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The Rico Chronicles: Inside Psychodrama

Rico with his daughters Rachel and Sarah circa 1990 photo courtesy of Steve Rees

This is the fourth and final article in a series commemorating my friend Rico Rees, AKA Richard Rees.

February 1967. Atherton, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Redwood City, California.

When Rico had two years and five months of high school left to endure, and I only had five more months of high school to get through, Rico bought a used mimeograph machine and he and I and Dave Biasotti launched Lyceum, a magazine. We brought out a new issue every few weeks chock full of articles and poems and stories. Dave made great pen and ink drawings for the first few covers, after which we used photos taken by Rico’s brother Steve for the covers. These photo covers were some of the very earliest Xerox copies.

We printed a hundred copies of the first issue and were thrilled when fifty people ponied up four dollars to have the next six issues mailed to them. Rico then convinced Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, the hippest bookstore in our world at the time, to sell Lyceum for 25 cents a copy, and Rico and I hawked the rest of the copies at school.

A heady experience of my young life was seeing several of my peers sitting around at lunchtime at Woodside High reading Lyceum. Along with drawing the covers, Dave drew a one-frame cartoon for each issue and wrote reviews of new folk rock and rock albums. Rico and I wrote articles and stories and poems, and by the third issue people were submitting poems and notices of things for sale, some of which we published.

Were we good writers? Hard to say. Were we enthusiastic? Very.

That spring Rico fell in love with a young woman named Maureen. She was beautiful and smart and sexy and funny, and she enjoyed Rico’s company but drove him crazy because she denied him the sensual romantic connection he longed for.

Also around this time, Rico shared with me that his doctors were not optimistic he would survive much beyond his twenties. He told me this in the context of a conversation in which I said something about us getting a place together, going to Europe, and living our lives as literary bohemians.

“I don’t know, Murray,” he said, sounding uncharacteristically pessimistic. “Lately I’ve been having this fantasy of blasting off in a rocket ship and just going.”

(Fortunately, advances in medical technology made it possible for Rico to live to sixty-eight.)

One afternoon I was at Rico’s and he asked me to play some jazz piano so he could jam with me on a saxophone he’d just gotten. He hadn’t taken lessons, but he loved jazz and wanted to make music. So I sat down at their wonderful Steinway and played a jazzy-sounding chord or two, and Rico blew slow long notes with great feeling. We were both thrilled by the sounds we made together, and Rico said he might take lessons, but as far as I know he never did and we never played music together again.

We brought out the last issue of Lyceum at the end of May, right before school ended, and Rico announced we’d made a profit of seventy dollars, which in 1967 was a pile of cash for the likes of us. Rico proposed we use the money to take some girls to San Francisco for walking around and supper.

I took my girlfriend Connie, Rico brought Maureen, and I can’t remember who Dave brought, possibly Connie’s friend Harriet. For some reason, Connie decided the gals would wear saris and she came up with three beautiful saris for them. We took the train from Atherton to San Francisco and caught a bus to North Beach where we hung out at City Lights Books, had coffee and biscotti at Caffe Trieste, went shopping in Chinatown, ate supper at The Spaghetti Factory, and came home on a late night train—everything paid for with money made from our magazine.

With the last of the Lyceum money, Rico got two tickets for Ray Charles at Frost Amphitheatre at Stanford, our last hurrah together before I headed off to college at brand new UC Santa Cruz and Rico stayed on at Woodside High.

I dropped out of college after two years, which coincided with Rico finishing high school. He decided to take what they now call a gap year before attending Antioch University in Yellow Springs, Ohio. During that interim year, Rico rented a room in a house in Palo Alto for some months before he moved into a hippy commune in Palo Alto with Jean Trounstine who would become his first wife.

Jean was a bright energetic Jewish gal from Cincinnati, five years older than Rico. She had a BA in Drama from Beloit and had come to California to join the cultural ferment going on in the Bay Area. I first met Jean when Rico took me to House of Pies on University Avenue where Jean was a waitress. The waitresses there wore uniforms composed of skirt, blouse, and cap that supposedly made them resemble, symbolically, a piece of pie.

We had a hilarious time as Jean enacted the required shtick of House of Pie waitresses when Rico, following the printed prompt on the table, asked in the manner of Humphrey Bogart, “What’s fresh today? Besides you sweetie pie?”

Jean batted her eyelashes and said, “Hold on a sec, big fella. I’ll go ask our baker.” And then she sashayed away to the kitchen, mimed asking the baker, and sashayed back to us. “You’re not gonna believe this, but all the pies are fresh today. And you know what just came out of the oven?”

“The apple pie?” I guessed, the place redolent with the scent of apple pie.

“What are you psychic?” said Jean, gaping at me. “The apple did just come out of the oven. And the blueberry and the cherry and the lemon meringue.”

I loved Jean. She and Rico were a great match and they were devoted to each other for several years until their lives diverged when Rico was in his late twenties.  

Around the time he was beginning his relationship with Jean, Rico heard a talk by Husain Chung, a radical practitioner of Psychodrama as it pertains to psychotherapy, and shortly thereafter Rico began attending group Psychodrama sessions at a house in Palo Alto, the groups led by Vik Lovell and his Psychodrama trainees. Interesting side note: Ken Kesey, who lived in the area, dedicated his book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to Vik Lovell.

Rico was fascinated by the evolving use of Psychodrama in psychotherapy, and these Vik Lovell sessions were of particular interest to him because Lovell was, according to Rico, “constantly experimenting and unafraid to seriously fuck up.” Rico asked me to attend one of the Lovell sessions with him and I did.

Before being admitted into the house where the sessions took place, participants agreed not to leave until the three-hour session was over. Rico had told me a little bit about what went on at the Lovell sessions, but I was wholly unprepared for what I was to endure for the next three hours.

Vik Lovell was a handsome man in his thirties with an assured air. I am tempted to use the descriptors arrogant, insensitive, misogynist, and narcissist to describe him, but maybe he was just having a bad day. His trainees were men and women who dressed alike in loose-fitting pants and black T-shirts to identify them as Vik’s assistants.

Vik sat on a high stool just outside the large circle of attendees arrayed in chairs around the empty center of the big living room that served as the stage for the evening’s psychodramas. Vik communicated with his trainees by gesturing and pointing, and he directed his DJ with quiet asides to play certain cuts from a handy library of LPs—what Rico and I would later refer to as psychodrama soundtracks.

After reiterating we were not to leave before the session was over, Vik invited a tall bearded American man to stand in the center of the circle and tell us what was on his mind. With little preface, the man said he’d had sex with the wife of a friend, after which the wife and friend broke off relations with him. To my surprise, the two people he was talking about were there, and Vik directed the man and woman to join the bearded man in the center of the room.

The couple was British, the woman strikingly beautiful, the man handsome with a muscular build. The woman acknowledged she had slept with the bearded guy, said she regretted doing so, and was grateful to her husband for forgiving her and being so understanding. Both husband and wife said they had no interest in rehashing the affair or having anything more to do with the bearded guy.

The British guy struck me as intelligent and reasonable, the British gal the same, while the bearded American seemed seriously disturbed and obviously distraught about being booted out of his relationship with the couple.

Vik gestured to his trainees. One of the female trainees stood behind the British woman, one of the male trainees stood behind the bearded American, and another male trainee stood behind the British fellow.

And then all hell broke loose. The woman trainee accused the British guy of neglecting her sexually and shouted, “Which is the only reason I slept with that disgusting pig!” The trainee standing behind the British guy shouted at the British gal, “Bullshit! You slept with him because you’re a whore!”

The British guy protested, “No, I don’t think you’re a whore.”

And Vik asked, “Then what do you think she is?”

And before the British guy could reply, the bearded guy said to the British guy, “She told me you were impotent with women but got turned on by young men.”

“I never said that,” cried the British gal. “My husband is a wonderful lover.”

I don’t remember the order of events after that, but following a few more inflammatory exchanges spoken by the psychodrama trainees, the British guy and the bearded guy started seriously brawling, the bearded guy throwing punches, the British guy trying to wrestle the bearded guy to the ground, and the British gal trying to intervene only to be restrained by two of the trainees who continued to call her whore and slut.

Then an elderly man in the audience of attendees shouted, “This is wrong, Vik. You need to stop this!”

And in the next moment the bearded guy broke away from the British guy, pulled the elderly man out of his seat, threw him to the ground and started pummeling him, which caused me to jump up and try to stop the bearded guy from seriously injuring the elderly guy. But before I could pull the bearded guy off the old man, two of Vik’s male trainees grabbed me and slammed me against a wall and one of them pressed his fist hard against my nose and shouted, “What’s your deal, asshole? Working on your hero complex?”

My nose started gushing blood and Vik signaled his trainees to let up on me, which they did, and then and one of them took me by the arm and led me to a bathroom where I stemmed the flow of blood with a plug of toilet paper and stayed in the bathroom until the bleeding stopped.

The trainee walked me back to my chair and said, “Don’t get up again unless Vik tells you to.” By then the chaos had subsided and Strawberry Fields was playing on the stereo. The British guy and gal were sitting apart from each other, both of them weeping, and the bearded guy was lying face down, sobbing, and I don’t know where the elderly guy was. I desperately wanted to leave but was afraid if I tried to go the trainees would hurt me again, so I closed my eyes and waited for the hours to pass.

Rico was very upset afterwards and apologized for not warning me that I was never to intervene in an ongoing psychodrama unless Vik invited me to participate. I suffered for some weeks with bruised ribs and did not attend any more Vik Lovell psychodrama evenings. Rico, however, went several more times and reported learning many valuable lessons from observing what went on in those sessions.

Later in his career as a psychologist, Rico would employ less violent psycho-dramatic techniques, especially when working with children and teenagers. When we were in our thirties, Rico and I collaborated on a screenplay called Any Time You’re Ready about a woman psychiatrist who runs a home for emotionally disturbed teens and employs Psychodrama as part of her work with the kids. We were never able to sell the script, though we were certain it was the best movie ever written.

Rico on the James River photo courtesy of Steve Rees

In 1970, when I was twenty-one and Rico was nineteen, Rico and Jean moved to Yellow Springs, Ohio. I’d only spent a little time with Jean before they moved to Yellow Springs, but I got to know her very well when Ilived in Yellow Springs for two months in early 1971.

While Rico was attending Antioch, Jean taught Drama at Central State University, a predominantly African American college, and she taught theatre games to little kids and adults on weekends. While I was in Yellow Springs, I assisted Jean with her little kid classes, took her classes for adults, and Rico got me a job editing a student handbook for Antioch. I’m not sure how he convinced my boss at Antioch to hire me as an editor, but he did.

I rented a room above Deaton’s Hardware, ate most of my suppers with Rico and Jean at their cute little house on the edge of the campus, and unsuccessfully romanced their good friend Kay who enjoyed me but didn’t consider me boyfriend material.

Jean was a gourmet cook and a frequent dieter. An ongoing source of amusement for me was that Jean would serve Rico and me wonderful multi-course meals while resigning herself to eating a hardboiled egg and a chicken thigh. Yet nine times out of ten, I wanted that egg and chicken thigh more than I wanted the fancy meal. Go figure.

What was I doing in Yellow Springs, Ohio, you ask, besides living near Rico and Jean? Well, I was waiting to hear from a major publisher in New York to whom I had sent my first novel. In my extreme naiveté, having recently read Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, I was sure I could write a novel as good or better than Vonnegut’s, and while living in a hovel in Ashland, Oregon, I wrote my first novel, The Apprenticeship of Abraham Steinberg, and sent it to Vonnegut’s publisher, having gotten their address from the copyright page of Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle.

On my way to New York to find out what was holding up my rise to lasting international fame, I stopped in Yellow Springs, Ohio and sent the publisher my updated contact numbers (Rico’s phone and address) and waited to hear from them, not knowing they didn’t read unsolicited manuscripts by neophyte writers unrepresented by literary agents.

In April of that year, I got a ride east with two of Jean’s Drama students from Central State University who were auditioning to get into the Drama department at Cornell University. From Cornell, I took a bus to Boston and crashed in a co-ed dorm with a couple high school friends, Dan Nadaner and Joe Tiffany, who were finishing up their undergrad careers at Harvard, and then I went to New York to find out what was keeping my literary career from taking off.

Interesting side note: while I was crashing at Harvard, one of the guys I got to be friends with, Jerry Hiatt, was taking a Creative Writing class from, you guessed it, Kurt Vonnegut.

In New York I stayed with my composer friend Scott Oakley in his roach-infested apartment in Harlem and called the publisher to inquire of The Apprenticeship of Abraham Steinberg. After a long wait, a young woman came on the line and sweetly explained that they did not read unsolicited manuscripts, but because I’d come all this way she would read my manuscript and get back to me in a few days, which she did.

I shaved, put on my cleanest shirt, and went down to the snazzy publisher’s offices in the heart of Manhattan where a woman no older than I met me in the lobby, handed me my manuscript, and said she really enjoyed the story, that my writing reminded her of William Saroyan, keep trying, and get a literary agent.

A year or so later, I was living in a boarding house in Santa Cruz and looking for a job when Rico called to say he and Jean were getting married, would I come to Yellow Springs and sing at their wedding. I said Yes and was so inspired by the invitation, I wrote a song especially for the wedding and then wrote a collection of short stories entitled What Shall the Monster Sing? which I dedicated to Rico and Jean.

That collection of stories ultimately landed me my first and finest literary agent Dorothy Pittman, and contained a short story about disabled folks hanging out in a bar that presaged my novel Inside Moves.

I flew to Ohio courtesy of Rico’s folks, stayed with Jean and Rico for a week before the wedding, sang at the wedding, stayed another week, and flew home. Singing for all those people at the wedding in the glen in Yellow Springs, and singing again at the big reception at Jean’s parents’ house in Cincinnati, along with writing that collection of stories gave me a vision of how I wanted to proceed with my life, and I have stuck to that course ever since.

Five years later Dorothy Pittman sold my novel Inside Moves (original title The Gimp) to Doubleday. After I’d rewritten the book with the help of my excellent editor Sherry Knox, Doubleday sent forth the galleys and soon thereafter we had a big paperback sale and then a movie sale, and a week after the movie sale I was summoned to Los Angeles to meet with Bob Evans who had just made Love Story, The Godfather, and Chinatown, and now wanted to make Inside Moves.

But rather than fly directly from my garret in Seattle to LA, I stopped in San Francisco to commune with Rico. We stayed up late talking and he drove me to the airport the next morning, his parting words, “Call me if you need to talk.”

I landed in LA, got a cab to the Beverly Wilshire with a Czechoslovakian driver who kept insisting I was Clint Eastwood, had lunch with my new Hollywood agent Candace Lake and a vice-president at Paramount, Nancy Hardin. After lunch Nancy dropped me off at Bob Evans’ mansion and I met with Bob in the pool house next to his big swimming pool.

After a few niceties Bob Evans said, “You’ve written a nice little fable here. I couldn’t put it down. But it’s too quirky, too many cripples. You overdid the cripples. Don’t get me wrong, there are moments, but the second act is a dud. We can fix this and it’ll be huge. So here’s what we’ll do. We hold off on publishing while you rewrite the book the way I tell you to rewrite it. That’s what I did with Love Story. I told Segal what to write and he made millions and so will you. We’ll get you a place in Malibu, a secretary, a cook, anything you need, and we’ll get this done.”

I was in shock. Much to Bob’s chagrin, I did not jump for joy, but said I would think about it. Somehow I got back to my room at the Beverly Wilshire from where I called my sister who lived near UCLA and she came and got me and I collapsed at her place.

I called my agent Dorothy Pittman and told her what had happened. She said she would support whatever decision I made. The book was to be published in just a few months. She had already heard from my Hollywood agent and Nancy Hardin at Paramount both of whom had reiterated Bob’s proposal to have me rewrite the book per his direction, for which I would be handsomely recompensed, after which they would put big money into promoting the book.

Then I called Rico. He listened in his patient way and when I was done telling him what Evans wanted me to do, he said, “Your book tells the truth, Murray. They’re afraid of the truth. Don’t let them wreck your story. You’ll never be able to live with yourself if you do.”

And I did not rewrite the book for Bob Evans. He hired Barry Levinson and Valerie Curtin to write a screenplay that changed the main character from a man crippled in Vietnam to a failed suicide, and they changed the heroine from a woman with a leg shrunken by polio to a woman with two gorgeous gams, and they changed Max from a man with no legs to a big strong able-bodied guy, and some months later Bob Evans dropped the movie, Dick Donner picked it up and shot Barry and Valerie’s script and added a revenge scene at the end of the movie that was the antithesis of the spirit of the book and the antithesis of the rest of the movie.

But the novel Inside Moves came out as I wrote it, and the inspiring story of a friendship between two physically and emotionally challenged guys, versions of Rico and Murray, lives to this day, however humbly.

Thank you Rico for being my friend.

Rico photo courtesy of Steve Rees

fin

Why Now? for Rico

Audible Inside Moves narrated by Todd

Inside Moves Amazon

Inside Moves Apple Books

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Worlds Collide

worlds collide

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser June 2013)

“There are only two emotions in Wall Street: fear and greed.” William Le Fevre

In search of good chicken for our once-a-week intake of animal flesh, I saunter into our magnifico Mendocino Market across the street from Mendocino’s blessed post office, my basket laden with the latest edition of the admirable Anderson Valley Advertiser, and I find the lovely little market and deli in the midst of a calm before the inevitable lunchtime arrival of legions of tempestuous teenagers and loquacious locals and inscrutable turistas.

Jeff, the jocular and unflappable co-master of Mendocino’s finest sandwich shop, has a few moments to wait on me, and as he rings up my purchase of four superb legs and thighs, he shares the following story.

“So yesterday, this guy comes in and I know he’s somebody famous, an actor, I’m sure. I’ve seen him on television. Has to be him, but I can’t think of his name. And then he uses a credit card to pay and his name comes up: Timothy Geithner.”

“Wow,” I effuse. “ Former Secretary of the Treasury, master criminal, and most definitely an actor.”

“I know,” says Jeff, smiling. “Amazing.”

“What did he buy?” I ask, guessing Timothy purchased a few bottles of expensive organic wine.

“Couple of chicken salad sandwiches,” says Jeff, nodding. “On a road trip.”

“Wow,” I say, “Timothy Geithner. God of the one percent. Stood right here and handed you his credit card.”

“Yeah,” says Jeff, chuckling, “we’ve got this Recession Special I was going to tell him about, but I decided not to.”

“Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.” Aldous Huxley

Thinking about Timothy Geithner buying sandwiches in our very own Mendocino Market, I try to imagine being so powerful and important that the President of the Unites States would appoint me Secretary of Anything, but my imagination fails me. However, I do have a vivid fantasy of shopping at Corners and bumping into Timothy Geithner in front of the broccoli and saying to him, “How could you? Have you no conscience?”

And that fantasy and the questions I asked therein, remind me of Obama’s recent appointment of billionaire Penny Pritzker to be Secretary of Commerce, which reminds me of my encounter with Penny’s father, Donald, at a fundraiser in Atherton, California just a few months before he died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-nine while playing tennis at a Hyatt Hotel in Honolulu, the Hyatt Hotel chain being one of several corporations owned by the Pritzker family, Donald the CEO.

Believe it or not, I met Donald Pritzker at the very same gathering where I met Daniel Ellsberg. What sort of gathering was this? And what was I doing there? I’ll tell you. The year was 1972 (Penny would have been thirteen at the time) and Daniel Ellsberg had recently become very famous for leaking the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and thereby seriously messing with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and the ruthless rulers running the Vietnam War. I happened to be friends with a guy, a zealous anti-war activist, who had convinced his mother, a minor Pritzker, to host a private fundraising soiree for Daniel Ellsberg, who needed funds for his ongoing legal travails and anti-war activities. When I heard about the soiree, I begged my friend’s mother to let me attend so I could listen to the great hero, and she said, “I’ll need kitchen help.”

So I donned white shirt and bow tie and black slacks and showed up at the snazzy Atherton digs at the appointed hour, at which point it was decided I would ply the crowd with champagne and hors d’oeuvres before Ellsberg spoke and then manage the groaning tables of food and carve the roast beef after Ellsberg spoke. And while he spoke, I could listen from the kitchen with the swinging door propped open a few inches.

There were about twenty people in attendance on that sunny afternoon, the females outnumbering the males two to one, everyone in attendance fabulously wealthy. The women were dressed elegantly, the men wore suits and ties, and the accents of these loud-talking folk were predominantly Chicago from whence the Pritzker clan sprang, though many of them had relocated to California. I remember being struck by how handsome and strong all the women were, and how nondescript the men, and whether it was true or not, I concluded that this clan of Jewish siblings and cousins was a powerful matriarchy, the men mere sperm donors.

I also remember being keenly aware that I was serving people who were used to being served and that I was invisible to them because I was a servant. I had met a few super wealthy people in my life, and it was my impression that extremely wealthy people were void of humor, but I had never before been in the company of so many wealthy and resoundingly humorless people. Or so it seemed.

After the preliminary wining and dining, everyone took a seat in the large living room and Daniel Ellsberg rose to speak. I positioned myself at the kitchen door where I had a view of the daring whistleblower, and just as Ellsberg began, a short bullish man rose from his living room seat and came charging into the kitchen.

“Phone,” he barked at me. “I need a phone.”

This was Donald Pritzker, red-faced and pissed off, and this was 1972, long before the advent of cell phones. So I directed him to the phone on the kitchen wall from which he proceeded to make call after call, buying and selling, cursing and commanding, threatening and cajoling—running his empire—while in the other room Daniel Ellsberg spoke about the ongoing atrocities being committed by our rulers and our armed forces in Vietnam. What a disconcerting dichotomy!

Despite the proximity of Donald’s torrent of vitriol, I managed to focus on what Ellsberg was saying, and I realized he was speaking to his audience as if they had never heard of Vietnam and knew nothing about the war that had been going on for almost a decade, which may have been largely true. These were not people troubled by distant wars. Indeed, they were prime beneficiaries of a most successful imperialism and a booming economy.

Halfway through Ellsberg’s talk, Donald Pritzker snapped his fingers at me and said, “Coffee. I need coffee. With sugar.”

I prepared his coffee and set it on the counter next to him as he growled into the phone, “You tell that sonofabitch he’d better come through or…”

He was purple with rage, the veins in his neck swollen, his knuckles white as he clenched the phone in a death grip—not a happy person.

I returned to my post at the kitchen door just as Ellsberg finished his talk and asked, “Are there any questions?”

No one said a word. Not one of the handsome women and non-descript men raised a hand, and Ellsberg stood there for a short infinity, looking very sad and tired. Finally, the hostess, the mother of my friend who had arranged for me to be present at this strange soiree, leapt to her feet and cried, “Eat, eat, eat!” and the Prtizkers rose to begin their feasting.

  “There is only one way to endure man’s inhumanity to man and that is to try, in one’s own life, to exemplify man’s humanity to man.” Alan Paton

I think of Timothy Geithner and his wife driving south on Highway One, enjoying their excellent chicken salad sandwiches from the Mendocino Market and superb lattes from the GoodLife Cafe, just, you know, having fun being far from the madding crowd, enjoying the view of the shining pacific and the passing fields rife with mustard flowers and the cerulean sky dotted with puffy white clouds. For just a little while, a rare little while, Timothy and his wife forget all about the millions of less fortunate people who are, in essence, paying for Timothy’s fun. Yes, for just a little while, Timothy might be anybody.

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Rich People

Photo by Marcia Sloane

(This article first appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser August 2011)

“ Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.” John Kenneth Galbraith

I know people who own nice houses and multiple cars and have sufficient wealth to eat and drink whatever they want to eat and drink, and to take occasional vacations, too, yet they do not consider themselves rich. That is, they do not think of themselves as people who should pay higher taxes because, well, they feel they pay high enough taxes as it is, too high, actually, and besides, they aren’t part of that one per cent we hear so much about, those multi-millionaires and billionaires who pay no taxes at all. These people I know don’t own three and four homes, for goodness sake. Some of them own two houses, and maybe a rental or two, but no one ever gave them a golden parachute. They voted for Clinton and Obama. They proudly click buttons on web sites to indicate their opposition to icky pipelines and their sympathy for homeless people and their support for endangered species. So…now their houses are plummeting in value, their stock portfolios are crashing, and the price of everything edible and the price of anything that produces heat and electricity and horse power is skyrocketing, so it’s not as if these people have much to spare. In fact, when you add everything up, these people I know with houses and money are, relatively speaking, poor, though the words poor and rich are not precise terms; so let’s just say that these people I know with houses and cars and money are adamant that they are not rich.

“A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money.” W.C. Fields

I was six-years-old when my family moved from a tiny house in a working class neighborhood in San Mateo to a three-bedroom house in Atherton. For those of you unfamiliar with Atherton, it is a town of eight thousand residents and their servants not far from Stanford University, twenty-seven miles south of San Francisco on the northern edge of what is now called Silicon Valley, formerly Santa Clara Valley. The town of Atherton, though there is no commercial sector to speak of so it isn’t really a town but more of an enclave, is where the fabulously wealthy robber barons (Stanford, Spreckels, Crocker, Hopkins, etc.) built huge estates in the late 1800’s to escape the madding crowds and cold foggy summers of San Francisco, the climate of Atherton kin to Camelot. Indeed, those untaxed zillionaires built a private railroad to carry them in gilt coaches from their San Francisco mansions to their Atherton mansions, which railroad became the commuter line that today runs from San Francisco to San Jose.

The vast estates of these robber barons were eventually divided into twenty-acre estates for the next generation of wealthy crooks and entrepreneurs, and when my folks bought their flimsy two-year-old house in 1956 for thirty thousand dollars, most of those twenty-acre estates had been subdivided into one-acre parcels. Today, Atherton is home to some of the wealthiest people in the world. That is to say, some of the wealthiest people in the world today have at least one of their houses in Atherton. But when I was a lad, the homeowners in our neighborhood were teachers, doctors, dentists, car salesmen, airline pilots, merchants, stockbrokers, graphic designers, advertising executives, and businessmen; and their wives. Most of these homeowners were children of the Great Depression, came from working class backgrounds, and had surpassed their parents on their way up the economic ladder to snag three-bedroom houses in Atherton.

My parents were forever out-of-step with the Atherton ethos, which is to say my father thought of our acre as a little farm, and so he planted a fruit orchard in the field in front of our house, planted a grove of twelve redwoods, let the wild oaks grow large, and cultivated a big vegetable garden on the edge of a small grove of ancient olive trees (planted hundreds of years ago) behind our flat-roofed one-story sort of modern-looking house. Everyone else in our neighborhood had manicured gardens patrolled by vigilant Japanese gardeners. I am proud to say that in my parents’ fifty-year tenure in Atherton, at least two ordinances were passed specifically to curtail the Beverly Hillbilly tendencies of my derelict father. The first ordinance forbade field grass to be above six inches high, and the second ordinance forbade the hanging of unsightly objects in trees—my father forever dangling strips of aluminum foil in his fruit trees to scare away voracious birds.

Which is all to say I grew up in the midst of rich people, went to school with a mix of rich kids and working class kids, had a few extremely wealthy friends, and was, in fact, rich, though I didn’t know I was rich because my mother insisted we were poor and if I wanted money I would have to work for it, which I began to do in earnest at the age of eleven, gardening for neighbors and babysitting their children, many of whom were not much younger than I.

“Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.” George Bernard Shaw

Shortly after the passage of Jarvis Gann in 1978, the infamous Proposition 13 that put a ceiling of one per cent on property taxes in California, and with the ensuing ascendancy of Ronald Reagan and his everything-for-the-rich-nothing-for-anybody-else policies, housing prices in Atherton went from high to incredibly high. And though my parents’ falling apart old house was by then essentially worthless, the acre it sat upon was worth a million dollars in 1980, two million dollars in 1990, and three million dollars in 1995. When I came home to visit over the course of those fifteen years, I found Atherton undergoing a shocking transformation that reached a crescendo of obscenity at the height of the dot com insanity circa 1997.

In the Atherton real estate parlance of the 1990’s, houses built in the 1950’s and 60’s were called scrapers, not tear-downs, but scrapers, because when such a house sold to a wealthy buyer, the entire lot—house, driveway, trees, everything—was scraped down to bare earth to make way for a massive new house that would cover most of that acre of ground and sell for between seven and fifteen million dollars. These new houses, by the way, were not passive solar, active solar, or even attractive. They were huge blocky hideous monstrosities, ecological disasters housing extremely rich people.

“Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.” Thomas Jefferson

True story. Just up the hill from my parents’ house, a shady lane departed from the main road and wended its way around a dozen large homes built in the 1950’s and 60’s, each house sitting on a two-acre lot. I used to go up that lane when I was a boy, braving the growling dogs, because at lane’s end there was a fabulous gorge filled with live oaks and a seasonal creek—a wild refuge inhabited by deer and bobcats and quail and nature spirits. I played there for many a summer, sometimes with friends but more often alone, imagining I was an Indian, and I don’t mean someone from India.

Forty-some years later in the 1990’s, a young man devised a kind of software I shall not name, software used for accounting, and he became a multi-billionaire. With a small portion of his fortune, he bought all twelve of the large houses on that shady lane, and he bought the wild gorge, too, along with several other adjacent properties. He paid five and six and seven million dollars for each of the shady lane houses, and twelve million for the house of an old woman who was not going to sell to him at any price, at first. Then the young man did an odd thing. He invited several of his friends to party with him in those many houses he’d bought, and in each house he and his friends put golf balls on the floors, and using the best golf clubs money can buy, the young man and his friends hit those golf balls through the windows of the houses. Fun? I don’t know.

Having shattered the windows of these many houses (some of which were designed by famous architects and featured in Sunset Magazine and Architectural Digest) this young man and his friends drove gigantic bulldozers into and through and over these houses, for the fun of it, I suppose, before they turned the work over to professionals who really knew how to scrape everything away down to the ground.

Then the young man ordered thousands and thousands of gigantic truckloads of dirt to be brought from faraway to fill the wild gorge so the land would be level for his very own nine-hole golf course, no skimping on distances, designed by a famous golf course designer. Then the young man had a house built at the high point of his property, a house that took dozens of carpenters and masons three years to build, an enormous four-story mansion resembling the castle in the Disney logo; and the young man also had a huge indoor athletic facility built a stone’s throw from his castle, a facility housing a big swimming pool and a tennis court and a racquetball court and a full-sized basketball court. And then, along with two posh guesthouses, one Japanese modern, one Swiss Chalet, he had a beautiful fountain installed at the bottom of the gently sloping hill behind his castle.

Only this is no ordinary beautiful fountain. No, this young man’s fountain, which resides in the center of an enormous plaza accessed by an immense staircase descending from the vast terrazzo behind the young man’s castle, is an exact replica of the largest fountain at Versailles. The young man had the massive fountain and the enormous plaza and the immense staircase built by a small army of skilled craftsmen flown from Italy to California to make these colossal replicas out of exquisite white marble quarried in Carrara.

Todd’s web site is UnderTheTableBooks. com