Pure Gold
Hello. Welcome to the Weekend Gene Pool, this newsletter’s main trading post, where you trade your intimate personal thoughts and anecdotes in exchange for our subsequent ridicule. Today there will be two items of business. Please read through to them. They’re worth it.
The first begins with a story about a man I once knew. His name was Herman Gold. Mr. Gold looked like Albert Einstein, only more disheveled, and he seemed older than Einstein was when Einstein was already dead five years. Mr. Gold’s preposterous shock of white hair had perpetual bedhead.
He first came into my office at The Miami Herald one day in 1983. I was the deputy editor of Tropic, the Herald’s Sunday magazine. Herman had retired from his career, which was in the garment trade, as I recall. He slapped a sheaf of handwritten loose-leaf pages in front of me, and said he wanted to be the weekly poet in Tropic. This was a swell plan except:
He said he’d never had a poem published; and,
Tropic never published poems. The was the only inviolable rule of our otherwise subversive and anarchic little magazine.
I explained this. Mr. Gold collected up his manuscripts, glowered at me theatrically, and shuffled away. But he’d be back frequently, almost always in an unannounced visit, always on some flimsy pretext, but really to try to nag me about his poems, which I had still not read. He always insisted on seeing me, I think because I was Jewish and he sensed leverage. In this regard, alas, he had none.
Sometimes, his pretext was to deliver a present. His presents were bizarre. He once gave me an uncooked chicken, “for dinner,” he said. He once gave me a little toy gyroscope, the mechanical kind you activate with a string. All of it was eccentric and puzzling.
Under the stricture I had set, he grumpily started writing nonfiction stories for us, and some we accepted. It turns out this unpublished, superannuated half-fossilized author/poet who wanted to be a poet/author also wrote compelling, mischievous prose.
With one of his prose pieces, one we published, he informed me we couldn’t use it if we did not use his headline. Un-pushy, he was not. Unstubborn, never.
(He also talked like that, in that cadence, like the old Yiddishe Jew, which he was. His spoken sentences sometimes had triple negatives, singsong cadences, and often inverted subjects and objects. Un-interesting, also he was not.)
The headline in question was “Don’t Go Up to the Attic!” It turned out not to be a schlock horror story, but a story about writing: the sin of redundancy and the sainthood of word economy. You “go” to the attic. You do not go “up” to the attic. Herman was right about the headline, and the story was charming, and unexpected.
Herman was unexpected, always. On the Monday after the Sunday that I published his first story, he strode into the office, marched straight to my desk, and in front of the whole staff, grabbed me by the ears, drew my face to his, and planted a big, wet, loud kiss on my forehead.
Eventually, after I became the top editor of Tropic, I looked at his poems. They were unrhymed and evocative. In total control of themselves, unlike Herman. I suggested he try the Paris Review, but he wanted Tropic. Stubborn.
He once told me he thought of me as his grandpa. I thought he had mangled the syntax, but he hadn’t. He meant he was trapped in his head as a kid, and I was trapped in my head as an adult. He was wrong about that last part; I was just as much of a kid as he was — I merely had a job that required me to fake it.
Knowing Herman gave me a great moment in my professional life, one for which I will always be grateful. It happened very early in 1990, when Tom Shroder and I were running the magazine. On February 11, 1990, we finally — finally! — published Herman’s poetry, two full pages of it.
Here is one of them. It is titled — perfectly, as was his wont — “FLIGHT”
From down the street
trampled as city grass
the old man wrestles emphysema
gasps for breath like a fish drowning in air.
She must be watched or lost
a sparrow in a windstorm.
They checked into Howard Johnson's.
"My wife prefers a high floor
she loves to watch
the flight of birds."
"Would the sixth floor do?"
"The sixth floor will do just fine."
He helped her climb out
on the window sill.
"Hold my hand.
No, no, not like that
tighter tighter
NOW!"
The sixth floor was just right.
The names of two sons
carefully neatly noted on a pad on the dresser
one in New York in dresses
the other in Seattle in hardware.
$3.45 was found in the old man's
right-hand pocket
in the left pocket instructions
how to start an eccentric 11-year-old Plymouth.
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The great career moment that Herman gave me was that I got to write the introduction to his poems. It was very brief. Because it was an introduction, it doesn’t appear to be online, so I am reproducing it here from memory, but if I’m off, it’s only by a syllable or three.
Many years ago, Herman Gold tried, for perhaps the tenth time, to get us to publish his poetry. When we told him, for perhaps the tenth time, that we don’t publish poetry, he gave us a withering look, and shouted, “What do I have to do to get my poetry printed? Croak?”
Yes. In December. Of sheer cussedness.
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So, that is your first challenge for today: Tell us of the most eccentric and/or compelling person you’ve ever known. And explain why. Funny is best, but interesting and colorful are almost equally important. All three, and you are Gold. Send it here:
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And our second challenge for the day: Give us a question for either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, or both, to be asked of them on Tuesday, for their debate. It can be funny, serious, and/or potentially revealing. Here’s mine, a simple one, to be asked of both: “What is the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done, as an adult? And what, if anything, did you learn from it?”
Please send your questions here:
And finally, here is the Gene Pool Gene Poll for today, which happens to be Saturday, August 37th, 2024. I specify that date because it is a day we originally gave, on Thursday, for the deadline date of the current week’s Invitational. If we wrote that, it was obviously true. So.
Which is the funnier published error from a newspaper?
“President Wilson spent the evening entering Mrs. Galt.” (should have been “entertaining”.)
Okay, we are outta here. See you on Tuesday.
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Also, that poem. Damn.
I voted the President Wilson one as funnier. While the second smacks you hard in the face like slapstick, it’s obviously a typo. The first at least suggests, through its suggestiveness, an element of subversive intentionality.