Mad Laughter is a series of narrative non-fiction essays about the 20th Century as seen through the lives of the people I knew and loved. It is concerned not with the history of the world, but the history of my immediate family, my extended family, my friends and my substitute families. Mad Laughter is neither an autobiography nor a statesman-like memoir. The great events of the century -- the world wars, the social revolutions, the march of progress -- appear only as we experienced them. This is not History but history. I was not important in any real sense. I did know some famous people, mainly because of my work as a journalist. Although I hope that some day this book might serve as the raw material for some professional scholar, my aim is not to elucidate the meaning of my time, but simply to tell what I saw and felt and heard in the most unpretentious and entertaining way possible.

i My Crazy Family

At the beginning of the 21st century -- 2001

When my daughter, Faera, was ten years old, she started writing a book she called "My Crazy Family." Everybody who knew us was sure that it would be a best seller. She never did get very far on the book, but I still feel it has great potential. Born in 1971, Faera not long ago sent me an e-mail that said, "Sometimes I want to run away and talk only to strangers." That's a title, I thought immediately. Basically, I myself have pretty much given up even talking to strangers. After you talk to them the first time, they are no longer strangers, my online friend, Otto Steinmayer, pointed out when I told him what Faera said.

ii Family Secrets

1901–1960

My father was not without faults. A warm, decent, soft-spoken man who had once done eight years for armed robbery in Dannemora, a maximum-security prison for incorrigibles, he had been a street-fighter, a tough-guy who associated with famous murderers and other important criminals, a stick-up man, a bootlegger, a confidence man, a loan shark. He was a compulsive gambler and, for a time, an alcoholic. In his youth, he smoked opium, which was what gangsters did to relax in those days. They called it kicking the gong around.

iii Getting Published

1961-1968

Despite the 1972 Playboy picture, I'm not exactly a tweedy book jacket author. I was never a longshoreman. All I've really ever done is work in this medium of print communication. One summer I did have a job as a busboy in a hotel in the Catskill Mountains. My waitress had thick legs. She hated me. I was totally inept. I couldn't remember a single order, no matter how simple. At lunch I poured a glass of tomato juice into her best tipper's lap, a young businessman in freshly laundered white duck pants. Our station was furthest from the kitchen. To save myself extra trips, I piled the bus tray beyond prudence with dishes. I walked the entire length of the dining room with dishes dropping off the back of the tray and breaking one by one. The owner followed me into the kitchen picking up the pieces as the entire dining room -- guests and help alike -- laughed and yelled Mazel Tov. Being fired was a relief. I went into Ellenville and found myself a two-dollar room and reported to the local employment agency After I had been sitting there in the July heat for a few hours, someone came out of the office and yelled, "Is there anyone here who has a suit and can type?"

iv Cops and Robbers

1969–1971

The first time I heard about Marin County I got the idea that it was buried back in Northern California's mountain wilderness. I was trying to reach Paul Jay Robbins, a writer who knew Owsley, the acid king. I wanted to commission a story about the man who gave acid away by the handful. I had to go through a special operator after first making an appointment for Paul to come from a distance to the telephone. Little did I know that Marin was a suburb of San Francisco.

I knew little then about the dealing scene, having turned on to grass only a year or so. My experience with it was just beginning to teach me the dangers of strict moral positions based on abstract theory. For most of my life I had been against drugs of any sort. I did not smoke. I did not drink. I did not take coffee. Pills were medicine, and, since I was rarely sick, I did not take very many pills.

[Go to Cops and Robbers sample text]

v Questions of the Heart

1972–1976

After a certain point, just about where you begin to lose count, you realize that it is easy to get laid and difficult to fall in love. Falling in love is like being raped by hypnotism. It is always embarrassing. First you draw the Queen of Hearts. Then you play the Fool. I met a lady once who took me so hard I remain her captive yet.

We now live two thousand miles apart in separate countries. Sometimes I hear the palm trees chanting her cry. I find myself staring off into space thinking about her smell. I dream of her naked on a gray horse in a pasture at the end of a dirt road in Andrew Wyeth country.

It is fashionable to sneer at genuine emotion, but is it wise? We prefer to be cool and casual, to avoid being vulnerable, to be either silent or clever. Let us rather glorify tenderness and compassion and awkward truth. We are on a long road and owe each other warmth and affection, and every so often to say the obvious even if it seems corny or trite. So much for apologia. Now the game of kiss and tell.

vi Brothers and Sisters

1977

Remorse has never been one of my vices. I do embarrass myself regularly, however. It is my main form of flagellation. My mouthopens. These words pop out. My life changes instantly. The '70s: Chrissie and I are separated. I go to visit Mimi with Faera, who is then about two. As Mimi gets into the car, I say jokingly, as if my child is deaf or retarded and cannot understand, "Well, Faera, here is Mimi, the lady who has come to take you away from your mother."

Bruce Jay Friedman once said, "The money is where you wince."

I baffle myself. Why do women hate me? Why does it always seem that I am doing the wrong thing? Why do I say these things? The fortune telling lady in Carmel said, "Put the other person first. You have a good wife. Don't mix business with pleasure. AND DON'T SAY!" She didn't shout that one. She just drilled it in with her eyes at 7.5 on the Richter Scale.

vii The Real Mexico

1978–1985

La Police Judicial arrived two days after our second baby was born. Anita was walking around the bungalow naked with milk dripping out of her titties as she nursed Jesse Brown and she saw these young guys looking in. I went out on the beach and they showed me their I.D. and waved an official-looking paper at me.

"Why are you working with out a permit" one asked me.

"I am not working," I lied. "I am here as a tourist."

"Then why is this woman suing you for her share of your profits?"

 There are two basic approaches to the police. You can bribe them. Or you can blow them down with flying spit. I had about 100,000 pesos in my pocket, and they meant more to me than I can possibly describe. I mean I loved those pesos. I didn't want these guys fucking with them any more than I wanted them fucking with Anita's titties. I began raving in my wildly defective Spanish.

viii The Ring and the Flowers

Backwards to the present

Anita left me twice, once for almost a year and a half, during which I was quite distraught. She finally called me from Hawaii and told me she was coming home, but this took a few more months. She was only twenty five and she knew what she was getting into with me. This was the third time and it was not going to be easy to get out of, you can be sure. When she finally arrived in New York in 1979, she had just had an intensely desperate final fling with a married Moslem artist from Bali whom she met in San Francisco on the way back from Hawaii. He came to New York to see her for five days while I kicked and screamed.

You know how you wear your friends out during one of these episodes? People soon began changing the subject with unconcealed boredom. Only Chrissie, now living with another man in Mendocino, California, was always available for heart-to-heart telephone counseling service. About the Moslem lover, Chrissie said, "Oh, don't worry about him. He's going to go back to his wife because she knows how to make the kind of food he likes."

Talk about culture shock. Anita told me that one night after they made love, he asked her how many men she had sex with before him. She wouldn't tell him, so he started guessing. "More than ten?" he asked. "Yes." He got very quiet and turned his face to the wall and didn't talk to her until the following day.

Acknowledgements

I owe much of the text of this book to the creative encouragement and technical support over the years of:

Arthur Kretchmer
G. Barry Golson
Laurence Gonzales
Lawrence S. Dietz

I would also like to belatedly thank Alan Rinzler for having had the courage to go along with me on my concept for Record, which was the forerunner of Mad Laughter. I am deeply indebted to my wife, Anita Brown, and children, Faera, Eli and Jesse, for their infinite patience. Among the many people who have helped us over the years are Stanley Bard, owner of the Hotel Chelsea, and our landlords, James and Mae Pope of Davis, Michigan.

This book is set in Adobe OpenType Minion for the main text and chapter heads, and Cronos for the illustration and photograph credits. The main titles are Trajan, with Jensen ornaments. I am grateful to Thomas Phinney, Western Type Manager, Adobe Corporation, for having provided these faces and many others to test. I designed it in Adobe InDesign 2.0 with final revisions in InDesign CS beta.

Very special mention must also be made of the late Irving Hillman, my beloved uncle, who showed me how to develop photographs when I was thirteen old, and let me use the typewriter on which I composed the one hundred words on photography that were published in the Joseph H. Wade Junior High School 117 Wade News, and led to my career in media.

-- October 31, 2003 at 7:28 p.m.
Eve of el Día de Muertos
Condominios Green 16
Paseo Pok-Ta-Pok, Zona Hotelera
Cancun, Q. Roo, Mexico