49 things to know about me

1. I grew up overseas, which may account for my infatuation with America.
2. My first memory is of driving through a bombed out city in Germany, spring of 1948, in a taxi cab held together with wire. 
3. We moved into a house formerly occupied by a Nazi cameraman. The attic was filled with films of Nazis marching and heiling.
4. Looking for buried treasure, I discovered an oilcloth package just lying around under the front porch. 
5. Inside were three Nazi daggers.
6. When I was six years old I routinely rode my bike a couple of miles from home.
7. Frequently carrying one of my Nazi daggers.
8. When I was eleven I went to an international school in Belgrade where classrooms were heated by coal-burning stoves and I fell in love for the first time. Vittoria Vittelli. Daughter of the Italian Ambassador.
9. When I was twelve I went to school in Singapore where it was so hot school let out every day at one o'clock so everyone could go swimming. That same year I discovered that I had a third ball and thought it might have something to do with thinking about Barbara York being naked.
10. It turned out I didn’t have a third ball. It was a hernia. That meant I could think about Barbara York as much as I wanted.
11. When I was thirteen I went to a French school for retarded kids, where I got into a fight defending America, and came away with a crushed vertebrae, so I didn't have to go back.
12. When I was fourteen my family dragged me to Versailles and I felt like I had been there before, only I hadn’t.
13. When I was fifteen we came back to America, where we lived in an American house with a lawn and a breezeway and woods out back.
14. And a TV to get addicted to. And other things as well.
15. For example. I found an unopened pack of Lucky Strikes on a restaurant table. I took them and smoked one a day for 15 days, and on the 16th day I smoked five.
16. By the twentieth day I was smoking twenty. 
17. I am a sports freak. College basketball and professional football in particular.
18. The first time I saw a major league baseball stadium in person I had trouble breathing.
19. I believe Edward de Vere,17th Earl of Oxford, really wrote Shakespeare.
20. I think there’s a good chance that de Vere was Queen Elizabeth’s bastard son, which might help explain why he wrote under a pseudonym.
21. I believe I have a special relationship with the I Ching.
22. My political heroes are George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Winston Churchill.
23. Doctors and hospitals give me the creeps.
24. I don’t remember the first time I had sex.
25. I was in Vienna, Austria, getting drunk, when JFK was shot.
26. My favorite poetic form is the sonnet.
27. My second favorite is the sestina.
28. The first time I tried to buy marijuana, in 1965, on 14th Street in Washington DC, a black guy sold me a Lipton’s tea bag for $8.50.
29. When I was a teenager I played basketball 20 hours a week.
30. I didn’t know what I wanted to be until I was 35.
31. My daughter was born in New York City, delivered by a midwife with amazing blue eyes.
32. My son was born at home on a commune in the Blue Ridge mountains. When he emerged I thought his brain was on the outside of his skull.
33. My first wife (and the mother of my children) is now a Buddhist and doesn’t believe in killing flies or anything that’s alive.
34. My second wife is a dance teacher and a poet.
35. For a while we lived in a ritzy apartment building that had a ballroom.
36. We drank Manhattans and went dancing almost every weekend.
37. It strikes me that love is the driving force in the universe.
38. My favorite female singer is Laura Nyro.
39. My favorite male singer is Frank Sinatra.
40. My working hours are from 10-2 and 10-2.
41. I suspect something very strange is going on in the universe.
42. I own a hi-def TV and a Tivo but no cell phone.
43. I think whoever invented butter deserves the Nobel Prize.
44. The first few times I went to Europe with my family, we went on a ship.
45. I once gave Adlai Stevenson a ride in an elevator in Belgrade Yugoslavia.
46. I peed next to Michael J. Fox at the Academy Awards.
47. My twelve year old daughter starred in a PBS series for kids called Powerhouse, and appeared on the Merv Griffin Show to answer questions about nuclear war.
48. I made a tango movie in Buenos Aires with Robert Duvall.
49. I think name droppers are pathetic.