Big Al's Condor Club

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In the summer of 1964, the hottest thing going—if you were a sex-crazed teenage boy—was the topless dancer Carol Doda who performed at Big Al’s Condor Club in North Beach. We didn’t drive two thousand miles to San Francisco specifically to see her humongous knockers, but we were in town, and you can eat dim sum only so many hours a day. My recollection is we never got inside the nightclub to see the recent attraction. We did look through the windows, along with dozens of others. My memory tells me there was a closed circuit TV that played the show. I wouldn’t swear to it, but I have a vague recollection of seeing the woman beyond her larger-than-life image on the marquee, where two red lights substituted for her breasts. Then again, years and decades of love and strife and remembering leave smudges on the lens in which we view the past.

Aside from her breasts, the show’s gimmick was a white grand piano, lowered from the ceiling electronically on cables. Carol was already on the piano when it made its short journey to the nightclub floor, after which she began her dance on the piano.

I returned to San Francisco several times after that, but never saw any reason to visit the Condor Club after I was “legal.” My good friend’s parents lived on the corner of Washington and Hyde, a noisy intersection because the cable cars travel up Hyde and turn left on Washington. Fisherman’s Wharf, Chinatown, and City Lights became favored destinations because we could get there on foot. On occasion, we’d walk to the Fairmont or Mark Hopkins.

Many years later I met a geographer who had once worked at US Virgin Islands National Park. Because I had lived in the Virgin Islands, we had something in common and swapped stories. My favorite story involving park rangers happened at Cinnamon Bay, a large beach on St. John that caters to tourists. I must have been with guests from the States, as there are beaches where you can spend the day without seeing a single person—my idea of a good day at the beach. The beach at Cinnamon Bay is shallow and drops off slowly, so you can be quite a distance from shore and stand in waist-deep water, which is where a young woman decided to get some sun on her breasts. She barely got her swimsuit top untied when four fully uniformed park rangers simultaneously waded in after her with the enthusiasm of FBI agents cornering John Dillinger. It appeared to me at least five of us had been watching her. There was a confab between the rangers and the embarrassed young lady, all standing in waist-deep water. I wasn’t close enough to hear what they talked about, but they kept her company long after she covered up. Simply, West Indians are not fond of public nudity.

My geographer friend was born and raised in San Francisco. He told me that during college he worked summers for a company that inventoried department stores and other businesses. He walked with his team to their new job. They were near their destination when workmen came up from a sidewalk freight elevator used to deliver goods. The workmen were excited and waved them over. Seems a building owner had purchased an adjacent building and hired the workman to punch a hole in the basement wall to connect the two. The workmen took them down to the basement to see their discovery. What they found was a German restaurant, the tables all set up for business. Everything was dusty, as might be expected since the restaurant was expected to open again on April 18, 1906, not more than six decades’ later.

Big Al’s Condor Club and Carol Doda disappeared into the a dusty corner of my mind until I saw a 1983 news article about two Condor Club employees who decided to engage in recreational sex on the famed white piano after business hours. In their enthusiasm, one or the other hit the switch that sent the piano on its way to the ceiling. I remember from the article that only the man was crushed. He was thicker than his partner who survived the freaky event. The only moral that comes to mind is to engage in sex only with a partner who is larger than you. Or play all the piano you want, but do not engage in sex on top of it. Or shit happens.

Arrangement in Grey and Black

Winans

In the 1830s, Russia did not have much of a railway system—seventeen miles of track to be exact. Czar Nicholas I wanted to build a line to connect Moscow and St. Petersburg. He looked to America for help. Ross Winans, a locomotive builder in Baltimore and one of America’s first multi-millionaires, sent his two sons, Thomas and William. The Russian delegation that visited America recommended Major George Washington Whistler as consulting engineer. A West Point graduate, Whistler had experience in constructing locomotives as well as infrastructure, especially bridges. The Whistler and Winans families were related. Whistler’s brother George had married Winans’s daughter, Julia.

In 1842, Whistler, with a seven-year contract in hand, moved his family to Russia to oversee the project. His son, James, was eight years old. With a five-year contract, Winans’s sons moved to Russia bringing along major machinery and equipment duty-free. After their first five-year contract, which they completed a year early, they were given another contract. Whistler didn’t fare so well. Just before his contract was up, two years before the project was completed, he died of cholera. Whistler is credited creating what is the standard five-foot-gauge track still in use in Russia and neighboring countries. With his brother-in-law, McNeill, he also designed the Canton Viaduct, in 1835, for the Boston and Providence Railroad. It has been in continuous service since. A bridge model of similar design is exhibited in the October Railroad Museum in St. Petersburg. The Whistler family moved to England for a time before returning to Massachusetts.

The four-hundred-mile-long railroad was completed in 1851.

Whistler

Also in 1851, James Abbott McNeill Whistler began his studies at West Point, as his father and other relatives had done. A combative young man, he was not fit for the regimen and kicked out. He appealed to Robert E. Lee, the superintendent. Some reports attest he was given a special exam. Others, that it was a regular exam. The anecdotal story: He complained for the rest of his life that if silicon were a gas, he would be a general.

In 1852, Thomas Winans started building houses in the States (the Czar paid in gold). His first project was Alexandroffsky, a Russian-style estate on a city block in Baltimore surrounded by a twelve-foot wall when the hoi polloi started closing in. His next project was Crimea, his country estate on nine hundred acres. Other buildings followed.

In1854, William Winans and Eastwick, of the Harrison and Eastwick firm, hired to construct rolling stock for the Russians, were investigated, after a complaint from DuPont, for manufacturing gunpowder for Russia, as the Crimean War broke out, which suggests the Winans were on Russia’s side in the conflict.

Also in 1854, Julia de Kay Winans, Thomas’s daughter, married George William Whistler, son of Major Whistler and brother of James. The two marriages between the Whistler and Winans families were slightly less intimate than the marriages between the Darwin and Wedgwood families, Charles Darwin’s mother and wife were both Wedgwoods.

In 1861, Ross Winans, a Southern sympathizer and member of the Maryland House of Delegates was arrested twice. His companies were reputedly making arms to defend Baltimore from Union troops. He was released after signing a “parole” that he was loyal to the Union.

In 1867, Russia sold Alaska to the US for seven-point-two million dollars. It is reported that more than two/thirds of that payment went to William Winans who continued his railroad work in Russia after the initial project was completed. William retired to England.

In 1871, Whistler painted Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1. The iconic painting of his mother hangs in the Musée ďOrsay.

In 1882, Ross Winans, grandson of his namesake, hired McKim, Mead and White, the most successful architectural firm in America, to design his house. Stanford White designed the forty-six-room Queen Anne mansion. Cass Gilbert served as clerk of the works. The big guns were called in. Tiffany was engaged as was Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who designed a small fountain.

Mercurys and Mayhem

On the day I turned fifteen, I got my license to drive a car. There was a written exam and a behind-the-wheel test. My mother took me over to the test center, never believing I would pass—something I didn’t learn until later. On the way, she mentioned that when she was growing up, she went to the drugstore and paid twenty-five cents for her license. I did pass. A week later, I was driving a red and white 1953 Mercury two-door hardtop. It was tired and rusted, but it was mine.

The world changed. First it was just the freedom to go wherever you wanted, pretty much whenever you wanted. After school, we’d all chip in a quarter, drive down to Lake Pepin—birthplace of waterskiing—just to see if the ice had gone out. One day it was up the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to learn if there was snow yet at Indianhead, a ski resort. There was a sprinkling of the stuff in Ashland. When we reached Hurley, they were using front-end loaders to load dump trucks to get the white stuff off the streets.

Evenings we would just go out cruising, meet up at drive-in restaurants. Three would leave their car parked and go off with a fourth. There was a circuit in St. Paul. It started downtown. The first leg was downhill on Fifth Street. A sweet-sounding exhaust helped because the whole point was to get the pipes rapping in the canyon lined by tall buildings. It was all about the echo. Then we’d wind around to Rice Street by the state capitol and hang a left on University. The cool thing about University was it was six lanes, separated by a narrow concrete divider. The really cool thing was stoplights were spaced four or five blocks apart, perfect for drag racing. The end of the circuit was Porky’s, a drive-in where guys with really great cars we aspired to hung out.

Time not spent driving was spent repairing, cleaning, and upgrading our cars, anything to make them better looking and faster. The favored marque in my neighborhood was Ford. It had been manufacturing the flathead V-8 engine since 1932. Over the years, engine displacement and horsepower increased. It wasn’t until 1954 that Ford came out with an overhead-valve engine. If you owned any Ford flathead-powered car, you aspired to get hold of a 1953 engine, which you could find at the junkyard in Hugo. There was a community swing set, which was barely up to the task of carrying the weight of an engine and therefore not ideal, but it got a lot of use when swapping engines.

Chevy was behind the curve, not offering a V-8 until 1955, but striking gold with its small-block V-8. Where is this all going, you may ask? The drag strip, and letting it rip for a quarter mile. Nothing was planned. I happened to be in the right place at the right time and got an invite. The guy with the car, a GM man, had the ability to make anything go faster. That night he was driving a mid-1950s Pontiac. If you won your class, you got your choice of a three-inch-tall trophy or five bucks.

He took the five bucks and took us to this bar on Randolph to celebrate. The bar was located in an older two-story building, apartments on second floor and storefronts at street level. The bar took up two storefronts, but one entrance was closed. I was to learn later that there were two exits on the alley side.

The four of us slid into a booth. I was underage, but had no problem getting a Coke. It must have been a weekend night because the joint was jammed, mostly by guys a lot older than us. So I was feeling cool and grown up until this big guy walked through the front door wearing an old overcoat, a nylon stocking over his head, and the biggest revolver I’d see until Dirty Harry.

Those of us facing the entry were the first to get to our feet and make for the rear exits. I was right there with them until I turned a corner and the guys I’d been following were coming toward me, hands in the air. We all learned pretty quickly that the man who came in the front door had two accomplices who came through the back doors, both dressed like the first man.

We were ushered to our seats. Then things got confusing. One man told us to sit and another told us to stand. A bit of dark humor didn’t lighten the mood, but it did end the confusion of whether to sit or stand.

A frail old wino, standing at the bar, didn’t take kindly to being ordered around and got belligerent. The first guy, the man with the biggest gun, smashed the wino in the face with his gun. The wino collapsed and lay on the floor bleeding.

The robbers got their act together. We were ordered to sit. While the leader cleaned out the cash register, the other two started cleaning out the patrons. I watched guys stuffing money in their socks, in their pants, in their shirts. I wished I had their problem. What I really wanted was to borrow a few bucks. I didn’t want to upset the man who was going to be cleaning us out in a few seconds.

I did the only thing I could think of. I turned my pockets inside out and crossed my fingers. Probably because I looked exactly like the scared teenager I was, he didn’t bother with me.

The ordeal was simply over. The three robbers fled. Some patrons lamented their loss. Other bragged when they pulled their cash out from where they concealed it. The wino still lay on the floor bleeding.

The crime spree the three started a couple of weeks earlier ended a couple of weeks later in a shootout with the police. It was bloody. I no longer remember the details, but there were deaths and injuries.

Many decades later, I was looking to get some bodywork done on my car and get the whole vehicle repainted. I looked around for body shops. I found one operated by the guy who had invited me to the drag strip and to that bar on Randolph. We had lost touch after the robbery.

I remembered him as sort of a bad boy in a really cool way, a James Dean.

I could still see who he’d been through what he was, but he was all grown up. I gave him my business because I somehow felt that my car would be the better for it. I loved my car. It was my daily driver for twenty-seven years.

Funny, but I never went to the drag strip again. It was not a conscious decision. It just never happened.

Tales From the Family Archives1

If you’re a longtime fan of Doonesbury, you may remember when Duke was appointed governor of Samoa. Upon his arrival, he met his new aide, MacArthur. The aide acknowledged he was named after the general. In fact, his parents named both their children after the general. Duke thought it was a wonderful way to honor the great hero. The aide replied that his sister, Doug, didn’t agree.

My mother, Marilee, was named after a general, also, but she was proud of it. The general was Robert E. Lee. Marilee’s grandfather, Harrison Monroe Strickler, served with E Company, 35^th Virginia Cavalry. As the story goes, there was a dangerous nighttime crossing of a river. Because Lee ordered flares sent up, the troops were saved. The situation must have been serious enough that Harrison credited Lee with saving his life, and what better way to honor the general than to name his granddaughter after him.

Harrison must have had life-changing experiences during the war. He turned twenty at Gettysburg. His outfit is credited with killing the first Yankees, several days before the big battle. He was with Lee at Appomattox Courthouse. He didn’t surrender. He rode home to Luray. For the next forty years, he traveled as a circuit preacher.

When WWI broke out, Harrison’s son Thomas quit high school and joined the Navy. After training in signals at Harvard, he went to sea. I always though it odd that I had a grandfather and a great-grandfather, both about the same age, that were WWI veterans. Harrison’s first wife died and he remarried. His second wife was a much younger woman. Thomas was born around the turn of the century. Thomas’s mother died in the early 1950s, which was a hundred and ten years after her husband was born.

A few years after the war, Thomas graduated from law school in St. Paul, where he met my grandmother. From what I’ve gathered, the twenties did roar for the two of them. Thomas played polo at Fort Snelling. He sang in the civic opera. My grandmother told me about driving to San Antonio in winter in a Stutz Bearcat, wrapped in buffalo robes. Thomas wanted to fly, not practice law. At Kelly Field, they met Charles Lindbergh, the shyest man my grandmother ever knew. She told me the speakeasies in St. Paul were hidden, but sported neon in Chicago. They had two children.

When Marilee was five or six, she thought it would be cool to earn some money. She charged all her friends a dime to ride in her father’s airplane, a two-seater Curtis Jenny. I’m guessing it was summer because she always said that you didn’t know what cold was until you flew to Minot in winter in an open-cockpit airplane.

Understanding her father could only take up one passenger at a time, she set her mind on the problem. The solution was graham crackers. Her friends could eat graham crackers while waiting for a turn. The idea was sound, but the temptation too great. When my grandmother learned of the plot, the graham crackers and the dimes my mother collected were history.

The stock market wasn’t the only crash that ended the roaring twenties. Thomas crashed and burned in a blizzard near Miles City. He was thirty years old.

Neighbor Strikes It Rich

When I was growing up on Goodrich Avenue in St. Paul, my mother befriended a woman a block north on Lincoln Avenue. Unlike my mother who had five kids, her friend had only one son and an older reclusive husband. The supermarket was close by, but without a car, the woman could buy only what she could carry home. She and my mother managed to coordinate grocery shopping for big trips, so they could use our car. Soon they were playing bridge with other neighbor ladies. Bridge may have been what brought them together initially. It was a long time ago and unimportant

Also unimportant, but maybe not—how does one really know—my mother was attractive and educated. She joined the Navy in 1942, interrupting her University of Minnesota education when my grandfather joined the FBI and was sent to Miami. She served at Balboa Hospital and at Pearl Harbor. She finished up college after the war. As to her attractiveness, a girlfriend from school got jealous when she saw my mother and me together on the street, not knowing it was my mother instead of a love interest.

My mother’s friend was not attractive or educated, but she was a nice person and had difficulty with her curmudgeonly and miserly husband who spent a great deal of time alone in an attic he kept locked. Her son, a few years younger than I, got a lot of my hand-me-down clothes. Their household was unhappy.

A few years went by, and not much changed until the woman’s husband died. The story came out that during the Depression the man had run a bar on the East Side near The Mining, as we called 3M those days. When McKnight ran out of money, he paid his workers in stock certificates. The opportunistic husband accepted the stock certificates as legal tender. He had squirreled away a whole trunk of the certificates in his attic, more than a million dollars’ worth.

The woman sold their rundown house and moved to 740 Mississippi River Boulevard, a newly constructed, spiffy high-rise in Highland Park. The rich tend not to hang around with the middle class, not that “class” has anything to do with it. Contact was lost for many years. Then one day, my mother informed that she had run into the woman. Shortly after, they were playing bridge again. It was one of those groups hosted by a different participant each week. When it was the woman’s turn, she held it at Lost Spur, a country club across the river in Mendota, just south of the city. The woman treated her guests to lunch, but not booze—perhaps something to do with her late husband. Each player got a party favor in the form of a tightly wrapped hundred-dollar bill next to her plate. My mother never missed a bridge game.

The son went off to school at Colorado College, I was probably in Vietnam by then. He and I had never been friends. Too many years separated us. In elementary school, three years may as well have been a decade. Also, we attended different high schools. Then there was the money. His mother did complain to my mother that her son seemed to major in skiing.

While the woman certainly acquired a better life after the death of her husband, she wasn’t a particularly happy person. She buried her next two husbands. I expect she was lonely most of her life, and the men she attracted were perhaps attracted more by her money—something I have no knowledge of. Her son remained a problem, appearing to have found a new degree program that required seven years of study to graduate. His mother was able to get his attention when she informed him he was disinherited until he graduated.

He did graduate, but he was too busy skiing to attend his mother’s funeral. My mother was livid. That was the end of the story until recently. I was telling a few people the tale, when one of the women present spoke up, shocked that I knew the man who had been involved with one of her friends in what I gathered was not a happy union. The woman informed me the boy-man had died. I guess the story reached its conclusion, unless I run into offspring or the lawyer who handled the wayward son’s estate.

SUMMER OF LOVE

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It occurs to me that today kicks off the fiftieth anniversary of the Summer of Love. Funny how daydreaming about a long-ago summer of sex, drugs, and rock and roll resulted in an essay that chose a turn-off that had little to do with sex and drugs, included only a smidgen of rock and roll, but a lot about death and automobiles. I attribute it to two realities: writing is a way of thinking; remembering is different from reminiscing.

The iconic summer got off to a bad start. It was my fault, putting in a lot of hours at my part-time restaurant job instead of paying attention to my classes. I did that to pay for my new ride, trading in my 1963 Austin-Healey 3000 for a 1966 Lotus Elan. Emma Peel of the Avengers drove one, as did two-time world champion driver, Jim Clark. Playboy named it the best-handling production car in the world. Gordon Murray, designer of the F1 McLaren supercar three decades later (an auto notably owned by George Harrison and the Sultan of Brunei) reputedly said that his only disappointment with the F1 was he couldn’t give it the steering of the Lotus Elan.

My Humanities final was scheduled for eight a.m., information gleaned from the student newspaper. I showed at the designated hour, the only student who did. Berating my laxity, I wandered around campus for an hour before I found a classmate. He explained the exam was a take-home final, assigned three weeks earlier by Dr. Livingstone. He fanned the spiral notebook as he spoke. His essay on Plato nearly filled it. I hadn’t been feeling particularly good about my predicament before, but this revelation cut me off at the knees.

I found the weary and unkempt professor an hour later, and he gave me twenty-four hours to come up with verbiage that would account for the semester’s grade. It probably goes to explain why I never became a fan of Plato—not that I could imagine living in a republic like The Republic—preferring the pre-Socratic philosophers, especially Empedocles. The professor gave me his home address and instructed me to deliver the essay at ten the following morning.

Badly in need of sleep, I showed at his door at the appointed hour. The two-story 1920s house sat on a large wooded lot, some of which probably belonged to the Short Line, the little-used, nearby railroad tracks that ran through the residential neighborhood below grade, so no visual pollution ruined the lush greenery. A matronly African-American woman in a white nurse’s dress greeted me, along with old newspapers and dust bunnies, but mostly the aura of resignation that settled into every cubby and crack.

Due to some warp in the space-time continuum, I aced the course, but within a few days of getting my grade, I spotted a newspaper article that reported my professor had hanged himself from a backyard tree.

About that time, the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper. I remember working that day. After numerous calls to the record store to get an update, we finally got word the album was in. We sent the dishwasher over to buy five copies for employees. When I got off work, I headed to Muntz’s stand-alone store on University Avenue, two albums in hand.

Madman Muntz was an entrepreneurial character—riches to rags to riches to rags to riches. One year, he sold cars worth seventy-two million. Five years later he sold TVs worth fifty-five million. In 1967, he sold car stereos and tapes worth thirty million. He had come up with the four-track cartridge and player—state-of-art car audio until Lear developed the eight-track.

The really cool thing was nobody gave a shit about intellectual property or piracy. I left the store with a new cartridge loaded with Revolver and Sgt. Pepper and went cruising. I-494 westbound was a trip until my engine started missing. I checked the tach and found the needle hovering at the red line. The speedometer needle was just south of one twenty, scaring the shit out of me. I slowed down and headed homeward at the speed limit.

I ended up on Mississippi River Boulevard, one of my favorite drives, at least until I heard a siren and saw flashing lights in my rearview mirror—it’s difficult to go really slow after going really fast. In a short car chase, the curvy road got me out of my pursuer’s vision just long enough to allow me to make a hard right-hand turn. Two additional right-hand turns got me chasing the pursuing squad.

At the end of July, my buddy and I headed for Road America at Elkhart Lake. We got a late-night start, arriving in time to grab a burger before the Sunday race. I parked on the street behind two Shelby Cobras and in front of another. The big boys from Chicago were in town. It was cool and we were, too. My Lotus was a big attraction at the track. Skinny people actually crawled under it—it sat pretty low to the ground—probably to check out its unique “backbone” chassis.

Because we hadn’t gotten any sleep the night before, we found a motel in Milwaukee and crashed early, before it was even dark. Monday morning we heard about the riots the night before and learned the city was closed down, nobody in or out. The motel owner gave us the word we were a couple of blocks south of the city limits. We decided to continue on to Chicago. Driving all by your lonesome on a six-lane interstate is a bizarre experience, like living in an end-of-the-world sci-fi flick.

I fought the urge to drive fast, especially as the guy in the next seat once drove us across the entire state of Utah, averaging more than one hundred mph, just one leg of a trip west that covered eight thousand miles in three weeks.

A friend came home from Vietnam, all jittery. Then others didn’t come home. Especially glaring was the loss suffered by identical twins. Two had become one, something that couldn’t be forgotten, as the survivor became a persistent reminder. Worse, the survivor, losing his other half, was never complete again. Family and friends weren’t either.

I no longer remember getting any love in the summer of 1967, especially not from my auto insurer. The outfit did not recognize my car as a “two-door coupe,” which is how I described it when I took out the policy. They refused to acknowledge it was a sports car, instead classifying it a “racing car,” which they refused to insure. The four-cylinder Ford block did have a Lotus head that housed double overhead cams and two Webbers that bolted directly to it without benefit of an intake manifold—four lovely velocity stacks. The header junction glowed cherry red. There was lots of performance, and the car weighed under sixteen hundred pounds, almost a go-kart on steroids.

Bugging me all summer was the backyard hanging of a middle-aged man who may have been ill. Still, he gave it up, not like the friends who would be forever young. It wasn’t as if I believed that knowledge led to suicide, but I found no enthusiasm for returning to school. I risked taking some time off from the classroom. That decision got me a quick slap upside the head, a letter from my favorite uncle intimating a study program abroad, the other half of the double-whammy.

While not exactly bracketed by the suicide and selective service, the summer of love segued into a winter of discontent.

I put in fourteen months or so in Vietnam before hitching a ride to Long Beach on the slowest boat in the US Navy—three weeks at sea. Finished up my degree. The Lotus is still on the road. It was a few years ago, anyway. Ran into a Lotus driver while gassing up, and we got to talking. He knew more about my car than I remembered. I miss that car terribly. And I miss the boys who didn’t come home—another set of broken twins among them. I wonder sometimes about the men they might have become. I wonder sometimes about the man I might have become.

LIFE IMITATES ART

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Jimmy Buffett and Herman Wouk

Bibles of all colors and flavors abound. In the Virgin Islands the bible is Don’t Stop the Carnival, written by Herman Wouk, in 1965. Paperman, a middle-aged New York publicist, retires early from the rat race to operate a hotel on Amerigo, a fictitious Caribbean island that suspiciously resembles Hassel Island, located in the harbor of Charlotte Amalie on the island of St. Thomas, where Wouk once worked.

Like all Continentals fresh off the airplane, Paperman is clearly out of his depth. In the islands, it’s not so much what you don’t know. Instead, it’s when you realize the utter irrelevance what you do know. Water still runs downhill, but not happily or with the same enthusiasm. Paperman wasn’t the first to experience it.

In 1937, Franklin Roosevelt appointed William Hastie to the United States District Court of the Virgin Islands, making him America’s first African-American Federal judge. A magna cum laude graduate of Amherst and Harvard Law graduate, Hastie was eminently qualified for the new post, except that when the Admiral of the Ocean Sea named the archipelago on the feast day of St. Ursula, she of the eleven thousand virgin martyrs, no St. Tennessee could be found in the canon, a definite vocational handicap in the Antilles.

In one of those small-world coincidences, I became friends with Hastie’s long-ago clerk—also Harvard Law, who worked in the Minnesota Attorney’s office and served as a Minneapolis councilman. In 1946, Harry Truman appointed Hastie Territorial Governor of the United States Virgin Islands, making him the first African-American governor of the territory.

During his tenure, the islands, purchased from Denmark, in 1916, were in the process of updating the electric grid from direct current to alternating current. No one was happy, and Hastie couldn’t understand why. Finally, a West Indian on his staff pulled him aside, reputedly telling him the people preferred DC, Danish Current, to AC, American Current.

Despite dodging and weaving West Indian attitudes, Paperman took a lot of shots before learning to roll with the punches. The punches weren't all from West Indians. The real world also intruded. In order to get the attention of the of the captain who skippered the barge that ferried fresh water from Puerto Rico to St. Thomas, Paperman needed a real-world solution to ensure he could get his hotel's cistern filled before the barge emptied all its water on St. Thomas. A female employee standing on his dock with her skirt raised proved effective.

The raised skirt worked for Paperman, but the cistern did not. Filled with fresh water, the aged cistern collapsed under the pressure. Easy to see how Paperman’s difficulties were laughable, especially when they weren’t happening to you.

Almost twenty-five years later, when I arrived, water was still barged over from Puerto Rico. Likely, it was the same barge, now condemned. After each shipment was unloaded, the Daily News printed a warning on how many minutes that particular shipment of water had to be boiled before it was potable. Water was precious those days. Public housing only got water during a few specified hours per day.

Desalinization plants were built on the three major US islands during my tenure. On St. John, they goofed up. Instead of taking the water directly from the ocean, they pumped it from a saltwater well. The salinity was seven times saltier than the sea, pretty much destroying the machinery. Years later, in one of life’s small ironies, my best buddy from college provided the island fresh water from a reverse osmosis system packed into a forty-foot container.

Before moving to the Virgin Islands, I read Don’t Stop the Carnival, never imagining myself in Paperman’s shoes. I figured that if I worked hard and kept my nose clean, things would work out. I wasn’t looking to get rich. You go to Hong Kong for that. I looked for an authentic life in paradise. The Economist categorized St. Johnians as lotus-eaters. What could go wrong.

The first thing to go wrong was Hurricane Hugo, a Category 5 storm. I boarded up the house I was working on for owners who lived in the Twin Cities—a job that provided housing in an adjacent building. Then, remembering the tail end of a typhoon I experienced in Vietnam—no dry clothes for days—I threw all my clothes into the washing machine, figuring to let them ride out the storm in the clothes dryer. About a half hour later, at high noon, WAPA, the Water And Power Authority, pulled the plug on the island. You don’t feel particularly bright when you blunder, but you feel downright stupid when you outsmart yourself.

It was a blue-sky, sunshine afternoon. The hurricane was still hours away, but I’d succeeded in accomplishing exactly what I’d hoped to avoid: my clothes were soaking in a tub of water. I buttoned up the wood shutters on the building I was living in. About three pm, it started to drizzle—the sky doesn’t turn black like it does in the Midwest, just gray. While I sat a couple hundred feet up on the mountainside, under the covered portion of my deck and waited, I watched a big old sailboat enter the harbor. A restored Chevy panel wagon from the late ‘40s or early ‘50s sat on its deck. The hundred-and-ten-foot Great Lakes Pilot Schooner built in Thunder Bay (my neck of the woods), in 1899, was to play a key role in Greater Trouble in the Lesser Antilles and Low Jinks on the High Seas.

I didn’t know a soul on the island, so I was surprised when one of my few neighbors stopped by and asked if I wanted to spend the night in the concrete cistern of a house he was building. Our tiny neighborhood, Little Plantation, had attained notoriety, our steep access road, specifically. Several accidents had occurred—one, fatal. I declined the invitation, not imagining anything less comfortable than spending the night in a concrete cistern.

The hurricane that was supposed to hit at five pm hung around St. Croix, toppling trees and knocking down concrete-block buildings. It was after midnight when I felt and heard the explosion. I jumped out of bed and headed for the bathroom, which shared a wall with the concrete cistern. My flashlight revealed whitecaps in the toilet bowl. On the lowest level, I couldn’t be sure what was left of the building overhead. There was no way I was going to look. I did hear a lot of furniture moving around.

I ended up applauding my decision to load up the washing machine before the storm. My clothes were about all I owned that didn’t go littering the mountainside when the roof on my neighbor’s guesthouse blasted through my bedroom wall (a bedroom I abandoned for the storm) and blew out the patio doors on the adjacent wall.

The next day, after I collected my stuff from the mountainside, my neighbor helped board up the damaged wall. I waited for the power to come on, sweeping out a three-inch-deep pile of leaves and debris on the floors, admiring minuscule shards of glass imbedded in the cypress wall paneling that sparkled in sunlight—glass that had once been windows. The effect was walls of diamond dust.

Boats littered the shoreline in the bay below. One was a seventy-foot ketch. A couple of days later, a tug and barge showed up. Using the barge’s crane, the captain plucked the seaworthy boats from shore. The ketch sat in a sling most of the day (half the money—we speculated five grand—got the boat in a sling, the other half floated it). As soon as the ketch was floated, which was at dusk, the man and his young son snatched another five boats from the shore and lined them up on the barge’s floodlit deck, so the owners could repair them overnight. The derelicts still littered the shore when the captain pulled out the next morning.

Downed trees blocked roads. I don’t know how much rain fell. My device only measured the first foot. Enough fell that it destabilized soil in the road cuts, toppling more trees and sending rocks tumbling onto the roads. Sandy beaches were strewn with rotting succulents and cacti, as if Gallagher had smashed watermelons. A lot of homeless critters—termites, bees, and rats—wanted to share my digs, but that’s a long story. FYI: rats are a lot smarter than you think, and they pass on information to the next generation.

What did I do? I waited for the power to come on. It was a long wait. Almost three months. We did have a little power during the day, thanks to a kind-hearted soul who donated a generator that was set up nearby and wired into that part of the grid where the conductors conducted. I still have the T-shirt: MOFPC—My Own Fucking Power Company.

What did I do next? I got a job working at a beachside restaurant a couple miles down the road. The operator, a road builder (specializing in jungle roads) had run the place with his girlfriend. She had split weeks before. His cook never showed after the storm. Searchers found his cottage duct-taped tight from the inside, windows and doors, but he was gone. Some weeks later, when an opportunity from the World Bank came along to build a road in Borneo, he inquired if I was interested in taking over his lease. It had almost ten years to run, so I agreed. During our negotiations, he queried whether I’d read Don’t Stop the Carnival. I said I had. He asked what I’d thought of it. I said I laughed. He suggested I read it again. When I did, he quizzed me a second time. I told him I cried. We shook hands to cement our deal.

Oscar Wilde said that life imitates art more than art imitates life. About that, as about many other things, Wilde was absolutely correct.

The business was a success from day one. The owner—who lived next door, raised goats and drove a taxi—got a monthly rent payment plus a percentage of the gross sales. She was shitting in high clover, but insisted on cutting off her nose to spite her face. Unhappy with her previous tenant for splitting up with his girlfriend (after he assured me he and the landlord were great friends), she took me to court.

President Reagan appointed my attorney to the federal bench. Despite being African-American, she wasn’t a Virgin Islander. Unlike Hastie, she never got through the door to her office. One of her underlings sat in the courtroom with me while my landlord held the lease up to the light and pronounced it a forgery. The judge almost fell out of his chair. I saw it as a good sign. Was I ever mistaken. I’d have been better off hiring an obeahmon than a lawyer. The trial lasted the entire day, interrupted by other cases. The judge was a reasonable man, but his reasonableness was limited to giving me several months to exit the premises instead of the several hours my landlord demanded.

On my last day of business, I threw a party. Several long-term residents claimed it set a new high-water mark. We ate up all the food and drank up all the booze. What didn’t get consumed went home with the guests. I gave one West Indian couple the barstools they courted on. Some women got premoistened T-shirts. Meanwhile, the landlord sat under a nearby sea grape tree, chanting and shaking the bones—not a physical exercise, but working the obeah.

The exercise didn’t work well for her. Her next tenant didn’t last, and the building stood empty for months at a time. She likely made more money in a month or two from me than she did in the next several years. Me, I found a job managing another bar and restaurant closer to home. It was a new operation, but the owners were not suited to operating it. A sign in the kitchen proclaimed: “No Eating Allowed.” When employees started bringing their own food from home, the sign changed: “No Chewing Allowed.” The owner simply was not going to allow employees to eat the restaurant’s food or their own food on her dime, never mind that she refused to give them lunch breaks.

Paperman struggled to get his world under control. It took him a while, but step by step he succeeded in constructing a life in the islands. It took me a while, too, but I succeeded in the same way. Just when he seemed to achieve immunity from the carnival, two senseless deaths among his acquaintances sent Paperman packing for New York.

One of my waitresses was diagnosed with cancer. We decided to throw a party at the restaurant and raise some money for her. Booze. Live entertainment. Hors de’oeuvres. A friend sold a calendar of near-naked girls he had filmed underwater, donating the proceeds. A big deal. Then came the phone call. An irregular patron, rumored to sell drugs, looking for his girlfriend.

Admittedly, the guy was a jerk, at least a jerk toward me. On the occasions I forgot to serve his Cuba Libre without a lime wedge, he’d toss the lime at me. His girlfriend was with another man. He told her that if she didn’t come home, he would kill himself. She didn’t and he did.

Across the bay, at another bar and restaurant, which had closed early because of our shindig, the body of my dishwasher was found the next morning, a bullet in his head. Due to the suicide on the other side of the island, the police were not prompt in arriving. It is difficult to open your business with a corpse blocking the entry.

Unlike Paperman, I got both deaths on the same day. Like Paperman learned, death does, as John Donne pointed out, diminish one. The bell always tolls for thee. What’s funny about your life imitating art is that you can realize it as it’s happening, but you can’t really do anything about it. It’s sort of like a recurring dream. You live through it, realize it’s a dream, but you go to bed the next night and it’s déjà vu all over again.

Police did not solve the dishwasher’s murder.

The one-hundred-two-year-old Wouk published Sailor and Fiddler, his last novel (according to him), at age one hundred. He is acclaimed for The Caine Mutiny, Youngblood Hawke, Winds of War, and War and Remembrance. In 1997, he collaborated with Jimmy Buffett to create a musical based on Don’t Stop the Carnival.