Devils & Blue Dresses: My Wild Ride as a Rock and Roll Legend

lineage promise of America leaning toward Italy, religiously baptized Methodist, occasionally raised Baptist, and converted to Catholicism by a sparky little Jesuit because I did not want to spend another empty, impoverished Christmas without the sensual rewards that lay within the opulent grandeur of the Catholic Church.
    Jew. It played into every racist and hateful prejudice I had learned in my childhood, but for that matter, so did hanging out with and befriending blacks. Not for the last time would the poison of my past come back to haunt me.
    I thanked Susan and headed to Florida.

Chapter 6
     
    C ERTAINLY WHILE TRAVELING IN S OUTHERN F LORIDA , but even before, I became aware of the backward gentile hearsay and long list of hates directed toward Jews. It did not help matters when every angry stereotype with regard to Jews seemed to find a face in Miami. It was another form of racism and discrimination that made me very sad.
    As I lay on the beach with my friend Joey Kubert, totally surrounded by what I jokingly thought of as the “evil Jewish hoardes,” the only crime we could discern being committed was the future burden on the health care system as it would come to struggle with an epidemic outbreak of skin cancer.
    I thought about my Jewish girlfriend, Susan. Susan wasn’t rich and neither were her parents, Jack and Belle. Jack was a truck driver and had, at one time, owned his own newsstand in New York City. Divorced, he married Belle, gave birth to beautiful Susan and lived in Oak Park, Michigan, right across the street from Oak Park High School. And here I was because of her, in love with the warm sun, the soft white sandy beaches, the warm rolling waves, the smell of the salty ocean water, the pleasant breeze, the swaying palm trees and the memory of the snow and cold from twenty-four hours before. Yes, it was my first winter visit to Florida and there we were, myself, Joey, and the Jews, all saying a prayer of thanks to the genius of Carl Fisher and his legacy, the dredge. But it would have to end. I didn’t like that part.
    It was, more than anything, my jealousy and distrust of the wealthy that drove me to the obvious. I did not hate Jews. I hated rich Jews. In fact, I hated all rich people. It is tacitly understood that if you hate rich or wealthy people and you are poor, you are undoubtedly envious, and probably stupid and lazy as well. It is interesting, how hate works. In America, something can be hated and still be allowed an escape mechanism through which you can change the negative energy into something positive. However,there is justifiable cause to balance and seek resolution in your favor for more precisely identified targets and issues––if you can prove your case.
    That is why it is essential to know and work from the premise that extremely wealthy people do not think of themselves as people. They think of themselves as gods. It was for me, unfortunately, the gods themselves that eventually pissed me off. But it is “so American” and it makes you rethink the twisted genius inherent in the founders of our country. Those brave, daring, and courageous men, mostly successful business men and wealthy plantation and land owners, a number of whom were slave owners and indentured servant keepers, who in one brilliant catharsis were able to proclaim that which they had no right to, that which was incredible and hypocritical, that all men are created equal.

     
a window to my soul
     
    
The defamation and ridicule, when left to the imagination of a common Southern population that still held distaste for “Yankees” in general, only heightened the evil perception of Jews. Jews were all seemingly rich, “obviously” from the bounty and wealth acquired by their greed and shameful abuse of poor, stupid, working class fools. The implication was that Jews were rude and arrogant, complaining and manipulating, skilled at pulling new interpretations of constitutional law from the belly of the constitution, abusively litigious, dripping with gold and odd fashion, attached to Cadillacs, and all speaking with, what I later discovered to be, a New York accent, even though they came from all over. One of the locals joked that we had traveled so far south we were north again
.
It was another ten years before I stumbled upon a copy of the book
Mein Kampf,
where Adolf Hitler carried these disgusting hatreds to an elevation that was profoundly insane. According to Hitler, Jews would direct the