Mark Dunn - Ibid - A Life

Winny had taught him well.

An important postscript to this story: The day the sledgehammers came out, Jonathan called Rivera and offered to commission the Mexican artist to paint a mural for the corporate offices of Dandy-de-odor-o. Rivera politely declined, but did eventually accept a financial contribution from Jonathan, which compensated him in part for work he did on another mural: a brazen reaction in colorful fresco to the Rockefeller Center debacle. A small private library in Harlem had the honor of Rivera’s gifted services. “You Americans view all states outside your own Capitalist-strangled system as imperfect, while you blind yourselves to your own blemished history,” Rivera is said to have screeded (in Spanish) as he embarked upon this new commission. “Perhaps it is time to remind you how far your nation has to go in reaching that pinnacle of perfection to which you smugly think you have already ascended.”

I have found no visual record of Rivera’s anti-American library mural, which was inadvertently painted over in the seventies. (The wall now depicts a cavalcade of American presidents up to Gerald Ford as imagined with African-American features.) However, I have read descriptions of some of the images incorporated by Rivera into his mural in Geraldo Rivera’s controversial The Story of My Grandfather Diego . Together they form a frightening indictment of an America rejecting the very ideals upon which it was built:

American soldiers issuing Small Pox-infected blankets to Indians in the 1870s. (Interestingly, Rivera had touched upon one of the world’s first acts of bio-terrorism!)

The U.S. Supreme Court declaring unconstitutional in 1918 the nation’s first federal child labor law. (Rivera supposedly has the justices using the backs of young babies for footstools.)

The racially motivated attack on off-duty Black Union officers by citizens of Zanesville, Ohio, near the end of the Civil War.

There was also an unflattering picture of a snoozing, pot-bellied J.P. Morgan, his nose painted the size of a cantaloupe, and another of Andrew Carnegie building libraries with the bones of steel workers who had unfortunately gotten within firing range of the philanthropist’s hired strikebreakers.

And finally, for no reason other than, perhaps, mischief, an image of Frida Kahlo seated before her vanity mirror, grooming her famous eyebrow.

Incidentally, a Ms. Ruby Towers, whom I met in Harlem, tells me that she has a photograph of the lost mural in her possession but would not let me see it unless I helped her “honey-voiced” granddaughter Shauneequa get on the television program American Idol . This I could not do.

30. In time Jonathan and Hunter grew closer.Jonathan’s improved relationship with his stepson is demonstrated by this letter home from summer camp. Hunter Gleason to Jonathan Blashette, July 51934, JBL.

Dear Dad,

Greetings from Camp Chaubunagungamaug! Camp Chaubunagungamaug is everything that you said it would be! Thank you so much for sending me here! Everyday I go swimming in Lake Chaubunagungamaug or me and the other fellows go hiking in the Chaubunagungamaug Forest and look for nuts or trail markers left by the Chaubunagungamaug Indians who lived here in days of old. It is a swell place and I am making many new friends here. I hope that you send me back to Camp Chaubunagungamaug next year. Oh well. Time to go fishing. You guessed it. Lake Chaubunagungamaug. I hope I catch a big one!

Give my love to Mom.

Sincerely,

Your stepson, Hunter

PS. Tomorrow the Chaubunagungamaug Forest rangers are going to let some of us fellows go up to the top of the Chaubunagungamaug Forest lookout tower to see if there are any forest fires in Chaubunagungamaug Forest or around Lake Chaubunagungamaug. I hope not, because then they’d have to evacuate Camp Chaubunagungamaug! Gee, this letter took an awfully long time to write!

31. Davison was dubious midwife at the birth. I cannot substantiate Harlan Davison’s claim that he was present at the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous. True, Jonathan’s trusted Man Friday was in Akron on a Dandy-D business call the very same night in 1935 in which William Griffith Wilson and Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith brainstormed together until dawn, but neither Wilson nor Smith mentions his presence in their personal accounts. Still, among Davison’s papers I have found what might have been his ultimately unsuccessful contribution to the evening’s session, “Twelve Steps to Sobriety.” The two pages are coffee-stained. (Legend has it that Wilson and Smith each drank fourteen cups of coffee that night, could not sleep for days, and surgeon Smith, in particular, was so jittery as a result that he allegedly had difficulty the next morning placing a patient’s rejected gall bladder into the organ pan). If the document is authentic, it is easy to see why it was dismissed by the two founders, since it incorporates none of Wilson and Smith’s dependence upon the power of religious faith, and at times the spiritually untethered Davison rejects divine assistance altogether. I have found no mention of either the document or Davison’s possible participation in the birth of AA within Jonathan’s papers, nor in any of Davison’s correspondence. Therefore, I draw no conclusions and submit the following document in its entirety without further conjecture or commentary.

Twelve Steps to Sobriety

A draft

by Harlan Davison

1. We admit that we are presently powerless. We embrace the fact that our lives are controlled by the demon liquid spirits.

2. The existence of God still open to question, we look for a power greater than ourselves with a more temporal address. A respected uncle, an admired high school football coach, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Clark Gable are all good choices. A good choice for women would be the ever-popular Dolores Del Rio.

3. We make a decision to turn our lives over to that power greater than ourselves, unless in the case of Clark Gable, he does not answer our correspondence with anything but an autographed picture of himself as Fletcher Christian.

4. We take a good, long look at our lives, where we have been, and where we have gone wrong. We do not take this inventory in a saloon because it may prove counterproductive.

5. We are specific about what we have done for which we should be ashamed. We make a detailed list. If necessary, we purchase additional Big Chief notebooks.

6. We make the decision to remedy defects in our character that have diminished the lives of others. This step does not necessarily involve the removal of unsightly facial moles.

7. We drink strong black coffee whenever possible, many cups of it. Our teeth become stained but we bear the stains as proud emblems of our sobriety, for lips that taste coffee do not taste liquor, Irish coffee excluded.

8. We make a list of all the people we have hurt. We prepare to make things right with them all, excepting those who have passed away, and in such cases we then prepare to make things right with their children, and if they died childless, we prepare to make things right with a close neighbor or perhaps the family butcher.

9. We make our amends to all those we have harmed in order of the grievousness of the offense. Maiming others with our automobiles would be highest on the list. At the bottom, perhaps, would be making a sarcastic comment to a newspaper vendor when he greeted us innocently and cheerily, only to have our sour mood darken for a moment his beautiful sun-kissed morning.

10. We look deep within ourselves and find those things requiring change, and we change them for the better and when we are wrong we admit it promptly, even if this admission involves chasing after the wronged party and wedging him between furniture to get our point across.