That I was his friend at all was itself something of a minor miracle since he often chose the talented and famous as friends, but he justified my friendship I suppose by elevating me to the status of “crackerjack computer professional” who was able to help him up off the “floor in a pool of blood” as he bombastically would describe the occasional difficulties he encountered in using his computer.  However those problems and questions occurred often enough that from about 2004 until his stroke ended our ability to communicate regularly, we spoke almost every day by Skype.  He would often even call to ask me to hold his “virtual hand” as he opened some piece of correspondence he had received that he feared might contain ominous or unwelcome news. 

The picture above at the right, taken by his friend Wayne Gallasch, was his favorite picture of himself.  Holding Maxe in his arms and wearing that rakish, leather Aussie hat that Greg Dixon gave him and his favorite coveralls is the way I will choose to remember him for it was the quintessential Paul that I knew in happier times. 

I invite you to read back through the entries he made here on this blog when you want to enjoy his brilliant writing and wit, and I encourage you, his other friends, to use the comments section below this entry to post your memories of him and to celebrate the unique soul that he was.  I think we might all agree that the Heavenly Choir had better be on its toes and sing on key or he may just get up and walk out at intermission.

Paul and I met, as I said in that first essay, online in iLink Writers in the early 1990s. We’ve been in each other’s physical presence only two times during our entire friendship — once in 1995 in San Francisco for less than a week and once in Berlin in 2003 for about two weeks, when Paul invited me into his home. Back then I was much more committed to blogging than I am now, so I wrote about that 2003 visit with Paul rather extensively (beginning here and continuing for about 16 consecutive entries until this one).

But through the years we’ve become closer as friends as we’ve moved further apart physically. Perhaps the irony is that there’s an inverse correlation between physical proximity and being really close friends. I’m sure if he and I were confined in the same space for any prolonged period of time, we’d drive each other insane. He tolerates me best, and with just cause, in small doses.

When I think of him, it is with great fondness and profound admiration. I really like him and spending time with him, in spite of himself. I sense he feels the same about me, and I find that very rewarding.

Today is his 86th birthday, so I want to tell him this.

Paul, I hope you get what you want for your birthday, whatever that is. I have already gotten everything I could have possibly hoped for in return for the time I have spent being your friend. I look forward to whatever time we have left to share.

I love you, Paul, and I thank you for rewarding me with your friendship.

To those of you who may read this, I invite you to write your own essay about your friend Paul in the comments below. And even if you can’t get it completed on his birthday, I’m sure he will treasure reading how you describe your friendship with him, and it will give you a way to share your wishes for him. Thank you, if you take the time to do so.

My most recent conversations with him indicate that he is doing as well as can be expected, but his stroke, coupled with his apparently approaching dementia, have resulted in his almost total inability to do things on the Internet that he used to do. Both he and I mourn the passage of that milestone, but he continues to want to interact with the world, despite his limitations. Alas, we are all therefore condemned to my imperfect attempts to convey what he might have said or wanted to say if he were still able.

Please know that he loves you and appreciates all of you and your continued interest in him and his welfare.

Dear Mr. Deas,

as Berlin correspondent for www.MusicalAmerica.com I attended – and enjoyed – your concert this afternoon at the Komische Oper, and I have a footnote to Aaron Copland’s arrangement of “I Bought Me a Cat” that I felt a real urge at least to tell you about.  I decided against coming uninvited to the party that undoubtedly took place in the house Casino afterwards; I didn’t want to seem like a party-crasher.

In New York half a century or so ago, circumstances involved me personally in the birthing of that meanwhile famous arrangement Aaron made at that time – but when he himself played the piano part and (more or less) croaked the tune, he always, invariably, incorporated a gimmick I’ve never known any singer to use, but to my way of thinking it adds a final fillip that I find considerably enriches the song’s ending.

Oliver Smith had made a fortune in royalties for having designed that goldmine called “Oklahoma!” and he used that money to set himself up as a producer (of hits including another goldmine called “West Side Story”).  He had a plan to outdo “Oklahoma!” and at the same time bring High Art to Broadway.  With that in mind he bought the rights to Erskine Caldwell’s novel “Tragic Ground”, engaged Lynn Riggs (the born Oklahoman whose play “Green Grow the Lilacs” had provided the raw material for “Oklahoma!”) to adapt the book and write the lyrics, and Agnes de Mille, whose choreography for “Oklahoma!” had introduced ballet to the Broadway musical stage, to do not only the choreography but also stage the entire production.  My friendship with both Riggs and Copland got me involved in Aaron’s spiffy setting of “I Bought Me a Cat.”

Lynn Riggs could not read music but his apartment (at 1 Christopher Street) did have an upright piano, so I got turned into a sort of bilateral amanuensis for both him and Copland.  During early planning discussions, Lynn told Aaron that during his Oklahoma childhood he’d grown up with a local ditty Aaron might find worth incorporating into “Tragic Ground” – and proceeded to sing it for him: “I Bought Me a Cat.”  Aaron took to it immediately, and it apparently set itself, for very soon after that Aaron sat down at Lynn’s upright and both played and sang his arrangement’s official world premiere.

Aaron had had Agnes de Mille’s choreography and dancers in mind, so at the very end of each verse, he’d insert a brief hiatus to clap his hands, twice, before continuing with the final “My cat says fiddle-eye-fee”, doing what he intended to have Agnes’s dancers do.  However – and finally here comes the bug I want to plant in your own ear – at the end of the very last stanza (“I bought me a wife”), he’d clap his hands not the two times the listener expected but, all of a sudden, three times, with an emphatic accent on the third clap, and only then go on to the valedictory tagline.

I’ve always found that little built-in surprise a delightful way to startle an audience, and if you do, too, I offer you this tidbit with my compliments and best wishes.  As far as I know, you’d become the first singer ever to perform that captivating little song the way Aaron himself did.

“Tragic Ground” never did get produced – or, for that matter, even finished.  If you have access to Volume 2 of the memoirs Aaron wrote with Yale’s Vivian Perlis, you might find footnote number. . . .  DAMN!  I can’t at the moment find my own copy, but you can easily locate the passage I have in mind by checking the index for “Alone at Night”, the nearest thing to a conventional pop song Aaron contributed, which he optimistically thought (and for financial reasons hoped) just might have a chance to become a popular hit.

With sincere best wishes,

Paul Moor

My first sixteen years in this vale of tears I passed under the strict, strait-laced Southern Baptist roof of my Mississippi-born parents (e.g., just for openers, no card-playing or movie-going on Sundays), with my almost hysterically religious/superstitious mother the dominant figure in that ill-starred dyad.  They did not belong to what their native state knew as a “Primitive Baptist Church” – a term I first discovered during an early visit to that exotic part of the country in my mother’s charge, where you’d see signs out in front of an occasional run-down church proclaiming it the This-or-That “Primitive Baptist Church”.  When I asked my mother the obvious question, her answer consisted entirely of this: “With foot-washin’”.

At least not snake-handlin’. That customarily indoor sport seemed focused elsewhere in the deep dark South, I believe in the hillbillier areas of Tennessee.  I’d long known that such things did enliven the “religious” services of some ultra-fundamentalist Protestant sects, but my own eyes – figuratively out on stems – didn’t witness that until an unforgettable documentary film (Dutch-made, as I recall) turned up years ago on German television, and branded itself indelibly into my memory.

During that part of the church service the European visitors had managed to film, the congregation members first danced themselves into an almost literally hysterical frenzy, then out would come the snakes, in a box where the totally ecstatic celebrants would take hold of them, lift them out, and hold them more or less at arm’s length while their frenzied dancing continued.  The filming even captured the instant when one serpent actually sank his fangs into the arm of the man “handling” him; the case-hardened pros behind the cameras naturally let their film run uninterrupted, and the man finally lapsed into his fatal last coma with them recording every last second of it.

These nuts justify what they do with some obscure verse from the omniscient, unquestionable Bible, naturally; this poor devil lapsed into unconsciousness flat on his back, clutching a Bible thoughtfully placed into each hand by his attentive co-religionists, who prayed their fool heads off for the good Lord Jesus not to let him die for merely having obeyed what they interpreted as a divinely inspired Biblical command.  (If this folkloric activity interests anyone reading this, let me know and I can go into more detail about that permanently unforgettable film at another time.)

Anyway, getting back to today’s posting….  My first sixteen years exposed me to a downright pathologically unhealthy anti-sexual childhood I somehow managed to survive.  When I finally went from El Paso’s Stephen F. Austin High School to New York’s Juilliard School of Music, unshakably confident of course that at sixteen I already knew just about everything worth knowing, I’d never once had a talk with either parent about sexual matters.  That deprivation has left me with a lifelong insatiable curiosity – especially after my introductory encounter with psychoanalysis, which in time came close to becoming my profession – about every aspect of the human animal’s almost infinitely variegated sexuality, some of those aspects exotic indeed … but what popped up today on my monitor screen surprised even comparatively case-hardened me.

“Red” Camp, the wild and wonderful jazz pianist married to a faculty member during my two post-Juilliard years at the University of Texas  in Austin, used to joke about some gentlemen he described as “queer for doorknobs”.  Well, this English dude brought to my unprepared attention this morning a specimen one would have to call queer for automobiles.

I forget the name of an especially sleazy tabloid (the Enquirer?) sold at the check-out of virtually every U.S. supermarket, but if you think that sleaze-sheet sets a journalistic low, you haven’t yet wallowed in the bottom-scraping equivalent area of the British press.  The present story at hand came from one of that London ilk’s standard-setters, The Sun.

To get finally to the point, Chris Donald, a literally passionate Cheshire mechanic by profession, in some mysterious way “makes love” to classy automobiles (The Sun uncharacteristically draws a veil over explicit details) that somehow ring his libidinal chimes.  The paper does at least in passing drop a tantalizing mention of exhaust pipes….

But instead of teasing you with mere paraphrasing, let me without further ado turn you over to that complete article.

Back in ancient times, before speed-of-light electronic journalism crowded old teletype news agencies out of first place, the maxim prevailed “If copy comes in, move it” – i.e., on its way into print on old-fashioned paper.  I never worked for a news agency (thank God: the unremitting pressure of that kind of journalism would probably have given me a gastric ulcer) but for about twelve years, starting in 1958, I did work almost exclusively for Time-Life International, where I learned the hard way that if you filed a story early in the editorial week, New York expected you to keep them additionally informed right up to press time. One residuum of that training expresses itself whenever something grabs me as genuine news: whenever I feel that visceral response, I instantaneously become a personification of the old nominally retired fire-horse, reflexively responding to the sound of the fire-bell.  As a result of that training – and although I deplored the reactionary political stance of Time Inc. (no comma after the magazine’s name, please – an order from its founder Henry Luce), I have to concede that I did indeed learn some invaluable strictly journalistic lessons there, especially with regard to getting facts as completely straight as humanly possible and also something so many people who communicate in English never do get around to learning: using words with absolutely maximum precision so that what you write says not approximately but exactly what you want to get across.

My TLI years fell within the Cold War, and I found myself repeatedly locking horns with old-guard Luceniks, especially two successive bureau chiefs in Bonn.  Covering Berlin plus East Germany (formerly the Soviet Zone of Occupation) required my fairly frequent attendance at press conferences over in East Berlin, where the Moscow-dominated political line missed no opportunity to embarrass and discredit the politics of the Bonn government, most frequently by means of exquisitely documented attacks based on unquestionably legitimate news archives. 

Let one example suffice for so many.  One such volley from East Berlin drew a bead on West Berlin’s Evangelical (Protestant, more or less Lutheran) Bishop Otto Dibelius after excavating a past publication of his in which he said in so many unequivocal words that he had always considered himself an anti-Semite. In other words: Bishop Dibelius, already a major figure among Germany’s Christians, publicly proclaimed himself in accord with Adolf Hitler’s eventually genocidal policy of anti-Semitism.

To me that startling revelation automatically meant NEWS, so I suggested the story and New York scheduled it – to the considerable discomfiture of my Bonn bureau chief, whose knee-jerk reaction to any news from behind the Iron Curtain dismissed it as almost automatically false.  Once it landed on New York’s schedule, though, he had no alternative but to let me run with it.  Bishop Dibelius himself declined to receive me, but I did manage a protracted telephone conversation with one of his close associates.  I patiently listened to a lengthy recital of unstinted praise for this and that in the crusty old man’s past – most of which I already knew and assuredly in no way discounted – but finally my patience ran out and I cornered him with the question “Now about that quotation – authentic or false?”  He paused for several moments before finally, after noticeable hesitation, admitting: “Stimmen tut’s” – meaning the East Berliners did indeed have their facts straight.

I have never lost sight of the fact that Germany’s powerful Communist Party (the KPD) during the late 1920s and early 1930s most militantly opposed the threatening Nazis, for which they paid bitterly not only during Hitler’s Third Reich but even also after the founding of the Bonn government - which eventually actually outlawed the KPD and made its admitted members virtually unemployable.  Another German TV documentary this past weekend depicted the plight of anti-Nazi Germans, most of them Jews, who had fled from Nazi Germany to France where they even joined the French Résistance and actually fought side by side with French men and women after Nazi Germany invaded and occupied France.  They, too, eventually paid a bitterly humiliating price for their heroism. 

From that documentary I learned one fact new to me.  When France celebrated some big Résistance anniversary and the French president himself requested the Bonn government to send some of those wartime German members as honored representatives, Chancellor Helmut Kohl himself blocked such a delegation, explaining to his French colleague - as if that explained and excused everything - that his government regarded those German members of the Résistance as “extreme leftists and Communists” and therefore unfit to represent Kohl’s Germany in Paris.

I may well come back to this general topic, for it has long occupied a place close to my heart.  Meanwhile you can read that Anglophone Spiegel article by clicking here.

” . . . I enjoyed reading these reminiscences of the times you spent with Rostropovich. Such an intimate portrait as emerges here provides a richness of detail about such famous people that those of us who only know them from their professional reputation seldom get to experience.

“As I’ve looked over that list of people here on your blog that you report having known personally during your life, any number of them intrigue me. I’d be very interested in your telling me how you came to know people like Aaron Copland or Tennessee Williams or Bob Hope or Dorothy Parker, and of course, I’d enjoy as much detail about the times you spent with them as you’d be willing to share….”

Wow . . . what a rare direct invitation to name-drop!

And naturally I’ll do my best to oblige.

For openers, the merest lick & a promise:

1.) Aaron Copland: When I returned to NYC at 19, with a diploma in hand certifying me a freshly baked Bachelor Musicae of the University of Texas in Austin, I had along with that a priceless letter of introduction to him from his boyhood friend Aaron Schaffer, meanwhile Dean of Modern Languages at U.T.  Aaron C. told me he’d first confided to Aaron S. his boyhood ambition to become a composer.

2.) 10 Wms. (as he sometimes whimsically signed himself in the return-address part of a letter envelope): At 18 I attracted the acquisitive attention of “the Texas Tornado” (as Tennessee referred to her) née Margo Jones, who joined the U.T. drama faculty the fall of 1942 after the World War II draft had taken all the men available for her Houston Community Players and she had no choice but to close the company down.  Our June/January affair (11 years’ age difference) upset the U.T. campus the 1942-43 winter term, but Margo numbered among the authentic discoverers of Tennessee, and through that connection he actually did me a major favor some months before he and I even met, lining up for me the Manhattan apartment of a friend of his spending that summer away from the putrid city.  We met only that fall when he returned from his comparative slave-labor Hollywood job, bringing with him the newly completed typescript of “The Glass Menagerie”, a private reading of which I attended in New York.

3.) Bob Hope: a truly brief encounter, during my first trip to Moscow in early 1958 (for what turned into The Van Cliburn Sensation).  The Soviet attitude towards the USA had thawed a trifle, just enough for Hope’s entire production team to film a program in Moscow (during which he made some singularly tactless, outrageously undiplomatic cracks that must have had the U.S. Ambassador “Tommy” Thompson cringing – e.g., all the TV antennas on Moscow rooves: ”no receivers, only aerials”).  I spent an evening out at the Embassy Club on the river, run by the Embassy’s Marine guards, where Bob Hope improvised hilariously for quite a while, but my only personal exchange with him occurred when we once stood side by side at urinals in the lobby men’s room of the National Hotel, when we had a brief exchange of an alimentary nature, during which he spoke of his “blasting problem”.

4.) Dorothy Parker (c. 1947) I met in the furnished apartment on lower Park Avenue the choreographer Jerome Robbins temporarily occupied, which he’d made available for a fund-raising party to benefit a left-wing organization called UNAVA, the United Negro American Veterans’ Association.  Hally, the first wife of John Henry Faulk, wanted me to play the not very good upright piano there, and to my boundless delight I had pie-eyed Dorothy Parker – for me already virtually immortal – mooning at me from only a few feet directly in front of me, elbows propped on the piano, egging me on and on.  That led to a truly cherished friendship – during the lull between her two profoundly neurotic marriages to Alan Campbell – which got put on hold when she moved back to him in Hollywood.  I feel a moral obligation to write at some length about my Dorothy Parker – a totally different person from the saber-tongued, poison-penned figure of popular legend.  I found her possibly the saddest of all the uncountable sad people I’ve known, at least to me touchingly kind and generous.  On one occasion she spontaneously, impulsively did me a favor of major proportions – psychologically too intricate to go into at the moment.

I believe that story reported the November 1982 election that listed one candidate for the city’s Board of Supervisors as Sister Boom-Boom, with the explanatory addendum one line lower “Nun of the above.”  Sister Boom-Boom belonged to a highly visible, almost hyper-active group of transvestite political activists called “The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.”  Sister Boom-Boom actually polled 23,124 votes – assuredly nothing to sneeze at.  Even the most case-hardened bird-watcher has always found San Francisco something special, truly in a class to itself.

I would never think of calling my esteemed San Francisco friend Father Robert Cromey an adult delinquent, but neither does he fit the mold of what most people think of as even an Episcopal clergyman.  Soon after I settled there, I’d heard so much about his Trinity Church that sheer curiosity impelled my first visit.  New and solitary in that weird city, attempting a wrenching adjustment after 32 years in Europe, I filled out the visitors’ card in the hymnal rack before me – and it startled me to get a telephone call only a day or so later from Father Cromey himself, inviting me to come in for a personal chat.  I found a big, strapping, athletic-looking, handsome man who radiated unforced friendliness.  I told him right off the bat that I didn’t want him to get the wrong idea, but I considered myself – the direct result of my Mississippi-born parents’ having force-fed me the strait-laced puritanical doctrines of the Southern Baptist Convention until I left home at 16 for Juilliard – an open-minded agnostic.  (Linguistic punctilio stopped me short of out-and-out atheism, which to my way of thinking implies proven certainty that God does not exist.)  My new friend gave me an even bigger smile and said: “Think of Trinity as a cafeteria – take what you want, leave what you don’t.”  It didn’t take long for Robert and his (previously Mormon) wife Ann to become dear and especially esteemed friends of mine.

This past March, the “San Francisco Examiner” published this letter over Robert Cromey’s name:

“Pornography has a positive side.  Psychologist Bill Perry (SF Examiner 3-6-07) says porno is bad for people.  I am a California Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and a Priest of the Episcopal Church and have found sexually explicit films and videos helpful for people who are sexually dysfunctional.  I and other therapists have suggested viewing porn films as helpful in re-stimulating sexual awareness in gay and straight couples.

“Studies of the effects of pornography on adults and even children are not absolutely clear that such viewing is harmful.  Porn is a billion-dollar industry indicating millions of Americans buy and watch porn.  Few of them can be called ill or criminal.

“Furthermore, images of nude men and women can be very aesthetically pleasing; porn is one way for people to enjoy the human body.”

Yup, I said to myself, that’s my Robert.  (Earlier this month, incidentally, “The New York Times” reported that according to the trade publication “AVN” sales and rentals of pornographic videos in 2005 came to $4,280,000,000 – that’s not millions but billions – and $3,620,000,000 the year following, as only a part of “the overall $13,000,000,000 sex-related entertainment market.”)

I’ve always admired Robert for a number of things, among them his repeatedly proven readiness to act as well as speak and write.  To cite only one instance, perhaps the most impressive, in 1968, with many Americans all over the country outraged over a particularly brutal racist murder in Selma, Alabama, Robert travelled there to join Martin Luther King in what became known as the Freedom March from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital.

Remember?  ”On Sunday March 7, 1965, about six hundred people began a fifty-four mile march from Selma, Alabama to the state capitol in Montgomery.  They were demonstrating for African American voting rights and to commemorate the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, shot three weeks earlier by a state trooper while trying to protect his mother at a civil-rights demonstration.  On the outskirts of Selma, after they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the marchers, in plain sight of photographers and journalists, were brutally assaulted by heavily armed state troopers and deputies.

“One hundred years after the Civil War, in many parts of the nation, the 15th Amendment had been nullified by discriminatory laws, ordinances, intimidation, violence, and fear which kept a majority of African Americans from the polls.  The situation was particularly egregious in the city of Selma, in Dallas County, Alabama, where African Americans made up more than half the population yet comprised only about 2% of the registered voters. . . .”

In San Francisco, needless to say, Robert has long since become a familiar figure in public demonstrations of all kinds, with his letters frequently published in the daily “Chronicle” and “Examiner”.  Acting on a tip, I went to one Sunday-morning service at Trinity featuring Robert’s bishop William Swing as guest preacher.  Leading off, Bishop Swing mentioned that this exchange took place (as I recall) annually, when sweetness and light prevailed – temporarily: “the rest of the time we drive each other mad.”  Regulars in the congregation around me smiled and nodded knowingly.

Only once have Robert and I ever come even close to locking horns over a religious issue.  Religion – the various world religions – completely to one side, I regard as irrefutable perhaps the most famous quotation from that fire-breathing militant old professional atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair: “Religion has caused more misery to all of mankind in every stage of human history than any other single idea” – not Christianity, not Islam, not any individual religion, but the fundamental concept of religion itself.  Robert had kind words for Ms. O’Hair as a person, but not for her out-and-out atheism.

So all in all it came as no surprise to me when a book Robert published two years ago bore the defiantly provocative title “Sex Priest”.  Perusing it provides numerous little zingers, but for the moment I’ll let one suffice:

“God is love.

“Love is sex.

“Therefore, God is sex.”

(I believe I can quote verbatim from memory one of Woody Allen’s better aphorisms, on which Robert as I know him would probably see eye to eye with him: “Sex is the answer.  What is the question?”)

One review of Robert’s book led off with this:

“With his new memoir, Sex Priest, Robert Cromey has done the churches a great service.  He has opened up the private and personal life of a priest (his own) with unflinching honesty.  He has neither minced words nor glossed over events in describing his own sexual experience.”

One characteristic excerpt:

“Priests are sexual creatures.  We masturbate, have intercourse, anal and oral sex, same-gender sex, commit adultery, bestiality, incest, fornicate, enjoy bondage, abuse children, and commit any and all forms of sex known to human beings.  We spend most of our time in ministry but we are sexual beings, too.  Most priests, bishops, deacons, ministers, mullahs, and rabbis in the world religions are sex-positive in their outlook. We  enjoy ecstasy, orgasm, pleasure, and joy in our sexuality.  We love to kiss, fondle, and embrace.  We enjoy fucking, sucking, and licking. 

“We teach others to enjoy their sexuality, too.  Joy and pleasure are not the first thing one thinks of about Christian clergy.  The pious priest and puritan parson railing against the adulterer, masturbator, and single mother are familiar.  Many scream against abortion and birth control.  But they are a minority with a good press.  Recently, Roman Catholic priests have given sex a bad name by being accused and often convicted of child molestation with altar boys and teen-age girls and women under their pastoral care.  Celibacy, a lonely bachelor life and poor training in human relations have caused this blight on the Christian ministry.  Sadly most Christian clergy do not speak or teach publicly their sex-positive views. We  hint and smirk but fail to be open about our sexuality. . . .”

That passage reminds me of a conversation I recorded in his San Francisco Institute with Wardell Pomeroy, Ph. D., one of Dr. Alfred C.  Kinsey’s closest co-workers, while doing research for a paper I published in the German psychoanalytic journal “Psyche”.  I quote from my verbatim transcript of that tape-recording when we got around to the etiology of homosexuality:

“‘You’re asking the wrong question.  The real question is: ‘Why isn’t everybody bisexual?’  Discussion of that question elicited from Dr. Pomeroy a casual but categorical statement which may well stun and scandalize most Americans.  In the best of all possible worlds, with everybody, free of neurotic complications and social taboos, just doing what comes naturally, he said, ‘I think most people would be [Kinsey] twos’ – bisexual, but more hetero- than homosexual.’  Nota bene: he did not say ones – almost but not quite exclusively heterosexual.  ‘If you look at other mammals, particularly the higher mammals, you find exactly that.  Homosexuality is rampant and available, but they end up procreating and having young.  So, mostly twos.  I think that’s the way it would be with the human animal.’”

As you’d expect, Robert has his own blog - and here you’ll find more information about his book “Sex Priest”.

Robert and Ann Cromey plan to visit Berlin this September.  I look forward to that treat enormously.

November 6, 1992

Misha My Love

From the very beginning, my little fawn-colored, nubbin-tailed French bulldog Misha had an almost preternatural ability to divine any intentions I might possibly have about going out.  He detected the slightest deviation from my customary workaday routine, and switched on his considerable charm to persuade me I really did need him, indispensably, to go along.  The destination didn’t interest him, just as long as he could come along and stay with me.

My taking the keys out of the inside lock on the front door would then galvanize him, but he waited – huge brown eyes spotlighting me, bat-ears erect, little black goblin face optimistic and eager – frozen in alert position for my decision.  A dog-biscuit treat from me (thank you, Prof. Pavlov) meant he had to resign himself to stay behind, but if I did reach for his collar and leash he erupted, almost violently, his joy utterly unconfined.  Usually he punctuated the few seconds before I finally opened the door with an impatient little dance step or two, bouncing up and down on his stubby little forelegs.

On October 29th, Misha turned twelve.  My first French bulldog, Charlie, had died in Berlin at eleven.  His successor Orje, who accompanied me when I moved to San Francisco, made it to twelve, when a stroke cruelly disabled and almost killed him.  The day before Misha’s twelfth birthday last Thursday, I noticed his unusual panting when we came home from his third, early evening walk.  On his birthday itself (in celebration of which I laced his dry Science Diet Light with a quarter-pound of ground round), I paid careful attention, and thought I noticed a new rapidity and shallowness in his breathing.  During the election news that evening – turning on the TV always also turned Misha into a lapdog – he couldn’t seem to come to rest.  As bedtime approached, his breathing sounded asthmatic.  His temperature proved normal, though, so I decided against the impersonality of the Emergency Animal Hospital, but when Misha’s regular vet arrived to open his office at eight last Friday morning, he found us waiting for him.

Dr. Harris took blood and made chest X-rays, then diagnosed pulmonary edema and gave me two kinds of pills; the results of the blood analysis would decide whether he’d add an antibiotic.  He wanted to see him again in a week – yesterday – for more X-rays.  Misha responded encouragingly to the medicine, but he continued to pant, and during his four daily walks he took to scrutinizing and sniffing even the most minuscule diverting object down on his level, so that his walks turned into a plod, and finally into a trudge.  He sometimes wheezed, and sometimes coughed.  Sometimes an indefinable vocal sound accompanied every rapid, shallow breath.  It developed very rapidly.

Yesterday, the morning of the second X-rays, Dr. Harris said his radiologist would come in late in the afternoon and he’d phone me that evening.  Around 7:30 came the definitive diagnosis: “multiple malignant masses – everywhere” in the lungs.  It had grown and spread – and would continue to grow and spread just as fast as it already had.  Cancer restricted to lung tissue causes no pain, but I heard from Jim Harris that Misha’s cancer would go on confiscating his lungs’ still available breathing space – more, and more, and more.  . . .

I’d learned something fundamentally important about love – not Eros, in Grecian terms, but Agape, non-erotic love – from an incident involving Orje, Misha’s Berlin predecessor.  Everyone knows the old cliche about loving someone so much you’d be willing to die for them.  Walking Orje one day, I saw an unleashed German shepherd the size of a locomotive charging towards us with the speed of an express train, unmistakable murder in his eye.  Without even a split second to think, I instantaneously dropped to the ground and completely covered Orje with my own body.  The attacker, thank God, found only Orje interesting as victim: he barked furiously, canicidally, but ignored me personally.  A chance observer pointed out just what might well have happened to me under slightly different circumstances.  My spontaneous protection of Orje made it clear I hadn’t really cared.

And I loved Misha even more than I’d loved Orje.

Perhaps only the old and lonely comprehend the unique status of a really beloved pet.  When Charlie sickened and died in Berlin during the scope of a single hour, his death meant in fact the extermination of my entire family, and at one single stroke.  The death of Orje, in San Francisco, repeated that same ordeal.

Dog shows, prizes, and the like have never seriously interested me, but I always welcomed any opportunity to brag about Misha, and he did have plenty to brag about.  The owners of the Clovis, California kennel where he’d entered this vale of tears spotted him immediately as “an exceptionally elegant pup”, and kept him to raise as a show dog.  His rejecting dam, unimpressed, refused to nurse Misha and his only surviving sibling, so he bonded abnormally early with humans.  The rejected orphan Misha and the house cat adopted each other, and from then on he never encountered a cat he didn’t try – with the utmost tact and diplomacy – to buddy up with and cuddle up to.  At the age of five, soon after Orje’s death, Misha came to bless my life.  As long as he lived, he had an almost panic anxiety he’d find himself abandoned again.

His owners’ prescience had proved justified: Misha became an American Kennel Club champion before his first birthday, and at two he won the official A.K.C.  rating as the second-finest French bulldog in the whole USA.  I prized him not for that but for his inexhaustible, never-failing, frequently comical – even hilarious – sweetness; that little tough-guy mug of his camouflaged a heart of solid marshmallow.  I’ve never seen any animal match Misha when it came to attracting spontaneous affection from strangers; during one single walk one record day, four different people stopped us and wound up down on the ground, cooing, fondling his ears.  He accepted such obeisance graciously, as a matter of course, with a meaningful glance upward in my direction to make sure I saw it and took it in, but he never did become really blase about it.

Before taking him to the vet this afternoon, I emptied his water pan and feed dish and put them out of sight, along with his prized Nylon bones, to avoid them as reminders when I would come home alone; I also dropped his two new medicines into the trash.

When Dr. Harris applied the tourniquet to Misha’s right foreleg, to make the blood vessels bulge more accomodatingly, he said that in only twenty-four hours his peripheral circulation and blood pressure had deteriorated noticeably, and he might have to resort to a catheter – but then he did find a blood vesseladequate for the hypodermic syringe’s merciful needle.  He assured me I’d done the humane thing by not waiting any longer.

Around 1985, when Orje had received his own lethal injection, his body had reacted by inflating his little lungs to the bursting point – what medical people call “the agonal gasp” – and then expelling that air in an unearthly, outraged howl I can still hear, and probably always will.  Misha, thank God, gave up his own little ghost with the same quiet gentleness that characterized everything about him.  With him standing on the examination table, me holding him in both my arms, my face buried in the fur on the back of his neck, his husky, muscular little body suddenly relaxed, then his legs gave way, and then we laid him – gently, gently – on his side, and I closed those enormous, glistening, dark brown eyes for him.  Oh, my little love.

. . .  And so, after a few minutes of unhurried leave-taking, I left with Jim Harris the thirty pounds or so of physical residuum my beloved, departed Misha had discarded and left behind him this afternoon, and came back to an apartment now of abysmal, aching emptiness.  When I replaced the keys in the inside lock of the front door, that cyclic act forced me to think back only an hour or so to how Misha had reacted when I’d removed them.  He’d looked as eager and optimistic as ever, uninterested in our destination as long as he could come along and stay with me, and when I’d reached for his collar and leash he’d reacted, as always, with that familiar little dance of his, bouncing up and down on those stubby little forelegs.