouth, gut-churning panic, like getting on an airplane, when flying is not your favorite thing, or like pushing long…
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THE MUNS STORY
Johnny raced out of the boy’s locker room, still wet under his clothes and smelling of chlorine. He actually liked the smell because it made people ask about it. That way he could talk about his swimming, otherwise there was never much to talk about with anybody. It was something he was good at; besides,…