Robert Rosen

Conspiracy theories about the Epstein Files and incessant talk of artificial intelligence and Elon Musk's Hitler-loving Grok machine are in the air, and they got me thinking: What might A.I. say about the well-worn conspiracy theories having to do with me?

 

If you're unfamiliar with my conspiracy theories, which like all conspiracy theories, no matter how absurd, refuse to die, I'll summarize: It came to my attention 25 years ago that a conspiracy theorist had claimed I was involved in a CIA plot to eliminate John Lennon. This theory soon metastasized into: I was the Zionist-backed CIA spymaster who ordered the killing. 

 

So I asked my favorite A.I. search engine, Perplexity: Is there any truth in the conspiracy theories linking Robert Rosen to John Lennon's murder? 

 

Perplexity wasted no words: "There is no credible evidence linking Robert Rosen to John Lennon's murder. The conspiracy theories that attempt to connect Rosen to the assassination are entirely baseless and originate from fringe sources."

 

Okay, good start. Anything else, Perplexity? 

 

Yes: "Some conspiracy theorists, notably Salvador Astucia (a pseudonym for a Holocaust-denying writer), have accused Rosen of being a 'Zionist-funded CIA spymaster' who ordered Lennon's murder and was later paid by the CIA to write Nowhere Man to disgrace Lennon's memory. These claims are absurd and unsupported by any factual evidence.... Rosen himself has publicly addressed these accusations, describing them as outlandish and fabricated."

 

You got that right, Perplexity. Now please summarize.

 

"In summary, the conspiracy theories linking Robert Rosen to John Lennon's murder are entirely without merit and are propagated only by fringe, discredited sources. There is no factual basis for these claims, and Rosen's only connection to Lennon is as an author who wrote about the musician's final years.... The mainstream discussion of conspiracy theories around Lennon's murder generally focuses on Mark David Chapman, possible U.S. intelligence involvement, and other figures—not Robert Rosen."

 

Thank you for sorting that out, Perplexity. 

______

All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.   

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky.

 

On Independence Day I received a text from a friend in Spain, Martín León Soto: "Congratulations for the 4th of July. That day signaled the start point on the long journey of getting free from the European autocrats so that you can have autocrats of your own." 

 

My response: "But the good news is when Trump's policies drive me into poverty in my old age I won't be taxed on tips when I go back to driving a cab."

 

"Did you really drive a cab?" Martín's wife, Aida Vílchez, asked.

 

Yes, I did, a long time ago... a lifetime ago. I began doing it in college. It was a good way to pick up some extra money. And then I did it to make a living for a few years in the late 70s and early 80s. It was a perfect part-time gig for a freelance writer. I could work three nights a week and make enough money to pay my bills. (My rent at the time was $200 a month.)

 

All this taxi texting reminded me of a cab-driving story that I've told many times but have never written down—until now. 

 

In 1976 a local newspaper, The Villager, asked me to review the movie Taxi Driver, the story of a deranged New York cabbie, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), who accumulates a lot of guns, goes on a shooting rampage, and wants to assassinate a politician. At the press screening, one of the PR people asked if anybody had ever driven a cab. I raised my hand. The woman invited me to go on TV with Martin Scorsese, the director, and Paul Schrader, the screenwriter, to talk about how realistic the film is.

 

I went on the show, Midday With Bill Boggs, and told the story of my friend, I'll call him "Sam," a taxi driver who'd gotten me into cab driving. Sam, a writer, was also on the rifle team at a local college, and he often talked about how he wanted to shoot the president, Richard Nixon, and then grant me an exclusive jailhouse interview. Schrader liked the story so much, when the show was over he invited me to go back to the hotel with him and Scorsese. So I got into the limo with the two of them and went back to the hotel. Scorsese didn't say a word the whole time. But Schrader was super-friendly. I sat in his hotel room for the better part of an hour interviewing him, and the story ran in The Villager as a combination review/interview.

 

Epilogue: Sam did not assassinate Nixon (as you may have guessed). But he did shove a chocolate cream pie into the face of born-again Watergate conspirator Charles Colson in a hotel elevator in San Francisco.

 

"Jesus told me to hit you with a pie because you're a fraud," Sam told him.

 

"Jesus forgives you," Colson replied.

 

You can read about the pie incident in the New York Times of Feb. 11, 1978. It's the last item in the "Notes on People" column.

______

All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.   

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky.

Nelson Algren, best known for his novels The Man With the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side, is also remembered for a couple of pithy quotes. One that I've long been familiar with is Algren's three rules of life: "Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own."

 

I recently came across another Algren quote that reminded me of my most recent book, A Brooklyn Memoir, set in Flatbush in the 1950s and 60s: "A writer does well if in his whole life he can tell the story of one street." That's a good description of what I attempted to accomplish with East 17th Street.

 

Here's a paragraph that tells part of the story of that one street:

 

That was life on East 17th Street—a street I'd lived on for so long, I couldn't imagine not living on it; a street on which I got to know, in an intimate, visceral way, not just the people I fought with every day, but every tangible thing that made up the block: the alleyways, the buildings, their cellars—some of them converted into fallout shelters and stocked with giant khaki-colored cans filled with soda crackers and Kotex. With the building I lived in (and played Chinese handball in front of), I knew every crack in the sidewalk cement, I knew every brick that comprised the street-level masonry, I knew the mortar in between the bricks, and I knew especially well those two Doric columns in front, which it was my joy to climb upon, to cling to, and to press my cheek against and feel the coolness of the fluted gray stone.

______

All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky.

If my business—if you can call what I do a business rather than a grand delusion that I've been pursuing for more than 50 years—needed a slogan, something like, "Just Do It" or "Finger Lickin' Good," it would be: "Pissing People Off Since 1971." This occurred to me the other day when I was thinking about all the people whom my writing has enraged or who have been infuriated by cartoons that other people have created and that I published in newspapers and magazines I once edited.

 

It's true that in the 1970s I did publish things to intentionally piss people off. In those days of emerging punk and outrage for the sake of outrage, it was a generational response to coming of age in a society run by criminals and hypocrites and seeing no path forward into a bleak-looking future. The Sex Pistols had good reason to sing, "No future for you." 

 

The best-known episode of this protopunk era was the publication, in 1974, in Observation Post (OP), a radical college newspaper I edited, of a cartoon of a "nun using a cross as a sexual object" (as The New York Times put it), drawn by the late artist and filmmaker Robert Attanasio.

 

The drawing was Attanasio's statement on his childhood abuse at the hands of the Catholic clergy, which left him with what I now think was a case of PTSD. And the public reaction to the cartoon, which I touched on in Beaver Street, and which I'm exploring in detail in the book I'm currently working on, was so extreme, I'm still trying to make sense of it.

 

A very pissed off ultra-conservative New York Senator, James Buckley, led the charge against OP, calling for a federal investigation and the expulsion of the editors responsible for the cartoon. But nothing of the sort happened. Student newspapers, the courts declared, have a constitutional right to criticize religion in any manner they see fit, and the Catholic Church is not above criticism—which I'd think is especially true for those who've been subjected to the Church's abuse.

 

The people who became enraged at my John Lennon bio, Nowhere Man, were Yoko Ono's media flacks as well as Lennon fans who didn't like the inherent truth I communicated in the book. The media flacks were just doing what they were told to do. But fans of the man who sang "Just give me some truth," yet are opposed to learning the truth of who Lennon was in real life, have always puzzled me. It wasn't my intention to piss anybody off with Nowhere Man. It just happened naturally.

 

Beaver Street, my history of the adult entertainment industry, pissed off a lot of people, too. Some of them were enraged that I treated certain characters with what they thought was too much sympathy. Others were angry for the opposite reason. But nobody was more pissed off than the late Gloria Leonard, a former porn star and figurehead publisher of High Society magazine. Leonard demanded I make clear that she was the real publisher, not a figurehead. I refused. The barrage of junior-high-school-level insults she lobbed at me were reminiscent of the wit and wisdom of Donald Trump. The episode saddened me. I'd met Leonard several times and I liked her. But she was not the publisher of High Society. That would be Carl Ruderman, who hid behind Leonard's skirt.

 

I've run into only one person whom my latest book, A Brooklyn Memoir, pissed off. It happened at an event where I read from the book and then took questions from the audience. A woman, making no effort to hide her rage, said that she grew up in Flatbush, only a few blocks from where I did, and what I described in the book was nothing like what she experienced. She implied that I was lying. My response: "Each block was like a mini-neighborhood and everybody had their own experiences." And I moved on.

 

There are more recent examples that I prefer not to get into here. Because there's no need to re-infuriate people whose wounds are still raw. But it does remind me of an old adage: If your stories don't piss anybody off, what you're writing is public relations, not journalism.  

 

And, of course, there are the immortal words of Joan Didion: "Writers are always selling somebody out."

______

All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky.