About John
How I got from there to here. Kinda.
It seems at this point, I’m a former lots of things: very briefly (whew!) a record salesman; a bartender – the worst and best experience ever. Think cops wanting payoffs to not look the other way when you need them; long, long hours sloshing booze to keep our family afloat; having to listen to every kind of story – funny, sad and just plain weird; trying to look the other way as Staten Island gives up guys to die in Vietnam; trying not to be one of them. There’s also a bit as a union rep and one at sports writing. The sports writing thing allowed me to cover more than 50 world title fights and to write their before and after stories – filled with a wonderworld of people, lots of them decent, tough and honest, others – cold-eyed predators in Armani, always, always on the hustle.
I also covered the Olympics, the World Series, World Figure Skating Championships, horse racing’s Triple Crown series, reported from Cuba twice and covered the renowned World Monopoly Championship.
My book, Dress Whites,” is a collection of short stories of fiction. The title is a reference to the impossibly-white uniforms Marine Corp officers wore back in the day when occasions called for full-out preening and strutting. The idea of earning the right to wear Dress Whites was a brilliant sales pitch the Marines aimed at young men looking for glory – young men years shy of fully-developed cerebral cortexes, where life decisions are made.
The stories are about wives, mothers, fathers, brothers, friends left behind to pick up the dismembered pieces of their lives after the Vietnam War. And now, as Luis, the old boxing trainer, says in the story, “Hammer and Nail” – “We got new people don’t know Nam from Spam and others who wanna forget about it.”
My tales – fiction truer than truth, I think – are set in and around Las Vegas; the hard, red dirt of North Carolina tobacco farms; the dangerous South Carolina marshes of a Marine Corps boot camp; and the bars of Staten Island, N.Y.
Some of My Takes
- A mother grows to hate her husband for encouraging their son to try to be a hero.
- A freshly-anointed Marine officer – his new bride in tow – has a last visit with his family before shipping out to Vietnam.
- A Vietnamese girl – daughter of an American Vietnam vet – despised in her country because of the color of her skin eventually becomes a refugee in California. She longs to be included in the American Dream.
- Her father survives Vietnam and desperately tries in the fight of his life to make money as a boxer to find her.
- A 23-year-old Vietnam War widow spat at by her dead husband’s friends for daring to go on with life.
- A young man describes the strange-funny NYC scene at a mass physical for the draft and then his decision to duck the war.
- A group of misfits banded together living in a seedy Las Vegas motel. One of them – a Vietnam veteran – valiantly tries to outrun his demons.
- A gruesome tale of how and why a Marine brought back a Timex watch that used to belong to his Lieutenant, whose leadership skills include bribing his men to bring him enemy trophy ears. His deal? More ears, more beers.
- A feral street guy, teaching two kids from Spanish Harlem how to show downtown rich White guys that they’re not nearly as smart as they think they are.
- A storefront deacon, living with an ex hooker, hitting on a new widow and scheming to boost collections.
- A kid brother, missing his big brother and concocting his own kind of random, savage revenge.
I hope you will read my stories that I was pushed to write when I finally realized how lucky I was to have all these years of life that Doug Ford and Nicky Lia and 58,218 other American guys didn’t have. Realized how lucky I was to have lived without crushing memories and wounds beating me up every single day. Realizing the U.S. of A.’s Three-Card Monte Vietnam scam also likely killed three million civilians – likely because no one bothered to count. Collateral damage. Realized what hell it was for mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, wives and friends to paste their lives back together. Sort of. Only guesstimates, extrapolated from the bodies – grandfathers, grandmothers and infants in diapers – strewn in ditches, their guardians’ bodies draped over them, as if trying to protect them even in death; old men and women spread dead in their rice paddies just for being there.
Rudyard Kipling’s words after his son died in World War I haunt me:
“If any questions why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.”
Gallery
F.A.Q.