When it was time to get my teaching job, I was told, in effect, “White men need not apply.” Keep in mind, I had a nearly perfect A-average in my graduate courses; my master’s dissertation was published in a major scientific journal (the Journal of Ethnobotany from Harvard); my PhD was published as a book! This combination would have automatically ushered me into the halls of academia in any other past generation. That’s when the worm turned; that’s when I became radicalized; that’s when I saw the true color of liberalism! Here I had two young children and I had killed myself to get that degree, but because of the social engineering of the radical Left, I was told to put aside all of my aspirations.
Affirmative action, a misguided liberal policy supposedly used to promote equal opportunity, almost destroyed my family and me. Here I was a “man-child in the Promised Land,” denied my birthright for matters of race. According to the ACLU this immigrant son had “to put his life on hold” so the less qualified (i.e., “others”) could move ahead. The rest is history.
I will not bore you with the details or whine. I do very well indeed today, but the government didn’t hand it to me. Affirmative action didn’t get me to where I am today! It’s been a long road of crawling on broken glass. Everything I ever achieved, I achieved with hard work, dedication, sweat, tears, and pain. By the way, none of those qualities are taught today. I guess you could say I’m a fighter; I do not now, nor have I ever, expected someone to hand me an entitlement, especially not the government.
I fight and work for what I want in life—always have.
THIRTY-THREE
Working on Cruise Lines
Have I told you about the force 10 storm? Let me tell you. It’s a true story.
This was one of the most frightening moments of my life because my family was on the ship with me. When I was a younger guy, when I was on the islands as an anthropologist and ethnobotanist, I took great slides with my Nikon F, in the light-meter days. Those were the days of real photography. I’m not saying you can’t do it with digital. You can, because I have a digital camera, and I’m very fond of it. I really don’t know how to compare the two. I’m very happy with the digital pictures, but the day of holding the light meter and stepping back—that was another story. Hearing the shutter click on a Nikon F was visceral photography. Those were exciting days of taking pictures! You took slides in those days.
Does anyone do slides anymore? I don’t think so. I don’t think anyone does a slide, but the quality of the depth of the picture was phenomenal. I have some pictures, for example, of kids—and these were mixed-race kids, incidentally—in the Cook Islands, circa 1970 or 1971, laughing on a roadside as I went by. I started to talk to them, right after a light rainstorm. Blondish hair, green eyes, dark skin.
Because I had great slides, I approached some cruise lines about presenting slide shows of the islands the ships traveled to. I was always in love with big ships. As a kid in Queens, New York, I was landlocked, I grew up in a family that didn’t know boating from a lox. I used to drive on the West Side Highway when I first got my car in New York. The great cruise ships of the world would line up on the Hudson River piers, and I would drive by them. They were the most beautiful visions I’d ever seen! Each ship was filled with the promise of a thousand lifetimes to me. I don’t know what drew me to the sea in that way, but I said to myself that when I got older, whatever I did, that I’d have to go to sea in some way or another. Now, I didn’t go into the navy—fate did not take me there. Perhaps that would have been another life and a great life unto itself, but, as I say, I went to the islands collecting medicinal plants and took these great pictures. Then, as I had children but still wanted to get out there and didn’t have the money to do so, I marketed myself in a proper manner. I went to the cruise lines and said, “I can lecture your passengers about the islands,” which was true.
So, I got a free first-class cabin for my wife and I, and another one for the kids. I took the kids out of school often, and I’d get the question, “Should you take your kids out of school for a month at a time? They’d fall behind in lessons.”
I remember saying, “Look, son, I’m taking you out of school for a month. This is a great privilege to go on a ship. You’re going to have to take your lessons with you. We’re going to do the lessons on the ship, and you’re going to keep a journal.”
“Sure, Dad.”
Needless to say, three days out and the journal was still blank. The pages were blank; the schoolbooks were still sitting on the shelf. The kids were wheeling around on the deck of the ship, bothering all the old people who hated children. They were the only children on the ship, in some cases, because who else had a child on a ship in those days in the month of, let’s say, October or November? Nobody.
So, one of the ships we got on was not a big ocean liner. It was small: 5,000 tons with a very shallow draft that let it into shallow waters, as in the Antarctic. So my family and I went back and forth between Tahiti and Fiji in two cabins. The ship didn’t have many passengers. Remember, for the average cruise ship then, a big ship was 35,000 tons. Today, they’re 100,000 tons or 125,000. They’re monsters! They’re hotels with propellers! I don’t particularly like monster ships.
So, I’m on a 5,000-ton boat with a very shallow keel. We leave Fiji, and we’re supposed to be out there, back and forth, for about twenty days, island-hopping to Tahiti around Christmastime or New Year’s. Well, we got into a hurricane. Now, you got a light, shallow-bottom ship in a storm, and this ship is rolling. In the middle of the night I heard a pounding. They put us towards the bow of the ship, in forward cabins—not exactly the best. I hear banging like someone’s hitting the steel hull with a sledgehammer, so I wake up and say, “Something is wrong. Why is the ship sounding like this?” I get up, go in the passageways—nobody is awake. Like a ghost ship.
Being a survival type, I knew something was wrong. I throw on a windbreaker, climb up to the bridge, and there is the German captain, who is normally as nattily dressed as you would expect of a sea captain. Now he is unshaven, in an undershirt, and his eyes are in another state. They weren’t in a state of panic, but they were locked: locked onto another place in another time, and he looks at me as though I’m not there—he looks right through me! His hands were locked on the wheel. It wasn’t a state of panic, but his eyes were looking somewhere away—maybe, you would say, like a soldier when people refer to the “thousand-yard stare.” That’s what he had, the thousand-yard stare.
He had gone a little nuts from the pressure. He said, “Lecturer, all the time Fiji, Tahiti; Tahiti, Fiji. Lecturer, Fiji, Tahiti; Tahiti, Fiji.” He had reached the breaking point. We were in a terrible storm, and it was very rough, very bad. I feared the ship would go down. After this experience, I became kind of disinterested in taking my children on long trips on small ships.
Now, I would ask you, if you came from a family that took you away on long trips as a child, did it affect you positively, in the long run, or negatively? Here’s the interesting twist to this whole story: It was actually liberal thinking in those days that, if you took your child out of school for a long trip and they were exposed to the world, they would get more out of that long exposure than they would from sitting in a classroom. That was actually a liberal philosophy, which I went along with and ascribed to—and it turned out to be correct!
THIRTY-FOUR
First Boat in Hawaii: Sailing for the First Time
Imagine what it’s like for a kid from New York to wind up in Hawaii: I’d never been to a place like that! It was like walking into heaven itself, or so I thought as I pi
cked fallen plumeria blossoms from the sidewalks.
When you land in heaven, you think you can do anything. You are filled with a sense of confidence that only children and the mad have and can understand. But, when a grown-up has hubris, it becomes very dangerous and, in my case, that was true. I had never seen sunsets like in Hawaii. I used to bicycle up to the university, and I would see plumeria blossoms lying on the sidewalk. I would stop the bicycle and pick up the blossoms and look at them and smell them. Sure, I had seen roses on a fence in the Bronx when I was a little kid, and they were soft and beautiful—but this was something unique. The sweet perfume was unlike anything I had ever experienced.
Sunsets and sunrises and birds in the jungles in the back of the rain forest, that you’d never seen or heard before—and you started to get tuned into your own body in a way you’d never been. If you’ve never lived in the tropics and it’s the first time, you start shedding clothing and shoes and leather, and you put it all away. And now you’re in flip-flops and shorts. All of a sudden at night the breeze blows gently through your sleeves and you start to come alive in a new way. You go in the warm water and start to feel like the original man. So you buy a sailboat—that’s the first big thing you buy.
So, I bought a sloop-rigged boat. Tarange was a sloop-rigged sailing vessel, about twenty-two feet long. She was made of white oak primarily and was built in Oregon, then sailed out to Hawaii. I bought her for next to nothing. She was in perfect shape and had no engine. I berthed her in the Ala Wai Yacht Harbor. Most people who own boats mainly use them to drink on and hang out—it’s as good a thing to do as any—but I was foolish enough to actually want to sail the boat, even though I knew nothing about sailing. I took it out without an engine.
I knew it was pretty easy to get out because the wind was prevailing out of the yacht harbor. I thought, Wow, this is great! There I was on the boat alone. My friends cast me off, released the lines, pushed me backwards, and there I went: down the Ala Wai Channel, out of the harbor, out into the ocean. I was zipping along with the sail all the way out.
And there I was out in the Pacific Ocean, alone. This is super. I’m really enjoying myself. Then I realized I didn’t know how to get back. I thought, How do I turn this thing around if the wind is blowing out? Well, I didn’t know how, so I thought, Well, I better figure this out because if this keeps up for a while, I’ll soon be out in the middle of the ocean—and then there will be no way back at all.
I had no flares, no radio, no engine. All I had was confidence that was bordering on the insane. The first thing I did was resort to common sense. I dropped the sails because that would cut the motion of the boat. I dropped the sails and, using the tiller, turned the boat around—you know: flip-flop, flip-flop—until I got the boat pointing back towards the land. Then, I figured, If the wind is blowing against me, there must be a way to go into a prevailing wind and still move against it. I’ve seen other people do it. And little by little, lo and behold, I was able to—luckily (I don’t know whether it was the current or God’s hand itself)—get pushed back into the harbor. I learned quickly that sailing is not for the amateur. That’s all there is to it.
Those days are over, but she was my first boat. I didn’t save the life ring from Tarange because I didn’t even have a life ring. I don’t think I even had a life preserver! That was in the late sixties, an age when people thought with total madness about what they could do and accomplish.
Now I drive a powerboat. It has all sorts of safety equipment on it, but not as much as it should have. But I like powerboats a lot better than sailboats because they’re easier to get out. I can get this boat underway in fifteen minutes. It’s forty-nine feet long, twin diesels, forty tons, and I can go out on it alone and come back on it alone in almost any wind. That’s the good part: just you and the birds and the water, the wind and the land. That’s why I go out now, just to look at the water and look at the birds and look at the landforms, mainly—and the seals. I can name every species of bird on the Bay. I’ve come to understand that every animal has a personality—isn’t it strange?
I still eat animals, but they all have a personality when you get to know them—and they all want to live. Dad taught me that everything wants to live. That’s how he taught me to respect life. He said, “You’ll notice that a cat wants to live, a dog wants to live, a rat wants to live, a mouse wants to live, a bird wants to live.” He learned that when he accidentally shot a bird as a kid. Remember, this is odd to a country boy—it sounds very weak, but remember, I’m a New York City boy. To us, it’s a different experience than it is to you guys. I respect your ability to hunt for your food—but every animal actually has a personality when you get to know it. They’re all different, just as we’re all different: Every human is unique, like a snowflake. Well, guess what? So are animals! They’re all unique. It’s amazing when you come to understand that.
THIRTY-FIVE
The Leather Man Gets Brain Cancer
This is about a man who grew up as one of my father’s best friends in a very poor neighborhood in New York City. They were immigrants together; their parents came over, maybe on the same boat, or they met each other in the slums of New York. They both had a very tough life, and they worked their way up, little by little, as immigrants have to do as they struggle in any society. This man went into a business that took off at a certain point like a rocket; he hit a fad in a certain business and started to make a great deal of money. He moved way beyond our family.
While we lived in an attached brick house in Queens, he had the money to move his family to a detached house. I remember how important that distinction was in those days: It’s like the Buick LeSabre as opposed to the Buick Roadmaster—or, God forbid, you were Rockefeller and bought a Cadillac, if you can imagine. People used to grade their status in those days by their car model and house. I don’t suppose it’s much different today.
So he moved to this detached house in Roslyn, New York. It was a beautiful house. It had its own lawn all around it (we only had a little strip of grass in the backyard and a tiny one in the front). The carpet was wall-to-wall and pink.
He was a big cigar smoker. We would go and visit; I had a very good time. He would gloat with the cigar and lord it over my father. We’d leave. My father never said anything against him, but you know, I could see in his eyes that he was a little, let’s say, that he lost that little battle at that time. You know how humans are—they’re competitive! Even if they love their friend, if their friend does better than them, there’s a degree of envy in every human being. It’s just one of the cardinal sins.
As years went on, the man’s business continued to thrive. Then I left home and moved away from NYC. I went and did my thing collecting plants, working for my graduate degrees thousands of miles away—I was living six thousand miles away, then nine thousand, in the Fiji Islands. Lo and behold, on one of my trips back to New York, when I was already a father myself, I heard that this man’s leather business had collapsed entirely. The fad that he rode like a wave died. People were no longer buying that particular product, and the man who had a chain of successful wholesale stores lost everything.
He lost everything, and it was so fast that he wound up living where he started: on the Lower East Side of New York in a poor relative’s apartment, with his wife and the relative’s family—back where he started in a one-room apartment. And that’s where I come in.
I came back from one of my trips to the Fiji Islands. I was a young man—I don’t remember how old I was; maybe thirty-five to forty. My father was dead, and here sits the leather man. Now, remember, I loved him like another father. I loved all my father’s friends. You know how it is when you’re a kid in a very close-knit community: You tend to love the people like they’re your own. We all grew up so close together, and there was never a bad word between him and my father.
He sat there, shrunken up in the chair in my parents’ living room, after he’d lost e
verything. He looked up at me, still smoking a cigar, and practically pleaded, “Michael, Michael, look what happened to me. Look what happened to me.” His eyes were wandering left and right. He didn’t understand what happened to him. He said, “I’d rather have cancer than what God did to me.”
I soon left New York again. I went back to do what I did, which was to collect plants, and lo and behold, I heard that two years later he died from one of the most rapidly invasive forms of brain cancer.
Be careful what you say: God hears the truth but waits.
THIRTY-SIX
From Immigrant’s Son to Radio Stardom
My father was an immigrant. He came here when he was seven. He was not born here, but I was born here. He was a citizen when I was born. I’m not an anchor baby—don’t get me wrong—but I do have one foot in the Old World and one foot in the New World, so I really speak from a knowledgeable position about it. I understand what it’s like to live in a poor household with many people. Trust me, we lived in such a place—I didn’t even have my own bedroom in the Bronx. There was one bedroom and a tiny living room with a fake fireplace. I remember hanging stockings on the fake fireplace: I thought Santa would give me a gift.
So, part in the Old World, part in the New World. My grandmother didn’t speak a word of English in the house. She spoke the old language from the old country. She was so wonderful! Boy, did I love her. She was so beautiful, very stoic—very, very Russian, this woman. She spoke to me in Russian by the way. I am not a Russian-language speaker, but it’s strange: I can understand the language to a certain extent. It’s a very hard language for an American to learn. The alphabet is very complicated for an English speaker. I can surely imagine how hard it is for a Spanish speaker to learn English, by the way. English is a tough language, very tough!
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