Robert Rosen

 

In the final weeks of her life, Sonja Wagner told her friends to go to her loft and take whatever pieces of art they wanted. There was much to choose from among the paintings, photographs, metal sculptures, and assemblages. Sonja, who passed away last year at age 85, was a prolific artist. My wife, Mary Lyn Maiscott, and I simply didn't have enough wall or storage space to take everything we loved.

 

As I was browsing the collection, I came across a framed photograph that Sonja had manipulated to look like a painting—that was one of her specialties. It was a gorgeous shot of pennants flying above a street in a Spanish city. One of the pennants said "Tio Pepe," a type of sherry.

 

"We need to take this one," I said to Mary Lyn.

 

Our friends Rocio and Jimmy Sanz own Tio Pepe, a Spanish restaurant that's been on West 4th Street, in Greenwich Village, for more than 50 years.

 

The other week, I brought the photo to Tio Pepe and told the manager, Leana Zittlau, about Sonja. She hung it on the wall in a conspicuous spot next to a Spanish flag, off to the left as you walk in. Leana then shot me standing next to the photo and posted it on Tio Pepe's Instagram.

 

The plan now is for Sonja's friends to gather by her photo for a meal at what I now call The Tio Pepe Museum of Fine Art and once again celebrate her extraordinary life.

 

You can see more of Sonja's artwork and read about her life in an article I wrote for The Village Voice.

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It's been hot in New York City. And humid. How hot is it? Nothing like the 120 degrees in Las Vegas or the 130 in Death Valley. But as I stepped off the elevator the other day after taking a walk, my neighbor asked if it was raining.

 

"No, I'm sweating," I said.

 

I'm dedicating this mid-summer post to memories of cooler days. The photo, taken in Washington Square Park the morning of February 13, 2024, was one of those days.

 

It doesn't snow much in New York anymore, not like it did in the 60s and 70s when you could count on three or four good blizzards every winter to shut down the schools. But it snowed that morning, coating the park in a pristine white frosting. By evening, every snowflake had melted.

 

That's just the way it goes these days.

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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 X or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.

In early 2005, I was preparing for Nowhere Man events in Mexico and Chile, and I wanted to be able to speak more Spanish than hola, adios, and que será será. So I placed an ad for a Spanish tutor on Craig's List. Julio Malone was one of the people who responded. He offered to teach me Spanish if I'd help him with his English.

 

Julio's a longtime political columnist for Lístin Diario, a newspaper in the Dominican Republic. He also does commentary for NY1 Noticias and Univision 41 Nueva York; teaches journalism at a Bronx middle school; and wrote a book for middle-school students about Sammy Sosa, the steroid-using baseball superstar who twice hit more than 60 home runs in a season. Sosa is from Julio's hometown, San Pedro de Macorís. The Chicago Cubs had traded Sosa to the Baltimore Orioles, and Julio had an idea for a column for The Baltimore Sun. I helped him write it and the Sun published it as "Latin Grit."

 

When the Mexican newsweekly Proceso asked me to review the Broadway musical Lennon, Julio translated the review and the Proceso editors barely changed a word.

 

Thus was born a friendship.

 

I began venturing up to Julio's Bronx apartment in a castle-like building on the Grand Concourse for Spanish lessons. But we'd end up smoking weed, drinking wine, and arguing about politics, while Julio, whom I've urged to open a restaurant in the Dominican Republic, whipped up fabulous seafood dinners. My progress in Spanish was minimal, but I didn't care. I was having too much fun hanging out and eating his food.

 

Nineteen years later Julio and I are still hanging out, though the other night he came down to my place and I did the cooking—as Julio watched with a critical eye. He gave my pasta pesto with sautéed broccoli and garlic high marks (though he did call my non-dairy Parmesan cheese "gringo food"). Then, after consuming sufficient quantities of wine, THC gummies, and weed, we turned to politics and economics. Below, along with my responses, are some of the ideas put forth by a gadfly Dominican journalist who recently became an American citizen and is going to vote for the first time.

 

Julio: Biden is a warmonger in charge of a corrupt system that needs to be torn down.

Me: Do you prefer Trump? Do you want to live under a military dictatorship? Cause that's what he's going to try to do with the Insurrection Act if he's elected. And you're not going to be one of his favored citizens.

 

Julio: Trump would end the war in Ukraine.

Me: No he wouldn't. If he's able to arrange a surrender or ceasefire, and the Russians still occupy parts of Ukraine, it would become a never-ending guerilla war.

 

Julio: There are Russian hypersonic missiles in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. This is going to be worse than the Cuban Missile Crisis of '62.

Me: I hope you're wrong.

 

Julio: Electric cars are a scam. It's a way for power companies to make more money. If they wanted to, they could build self-charging electric cars that have a generator on each tire like the little generators they have on bicycles for the headlight. 

Me: I'm sure somebody's thought of that. This is America. If there's money to be made, somebody's going to do it. There must be all kinds of technical and engineering problems to overcome before that would work.

 

Julio: The dollar is going to collapse.

Me: You've been saying that for 19 years.

 

Julio: Recycling is a scam. We wash it, sort it, store it, and bring it down to the basement so a mega-corporation can take it, turn it into something else, and sell it back to us for a profit. We're doing their work for free. They should be paying us.

Me: You might be on to something.

 

Epilogue: After 19 years, I can now read Spanish on the level of one of Julio's middle-school students. Progress.

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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 X or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.

...but at least they mention Nowhere Man a lot.

 

I don't know what it is with News Corp, Rupert Murdoch's media empire, but in the course of destroying democracy with lies and propaganda, his various publications and Websites cite my John Lennon biography, Nowhere Man, more than anybody. They've been doing it since the 1980s, when the book was just a germ of an idea that I'd mentioned to a reporter.

 

Since then Murdoch's scribes have written about Nowhere Man in such places as the New York Post, mentioning it in the same breath as The Catcher in the Rye; in The Wall Street Journal; and on Fox News, as they did the other week. The stories aren't always complimentary and they don't always get their facts right, but it doesn't seem to matter. As long as they spell the title correctly it helps keep the book alive.

 

The recent story that popped up on various Fox News sites, as well as on the Argentine site El Cronista, is about a loft in New York's Soho neighborhood, once owned by Lennon and Yoko Ono, that sold for $5.5 million. The article said that according to Nowhere Man, the Lennons bought the property "around 1980." This is false. I don't specify when they bought it. All I say about the loft is that they allowed their tarot card reader, Charlie Swan, to live there rent free as part of a generous compensation package. This would have been an interesting detail to include in the article. But... whatever.

 

Of course I take issue with Murdoch's grotesque right-wing politics. All I'm saying is that it's hard to feel totally negative about something as malignant as News Corp when they've been so... helpful.

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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 X or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.

I've been getting enough smoke in my lungs breathing New York City air. So I decided it was time to take advantage of legal cannabis and buy some edibles. Since marijuana was legalized here two years ago, so many dispensaries have opened that if you live in Manhattan, you don't have to walk more than a block or two to find one. The problem is that most of them are unlicensed, and you can't be certain of the potency or purity of their products. And the handful of licensed dispensaries charge a premium, sometimes two or three times what you'd pay for the same thing in a licensed dispensary in, say, Arizona.

 

Being the frugal sort, I figured I'd take a chance, save a few bucks, and check out an unlicensed dispensary on Hester Street that had caught my eye. How bad could it be? So I went to Smokers Paradise 2, hoping to score some brownies or cookies. There were two guys behind the counter, neither of whom spoke English very well. Considering it was my first time buying legally, the product was a drug, and I had questions, I should have walked out. But I was able to establish that all they had in the way of edibles was a wide selection of gummies. For no particular reason I chose Jolly Rancher. They were manufactured in Canada, and the entire package, according to the label, contained 600 mg of THC. The proprietor was, with some difficulty, able to communicate that one gummy was equal to one dose. The package was $20.80. I was able to pay with a credit card, which surprised me. I thought cannabis transactions were cash only.

 

There were seven gummies in the package. That meant that each one should contain about 85.7 mg of THC, more than enough to send me into orbit. (A standard dose is 10 mg, but I have a high tolerance.)

 

I ate one gummy and waited three hours. Nothing happened.

 

The next day I ate two gummies and waited three hours. Nothing happened. 

 

The next day I ate the last four gummies, allegedly 342.8 mg of THC, and waited three hours. Nothing happened.

 

Smokers Paradise 2 had sold me some very overpriced candy. It's the first time in my life I've been ripped off buying marijuana, and I've been buying it since high school. But I'm not going to get into an argument with the manager of a rip-off store. And I'm not going to tell Mastercard that I want a refund because the THC gummies I bought at an unlicensed dispensary didn't get me high. I'm just going to write it off as a research expense.

 

Next time I'll go to a licensed dispensary. Maybe they'll have brownies.

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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 Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

 

I've been reading The Overstory, by Richard Powers, a book about activists who try to save giant redwoods and Douglas firs, some more than a thousand years old, from logging companies determined to clear-cut entire forests. The book got me thinking about ancient trees, and the other day, as I was walking around Washington Square Park, I noticed that some of the trees looked like they'd been there a long time, maybe since the Civil War. "What's the oldest tree in Washington Square Park?" I asked Google. The answer surprised me.

 

In the northwest corner of the park is an enormous English elm, planted, according to some sources, in 1679, soon after the British took possession of New Amsterdam from the Dutch and renamed it New York. The area was farmland surrounded by a marsh. Minetta Creek flowed down what would one day become Minetta Lane and Minetta Street.

 

The tree, 344 years old and 133 feet tall, is the oldest living thing in Manhattan. Its roots are thought to reach halfway across the park. Since nothing can live that long and be that big without having a legend attached to it, the English elm is also known as "The Hanging Elm," though there's no official record of anyone having been hanged from it. People were hanged from a gallows erected near the current location of the park's fountain and buried in the potter's field that's now the eastern two-thirds of the park. More than 20,000 bodies still lie underneath Washington Square, many of them victims of the yellow-fever epidemics that ravaged the city in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The elm has seen a lot.

 

I approached the northwest corner of the park looking for the tree. There was no mistaking it. With a trunk almost six feet in diameter, it dwarfs the surrounding trees. The elm seems to call out, "I'm the tree." I've walked by it a thousand times and wondered how I never noticed it before. I tried to take a picture of the entire tree but couldn't fit it all into the frame, not even close. So I settled for a photo of the bottom part of the trunk, which best communicates the enormity of an old English elm that will probably outlast me and you, too.

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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 Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

 

On Friday, March 12, my wife, Mary Lyn Maiscott, and I received our second Covid vaccinations at a Duane Reade a few blocks from where we live—Moderna for those keeping score.

 

Exactly one year after New York City went into lockdown we walked out of the drugstore feeling elated, facing the world as fully vaccinated people, awaiting a return to something approaching normalcy. To celebrate, we bought bread and little pizzas at the Sullivan Street Bakery.

 

People told us we were lucky to get vaccinated so quickly. I've no doubt. I know people in Florida and Missouri who drove hundreds of miles to be vaccinated. We've certainly been luckier than the nearly 540,000 Americans (more than 30,000 in New York City alone) who've died from Covid-19 and continue to die at a rate of about 1,400 per day. That only one person in my family, my 81-year-old uncle, succumbed to the disease is both tragic and miraculous. My mother, 94 and in an assisted-living facility in Florida, continues to endure, though I haven't seen her in more than a year.

 

I've spent that year mostly within the confines of my apartment with Mary Lyn and our cat, Oiseau, who seems to appreciate having us here 24/7 and will soon be in for a rude shock. The days have been a blur of routine and routine horror. April, the "cruelest month" as T.S. Elliot called it in "The Wasteland," more than lived up to its reputation in 2020.

• It was the month almost a thousand people a day in New York City died from Covid.

• It was the month the sound of ambulance sirens were heard round the clock and the sound of vuvuzelas and people banging on pots and pans to salute "essential workers" filled the air every evening at seven.

•  It was the month most of our building cleared out and we were the only ones left on the seventh floor.

• It was the month that one morning, before dawn, clad in latex gloves and a $3 face mask and armed with a small bottle of hard-to-find hand sanitizer, I ventured into a supermarket. On the checkout line, I saw, social-distancing behind me, a man wearing a gas mask, with the rest of his body, down to his shoes, wrapped in plastic garbage bags, his cart overflowing with carrots, potatoes, and onions. I felt as if I were in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie.

•  It was the month we stopped going to supermarkets.

•  It was the month we began washing our groceries with disinfectant.

•  It was the month I began studying a Covid map of the USA. A small corner of Montana had no cases. I wanted to be there.

•  It was the month we stopped taking the subway.

•  It was the month Mary Lyn began working from home, turning our couch and coffee table into her office.

•  It was the month I lived in a state of terror and didn't leave the house for days at a time.

•  It was the month that when I did emerge from my apartment, always early in the morning or late at night, when there were fewer people in the street, I felt enraged every time a maskless person came too close to me.

•  It was the month, while passing through Times Square, I saw only two people: the Naked Cowboy and a solitary tourist listening to him.

•  It was the month that every time my throat felt scratchy I thought it was the beginning of the end.

•  It was the month I became aware of the mobile morgues—refrigerated trucks and trailers—parked outside every hospital and couldn't walk past one without imagining the overflow of bodies inside.

•  It was the month my post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie became more of an Edgar Allan Poe story.

And that was only April.

 

As the months passed and the body count grew, every day I binge-watched the news, though it sometimes made me feel physically ill. I could barely believe I was living in a country that elected Donald Trump. For all the good it did (none), I began rage-tweeting at Trump in response to his endless flow of toxic inanities.

 

By May, as restaurants struggled to survive, our entire neighborhood, Soho, was transformed into one big outdoor café. It would have been nice to sit in one of those cafés and have a glass of wine if being around people didn't seem like such a bad idea.

 

Post-riot graffiti as literary criticism. Photo © Robert Rosen.

 

On a Saturday night at the end of May, after the murder of George Floyd, Soho was trashed and looted. The luxury stores and quaint restaurants were reduced to a jumble of smashed windows and boarded-up storefronts, some covered with graffiti, others with street art.

 

The pandemic played havoc with what I loosely call "my writing business." The European and West Coast events I was planning for Bobby in Naziland went by the wayside. My participation in a documentary, Did America Kill John Lennon?, and an event celebrating Lennon's 80th birthday, at Subterranean Books in St. Louis, were postponed indefinitely.

 

But some good news did emerge from our household: Being in lockdown gave me time to make progress on a new book, as yet untitled, about the 1970s. You can read a description here. And Mary Lyn released some new music, including a pandemic-inspired song, "I Can't Touch You (Supermoon)."

 

Then came the election. We lived through that, too.

 

Now I'm wondering if the widespread availability of vaccinations is the light at the end of the tunnel or just another oncoming train.

 

I'm betting on light. In a rare act of faith and optimism, I've rescheduled my Lennon event at Subterranean Books for October 7, 2021. I hope to see some of you there, well vaccinated and probably still masked.

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My latest book, Bobby in Naziland, is available on Amazon and all other online booksellers, as well as at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.