Rich Hanson is an out of work, mid-level auto executive from Michigan, who knows nothing about football and cares less. As a joke, his wife enters him in a nationwide “coach contest,” the winner of which gets to coach one game of the hapless Boston Terriers, who have languished in the basement of the NFL so long that they think they are -- and are treated like -- janitors. Of course, under his comically unconventional guidance the Terriers win. And win. And win. He stays for the rest of the season, becomes a national hero, and and over the course of a winning season and a Superbowl victory uses this “Chance of a Lifetime” to learn much and teach more about the meaning of success, ethics, love and loyalty.

“The Chance of a Lifetime” is part “The Natural,” part “Slapshot,” and part “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” Said Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago Tribune columnist, Clarence Page, “I loved this book.  Author Dennis Wholey serves up an instructive parable for all of the Walter Mittys out there who still harbor dreams of a great Super Bowl moment in their lives.” Said poet Nikki Giovanni, “If you were my sister-friend, I’d say GO GIRL. Everyone who’s had a dream needs this book.” And no less than pioneering author Gay Talese remarked, “I’m a football fan and a Dennis Wholey fan, and Dennis’ latest book reaffirms my appreciation of both.”

Dennis Wholey is a New York Times best-selling author of a number of self-help books. He also is host of the nationally syndicated PBS international affairs television series, “This Is America with Dennis Wholey,” in which he chats with world leaders, celebrities, newsmakers, authors, journalists, and experts from all walks of life. Dennis is a born empath. His subjects tell him everything. 

He is a friend of mine, you may have guessed, going back to the mid-sixties when he perpetrated the #1 hit record, “Wild Thing with Senator Bobby,” which for one thing earned him the undivided attention of RFK for a flight from New York to Washington during which he schooled the future presidential candidate and tragic legend on how to make a record. 

And while Dennis is a friend, I have a couple of criticisms of “The Chance of a Lifetime.” As a first-time novelist he hasn’t quite gotten down the balance between description and dialogue, as a result of which there’s too much of the latter. That does, nonetheless, give the prose a kind of energy that foretells the novel’s inevitable appearance as a motion picture. And he kind of rushes the ending, addressing the readers directly. I don’t care for that technique, but in line with the dialogue it does lend a sort of immediacy.

All that notwithstanding, “The Chance of a Lifetime” does exactly what NBC sportscaster Bob Costas says, give “a whole new meaning to the idea of Fantasy Football”

Here’s an excerpt. 

http://denniswholey.com/files/The_Chance_of_a_Lifetime_Wholey_11_page_excerpt.pdf

Slats Thompson and the Good Ship '100 Proof'
by Joseph C. Jahn

It's been 42 years, give or take a drink, since the Volstead Act passed into blessed oblivion, but there are old timers out my way who vividly remember Prohibition's effect on their lives.

Rum Row was only a few miles off the coast, and ships that passed in the night included small vessels (local registry) whose bilges were awash with illicit bottled goods. A good deal of maritime money passed hands, allowing some blue collar workers to live in the same baronial splendor as politicians and cops.

Slats Thompson was nonplussed when he stood before his draft board, at age 35, in 1941, and volunteered for the Navy. "Have you had any sea experience," the chairman asked.

"In small boats," Slats said. 

That was modest. Slat's old speedboat wasn't called "100 Proof" for nothing during her heyday on the Great South Bay. Not only was she the fastest boat around, but Slats enjoyed 100 per cent protection from the law due to his generosity to parties of the second part.

But rum running was only one manifestation of local interest in the outside world during Prohibition. The ' worst booze Manhattan speakeasies served their customers did not come from Rum Row. It came from stills in and about my town. The odor of booze was as familiar to discerning natives as the smell of salt in the seaborne air. 

Oddly enough, just about everyone smelled it but the constabulary. "They allus seemed to have bad head colds," is the way old man Phillips explained their inability to detect the odor of ersatz Old Granddad fermenting in farm houses and barns.

The constables' vision wasn't any better. Among the things they never saw were speakeasies. And their hearing was even worse. Among the night noises they never heard was the roar of trucks carrying booze from the speedboats to the city. The free-wheeling trucks shook our houses, but never stirred the law.

These activities brought interesting visitors to town, including gangsters like Dutch Schultz, who immediately fell in love with the environment. It was an ideal place, Dutch concluded, to dispose of the bodies of members of other gangs who dast hijack his trucks.  

More than one native peered into an abandoned car to discover the remains of a hoodlum with a neat round hole in his noggin. Did they report their findings to the constabulary? Only if they were very dumb. To be called as a witness in a gangland rubout was the closest thing to suicide. It made insurance companies very nervous, too. A chicken farmer who lived north of town was painting his front porch one Sunday afternoon when two dapper gents in a long black Lincoln stopped to inquire the whereabouts of the town dump. The chicken farmer's curiosity was whetted by the presence in the back seat of a third party who appeared to be in need of an undertaker.

"Three blocks to the east and turn north," he told the visitors. When the long black Lincoln pulled away, the painter got his family into his old flivver and hauled stakes. He returned a week later to learn from a neighbor that in his absence a very deceased person had been unearthed at the town dump.

"You missed all the excitement," the neighbor said.

"The hell you say," the chicken farmer responded, and resumed painting his porch.

Published in the Long Island Press, February 21, 1975

"So what's with Christmas trees anyway?" Mosko asked, wondering if it wasn't time to break the spell.

"Its a nice tradition if you're not allergic to them and don't have cats," Donovan replied.

"I mean what's a tree got to do with Jesus or the Holy Land? I been to Israel a couple of times and I didn't see a single pine tree."

"This is a Norway spruce," Donovan replied. 

"I seen even fewer of them," Mosko insisted. 

"You want to know what the tree thing is about?" 

"Yeah. I figured you would know. Does it have something to do with the tree the Romans cut down to crucify him on?"

"I don't think so," Donovan said dully. "To the best of my knowledge, the Christmas tree is a pagan tradition from northern Europe. They used to bring a tree indoors every year before the snows closed in. It was a ritual to ward off evil and ensure that the trees outside would survive the winter."

"That still doesn't tell me what a Christmas tree has to do with Jesus," Mosko said.

"Nothing, okay? It has nothing to do with Jesus. What's a gefilte fish got to do with Abraham and Sarah?"

Mosko replied, "The day there's a seventy-foot gefilte fish standing on Fifth Avenue I'll tell you."

This year marks the 44th anniversary of my becoming the first full-time reporter/photographer covering the rock beat at The New York Times and, as such, the first full-time rock journalist of any major American newspaper or other form of major media. It was a dirty job -- forget Mike Rowe's sewers, septic tanks and oil spills -- but someone had to do it. Why was it dirty and depressing? Because I've known and loved and praised, hated and insulted, been insulted by, run into, run from, abused substances, had my ears assaulted, or otherwise invaded the private spaces of a lot of rock stars who have since become deceased, ceased to be, rung down the curtain, kicked the bucket, croaked, shuffled off this mortal coil, or in one way or another joined the choir eternal. 

The ability to manipulate six wires is no guarantor of intelligence.

Put another way, many rockers’ tin ears seem to have metastasized. 

The number of dead rockers -- some of them good and talented people -- of my acquaintance stands at 33.

It's tempting to think that drugs were behind most of these abrupt departures. However, in many cases death came via largely unrelated medical problems -- heart attacks or cancer, mainly. A number did die of overdoses of either drugs or alcohol, sometimes both. Others succumbed to crashes by aircraft, cars, and skiing into trees. There also were murders and one suicide, possibly to avoid death by any of the aforementioned. This year there are three new entries, Hoyt Axton, Steve Ferguson, and Steve Paul as well as expanded commentary on many of them. 

If you're adding up and tracking deaths per band, we’re talking about three-fifths of Canned Heat, half of the Who, two-fifths of MC5, one-third of the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Peter, Paul & Mary, and a quarter each of the Doors and Beatles.

They were rockers who died, died. Here's the list.

SPIRITS OF ROCK STARS PASSED [sic]

Hoyt Axton -- folk and country singer and son of the co-author of “Heartbreak Hotel.” His own writing included “Joy to the World,” the worldwide hit by Three Dog Night which became the theme of “The Big Chill,” the movie that chillingly summed up my grad school experience and the years thereafter. (You’ll simply have to guess which one of them I was.) Of Three Dog Night, Hoyt dropped a couple of tidbits on me. Both concern their renditions of his song “Never Been to Spain.” They objected to using the line “but I kinda like the Beatles” because they considered themselves competitive with the latter. But they sang it. However, they changed his line “in Oklahoma, born in a coma” to “in Oklahoma, not Arizona.” Considering the political climate in Arizona lately, I’ll take the coma. He died of a heart attack in Victor, Montana, on October 26, 1999, two years after his mother drowned in a hot tub in Tennessee.

Sonny Bono -- of skiing into a tree, January 5, 1998. Interesting man with extraordinary taste in women. You’d have to chat with her to fully understand that. 

Harry Chapin -- in a car accident July 16, 1981. Harry was one of life’s really good people, and I don’t say that simply because he was grateful enough for my career-launching review to put me on his Christmas card list and invite me to his wedding.

Jim Croce -- in a plane crash September 20, 1973.

John Denver -- in a plane crash October 12, 1997.

John Entwistle of the Who, and the only one of them who was capable of standing still -- June 28, 2002 of a heart attack also involving cocaine and a prostitute. In Vegas, naturally.

Steve Ferguson of NRBQ. He was the guitarist and the best. And is credited with their eclecticism, which included rockabilly and experimental jazz. I was an unabashed NRBQ fanboy in their late 60s years, wrote them up as often as I could, and dragged Clive Davis to see them, which got them their first recording contract. Then I dragged Hendrix to see them and they goofed on him. He threatened to throw a table at them, then walked out, shaking his head. That was the last time I saw him. I lost interest in the band after Steve left in 1970. He died of cancer, October 7, 2009. 

Rory Gallagher -- Irish blues rocker, died June 1995, of complications of a liver transplant. I should have gone with him that night backstage at the Rod Stewart and Faces show in Anaheim when he said "come have a jar" and beckoned me toward his dressing room. But I had just had a bottle with Rod and the boys during the ride from L.A.

Jerry Garcia -- died August 9, 1995 of a heroin-related heart attack doubtlessly aggravated by his lifelong taste for junk food.

Bill Graham -- legendary concert promoter and foul-mouthed pain in the ass. We had a rocky relationship but eventually made up. He died October 25, 1991, of a helicopter crash while returning from a Huey Lewis and the News concert. 

Jimi Hendrix -- died September 18, 1970, of a drug overdose. He would be humiliated by his surviving family's messy fight over his estate.

Bob Hite -- six-foot, 300-pound singer for Canned Heat, died of a heart attack April 5, 1981. He proclaimed me “a freak” at a time when it was considered high praise.

Janis Joplin -- died of a heroin overdose October 4, 1970. That'll learn her for snarling at me.

Don Kirshner -- pioneer assembler of boy bands, famously the Monkees. Of a heart attack January 17, 1991, in Boca Raton, Fla. Should have known it was bad karma to live in a place whose name translates as "mouse mouth."

Ronnie Lane -- of the Faces and Rod Stewart and Faces; died June 5, 1997, of multiple sclerosis. No doubt he had a jar with Rory Gallagher, who opened for Rod in a 1974 tour.

Jerry Leiber, August 23, 2011, of cardiopulmonary failure. Do I really  have to explain who Leiber and Stoller were? Let me just say “Hound Dog,” “Yakety Yak,” “Stand By Me,” “On Broadway,” "Spanish Harlem" and on and on. Of their songwriting partnership, Leiber said "I yelled, he played." They did it for me once, using an old upright piano, at the Brill Building, which also needs no explanation. That private performance was one of the most wonderful rock and roll moments I ever had.

John Lennon -- murdered on December 8, 1980, outside his apartment building, New York's 19th century landmark the Dakota, which also was the setting for "Rosemary's Baby." He would have enjoyed the subsequent deification.

Linda McCartney -- one-time photographer (I bought some photos of Jim Morrison from her)  -- and part-time, sort-of backup singer; I first saw her getting into the elevator at Andy Warhol's Factory. This was a year or two before she told a friend she was moving to London with the intention of marrying a Beatle, any Beatle, and snagged the prize. She died April 17, 1998, of breast cancer.

Keith Moon -- the Who's wild man drummer; drowned in his own vomit following a drug overdose on September 7, 1978, surprising no one.

Jim Morrison -- died July 3, 1971, by one account of a heroin overdose and choking on upchucked sweet and sour pork, surprising even fewer than were later surprised by Keith Moon. He would have enjoyed the postmortem idolatry, especially since current cultists are actually building a religion around him.

Felix Pappalardi of Mountain, April 17, 1983, murdered in the Riverside Drive building where I used to get my teeth fixed.

Steve Paul, legendary proprietor of Steve Paul's Scene at 46th and Broadway. It was there that many of the star-studded jam sessions you heard about took place. The Scene was three blocks from the Times and easy to drop in after work, which is to say at one in the morning. It was harder to remember what happened the next day. He died October 21, 2012, at a hospital in Queens, cause unknown at this time. I have a query out. Check back next year.

Elvis Presley, August 16, 1977, drug overdose aggravated by too many fried banana and peanut butter sandwiches. He would have been embarrassed by the deification.

Billy Preston - R&B keyboardman who became famous for keeping the Beatles from killing one another during the "Abbey Road" days, June 5, 2006, of kidney failure.

Doug Sahm -- of the Sir Douglas Quintet and a dozen other bands and a very influential figure in tejano. He talked faster than anyone I ever met. His embullience let him sing the line "you're such a groove you blow my mind in the morning" and make you like it. From his hit "Mendocino." He died November 18, 1999, of a heart attack in a hotel room in Taos. I would like to think there was a bottle of Lone Star on the nightstand.

Fred "Sonic" Smith -- of MC5, later husband of Patti Smith (no blood relation). Died November 5, 1994, of heart disease.

John Stewart, of the Kingston Trio and a long solo career that included writing "Daydream Believer" for the Monkees, "July You're a Woman" for everyone, and "Chilly Winds," a tip of the cowboy hat to the glory days of folk's road songs, for his old mates in the Kingston Trio. Try his tune “Cannons in the Rain” if you get the chance. He died on January 19, 2008, of a stroke.

Mary Travers of Peter, Paul & Mary, September 16, 2009 of cancer. The only folkie to come out of the 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene who actually grew up in Greenwich Village. We hit it off, an iffy sort of thing with people whose performance you have to review. Mary was a keeper.

Rob Tyner -- singer for MC5, died September 17, 1991 of heart failure while driving home from the grocery store.

Dave Van Ronk - "the Mayor of Macdougal Street" and early nurturer of many folksingers, including the young Bob Dylan. Only Dave could get away with singing "Swing on a Star" in a Village club. He died February 10, 2002, of colon cancer.

Henry Vestine -- guitarist with Canned Heat; died October 20, 1997, of a heart attack.

Alan Wilson -- guitarist with Canned Heat. He killed himself in Bob Hite's backyard September 3, 1970.

Frank Zappa -- rock's cranky innovator (he was House with a guitar before Hugh Laurie became House with a guitar) and first-amendment advocate who clashed famously with anti-rock activist Tipper Gore over censorship of rock lyrics; died of prostate cancer on December 4, 1993.

"Good humor and a nice line of acerbic wit throughout … some clever turns of phrase … a fun read." -- Amazon

Murder on the Waterfront"

I wrote The Quark Maneuver in the early 1970s after having spent the first half dozen years of my career writing about music, TV, and the movies for several publications, predominantly The New York Times. Correspondingly, I was accustomed to periodic sleepovers at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard, often while trying to get a foot in the door of Hollywood  screenwriting. The only thing to come of that was a script I thought perfect for Harry Guardino and Brenda Vaccaro, who were at the heights of their careers at the time. I had always wanted to write mysteries and was in love with the Inspector Maigret stories by Georges Simenon. I felt that New York City needed its own Maigret. At the same time I also was obsessed with The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth (book 1971, movie 1973). Between the two I had the notion of taking a middle-aged, going-to-seed sort of character and sticking him a thriller plot, adding a girlfriend. 

That’s sort of what Forsyth did in Jackal,  minus the girlfriend, though his Claude Lebel is hardly as studiously middle aged as Jules Maigret. Nonetheless, sticking an anomalous hero in a thriller won Forsyth fame, public acclaim and an Edgar Award. So I wrote a screenplay titled The Jericho Incident, booked myself into the Chateau Marmont, and shopped it around. There was some polite applause, but no sale. I doubt that Harry Guardino and Brenda Vaccaro ever got wind of it. Finally, a well-respected Hollywood agent told me to go back to New York and turn it into a novel.  

After 18 rejections it was bought by Ballantine, the publisher that rejected it the first time (a new and clearly more visionary editor had come on board). She considered the title too obscure. We changed it to The Quark Maneuver, referring to ... oh, never mind, that would be a spoiler. Our mistake was that in the early 1970s no one beyond physicists and a few science geeks had heard the word “quark,” nor could spell it. Likewise with the name of the Harry Guardino character, Paul DiGioia, the middle-aged, paunchy and somewhat grumpy detective lieutenant. The Brenda Vaccaro role was Diana Contardo, a lost and lonely 26-year-old who ran an Italian restaurant near the East River and who, fortuitously, got her exercise by doing martial arts. So here we had a pretty 20-something girl with sad eyes hooking up with a 42-year old man who life had beaten up a bit. The should-have-been-predictable result was that she took over the.whole.book as readily as she took over DiGioia. 

Whatever, The Quark Maneuver worked. People loved the combination of who'd-have-thunk-it heroes and thriller plot (that had a bit of a stealth mystery in it). Paul and Diana tore themselves away from Contardo's ("fine Italian food") and she rode off in her white 1970 Pinto to save the world. Six years after Forsyth got his Edgar I got mine. 

I was so enamored of the team of Paul DiGioia and Diana Contardo that, in the early 1980s, I brought them back, with the names Bill Donovan and Marcia Barnes, in Night Rituals, the first Bill Donovan Mystery. In 2012, exactly 35 years since they first came to life, Paul and Diana live on as Donovan and Marcy in the Donovan books. New York has its own Maigret, and he's hooked up with New York's own Emma Peel. Here, in The Quark Maneuver, is the moment of their creation.

12-10-12

Don't ask.

"Mike- your Murder in Coney Island book was just the ticket for reading while we were driving home to Austin from Big Bend. That's a long drive. The only way to make the book better was if it were about 100 miles longer. And I'm not even a big mystery reader. Loved it. Made me really miss Noo Yawk …  And I have another one queued up and won't wait for a road trip to read it. I can lock everyone out of the house and read it at home." -Sara Breuer

Wow! Thanks!

http://www.amazon.com/Michael-Jahns-York-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B005GSS314/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2

"Bustling New York harbors a psychotic killer who, viewing himself as a latter-day St. Augustine protecting the "City of God," bashes people who desecrate the cathedral of St. John the Divine. Series detective Bill Donovan moves into the labyrinthine church to stalk the killer, possibly jeopardizing his relationship with black girlfriend-policewoman Marcie, who wants him to help her find the thugs who killed her best friend on the edge of Central Park. Tandem cases cram the story with detail and personal conflict, while energized prose adds excitement. A great procedural from the author of Night Rituals." 

“Murder at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine” is crucial to understanding the intertwining back stories of the Bill Donovan Mysteries. No spoilers here, but Donovan’s relationship with Marcie comes into focus, Brian Moskowitz makes his debut, and Marcie has a secret so deep and dark that not even she is aware of it. And Donovan begins to confront his deep-seated hatred of the rich and consequent fear of marriage to a wealthy woman.

http://www.amazon.com/Michael-Jahns-York-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B007L3I19G/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331954468&sr=8-1

For all the whooping and hollering and “just plain folks” blather about being “Jenny from the block” or otherwise like you and me, show biz operates pretty much within the yurt. You’re either inside with the rest of the tribal chiefs and the music and the wholly uncontrolled substances, or you’re alone on the steppes staring at mastodon bones.

I remember Cissy Houston at one or another rock scene powwow in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Those were the years during which I covered rock and roll and related riots for the New York Times, which got me into a lot of yurts.  Those days Cissy was a session singer for Hendrix and a lot of others and just beginning a solo career. I saw her around. Everyone knew everyone else because they were around.

I did not know her daughter, who I understand just died. My son saw her around, in the early 1990s when he was working at Arista Records, founded by Clive Davis, who has been in the news a lot lately for having discovered Whitney  Houston. Clive was around at some of the same powwows I was, and presumably Cissy was, the big  difference between me and him being that he got there in a limo. (He let me use it once.)

I don’t know if Cissy ever brought her daughter to a powwow. I routinely brought my son to them, him riding on my shoulders.

Steve was another guy who was around. He was a good friend of mine who had a quartet that opened for the Who during one of their 1970s arena tours. How did a folk/rock/jazz fusion quartet get to open for the Who (and get booed for their effort)? Steve was good friends with Pete Townshend, who I also knew from around ... ran into him at a guitar store on 47th Street twice and on the street in San Francisco once, following which we went to his hotel room and split a six. I don’t recall what we talked about. Probably all the people we knew from around.

One weekend night circa 1970 I got a worried call from Steve, who said something like “Pete’s here. The cops are looking for him.” The exact words don’t matter when you’re in a situation involving guns and jails. It seems that Pete threw a fire marshall off the stage at the Fillmore East -- there was a fire next door and the man interrupted a Who set to ask that the theater be evacuated. Pete gave him the old heave-ho and later, when told that the NYPD frowns on such things, ran off to Steve’s apartment to hide. I told him that Pete should lay low until Monday when the lawyers were around.

One thing you always talked about when you were around was what everyone was doing. In the 1960s/1970s when I was around, everyone else was either “smoking dope” or “doing smack.” You hadn’t seen someone in a while and you ran into him, the first words might be “Tim kicked!” That was good news at the time, but in this particular case Tim didn’t kick permanently. Tim died.

So did Steve, but it was in the 1990s and not of a heroin overdose. He died of hepatitis C, but not the AIDS-related kind. He got it in a Nashville hospital, where he was working as a nurse, having failed to make it in show biz -- musical support from Pete and editorial support from me notwithstanding. He burned all his master recordings and turned his back on the show biz scene where people lived unhealthy lifestyles and, in consequence thereof, died. He got a nursing degree and went into health care, which killed him. 

I hear that he was a very good nurse, though. Found it very fulfilling and everyone at the hospital loved him.

Before Steve was entirely done with show biz, he wrote an especially good pop song and got Nashville session singers to record a demo. It was a wonderful song. So wonderful that I gave the tape to my son to give to Cissy’s daughter the next time he saw her around. He didn’t know her other than as someone he saw around, and thus gave the song to her A&R people, those record company souls who decide what songs pop artists record. The artists themselves are often too busy being around to make the decisions themselves. The tape came back with the word that it was a good, “well constructed” song ... thanks for letting us hear it ... but it’s not right for Whitney.

At Steve’s memorial service in Nashville everyone sang a different song of his, one about saying goodbye. At Whitney’s memorial service on Saturday in Newark, the church full of celebrities -- invitation only, mind you, this is a show biz powwow, ain’t no Jenny from no block gettin’ into this yurt -- will sing “I Will Always Love You,” the song she recorded about never saying goodbye. Naturally the service will be broadcast on CNN and livestreamed.

And we can hear those notes forever.

Let me start over. I was born to write. Was I born to write well? I'm not sure, you'll have to ask my editor. His answer will depend on how drunk you get him. I'll pick up the tab.

I was not born to fish. The only way I could catch a fish was to make him die of laughter. I tried fly fishing when I was a kid. I even tied my own flies, spent hours and hours on it. But I never caught anything. My flies never got so much as a hungry glance. The fish were too busy laughing their fins off.

But I was born to race sailboats. I was a very good sailor, at least by the standards of the Great South Bay, alongside which sat my home town of Sodom-by-the-Sea. I sailed a dinghy (not dingy; that would be my resume). In other words, small. It would take a very long stretch of an exceedingly fertile imagination to call them yachts.

It takes quite an imagination to visualize sailing yachts at all these days. Forget huge, sleek wooden vessels with acres of billowing white canvas above and scores of gin-swilling gentlemen in blazers below. Think instead of the Volvo 70, which is ... let me think (it's been known to happen) how to describe it ... perhaps as a 70-foot windsurfer plastered with corporate logos and able to outrun a U.S. Navy destroyer. Watch a video shot from one and you think the camera was mounted on a surfboard. Towering spray shoots everywhere. The men who sail them describe the experience of going on deck during full-tilt conditions as “being firehosed.”

Manned by Olympic athletes and equally trained others who are also professional sailors, six of the $10 million boats are currently tearing around the world in the Volvo Ocean Race, a nine-month, 39,000-mile aquatic Grand Pris that began in Alicante, Spain, in November and will end in Galway, Ireland, in July. They're currently at a planned stop in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, on the Persian Gulf.

And therein hangs a sail. The Volvo 70 may be a windsurfer, but it’s high tech in every way. Laptops and displays are everywhere. Satellite data let them find good wind and sail around storms. There’s a “Media Crew Member” who blogs, tweets, and uploads videos to Youtube. There are cameras all over the place. The boat is more thoroughly wired into the Internet than a thousand teenage hackers. Think of a Superbowl with a camera mounted in the ball. It’s possible for a fan to get engulfed in the data stream and spend night and day doing nothing but watching the Volvo 70s circumnavigate. It’s easy. There are position updates every three hours that can be read by anyone.

Including pirates.

Finally, the ink-stained wretch who was born to write gets to the point. Better pump a few more shots of Old Red Eye into that editor before asking his opinion. The point is to remind us yet again that nothing is new, no matter how many digital bells and whistles you hang on it. Here we have the ultimate racing boats ... extreme sailing, some call it ... ripping up the sea faster than a destroyer, interacting in real time with the entire planet, docked in glittery Abu Dhabi hiding from pirates. And worrying about Iranian threats to close down the Strait of Hormuz before Saturday, January 14, when the boats have to get through it again to start of their sprint around Southeast Asia to Sanya, China, the fourth leg of the circumnavigation.

They’ll make it and "the Everest of racing" will continue ... if they aren't kidnapped or blown up.

Why would the boats not have to fear pirates? They're big buckets of cash ... I think I mentioned the $10 million price tags ... sailing the ancient trade routes carrying a fortune in publicity and promotion from port to port. Abu Dhabi and Sanya aren't putting on immense, citywide celebrations because they love wind and sea. (They are sponsoring two of the boats, the ones repeatedly breaking down). The Emir's crew just announced that more than 12,000 Abu Dhabi hotel nights have been sold to race organizers, support personnel, and fans. I suspect that the room rates are a bit higher than you and I pay at Motel 6.

Let's face it -- the Volvo 70s are merchant vessels. And navies were created many centuries ago specifically to protect merchant shipping. At some point just past Madagascar, as they were about to enter the Somali pirate danger zone, the race managers shut off the data stream, cut the position reports, and hoisted the boats, masts and all, onto an armed ship ... there are photos of a deck protected by razor wire ... for a series of secret maneuvers that ultimately got them to Abu Dhabi. Where the Emir is throwing one whale of a party. Truly, some party, a citywide celebration like that given the Olympics. When I got back from one of my races maybe I got a bottle of warm beer.

Pirates are not invited. Bloggers are, and a bunch of ours were flown in to help cover the festivities. 

I didn’t have all these problems racing off the shore of Sodom-by-the-Sea. I might be swamped by a ferry wake, run up on the rocks or a sand bar, tipped over into a school of jellyfish, or get stuck in the middle of the bay in a lightning storm while quivering five feet from a tall metal stick. That happened. I had the soiled trousers to prove it. Worse, when I got back to the dock someone had stolen the beer and there was sand in the sandwiches. But no one took me captive and no Iranians were firing missiles at me. 

So on Saturday, January 14, have three fingers of Old Red Eye in honor of the Olympian, high tech, tweeting sailors of the Volvo Ocean Race and cheer them on as they ride their heavily armed freighter out of missile range and far enough past the pirates to get back in the water, switch on the data stream, resume uploads and tweets, and show, one more time, that nothing is new. 

They were born to do it.

Mike Jahn’s newest Kindle book is “Murder in Central Park” http://www.amazon.com/Michael-Jahns-York-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B006QBRN0C/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1326057566&sr=1-3

The Volvo Ocean Race http://www.volvooceanrace.com/en/home.html

I was thinking about the Kardashians. Thinking about this family of orange grifters is a feat not normally accomplished without several applications of Ol’ Red Eye followed by a plump couch to sleep it off on. The Kardashians are, Mom would have said, a perfect example of the rule “you are the company you keep,” in their family’s case, O.J. Simpson. They do nothing, nothing at all, are boring as all get out, and are paid for it. They are like my ancestor on the Yankee side, Obediah, and the seven or eight generations following.

Obediah and his household came from Stratford-on-Avon, England, via Lynn, Massachusetts, staying in the Boston area just long enough to relieve themselves but not long enough to be tarred by the feather of living in the proximity of future Red Sox and Kennedys. They did not come from the place where loiter orange grifters and double murderers.

My ancestors left the place where, if lucky, you might have dug up the sod around Shakespeare’s begonias. They wound up in Southampton, New York, in 1641, becoming one of the first English settlers of the Empire State, which otherwise was chock full of stubbornly prideful Dutchmen and increasingly worried Indians. 

What did they do when they got there? They dug clams. For 10 generations they dug clams and, I imagine, grew potatoes and carved up the dead whales that washed up on the beaches upon which the celebrities who now overpopulate the place turn themselves orange. There were lots of whales to die and wash up on the Hamptons beaches. There were no celebrity sunbathers because, if you think about it, it has not socially acceptable to walk around half or entirely naked until quite recently. There were lots of whales and clams but a decreasing number of, as my newspaperman  father put it, “durn angry Indians whose land was stole.”

After finishing with clams, Obediah’s descendants moved to Sag Harbor and began going to sea and actively slaughtering whales, one of them, my great-great grandfather, acquiring the title “Captain.” That part of the Empire State having become largely rid of Dutchmen, prideful or otherwise, they finally moved west to the town on the Great South Bay that I call Sodom-by-the-Sea. I do not call it that because it’s the place to catch the ferry to the gay parts of Fire Island, but because before the gays came it was notorious for swinging. You can keep yourself quite busy on or near beaches these days.

As for the durn angry Indians, they moved to Upstate New York and opened casinos, which is substantially better than turning yourself orange in Hollywood. So is digging clams, come to think of it.

It rained Monday night and early Tuesday morning, hard enough to flood the West Village apartment of my son, Evan, and his wife, Denise. The flood was bad enough to keep them up half the night sopping up the water with towels. The task was so exhausting that Denise decided to skip her 9 a.m. meeting at the World Trade Center. Instead, she was out on the terrace putting the towels out to dry when a mob of amateur butchers flew two jetliners into the landmark buildings where she otherwise would be sitting. It was line-of-sight from their terrace to America's future. She watched, transfixed, as flames and smoke rose and the buildings came down. 

Praise the Lord for rain

I was in a New Jersey Transit bus pulling into the Port Authority Bus Terminal at 8:42 a.m., about three minutes before it happened. I was there as result of a last-minute decision made because I was too tired for the ten-minute walk to the train station. (But the bus stop is outside my door.) The bus goes straight to midtown. En route to midtown, the train goes under the World Trade Center. 

Praise the Lord for tired feet and impetuosity

Still unaware that the skyline was being redone, I walked across 42nd Street hell-bent for my own 9 a.m. appointment. I walked by the corner of 43rd and Seventh, and paused long enough to reflect on the fact that 43rd Street in front of The New York Times headquarters looked exactly like it did 35 years ago (not counting the demise of Gough's Bar, where the guys from the press room used to drink drafts, wearing hats fashioned from pages of newspaper). Everything else about Times Square had changed, considering what has been called the "Disneyfication" of the square over the past decade. When I started uptown again I found my path blocked by a large group of people looking up at the news ticker and giant screen TV on the facade of One Times Square, formerly called the Times Tower and, later, Allied Chemical Tower. It's the triangular building atop which the ball falls on New Year's Eve. "Tourists," I thought, and stepped out into traffic to walk around them. Two blocks further uptown I had been slowed by two more corner crowds, all looking up, many with mouths agape. Then I heard a hardhat yell to another that "a fuckin' plane crashed into the World Trade Center." I stopped, turned, and watched along with everyone else. 

It was eleven hours before I would get home. The homeward trek would take place via feet, boat, feet, train, and car, in that order, and the feet component would add up to about five miles--more than enough to put me into the recliner with the remote and a six-pack of Buckler (The Afghans who run my local convenience store having run out of Kaliber, the nonalcoholic beer that I drank in those days.

My early morning wish to avoid walking didn't exactly work out.

Here's what it was like in the City that Never Sleeps on the day that the Daily News described as with the simple words "It's War." It was long, and draining, and strange in that sort of way poets are called for to describe. It reminded me of scenes from Independence Day, Armageddon, M*A*S*H (the movie, not the sitcom), Godzilla, and, oh hell, I don't know, The Mouse that Roared, in which invaders land in Manhattan only to find it deserted. Very shortly after the attack, authorities (the famous "they"), closed the island. No one in, no one out. Whoever stood in the streets on Tuesday morning was staying a while. After my 9 a.m. appointment grew into three hours--much of it talking about what happened downtown--followed by lunch with a pal at an Irish joint in Times Square dominated, that day, by gigantic TVs, infuriated patrons, and at least one very nervous looking busboy who appeared to be of middle Eastern descent, I set off on two quests.

The first was to get my hands on a couple of pills I would need before midnight in case I couldn't get home. I will confess to having reached the age where I need that sort of thing nightly and, sadly, not for the entertainment value. I talked a local doctor into giving me a prescription only to find out that a Rite Aid pharmacist was more than willing to hand over a night's supply, no questions asked, no money accepted. It was only the first instance in which I found it impossible to pay for something. The pills turned out to be easy to get. But a cheap AM radio was not to be found anywhere. Normally, you can buy them from sidewalk vendors for a couple of bucks each.

The second goal was to get home. For the time being, that was impossible. The island remained closed, although as the day dragged on an increasing number of bridges (but none in the direction I was going) were opened to foot traffic.

According to the Daily News's Corky Siemaszko, "... New York resembled a Third World capital after a particularly explosive coup"

No subways or buses were running. Taxis had entirely disappeared. There were, in fact, almost no civilian vehicles about. Instead, the streets were empty and strangely quiet save for official vehicles and the occasional convoy of police-escorted buses carrying victims to hospitals. Phone service, especially cellular phone service, was on and off, and highly erratic when it was on. A woman calling from Connecticut got my cell phone, which has a New Jersey area code, and when we sorted out who she was trying to reach determined that the circuits got every single digit wrong. The number she dialed bore absolutely no resemblance to mine, despite the fact she swore she dialed correctly. Twice.

I set out on foot for Evan and Denise's apartment, a distance of 40 blocks (two miles). We hung out on the terrace for a while, watching the smoke rise, then watched the news on the big-screen TV back where it was air conditioned and shook our heads. The sun failing to do a good enough job drying the towels, Denise took them down to the basement and put them in the dryer. Occasional forays out onto the terrace showed billows of smoke still rising from what remained of the World Trade Center. The smoke shared the clear blue sky with press helicopters and fighter jets, which roared over Manhattan and the outer boroughs. The normal, 24-hour buzz of Manhattan traffic and the blaring of horns was gone, replaced by silence broken every minute or so by the wail of sirens. Slowly and silently, stunned survivors walked uptown, a sooty and morose procession. Some spoke quietly on cell phones ... or jabbed in frustration at them. Most just walked, alone in their thoughts. They passed each block's neighborhood hangabouts--the usual suspects one finds on every corner or in every local hash house countrywide, the janitors, delivery men, small storeowners, and borderline ne'er-do-wells--who debated loudly the mechanisms of building collapse, international terrorism, and carpet bombing. Doctors also walked around, and quickly one came to accept as normal the sight of a doctor in blue scrubs standing in line for coffee or candy at a local shop.

If you were in a suit and looked tired, you got used to strangers walking up to you and asking, "you okay?"

Toward late afternoon, the view from the terrace showed ferries operating out on the Hudson. So we headed off for the waterfront, where poking around turned up a couple of piers where I was likely to hitch a ride. Our feet clattered on the cobblestones of the wholesale meat district, which also is home to gay bars and the sorts of nightclubs that Puffy, Jennifer, and others of that crowd periodically shoot holes in. Now, Manhattan has a beltway of sorts. Starting near the mound of smoking debris on the southernmost tip of the island and proceeding clockwise, there is West Street, the West Side Highway, the Henry Hudson Parkway, the Harlem River Drive, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, the latter known simply as the FDR. West Street is a wide boulevard connecting Manhattan's West Side piers. Normally it's clogged with traffic, with the center lanes zipping along fast enough to qualify for a grand prix. But on that day it was almost empty. The few vehicles were official, principally ambulances on their way to the medical staging area set up at the Chelsea Piers sports and entertainment complex. 

Ambulances and EMS units from all over the New York metropolitan area were parked for blocks around what resembled a gigantic MASH unit. Doctors and nurses wandered around or drank coffee, wearing scrubs and masks upon which someone had placed large labels made from surgical tape. Most of the labels read either "ALS" or "BLS," for advanced or basic life support. Such labels also decorated the windshields of ambulances. Many of the medical professionals seemed at a loss for something to do; so many bodies ... up to 50,000 people normally work in the World Trade Center ... presumably remained buried in the 12-story-high pile of debris that were was a shortage of patients to work on. Yet amidst the disaster-movie look of the West Side waterfront were clear reminders that this was, after all, New York--mixing among the docs and rescue guys were dog walkers, couples in arms, and the occasional half-naked roller blader. Imagine Roller Girl in Boogie Nights slipping silently through the set of M*A*S*H.

The West Side piers had become a contemporary Dunkirk. It seemed that everything that could float had been pressed into service ferrying people from Manhattan to New Jersey. I saw the Amberjack V, a luxury dinner cruise ship, taking on refugees, as was the entire fleet of Spirit of New York Cruises. Further up the harbor, Circle Line cruise boats joined Weehawken ferries in making the evacuation. A line snaked around the pier to get into the Spirit of New Jersey. I joined the line ... becoming number 280 to step onto that yacht, and stood aft as the majestic white ship pulled out into the Hudson. The interior of the ship was a full-service restaurant designed to take maximum advantage of a New York City skyline view that had forever been changed. Tables were set for the lunch cruise, but now offered only free water for the refugees who, I learned, could get free water just about everywhere. Eager young people handed cups of the stuff to you as you trudged here and there looking increasingly lost, much as they did for marathon runners. 

The Spirit of New Jersey crossed the Hudson, slipping between two battered brown Army Corps of Engineers tugboats that were chugging downtown. The setting sun lit up the smoke and dust cloud over the financial capital of America, making it glow and, for a moment, radiate. 

A fighter jet flew overhead, flying east. A young man, pale skinned with a small mustache, said, "nuke Mecca" 

A thirtyish woman looked at him without expression, then made a cell phone call during which she described the view from the river to the folks at home. When the ship docked in Weehawken, site of the famous duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, the sun was dipping toward the horizon. Another single-file line took me through another M*A*S*H-type scene, past portable tables covered with yet more free water, and to a staging area where dozens of buses were ready to shuttle the weary to the train terminal in Hoboken for the duration of the trip home. The wait for the buses was two hours, I was told. Despite the amount of walking I had done already, I decided to walk the mile and three quarters. I joined another line of refugees, and what seemed like an hour later got a seat in an ancient train car that New Jersey Transit found somewhere, most likely in a museum. Trains were running on a load-and-go basis, of course for free. Forty-five minutes later I debarked, weary and sullen, in the pretty little suburban town, twenty minutes from the still-closed George Washington Bridge and noble, battered Manhattan, where I have lived in recent years.

A kid had erected a seven-foot flagpole in the back of his black pickup and from it flew a large American flag. He was driving around, looking pleased with himself.

Ellen drove me to the convenience store, the one in which I had joined the owner in considerable Taliban-bashing over the past few years. He was watching TV like everyone else, but looking edgy. After waiting for all other American-born customers to leave, I said, "you know who's going to get blamed for this, don't you?" He jumped into a rant more excited that the ones the subject of the Taliban gets him into, and said, "bin Laden is a madman! You cannot blame Afghanistan! This is not the fault of the people of Afghanistan!"

"Nonetheless," I said.

He was so excited that his English began to fade, and I lost track of what he was saying.

"Take care," I said, and went home to put my feet up.

"Michael Jahn's New York City Mysteries: Murder in Coney Island" has been published  as an eBook to be read in Kindle and related devices. The price is $2.99. It's available for download now. It's the first of the ten books in my series of hardcover mysteries, published between 1982 and 2008, that I intend to publish as  Kindle editions. 

It's a year after the destruction of the World Trade Center. Captain Bill Donovan, the  NYPD's legendarily brilliant, famously eccentric detective -- he’s been called “the ‘House’ of homicide” -- has managed to piss off the Feds so badly they won't let him near the case. So there he is in the basement of an ancient mom and pop candy store in Coney Island wondering why a prominent housing developer lays in a pool of blood at the foot of the World's Most Complete Collection of Brooklyn Dodgers Baseball Cards, beaten to death with a bronze statue of Ebbetts Field. 

And then ...

http://www.amazon.com/Michael-Jahns-York-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B005GSS314/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1

I forgot to mention that Donovan listens to techno on headphones.

(And if it isn't obvious, I don't know how to format text in this software. The type should not be that small. I promise to keep working on it.)