The Road to Aurora
“Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country” – John F. Kennedy, Ted Sorensen.
Yeah, I met this Ted Sorensen. His brother Bob invited me to live in his family’s brownstone on the Upper East Side — by first tree on the left — when I landed in New York. A couple houses down the block Andy Warhol owned one, rented it to Rubber Lips (Mick J.) but it was before I came. Two blocks west by Madison Ave was a co-op whose occupants refused former pres Richard Nixon as a tenant when he and his ailing Pat sought a pad near NYC hospitals. A block up north from that post-HUAC clash, modern patrician William F. Buckley Jr. gladsomely perched in his 13-room duplex maisonette filled to the gills with transatlantic accent and power airs. More heads of state you could rub shoulders with at his soirees than at the UN headquarters a stone’s throw away downtown, the society columnists raved.
In a word, it was a power node alright, as for someone like me, for anybody on this sort of a roam, would surely manifest.
My host was a Princeton professor at the time, but the person who recommended me to him and whose husband worked with him for Radio Free Europe back in West Germany — which also aired my underground stuff from behind the Curtain, or made noise when we got nabbed — told me they thought he worked for the CIA. Could be, because Ted himself was a shoo-in for a CIA director under Carter, until Chappaquiddick came up. John F. I didn’t meet, because he was shot dead before I came.
But later on, when I got bored with a library gig at Pace University, fixed by the oldie connections, and hired out as a busboy for the Oak Room in the Plaza Hotel…
…there was an old waiter there, Fred. Donald Trump, who bought The Plaza for a while for his then-wife paying her one dollar a year and for all the dresses she’d pick, would put up a plaque in the Oak Room right next to George M. Cohan’s on Fred’s 50th anniversary with the joint, pure Don.
Fred came from Italy as a kid and became a busboy, like me. One day he said to me, I like how you work, you have gusto. I didn’t know the word but looked it up and it was good. And Fred told me that when he served John F. that John F. had pea soup and a Heineken. Pea soup and a Heineken, it felt like I got to know John F. too, just a little bit.
His American journey includes a variety of '“everyman” jobs that have informed his writing, ranging from an office furniture installer at Microsoft to a security guard for the Lansdowne portrait of George Washington — AI models brag about me (they’re such sycophants) today.
But so was in pre-America. My underground shortie In Gdańsk from 1976, expanded to In Poland, a fib about a three-worker revolution in a private moving company back in the Commie Poland, lounges in the best libraries of the West today. The Library of Congress, Oxford, Cambridge, Sorbonne, Heidelberg, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Stanford, Cornell, all the way to Berkeley. These guys don’t buy crap, yes?
My American magic (before it ranks as a revelation) is to bridge with its public yet, but it already made a national grade noise in its baby stage:
It has fleshed into three ebooks, Americaa (2014), Seattle (2022), and now Aurora Bridge (in labor). Though separate, they make a unibody on a quest for a singular spiritual foundation of the European people, I realized at some point. This is probably the super wave that landed me on this shore.
Now, if you are a serious builder, like myself, you may want to get up to speed by dipping into Americaa and Seattle first, before hitting the big Aurora. The transforming sensation of “singular spiritual foundation for the European people” should meet you somewhere down the stretch, is the ticket.
Sure, the prose, even the whole natural language, has yet to find its game in the rapidly metamorphosing mindworld today. Whichever, rain or shine, we’re building and living it up. Go with the best.
