I'm going to throw this out to my audience knowing this is only the beginning of the last narrative in my GHOST RUNNERS series. Let me know if you like it, or just let it be.  It's going out free from me. Now, if a publisher or agent wants to make whoppee with me, that's another story.  But first draft promise is to my audience here."Each...

While swimming or walking Caesarian on the shores off Coney Island, I am reminded that less than a year ago, my precious ocean overturned, and we were greeted by the fish and the mud, and the debris of other shores. When my beautiful granddaughter, Aria, was born and my second son married this past August, I thought about completeness. I thought GH...

Hurricane Sandy was the storm that changed the beach. I remember sitting under the boardwalk. How it took a long time to reach the shore. Today at Coney Island, the sea has wiped the distance away. There is no more shore line. In a few more hurricanes, there will be no beach. Maybe no people. New York is going under the water from which it came. Ha...

I live on the fourth floor of an overpriced pre-war building one block from the Atlantic Ocean. I love the sea. On Saturday, as I had done almost every day for the past three months, I went into the ocean at Brighton Beach. The temperature was sixty-three degrees inside and outside on the shore. I gazed with love at my ocean. I feel it even healed ...

The Olympics begins in a few weeks amid the pageantry of spectacle that will have many of us glued to our television set. London seems to be a wonderful place to hold this event. For Jews, though, the Olympics are a place in which bad things have happened. We cannot celebrate fully; Munich and the death of Israeli athletes must be with us like shat...

Honest to a fault, I thought. My little pension was carrying me through, and I NEVER stole a dime, I swear, but now I  feel I may be involved in something very weird.About seven days ago, my pension check came into my Chase account as it usually does at the end of the month through ACH. Along with that, another ACH electronic check was posted....

In the aftermath of a painful truth about the death of an American boy on an American shore, I taught my racial psychology class, and the irony did not escape us last night. It is in the pre-holiday spirit where the teacher does not want to teach; the students do not want to learn. Early dismissal and goodbye. But it just doesn't go down that way. ...

I knew Dante the first moment he hugged his son but was skittish about doing it, as men often are. His son, Junior is going off to the Gulf War, and the father is choking on the inside cause he knows about combat. He knows about Nam. We are not told about the killings there. You see, that begins the beauty of Vic Fortezza's novel, Killing, on amazon.com. Amid all the words, it is Dante's silence that holds us with a fist of menace. We know from the beginning, this man is wound too tight. He is coiled and G-d Forbid Junior does not come back home.
Yes, I know Dante. He was from the other side of the street where I grew up to be safe. I mean, being white was a blessing in our Brooklyn neighborhood. Being Black was always worse, walking our mean streets. Dante's son knows one of the crowd of ten to thirty that saw Yusef Hawkins killed. He was a Black kid in the wrong neighborhood. Dante's neighborhood.

We were lucky and expected and got only belts in the mouth, a whack in the gut, a kick in the ass. But they let us live if we obeyed the law of the streets, the territories staked out between the bowling alleys and the pizza joints.Killing is Saturday Night Fever on steroids.
By that I mean, it has left me undone. The novel brings back a divisive time and guilt I never thought I owned. You see, I was on the other side of the street, deferred, crazy; seeing spirits, hearing voices during the hearing test. "Hell no, we won't go." And they, not us, were crazy.
But you know, there were Dantes.Though he says stuff that is repugnant to me, he has a case. He is from the other side and hates our protest as much as we hated the war. It was a soldier's prerogative.
Tonight, I recalled a real soldier who came home from the war, as silent as Dante. He was my childhood friend. W.W. came to visit me during a protest rally in Brooklyn. He said nothing, and I said nothing to him. I did not know where or what he had done in Nam. He wasn't telling and I wasn't asking. It was the last time we spoke until tonight.
As Dante tears at my heartstrings,though, I softened my position and felt profound guilt I had not known I carried from that last conversation with my childhood friend. The difference gave him the right to wear Vietnam Veteran caps and does not allow us to wear Vietnam protestor caps. It gives those like him who served the right to have fifty thousand names on the Washington wall. Not one protestor, I believe, is so honored, except, perhaps in isolated places like Kent State. I wanted to put down this book when one of Dante's friends says he was glad about the massacre that tore the fabric of our youth away. But I read on. Though I still hate the words, like i say, they had their case. And now the soldiers finally have the field and the final word.
Still, it is so shocking to hear them mouth the words from the inside out, but Vic Fortezza makes soldiers and dads, sons and wives, breathe with eternal, even heroic life.

This is more than a good read. The dialogue is too real, shocking, to be a play. Look, I am not no mammaluke, no sfacheem. I don't know why this extraordinary novel has taken so long to see the light of day. But I am convinced it is so real in its dialogue that resonates such truths as to make Killing a visceral explosion.
Tonight I spoke to my childhood friend, W.W., whom I did not talk to for fifty years and I said, "I'm sorry," for not understanding his right to be silent. Vic Fortezza has given voice to an era of silence, cowardice and heroism. His amazing gifts bring us a common humanity; the shared affective suffering of our mixed-up generation. "

In the capital of Indian country, on the murals of Aztec Avenue and down the street at Ford Motors, it was payday. A perfect storm greeted the Navajo, the Hopi, and the Zuni; even as far away as Arizona, the huge Pima had gathered. Pick-up trucks and ever gleeful children rode in the open air. It didn't matter the highway. Route 666, though having ...

The White Bridge, the title of my newly published novel by All Things That Matter Press, is not unique in the annals of American literature, though it may well have been. Just yesterday, a very small, yellowish-bound, but otherwise perfectly preserved copy of a one act play arrived indelicately by post from San Francisco. It cost me seven dollars, and gave me, in my hands, the connecting link with my own history. The White Bridge-A One Act Play, written in 1938 by Hildegaarde Flanner. Turns out, Hildegaard was quite a conservationist, planter, essayist and poet and did some prolific work. Also, the copy sent me has to be rare because it was signed by her as a greeting to a reader. The date also was perhaps prophetic: December 7, 1938.
So, it was with an eerie feeling that I began reading Hildegaarde's vision of what I thought was solely mine. Now, those who know my family understand our love for the southwest, Indian territory, Albuquerque, and the ever quirky Gallup, New Mexico. One day, I will write only about the Gallup anomalies that are about ready to surface in my simmering brain. Indeed, just now, while dreaming of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range, I opened the delicate white pages of my little rare find to read Hildegaarde describing her bridge as mythical; hey,like mine; as vast,hey, like mine, as white,  what the ... And her bridge is a connection over a canyon in ...the southwest. Whaa? Not only that. It involves a crime and newsboys and newspapers and selling the news ... like mine.
I know after reading Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi  (The Glass Bead Game) that connections between two events are very likely in the universe of matter. But I am beginning to think that people through history, unbeknownst to each other, are compatriots of the spirit and suffer from similar visions. Hildegaarde, by signing her copy to a reader three years to that most fateful day in American history until, perhaps, 911, was foreshadowing events of the war to come ...that spectacle that created the events and Raison d'être of my The White Bridge.

Coincidences, I am not certain. Six degrees of separation; yes. In the infinite plane of existence,  love and beauty may turn to naught, but the sweet voice of settled history, the good and the bad, will remain our sole companion through the silence of time.They say King David could pluck psalms from the holy air. Maybe that is what we novelists do. We take ideas, metaphors of yesterday, and re-interpret them, give them our perspectives. Breathe life through the nostrils of time. Nothing dies; never my secret loves. Dear Natalie Wood and Emily Bronte.

In a convoluted sense, I truly understand the “Stand Your Ground” law in Florida. Poor Trayvon Martin’s fiancé will just have to find another American dream—of love, family, and her pursuit of happiness. For the rest of us, we will go on until the next atrocity, the next isolated event. But for her, and Trayvon’s family, trust me, this is a "shattered glass," a holocaust. I don’t want to self-aggrandize here, but I have been studying history keenly lately. Just last night I taught my Advanced Topics class: The Psychology of Racism about how the poison of race hatred is hidden nowadays. Aversive racism is the inner biases that hide behind the outer shell of right political thinking.

It is ironic that I teach this course, and I have a confession: “As a result of mental disturbance from my experiences during the atomic wars... I was a willing subject of Goldstein's influence. I was stubborn and egocentric. I went into the proletarian zones...  I had sex with prostitutes. I deliberately contracted syphilis.” The Orwellian quote here I offer to the defense of Mr. Zimmerman, in the present, as yet, non-case, in Florida if ever he would face prosecution. If ever he were forced to stand down.

On Fire With Ginger Lee ... an introduction

“ ... there is a connection to a bridge that they draw like Jesus on a mural, in the dashboards of the American brain. It’s being built, in reality, an irresistible idea, from our country to theirs, to Nazi Germany. Verschauer’s assistant is a doctor named Josef Mengele. He has zeal to study twins. What are Nazis doing here? It’s about racism and where it is all headed; a bad seed, a party I don’t want to be at, at all, but it may be too late to do anything about the blood that is about to be spilled.”
How she envied the passion, but not the plan that had the will to believe in a cause without a care. They lynched, burned, hanged, how else could they kill? Hate, not love, was the fuel to run the engine. She had a pen and a gun, but didn’t know how to fire either effectively. She would have to really learn how to use it, she thought. She would have to have more reason to fight fire with fire. She would have to hate more to be of real service to the nation. Then she remembered the outrage to Jenny Love, and, in Stockton California, to herself. There was an evil about, skirting like a stone across the ocean that nobody could foresee because, well before Mengele came for their eyes, America already had gone blind.
What would Nelly Bly have done? She wondered. “Just get me the bullets, Buddy.”
“Ginger, Ginger Lee,” Bud Grant said, but the telephone line had already gone dead.