On a frosty January morning in 1973, I packed my belongings, such as they were, in the back of my old truck, rolled down the driveway, popped the clutch, and drove slowly away from my temporary home in a former schoolhouse in Mainland, Pennsylvania.  Away from my cousin and his big white dog and away from my old life, with little more than a smile and a wave goodbye.

I was headed east, to Brooklyn, New York to find someone I knew was waiting for me there—myself.
In a few hours I had gotten as far as the Lincoln Tunnel. I paid the toll and followed the cars in front of me into a dark hole in the rock. Traffic in the tunnel was moving along nicely. I got in the fast lane and stayed there like the sign said. Cars passed me on the right. Now and then a driver would glance over his left shoulder to see what kind of moron would be driving such an old truck into Manhattan.

Under the river we were. I hoped there was more than dirt and ten million white tiles holding back all that water.
Down and down we went, then, heading back up again, a twist and a turn and to my great relief, I sensed light ahead. We must be nearing New York.

Suddenly, there were different lights. Many lights–all of them red. They were on the backs of the cars that were slowing down… and then stopping… as we got near the tunnel’s end. I slowed down too, and I came to a stop, just as my new life was set to begin. I was still well inside the tunnel.

I glanced at the temperature gauge. The needle was well over to the right, indicating HOT. I had replaced the radiator fan not long before, but I was more than a little worried about the engine overheating.

So I did what I thought was the sensible thing, I cut off the engine.

We were stopped, after all, and who knew for how long?

No point in wasting gas.

I sat there for a minute or two thinking about I don’t remember what– and then slowly… the tail lights on the several hundred cars in front of me flickered off and on then off again– and traffic started slowly moving.

I pressed the little chrome starter button on the dashboard and the engine turned over nicely, but would not start. “UHHNNHHH-RRR-RRRUH….RRUHHH….” she told me.

I pumped the floating gas pedal and held the button down–a little more panicked now…. I tried not to flood the carburetor.

Behind me, horns began honking. They were not friendly honks.

Soon hundreds of horns were honking all the way back through the tunnel to Weehawken, New Jersey and echoing through the tunnel and up toward me.

It sounded like some kind of celebration. I wanted to join in, but, of course, I realized they were all honking at me. I had come to New York to get attention, but this was not the kind of attention I sought.

Thankfully, after the angry horns were playing a murderous symphony in my head, the old 100 horsepower flathead V-8 engine started. I shifted into first gear– and then second– and in a minute or two, I emerged into the late afternoon sunlight.

As I slowed down, reading the signs in a quick panic and trying to figure out which way to go from there, a bald man with a cigar clenched between his teeth and his sleeves rolled up passed me on the right. He rolled down his window and spoke to me in a voice that was neither  friendly nor kind, “You’d have to be a hick from the sticks to pull a stunt like that!!”

I was embarrassed.

But I had arrived—and to a tumultuous and shouting welcome from my fellow New Yorkers!

Now that our two children are grown and away at college, my wife and I recently decided to put our house up for sale and move to a small apartment in a neighboring town.

We haven’t actually moved in yet, but today I had to go over there to meet with the Verizon tech who was setting up the internet connection.

I parked my car behind the building and let myself in using the key fob which automatically opens the doors and took the elevator to the second floor. As I approached the door to our apartment, I was pleasantly surprised to see someone had placed a small bouquet of yellow flowers at the foot of the door.

Naturally, I assumed it was from the building’s management. “What a nice thing for the owner to do,” I thought. I’ve lived in a lot of places in my life, but the landlord never sent me flowers before!

I picked up the small potted plant with the yellow flowers and unlocked the door and set the plant down on the windowsill of the empty apartment. There was a little hand-written note on engraved stationery tucked inside: “Welcome! I hope you will enjoy living here as much as I do!”

I quickly realized it wasn’t from the management at all, but from another tenant. A total stranger– a woman. There are sixty six units in this building. My first thought was, “…what a nice person she must be! I wonder if she does this everytime someone new moves in…?”

Then I thought, “I wonder if this person is somehow trying to ingratiate herself with us and will become very needy….or involve herself somehow in our lives in an unpleasant way.”  After all, some of the places I have lived were in New York City . After you’ve lived in New York City, you start to think about things like that.

Then the Verizon tech called, I went downstairs and let him into the building and escorted him back upstairs where in about fifteen minutes he had completed his work. I thanked him, took his card and called his supervisor to tell him that I was happy with the service and thought the young fellow was very professional and friendly. In fact, the tech laughed at everything I said. That’s a sure way to win my favor.

As I got ready to leave, and feeling somewhat emboldened by my stand-up comedy routine with the Verizon tech, I thought, “I should go down to the apartment of the lady who had the flowers delivered and thank her….to do otherwise would be rude.”

After all, she had written her apartment number on the card!

I took the elevator and exited on her floor, and, flowers in hand, my eyes scanned the numbers on all the closed doors until I found the one that matched the number on the card.

As I approached the door, I could hear a woman’s voice coming from the other side. It sounded as if she were talking on the phone to someone. I decided not to knock. But then, I thought,

“If I don’t do this now, I probably never will.”

So I knocked, using the little metal door knocker which was identical to the one on every other door in the building. If she heard it, she ignored it, because as I stood there, I could still hear her talking.

I knocked again, a little louder this time. But not a loud knock like the police had come to arrest her. It was more of a fun knock, like KNOK-KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK…..KNOCK-KNOCK!!

Still no response. I put my ear to the door. I didn’t hear anything. Then I heard a woman’s voice say, “Just a minute….” and fully expecting the door to open, I stepped back and away from the door, still holding the little yellow flowers.

There was a faint sound of metal against metal and then suddenly there was an eye looking at me through a little circular opening in the door. I had seen these types of openings in doors before, when I had been in apartment buildings in New York City. But there was usually a convex glass lens and the image seen by the viewer was a distorted fish eye kind of view. But this time, there was no glass separating the eye and me. The eye was pale blue and it was looking at the undistorted me. I could make out wrinkles around it.  It reminded me of the eye of a very old whale. Just an eye surrounded by a large expanse of grey.

“Yes…?” the eye said.

I began to speak.

“Good morning, ma’am. Uhm… I just wanted to thank you for the flowers –and the nice note. That was very sweet of you….”

The door stayed closed.

“I hope you like living here,” the door said.

Then, suddenly I had the feeling  that I wasn’t talking to a person, but that it was the eye of the building with solid brass eyelids  and I was talking to the building. And it was studying me….looking me up and down….judging me to see if I was the type of human who was fit to live in it….

I’ve often heard the old expression, “If walls could talk–the stories they would tell!”

Quite frankly, I have always been very relieved that walls couldn’t talk–and I’d feel a whole lot better if doors couldn’t talk–or have eyes, either, for that matter.

I have always loved animated cartoons.

So, one day, around 1990, finding myself with nothing better to do, I pulled on an old black sweatshirt over my old black T-shirt and took the elevator from the top floor to the ground floor, let myself out of the cast iron building through the swinging door, crossed Prince Street and made my way one block up cobble-stoned Mercer Street to Houston and the movie theatre  where Spike and Mike’s Sick and Twisted Animation Festival was playing.

I remember one of the cartoons, which seemed particularly well-done, maybe too well-done, featured a violent butcher character who ran around chasing a smaller character slicing off large parts of another character with a big meat cleaver. The character being sliced kept running around though, as if nothing could kill him. Even though there was no blood, it was deeply disturbing to see the lower portion of the smaller character still on his feet– turn and start chasing the other character. Others in the audience laughed.

Not me.

I think that’s when I realized cartoons had really changed since I was a kid. The most violent thing I remember was Jerry the mouse hitting Tom the cat over the head with a huge mallet—- or a cartoon bulldog chasing Sylvester the Cat and eventually having a stick of dynamite explode in his face, which did no real damage other than blackening it.

I laughed at that.

Another cartoon which I found very disturbing ( I should have known that something named Spike and Mike’s Sick and Twisted Animation Festival would bother me ) featured two teenage boys playing baseball.

One boy had a wooden bat and the other boy was throwing a frog which the boy with baseball bat swung at repeatedly and missed.

Every time the boy swung the bat at the frog, I thought I was going to die. Not from laughter, but from the built up tension and the dreaded sound and color that seemed inevitable and the logical consequence of their actions. I remember the two boys each had a strange laugh.

It was the laugh of irresponsibility.

I guess I had been working at Marvel Comics for about a dozen years at that point in time and it was during the last six or seven of those years, I had begun to draw again. I had done a great deal of drawing when I was a kid growing up but had gotten away from it in college as my interest in art became more wide-ranging.

I had done a few things for the editors at Marvel and there were a few people who seemed to like my work.

One young assistant editor in particular seemed to get a kick out of my drawings. He told me if he was ever in a position to hire me, he would. He was true to his word.

A couple of years later, those same two teenage boys in the “Frog Baseball” cartoon I had watched with dread had somehow made their way onto television and were hosting MTV’s music television videos, laughing their funny laugh and making silly comments. It really caught on with the public and even Tom Brokaw was imitating them on the NBC Nightly News program.

My wife and I and our newborn baby were visiting my parents in Georgia when that editor who had promised to hire me called and told me that Marvel Comics had gotten the license to do Beavis and Butt-head comic book and he wanted me to draw it.

I felt like a baseball player must feel when the owner of the team calls and says he wants you to play for the New York Yankees. It was the most popular entertainment property in the country at that time and after a dozen years at Marvel and a new little one in the family I was happy to get such a big break.

The editor picked a team of creative people to do the comic. The writer of the series would be Mike Lackey, a very clever bearded young man whom I knew from working at Marvel. The three of us went to lunch along with the editorial consultant from MTV and it was determined that we would have another bigger meeting at Viacom’s headquarters in Times Square as soon as the rest of the creative team could be assembled.

On the appointed day, five of us left the Marvel office on 28th Street and Park Avenue and took a Checker cab uptown to meet Mike Judge, the creator of the series, as well as various producers, licensing directors, consultants and others who were associated with the “property”.

We were led into a big conference room to await the imminent arrival of Mike Judge.

No one knew who we were, but we all knew Mike Judge was the creator of the show– and a very important person and based on the tension in the room and the way the others present were speaking of him in hushed tones of reverence and awe, I fully expected to look around and see two or three barefoot maidens clad in chiffon robes strewing rose petals in the hallway leading up to the conference room.

And in a few minutes after everyone was seated around a long table, in walked this guy in bluejeans and a yellow T-shirt who looked like he had just come from watching his eight-year-old play little league ball in a nearby park.

He sat down at the head of the table without saying a word and the meeting began.

Abby Terkhule, the producer of MTV who had “discovered Mike Judge” and got him to sell MTV his creation, stood up and began by saying,

“Why don’t we go around the table and have each one of you stand up and introduce yourselves… and say what it is you will be doing on the project.” 

That seemed as good a place as any to start.

Glenn Herdling, our editor, a bright confident fellow with a permanent sense of mischief in his eye (and a practical joke in his heart) stood up and introduced himself and his assistant, Scott Marshall, who also stood up— and then they sat down.

Next, Mike Lackey stood up and said, “Hi–I’m Mike Lackey and I’ll be the writer….” 

Then the colorist stood up and said something like, “I’m Bob–and I’m the colorist.”

Then one of the MTV people stood up and said who she was and what she would be doing, followed by another person who worked for MTV. They were working their way around the table.

Mike Judge sat still in his chair at the head of the table and spoke not a word.

Soon it was going to be my turn.

I confess, as I listened to the others and stared at their faces, I must have rehearsed what I was going to say and how to say it about ten times in my mind. I was staring out the window at the tall buildings and trying not to pass out and breaking into a cold sweat when I suddenly realized that the room had become eerily silent.

They were waiting for me to stand up– and say who I was and what I would be doing.

“Uhm…I’m Rick Parker –and I’ll be drawing the comic book….”

 The words echoed in my head and off the walls of the room.

They echoed off the eardrums of Abby Terkhule and Mike Judge and the lady from licensing.

They echoed off the plate glass window and off the tall buildings in Times Square and the other skyscrapers stretching to the East River.

They echoed off the dim, half-remembered faces of every kid I had ever drawn a funny picture for in elementary and high school. They echoed off the sweet round face with the brown eyes behind half-glasses of Miss Sullivan, my second grade art teacher who had once held up one of my drawings in class and made me feel special.

When the last echo faded away in my head, I sat back down feeling that I had been on my feet for quite some time.

Finally, after all the introductions had been made and the final echoes had vanished in the Atlantic off Coney Island, Abby Terkhule spoke up, “Well. Mike…….what do you think….?

Mike Judge, the creator of Beavis and Butt-Head, the Texan in the T-Shirt and Jeans who had only recently become a millionaire finally spoke.

The room fell silent.

Mike was channeling Butt-Head and simply said,

“Uhhh….Yeah!! –huh-huh…that would be COOL.”

I remember once, many years ago, Jack Morelli and I were coming back from lunch and there was a guy in the Marvel reception area who was trying to get an editor to look at his portfolio.

He just showed up and didn’t have an appointment or anything like that. I think the editors were still at lunch or maybe too busy or something.

As Jack and I got off the elevator on the tenth floor, the fellow was asking the receptionist, “Well….will YOU look at it?”

Before she could answer, I interrupted, “I’ll look at it!”

“Who are YOU?” the young man demanded to know.

Jack was my assistant, and I guess he was a little incensed at the question,

“Well–you were just getting ready to show it to the receptionist,” he shot back.

I calmly explained that I worked in the bullpen and that I was an “artist”.

Alas, as I should have suspected, his work was, as Will Eisner used to say, “Beyond the Pale,”or as the noted New York art dealer, Ivan Karp might tell someone, “Your work is alien to my consciousness”.

I wanted to like it. Lord knows I did.

I’m a nice person.

I wanted to be helpful and for a moment or two as I beheld his “impasto” application of black and white on paper, quite unlike anything I had ever seen this side of a Jackson Pollack–I struggled to come up with something postive to say, a few words of encouragement, as I ran my index finger over the surface of one of the pages to see if indeed that really was three-eights of an inch of Snow-Paque® on that figure.

“A blind person could have a very enjoyable tactile experience here, just touching this….” I thought to myself.

Searching for something helpful to say, I confessed that I was having difficulty discerning what was a figure and what was background.

The young man became increasingly agitated when it became clear that I was not going to tell him what he wanted to hear. I suggested as tactfully as I could that, “…perhaps, it might be a good idea if you made a careful study of the books Marvel is actually publishing, and, “make your work more like that….”

This information only resulted in the poor chap becoming even more defensive, and, frankly, a little agressive and threatening toward me.

This annoyed my friend Jack to no end. Jack was a bodybuilder from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn and a former deckhand on the fishing boat, The America who had detached human body parts from fishing hooks, upon which they had snagged in the waters off Brooklyn– and Jack had a close relative who was a pro wrestler. Jack had been in a few fights in his young life and I could tell he was ready to mix it up with the guy if he became any more aggressive.

“YOU AIN”T NEVER GONNA WORK FOR MARVEL!“, said Jack, as I moved my own body between them.

Luckily, the elevator arrived and the young man wisely got on it.

As the doors closed and the elevator descended back to street level, taking a young man’s dreams with it, the young man shouted at us, “I’M GONNA MAKE YOU EAT THOSE WORDS!!”

I held Jack back, we both went down the hall and went back to work, and as far as I know, sadly, the young man never did work for Marvel.

From the perspective of thirty years, I wish I had yelled back, “I HOPE YOU’RE RIGHT!”

But I did not.

For the record, I would be perfectly happy to eat those words, even now, for I would have been very happy had he developed his artwork to the point where an editor thought he was good enough to draw for us.

Recently, during a cold snap, the pipes froze in the upstairs bathroom of our house in New Jersey and the water caused the beautiful metal ceiling I installed eight years ago in my kitchen to fall down. I had spent a solid six weeks of my life making that boring-ass 1980’s kitchen into my dream 1939 kitchen and had ordered the pressed brass ceiling from a company in Canada and installed it myself. But now it’s just a twisted pile of metal on my front porch. The best laid plans of mice and men. Or of rats and men. The whole thing got me to thinking.

This most recent “disaster” in my life reminded me of another “disaster” which happened a long time ago, back in the 1970’s, when I was single and living by myself in New York City. There were many disasters in my life back then, and this is but one of them.

This is a true story.

The faces have changed with the passage of time and the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

I had paid the $3,000 in “key money” a few years before, for the rights to illegally occupy a rather primitive storefront loft on Grand Street in New York City’s emerging “artist community” and I had moved right in, in the light of day, along with my girlfriend, Shirley, and her dog, Zoe, but by the Spring of 1978, the three of us had long since gone our separate ways– she to a loft a few blocks South, on Beach Street, in Tribecca (triangle below Canal Street)–and she took her dog with her, so when the ceiling collapsed that Friday morning in 1978, as I sat reading the Classified Section of the Village Voice, it was all on me—as it always is in life.

It had been one of the first things I noticed about the place that I liked that June when we rented it. It was a thousand square feet of pressed tin, a full eleven feet high– but someone long before had painted it light green.

Practically the first thing I did after drinking a few beers and sweeping up the red clay dust the potter had left behind was to borrow a stepladder and buy several gallons of silver paint and a couple of brushes, and like some more famous artists before me had done, I, too became a painter in Soho, although they didn’t call it that then.It was the “South Village.” And over the next twelve years or so I was to live there, a lot of things went South.

The building itself still stands, an old law tenement, four stories above a store, built probably in the late 1880’s. The place is a Chinese Laundry now, “G&G Cleaners.” An odd coincidence, though not Chinese, my parents were in the laundry business and my children’s names are Grant and Grayson.

It was around ten o’clock in the morning and I had taken the day off from work. I was reading the newspaper while waiting for a friend to arrive for a visit when I heard a sound I had never heard before. An odd sound. I can only describe it as sounding like small pebbles–the kind you might expect to see in the bottom of a child’s aquarium–dropping onto a painted white plywood floor in the middle of the room in which I sat.

Except there were no pebbles and no child’s aquarium attached to the metal ceiling eleven feet overhead.

What was attached to the ceiling were three rather large flourescent lights of 1940’s vintage which had been there for decades and into which I had installed colored flourescent lightbulbs in my own version of a Dan Flavin artwork. There was also a 25,000 BTU gas-operated heater with a fan which hung from the ceiling by two cast iron pipes mounted directly into the wooden joists through small holes cut in the tin. The heater, which I installed at my own expense, provided the only source of heat for the entire space and was rather unsightly but in no way contributed to the disaster which was now only minutes away as I sat reading the newspaper.

I heard the noise again, a slight variation of the earlier noise of the pebbles dropping onto the painted plywood floor and this time I put down my newspaper, got up walked a few feet to the window, looked out and saw a man unloading something from the back of a truck parked across the street at John DeLorenzo Iron and Sheet Metal Works. Obviously the noise of the pebbles was coming from that truck.

It’s funny how the mind will find an explanation, no matter how implausible for something it cannot understand. Satisfied that I had solved the mystery, I went back to my chair, sat back down, picked up the newspaper and continued reading. Suddenly there was a polite knock at the door.

My friend had arrived.

As I arose from my chair to answer the door I heard and saw to my utter shock and amazement what I can only describe as a sudden, unexpected, loud crashing noise accompanied by nothing else other than the sudden detachment of a large section of metal ceiling, which, now escalating in intensity under its own weight, proceeded in a destructive wave some fifty feet toward the rear of the space, ripping down the gas heater, fluorescent lighting fixtures and covering every square inch of floorspace, chairs, lamps, drawing table, magazine rack, potted plants, boxes of books and everything else I owned in twisted metal, plaster rubble, wood lath, old rags, scraps of clothing and newspaper, bent nails, dead rats from the 1920’s and 30’s and the soup bones they pilfered from the immigrant families who had once occupied the small apartments upstairs.

All this and more lying freshly deposited, below a noxious cloud of black dust and the dirt of a hundred years which now settled slowly upon me.

I was only saved from injury or perhaps sudden death because after a little more than half of the ceiling had collapsed and came to rest upon the floor, completely blocking out the sunlight from the front windows it supported itself from further collapse.

In the darkness and dust, I was somehow able to pry the fallen ceiling aside and make my way through the dried out soup bones and dessicated carcasses of century-dead rats, and half stumble and fall in semi-shock across the unpainted top of the tin ceiling and plaster rubble on top of it to finally open the door and greet my friend, the look upon whose face I shall never forget. “What happened?”, she asked. “The ceiling fell in.” I answered. As we stood there on the steps just outside the apartment looking at each other, she explained that she had just knocked on the door when there was, “this tremendous crash from inside and a cloud of dust emanated from under the door.” She needn’t have been surprised, I had told her before that she had an effect on me.

I called the landlord, an artist and collector, and to his credit, he came rushing down in a cab and stopped a passing city garbage truck and paid them fifty dollars in cash to go in and rip out what they could and in fifteen minutes time, they had hauled that twisted metal ceiling away. His insurance company settled with me for three hundred dollars.

Along with the help of a good friend from work, a couple of brooms and a dustpan and a mop and a box or two of black plastic bags, by the end of the weekend we had the place livable again.

Good enough for an artist anyway.

A couple of years ago, my wife, a wonderful woman to whom I have had the good fortune to have been married for twenty years, hung up the telephone, walked slowly into the room where I was drawing, and in a halting, emotionally-charged voice I did not even recognize at first, announced to me that she “had stage three colon cancer and it had already spread to her lymph nodes”. She would have to have surgery immediately and undergo a debilitating six-month round of chemotherapy. They did not know if it had progressed beyond her lymph nodes.

We had just settled into our new home from another state and it was a shock which neither one of us expected and one for which we were quite unprepared. She had the operation, the chemotherapy, the CT-scans every six months, and the scary consultations with her oncologist to look at the scans and discuss the medical findings. The last time she had a CT-scan she passed out from an allergic reaction to the dye, but they told her things looked good, they didn’t see anything “abnormal” and to come back again in six months and be re-tested. This was a tremendous relief not just to her, but to me, as well, as the idea of my life without her in it seemed incomprehensible.

A few months ago, we lost a friend of many years to Kidney Cancer. He went to the doctor complaining of a pain in his back and a few months later the “mountain of a man” was gone. Before he knew it, it had spread to his bones and to his lungs and we all watched helplessly as he wasted away before our very eyes and then one day a wife had no husband and three young adults lost their father.

Recently, a friend of mine, a well-known New York artist in his early 40’s, was released from the hospital to return home to his wife and young son after nearly nine months of treatment for a very aggressive form of Acute Leukemia. The Medical Establishment had done all they could for him. He had received many rounds of chemotherapy and eventually been cleared for a bone marrow transplant only to have the cancer return with a vengeance after they had found a donor match. More chemotherapy and more waiting and testing. Not long ago, his doctors regretted to inform him that, at most, he had only a few weeks to live, maybe only a few days. My friend, a very talented and accomplished photographer, but not really a cartoonist– or comic book artist– used his time in the hospital to do a series of drawings of superhero characters for his young son. Using what little strength he had left, he managed to draw everyone from Daredevil to Batman to Chewbacca the Wookie. It would have been his gift to his son. Pictures on pieces of paper, all signed “Love, Daddy”. A poor substitute for a father’s love, but something that his son would treasure always, and would no doubt, show to his own children when he grew up and told them about their grandfather who they never knew.

The whole thing with my wife and my friends got me to thinking about my own life, my own mortality and my own relationship with my family, my friends, myself and my art. I have been very fortunate to have had the opportunity to pursue my artistic muse for the better part of what for many is more than one lifetime. I have been lucky enough to have fallen in love with and married the person of my choice and to have lived life with her now for nearly a quarter of a century. I have had the pleasure of being an eye witness as our two children reached each milestone along the road of their young lives and have watched with pride and great joy as they grew up into fine young men and went away to college. I have had much success in work and great happiness in life. And I am very grateful for that.

But there was a time not too many years ago when following my annual check-up, and a routine laboratory examination of my blood, I was told by my doctor that my PSA levels were “elevated”. He referred me to a urologist who would perform a biopsy on my prostate.

For the initial consultation, I entered the urologist’s waiting room to discover a roomful of men approximately my age and most of whom sported grey goatees and wore glasses like mine. It was uncanny. It was as if someone was playing some kind of sick joke on me. One or two of them looked up at me when I came in. I started looking around for Rod Serling of The Twilight Zone. My fourteen twins all sat there nervously waiting to be called in for a consultation. Eventually my turn came, I met with the urologist who told me if I did indeed have cancer it was probably treatable, and suggested I schedule a biopsy, which I did.  He reassured me, though, that it was “early-stage” cancer and that it was treatable and in all probability they had caught it in time. This was reassuring, to say the east, because I had a young wife and two young children and still had not even written and drawn my own graphic novel. Life is unfair, but is it really THAT unfair? Apparently the answer is yes. Getting a biopsy on my prostate gland, an organ about the size of an orange which sits way up in your abdomen where the sun don’t shine and is not exactly easy to get to, didn’t sound like much fun, but I supposed it was better than a slow and painful death from cancer. As I left his office, most of my look-alikes were still sitting there waiting to be called. Perhaps a few more who reminded me of myself had come in and sat down and began reading magazines they were not the least bit interested in. As I closed the door behind me to leave I hoped that they would all get the same “good news” that I had.

So on the appointed day, I presented my prostate for examination by the doctor and his female assistant.

I didn’t mind too much the doctor being there, I understood he was just doing his job, but it was embarrassing having to take my clothes off in front of a woman.

The doctor explained that they would be taking a series of twenty-eight tiny snippets from all around my prostate gland and I would hear a clicking sound each time he took a sample. He went on to reassure me that it wouldn’t hurt because there were no pain receptors “in there”.

FINALLY some good news.

I lay there on my stomach and wondered what the Hell they could be doing back there that was taking so long. I thought perhaps they were taking selfies with my butt. I tried to think of something else other that that clicking sound every ten seconds or so. I tried to imagine I was on the deck of a four-masted schooner rounding Cape Horn and the icy salt spray was hitting me in the face…..that was sort of nice. “KLIK!!” I was rocketed back to reality…..seconds ticked away and I imagined myself standing on the wings of a bi-plane piloted by Hulk artist, Herb Trimpe as he buzzed over my old boss, Danny Crespi’s house in Armonk, New York. Herb flew low over the house and I could see Danny standing in the back yard waving his arms and looking a bit like Martin Balsam, when “KLIK” number 14 spoiled the illusion.

“How many is that….?”, the urologist wanted to know. “I don’t know”, I said. “What–?, he demanded. “You haven’t been counting–? We’ll have to start all OVER again!!”

A week passed. The urologist called me. I think I was drawing a picture of The Crypt Keeper at the time my wife brought me the phone. I put down my pencil and said, “Hello….?”

I was actually shocked when I received the diagnosis of prostrate cancer. It was a surprise to me because my body has always been my friend, it had served me well, and if, I now had cancer as the doctor was telling me over the phone, I certainly wasn’t feeling any ill-effects from it. I was sure there must have been some mistake, a clerical error perhaps, he must have me confused with someone else–perhaps one of my twins in his waiting room.

But I could tell by the no-nonsense tone of his voice that it was, as the commercials on TV say about the Shingles virus, the cancer was “already inside me….”

We arranged a consultation at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York with Dr. David Semadi, a native of Iran and one of the leading surgeons in the field. He had done hundreds of these operations, and, in fact, had been a pioneer in robotic laporoscopic surgery. He sat at a control panel and looked at a computer screen as tiny little pincers went in like little metal lobsters and snipped away at my 40% cancerous prostate gland and pulled it out in little pieces through some holes that he had punched in my abdomen. It was sort of like being a drone pilot or playing a video game and I was a ticking time bomb that he was defusing.

This story has a happy ending.

My friend with the leukemia went home cancer-free to his family last week. His recovery was a miracle in every sense of the word. And it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

My wife is fine and cancer-free.

Me…? I’m fine. It’s like it never happened. I don’t even remember it, it seems so long ago. And I was so afraid I might die, I did finish drawing that graphic novel in 2008.

So take good care of yourself. Go to the doctor regularly, get checked out. Early detection saves lives. Pet the dog, kiss your wife and kids, be nice to everyone you meet, laugh and love and help others–believe in yourself–think positive–work hard to make your dreams come true. Medical Science can do wonders. Live each day like it’s your last. Even if it isn’t.

But nobody lives forever. And forever is too long, anyway. One lifetime should be enough for anyone. And everyone deserves to live one lifetime.

Let’s all make ours count.

On a blue-sky Fall Day in 2012, with the sun shining overhead and the cold weather still weeks away, and having no particular place I had to be, and, feeling a slight need to get out among my people, I gathered up some colorful computer prints from my Sidewalk Superhero series and a few prints from my Comics You’ll Never See Series plus one or two other things and drove down to Congress Street in Portland, Maine. I parked my old car over on State Street and walked a couple of blocks to the corner of Congress within sight of the Portland Art Museum. I think they were having a show of Winslow Homer paintings at the time. It may have been N.C. Wyeth, who can keep up with these things?

Two men sat smoking on a bench in Congress Square and paid no attention to me as I knelt down and arranged about fifteen pieces of artwork on an old army blanket I had bought at the Church Sale in New Jersey. I had to admit, the prints looked good in the 97 cent plastic frames I had bought at Walmart® and I was eager to maybe make a few dollars, perhaps enough to fill up my gas tank on the way home. But I have always been a dreamer.

A couple of people passed by and glanced down at my exhibit without slowing their stride. I guess they weren’t in the market for a large drawing of a man with a green face and deep-set sunken eyes. If only I could have charged by the wrinkle, this piece would have been quite expensive, but I was willing to let it go for a mere $75 dollars–a steal!

The previous year, I had carted it with me to the Maine Comic Arts Festival where it had been commented on by that year’s Guest of Honor, Jeff Smith of Bone fame. But Jeff Smith was nowhere to be found that afternoon.

After about an hour and six or seven more people had passed me by, I saw an old woman approaching from the direction of Paul’s Food Center. She was pushing a shopping cart with her belongings in it. She stopped in front of my exhibit. Gesturing at the large green-faced, snaggle-toothed version of Phantom of The Opera, she spoke up after a minute or two of contemplating each tiny wrinkle. “That reminds me of my father, ” she offered rather off-handedly. I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing and smiled an understanding smile, but she wasn’t looking at my face, but at the green one with the blood-red background. I was a bit taken aback at the notion that there might actually ever have been a real life counterpart to any of my drawings, much less this one, which seemed more grotesque and creepier than my usual offerings. It never crossed my mind that she might buy it and my suspicions were confirmed when she grabbed ahold of her shopping cart and slowly shuffled off.

Several more people passed by without stopping. In short order a little grey-haired man stopped in front of the big drawing. He looked as if he had just stepped off a  Greyhound Bus from somewhere in New Hampshire where the motto is “Live Free or Die”. He looked as if he had decided to do the latter. The stub of a cigarette dangled from his lower lip and as he spoke, it jiggled up and down once or twice for each of his words which he addressed to me: “Is that a self-portrait?”, he asked, quite pleased with himself.

A normal person would have smiled and allowed him to have his joke, even if it was at my expense. But I am not a normal person. I am the funny one and I do not like to be run-through by someone’s cutting sense of humor. And I suppose I was a little annoyed that I had been standing out there in the cold for over an hour, offering such great masterpieces to the world and had no takers. So something mean and cold from deep down inside me took control. Before I knew it, an idea, a response to his jibe formed in my grey and slightly balding head. My lips began moving and I heard myself say to the man, “No, but your daughter was by here a little while ago…” Of course the man had no idea what I was talking about.

But I knew.

I have always been my own best audience.

I woke up in Mamaw’s bed that morning as usual.

She was still walking then.

It must have been a Sunday, because Bill and Nell were not at work. I called my parents Bill and Nell because that was their names.

I looked out the window and it was still dark outside. I could see part of the moon through the branches of the pecan tree in the backyard. It was a silver sliver up high in the sky. All around it were stars. The stars were my friends and I always liked looking at them, although in those days I went to bed pretty early. My friends came out later.

I knew that this day was going to be special. We were going to Lookout Mountain. I had never been to Lookout Mountain before and we would be taking the car. I would get to sit in the back seat next to my grandma the whole way and back again and Bill would drive. Nell would sit next to him in the front seat. Bill always had a big Thermos® bottle full of hot coffee next to him on the seat. Bill never drove anywhere in a car without a Thermos® bottle full of coffee and a few sandwiches. This day, the sandwiches would be Pimento Cheese. The same ones I had watched my Grandma making the day before. I didn’t especially like Pimento Cheese sandwiches and I probably told them so. But there were Ritz crackers and cheddar cheese for me.

Bill had been the first one up that morning, followed by Nell. Bill came in to my Grandma’s room to wake us up for the trip, but I was already awake. I’ve always been a light sleeper. There was a certain amount of hustle and bustle in the house, but I wasn’t a part of it. Bill and Nell had a few things to do around the house before we could leave, but it wasn’t too long before my Grandmother, my Mother and I were standing outside the front of the house and Bill was backing the car out of the driveway. My grandmother opened the door and got in. Then I guess my Mother handed me to my Grandmother. I was still too small to reach the running board. Then My Mother got into the front seat and Bill backed up the rest of the way into the street, turned the steering wheel to the left and slowly headed west on 51st Street.

It was just getting light out. There were no other cars on the street. Everyone else along the block, The Thomases, The Owens, The Pilgrims, The Bailey’s were all still sleeping.

We hadn’t gone too far, in fact, we were only at the corner of Harmon Street when my father saw Jack lying in the middle of the street.

Jack was our orange cat. He had been hit by a car. My grandmother was very upset. I was a little upset, too. I liked Jack.

He was a pretty independent cat. He seemed to know his way around. Jack had been there before I was and I kind of looked up to him. There were various cats living in the rafters of our garage in those days. You could see their footprints on the trunk of the car or on the hood. They would jump up onto the car and then jump up into the rafters of the garage. That was their home. Jack and the others, I never knew their names, lived in our old brown wooden one-car garage that had come with the house. Some had probably even been born there. I don’t know how they got up and down when the car wasn’t in there, but it wasn’t one of my concerns. They had picked the place and that’s where they lived.

Jack was allowed in and out of the house, but the other cats weren’t. Jack was special.

My father stopped the car and left the engine running. Nell and my Grandmother and I waited inside while Bill got out. He picked Jack up and handed him to my Mother. I looked over the front seat at him. Jack’s eyes were closed and he had a little trickle of blood coming out of his mouth. But he was still breathing, so my father turned the car around and we went back home. My grandmother and I waited in the car while Bill and Nell got out. Bill put Jack in a cardboard box on the back porch.

Then Bill and Nell got back into the car and we started out all over again for Lookout Mountain. Once again we passed the place where Jack had been hit, and my father allowed as how he thought Jack was just “stunned” and would be all right.

I hoped so. I liked Jack.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t remember much more about the trip except that they took me to see some gnomes or dwarfs, like ones in Snow White, except these gnomes or dwarfs, I’m not sure which they were, didn’t move or talk. They just stood there.

The only other thing I remember was my father showed me a glass door in the place that had an “electric eye”. It could tell when someone was coming and it would open automatically for you.  Bill was somewhat impressed, but I was a little apprehensive about a door with eyes that could see you.

I never did get to see the mountain although I looked for it.

The next thing I remember was being back home again. It had been a long trip. Bill and Nell and my Grandma were all quite tired. But I felt fine. I wasn’t tired a bit. I think it was because I slept a lot in the car. While the others were unpacking and going in the house, I broke free and went through the front door and directly to the back porch to check on Jack.

There was the cardboard box with the piece cut out for a door. But where was Jack. Had he died? Do cats disappear when they die? My grandfather had died and he disappeared. Maybe Jack had died, too. I was sad. There was only a white towel with a little spot of blood on it where Jack had been.

Then I felt something soft and warm rub against my leg. Jack had been in my Grandma’s bedroom and had come to see us when we got home. I was relieved to see him.

Then, suddenly I, too, felt tired– and I went into my Grandma’s bedroom and lay down on my side on the bed. I put my head on the pillow and it was warm there. Jack had been sleeping on my pillow while we were away. While I lay there thinking about the gnomes, Jack hopped up on the bed and curled up next to me. I reached out and petted him on the top of his head.

Then I closed my eyes and went to sleep.

And that was that.

Yesterday, a friend who is a real estate broker in Manhattan notified me of a good deal on an apartment in New York City. “Where is it?”, I inquired.

“…115th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard…” she told me.

I was familiar the neighborhood. About forty years ago, when I was a taxi driver, I had once been mugged there.

It was around four o’clock on a nice sunny weekday afternoon in the Spring of 1976. I was twenty-nine years old and in excellent physical condition. I hadn’t been ON DUTY for long. I had eased behind the wheel of the brand new Checker cab at the garage a couple of hours earlier around two o’clock as I usually did. I had driven over the 59th Street Bridge from Long Island City into Manhattan and had picked up a couple of fares. I think I had about ten bucks in the old wooden box I kept on the front seat next to me and seven or eight dollars in quarters, dimes and nickels in my coin changer.

I found myself at a stop light on a side street off on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. A young man off to my left approached my driver’s side window. It’s always a bit ominous when someone approaches the driver’s side window. Taxi drivers much prefer that passengers who hail cabs and are duly acknowledged by the driver, simply walk over, open one of the two rear doors, get in, sit down and then notify the driver of their preferred destination. That’s the way it happens most of the time. If there is any type of conversation necessary prior to pulling away from the curb, believe me when I tell you, that most taxi drivers would prefer that it be done inside the vehicle, in between the driver and a passenger who is seated in the back seat.

Walking straight up to my rolled-up window the young man asked, “Hey, man–can you take us downtown…?” I only saw one person. My first thought was, “us…who’s us…?”

I thought to myself, “Okay, the partition is locked, this is a brand new cab with pneumatic door locks.”

“Who’s “us”…?” I inquired from behind the rolled up window. The young man put the third finger of his right hand and his thumb into his mouth and whistled loudly. I was impressed. My father used to be able to do that. Although I had tried it many times over the course of my life, I had been unable to duplicate the sound.

Suddenly, as if on cue, off to my right, and off to my left, and from somewhere back behind the cab in my blind spot, three other young men approached the car. The rear doors were still locked. In those days, cabbies always locked the doors when they were above 96th Street or in the outer boroughs.

While I was watching four young men seemingly surround my cab and thinking to myself, “The partition is locked, the doors are locked, I’m secure here…” yet another young man appeared at the front seat passenger position and began knocking on the window and pointing at the little silver door lock for me to open it. “Open the door and let me sit up front,” he suggested in a rather impolite tone.

“Naah, sorry….you’ll have to sit in the back”, I told him, and then I pressed the little button under the dash that unlocked the doors. There was a thumping sound as the door locks all popped open and then the five of them crammed themselves into the backseat like some kind of weird circus act. There were arms and elbows and hands pressed menacingly up against the plexiglass partition, but they were all inside the cab.

“Where to…? I cheerily inquired from the secure and roomy comfort of my front seat.

“115th Street and Lenox Boulevard…”, came from someone who seemed to be in authority.

“That isn’t exactly “downtown,” I remember thinking. When they said they wanted to go “downtown”, I had assumed they wanted to go to Times Square, a considerable distance from the Bronx and I guiltily confess, a destination which would have been a “nice piece of change” for me. But 115th Street and Lenox Avenue it was, and so, with my carload of young men, I pulled away from the intersection and turned left into traffic.

I hadn’t gone far when I had to stop for traffic approaching the Willis Avenue Bridge. Up to that point, I hadn’t turned on the meter, thinking that they were planning on running away and I didn’t want to pick up the tab.

“C’mon, man, let me sit up front,” said a friendly-enough looking young man from amid the ten arms, ten elbows and ten knees gathered together on the rear seat and the two jump-seats. I looked over my right shoulder and addressed him directly through the closed and locked bullet-resistant plexiglass partition, “Naah, sorry…don’t worry…we’ll be there soon…it’s not that far…”

“Look, driver–we’ve got money”, he said, holding up a wad of cash against the partition so that I could see it.

Thinking that they were going to pay for the ride, and knowing it would be seven or eight dollars, I offered them a deal.

“I’ll tell you what. I’ll take you guys down there for five dollars…”

“…Nah, man…it don’t cost no FIVE DOLLARS to go down there!”, someone said, I wasn’t sure who.

Traffic had started again and thinking that they were planning on paying for the trip, I thought, “Oh, yeah, well, I show them!

So I threw the arm on the meter, it started clicking and I started driving….

It wasn’t a long trip. As we neared our destination and got closer and closer the banter in the back seat died down and it got quieter and quieter then as I rounded the park it got very quiet. You could just tell that something was going to happen and it probably wasn’t going to be good. Five people in the back seat were thinking. I, alone on the front seat (except for the wooden box with eight bucks in it), was thinking, too. I was thinking, “They’re probably all going to jump out and run when I get to the destination…”

That had happened a few times before over the year or so I had been driving a cab. Then I had another thought, “I know… when they’re getting out of the cab, I can GUN it, step on the gas, just as they exiting the vehicle. That should send them for a loop….”

But then, I thought, “Do I really want to kill or maim someone for a three-dollar fare?” I decided to just let it go. To chalk it up to being part of the job. I’ll let them run away, it’s no big deal.

Just as I had suspected, as we neared the intersection of 115th and Lenox, someone broke the silence, “Right here is good.” So I stopped the car about fifty yards short of the intersection.

People started getting out.

“The money’s in the THING, man….” someone said, as someone else banged the little cash chute forward with force.

Just as I looked back over my right shoulder to confirm my suspicions that the money was definitely NOT in the thing, I felt my body slide to the left just as I heard the driver’s side door being opened and I felt an elbow around my neck. I was suddenly jerked up out of the car and stood on the pavement standing there, bent over slightly, with someone’s arm around my neck. From this disadvantage point I could easily make out five sets of sneakers. “They are going to beat the crap out of me!”, my brain told me.

“Thanks a lot brain, where were you when I needed you before? Why didn’t you tell me that when I unlocked the doors to let them into the car that I also unlocked my own door, thus allowing myself to be pulled bodily out of the car into the street. Some friend YOU are! Geez!”

But my brain wasn’t listening. All it could think to do now was to tell me to run. I don’t how I did it, but I somehow quickly managed to wrench myself free of the chokehold some guy had on my neck, and I took off running like a scalded dog.

I was always a fast runner. For about twenty yards two guys chased me, but the adrenaline was flowing in my veins. My instinct to survive was stronger than their instinct to kill me. I passed a young woman pushing a baby in a stroller who barely looked up as I sped by. It was as if she had seen this movie a hundred times. In ten long seconds, I heard their footsteps trail off and go silent. I kept running, anyway. After about twenty seconds, I looked over my shoulder and saw there was no one chasing me.

I could see the cab had been driven down to the intersection of 115th Street and Lenox Avenue and it was stopped there with the turn signal flashing. All four doors were open and silhouettes of young men were going all through the car, looking for cash, money, gold coins, jewels, and perhaps a Stradivarius violin or cello. But there was only the old wooden box my friend had given me, the one that he had made as a schoolkid back in the Depression. The box with the eight dollars in it.

I stood there watching them for fifteen or twenty seconds. In a minute or two the intersection was quiet again, except for my cab, which stood there with its four doors open and the turn signal flashing. I felt like the car had fared worse than I had, and as if to show my solidarity with my old yellow metal partner, I started walking toward it.

The woman pushing the baby carriage I had passed earlier walked by me, and without so much as a “Howdy-DO?” or a glance in my direction, continued on her way as if I had been nothing more interesting or unusual than a dead squirrel or a sewer worker.

Walking in the street now, and still breathing heavily, I spotted a dark blue Monroe shock absorber. Someone in the not-too-far-distant past had apparently changed his shocks and left it there for me. How thoughtful.

I picked it up, hefted it in my hand, like Bruce Willis hefted the hammer in his hand in the pawn shop scene in Pulp Fiction. If anyone came anywhere near me, I was determined to administer some shocks of my own to their head.

I hadn’t gone very far when, from out a shadowy doorway of a building on my right, and from somewhere else off to my left, two young men emerged from opposite locations and were suddenly charging toward me. I had no idea whether they were part of the same crew who I had so begrudgingly given a lift to earlier. I dropped that heavy-ass shock absorber and sprinted across two lanes of traffic on Lenox Avenue without even bothering to look to see if I had the light. I’ll take my chances with cars over kids any day.

Crossing Lenox, I saw a Seafood restaurant. I went inside. Business was good. All the stools had men sitting on them with their backs turned to the door. There were no tables and chairs. “Eat at the counter or don’t eat here!”, could have been their motto. One or two people glanced up when I burst in, but neither the owner, nor any of the patrons looked surprised to see me.

I felt like a fresh water fish in a salt water restaurant.

“Can I use your telephone to call the police?–I was just robbed…”, I inquired of the man behind the counter. I was still huffing and puffing somewhat from my great escape. His expression did not change. As he slowly turned and reached for the cash register, one of the male patrons swiveled on his stool to face me. It was a man in a straw hat. “We ain’t gonna let them niggas get you, cab driver—we’ze gonna get you OURSELVES!”

As I was standing there pondering the sad state of race relations in New York, the proprietor handed me a quarter and told me there was a pay phone in the back I could use. I took the money and walked about twenty five feet to the phone.

It was in use.

The would-be caller was dressed in a black suit and rumpled white shirt. A tie with purple and green stripes hung loose around his neck, as if someone had grabbed him by it earlier and dragged him to his present location. He balanced the phone in one hand and a little black book in the other as he struggled to remain standing. He seemed to be recovering from what must surely been a very good party the evening before. He was completely oblivious to my situation but enlisted my help as soon as he saw me. I was happy to finally see a smiling face.

“Can you dial this number for me?”, he asked, struggling to remain upright while handing me the little book. I don’t remember the number but the name of the person he was calling was Doris. I dialed the number and handed him the phone. He talked to her for some time. By the time he was finished my breathing had returned to normal and I called the police and stood just inside the door to wait for them.

After about ten minutes, a patrol car arrived and parked on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. A small crowd gathered around the car. I went outside and spoke to the officer in the passenger side of the car. His window was rolled down.
“Are you the guy who called us?” he wanted to know. He was the first white person I had seen in what seemed like a very long time. I was relieved to see him, but white people can ask some really stupid questions sometimes.

“Yes”, I said. “Can I get in the back seat?” I inquired nervously from the middle of the assembled crowd surrounding the car.

He just looked up at me with this dumb expression on his face and then he said, “We’re here….” as if I hadn’t noticed.

Eventually they took me to the police station where I looked at some mug shots, but I didn’t recognize any of the faces they showed me. Perhaps if they had shown me photographs of sneakers. After an hour or so, they drove me back to the intersection of 115th Street and Lenox Avenue where the man from the garage was waiting with an extra key to the cab, which was still right there on the street where they had conveniently left it.

Of course, my coin changer was gone, the one I had bought which had been just like the one the old grey-haired bus driver with the shiny black shoes had used on the bus in my childhood, that man who rolled his own cigarettes from a pouch in his pocket and smoked them on his break while I sat there on the way home from the movies by myself waiting for five minutes to be taken the last six blocks home.

But the old wooden box was still right there on the seat where I had left it–minus the eight dollars.

So, I got in, locked the doors, started the engine, and, as it was now getting dark, turned on the lights.

Then I rolled off– grateful to be alive–to begin my night.

A while back, I stopped into Walmart to buy some windshield washer fluid.

Looking for a short line, I spotted a cashier with a nametag which said “MARGE”. She reminded me a little of Maw Joad from The Grapes of Wrath.

She was just completing a transaction with a female customer. As she counted out a hundred dollars and gave it to the lady, I spoke up: “I wish someone would give me a hundred dollars.”

She responded: “Sorry I just gave her my last hundred.”

“ But Marge, I thought we were friends.” I offered in response.

“We WERE– until you asked me for money.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s a good way to lose a friend.” I said in a slightly dejected manner.

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be!” she shot back.

“Those old adages have a lot of wisdom to them.” I  said as I nodded sympathetically.

She wasn’t looking at me now….she was on a roll:

“I wish my children would listen to me when I give them advice…”.

“How many children do you have, Marge?, I inquired discretely.

“Four. All in their 40’s. They only call me when they have a problem….”

“Well, at least they call you.” I offered sympathetically.

“The last call I got was my daughter calling me at 10 o’clock at night, asking me how to change the guts in her flush.” 

I was getting into deep water here.

“Excuse me?” I said although I was afraid of what she might tell me….thinking it might have something to do with a medical problem.

“She wanted to know how to change the guts in her flush!” she repeated as if I were slightly deaf.

“Oh…..” I said, while pretending to understand.

imitating her daughter’s voice, she said, “You want me to stick my hand where….?”

I was relieved to realize that she was only talking about a broken toilet.

“But that’s clean water back there,” I said.

Marge nodded once and started taking items from the next customer.

“Nice talking with you, Marge,” I said as I turned  toward the door.