-8-

CHAPTER ONE:
BIG STRONG MEN WILL VERY RARELY EAT PORK CHOPS

“Better to burn out, than to fade away.” --NEIL YOUNG

“I have always had the strongest admiration for them as

can write books.”
--ALEX, IN ANTHONY BURGESS’ A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

“See the lonely man there on the corner,

what he’s waiting for, I don’t know,
but he waits everyday now.
He’s just waiting for something to show.”
--GENESIS, “MAN ON THE CORNER”

“Q. To what other cities do you prefer Cincinnati?

A. Buffalo, Erie, Dayton, Columbus, Cleveland, New York,
Boston, Washington, Richmond, Miami, etc., etc.
Q. You name almost all the cities in America you have
seen!
A. Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. Cincinnati is the best city I
have seen so far in America.
Q. What do you like about it?
A. Fountain Square. The Carew Tower. The streets.
Garfield Place. The atmosphere. A grain elevator I saw on
the way in. The Station. The Cincinnati Club. That new
little church. The attitude of the people. Well dressed.
Happy. Larfing. The air is invigorating.”
--THOMAS MERTON, THE SECULAR JOURNAL OF THOMAS MERTON, APRIL 5,
1941
 -9-

November 1990

THERE WAS NO CLEVER or immortal opening line, such as “Dr. Livingstone, I

presume?” or Sherlock Holmes’ first words to Dr. Watson, his Boswell

and long-suffering factotum: “You have been in Afghanistan, I

perceive.” I was totally at a loss for any opening salvo that was clever

or memorable.

“Excuse me, sir, but are you Robert Lowry, by any chance?” It

was simple, it didn’t embellish any words, and it was economic in word

choice. Lowry had said in the Clifton article that Ernest Hemingway

was the number-one writer, so this lackluster opening line would

certainly meet with the approval of a fan of Papa’s.

On a clear, sunny, slightly chilly Saturday afternoon, I met Robert

Lowry. I was walking from the Ohio Book Store on Main Street, and was

walking south, hoping to see what books I could buy at Acres of Books,

an acclaimed establishment among Cincinnati bibliophiles.

This day had been an ordinary, just-paid Saturday for me. I

would sleep until late morning or early afternoon, and then go book-

buying downtown.

Even after a year in Cincinnati, it was difficult for me to

remember the order of downtown’s northbound main streets. On

Saturday afternoons, I often explored downtown Cincinnati, and while I

was walking, I would recite this sentence like a mantra:

“Big strong men will very rarely eat pork chops.”

 - 10 -

Mrs. Archer, my middle school science teacher, was a strong

believer in mnemonics as a way to memorize. If you couldn’t

remember the planets’ order from the sun, she told you “My very

educated mother just served us nine pies.” Were you stumped by

taxonomical classifications? “Keep people coming over for giant

sandwiches,” she would say, insisting that you write it--in ink--in your

science notebook.

Mrs. Archer would have been proud watching me navigate my

way through downtown Cincinnati, repeating over and over again a

nonsense sentence that a Cincinnati native had taught me before I left

Athens for the Queen City. It would be the way I would remember the

order of the northbound streets as one moved west away from the

Ohio River. Broadway, Sycamore, Main, Walnut, Vine, Race, Elm, Plum,

and Central Parkway.

WHEN I MET ROBERT LOWRY, I was preoccupied with the books I had just

bought, and the ones I planned to buy at Acres of Books. I almost

didn’t see the man sitting on the bench at the corner of Seventh and

Main. His thick hair was yellowish white, not gray, and worn parted to

one side. His heavy jowls were peppered with stubble that looked

almost tattooed onto his face. When he drew an unfiltered cigarette up

to his mouth, I saw the mole-brown nicotine stain on the thumb and

index finger of his right hand. I knew who it was, beyond any doubt.
 - 11 -

Although Lowry had not answered my post card, I still

remembered the Clifton article, and had committed much of its

information to memory. This meant that I remembered the

photographs appearing with the article.

I was still intrigued by the story of this Cincinnati native, who,

like me, had wanted nothing more than to write. While in

kindergarten, young Bob Lowry had badgered his parents for a

typewriter, and that Christmas a small toy Simplex was under the tree.

He had spent hours in self-imposed exile in the attic in front of his

machine, typing stories about prizefighters, detectives, and his brindle

bulldog King.

This struck such a chord with me. At the age of three, I had

laboriously typed a little story about a carnation that was not afraid of

the rain. In third grade, I set out to write my own dictionary, and had

gotten as far as aardvark. (I had asked my parents if it was all right to

include “bad words” in my dictionary, and they said yes, it was. If I got

that far with the project, they reasoned, I was entitled to indulge

myself.)

ALTHOUGH HE ONLY attended a single year at the University of Cincinnati,

Lowry produced the University of Cincinnati’s first literary magazine,

The Little Man, after passionately arguing before the Student Council

about the need for a literary magazine at the college. The University
 - 12 -

did not fund the magazine the following year, so Lowry dropped out,

bought a flatbed press and two type fonts, and set up shop in the

basement of his parents’ house in Linwood, that low-lying, flood-prone

neighborhood on the East End.

Reading about his magazine, and the Little Man Press that he

originated in his basement, I thought about my first “real” job. I spent

18 months in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working as a typesetter for

The Harvard Crimson, which had reported the news to the Harvard

University community since 1873, and was known as “Cambridge’s

Only Breakfast-Table Daily.” I had lived on Coca-Cola and Chips Ahoy!

cookies for many long nights, working under the whitish glare of

fluorescent tubes in The Shop, the windowless basement of The

Crimson’s Plympton Street headquarters just off Harvard Square. In

the 1930s, Lowry hand-set the editions of his magazine, publishing

short stories written by himself and others. In the early 1980s, I sat

before the green glow of the CRTronic Linotype, typing out the copy

which was clipped in front of me, typed on yellow foolscap and

scrawled over, crossed out, and rewritten many times before it reached

my hands. With a manipulation of function keys and commands, a

finished galley would soon be in my hands, set in nine-point Times

Roman, 10½ inches wide, which would be pasted onto the cardboard

flats in the adjacent room. Later on, my own works would appear in

both The Crimson and its weekly arts magazine, What is to Be Done?,
 - 13 -

and I would have the honor of setting the type for some of my own

works and watching with pride as the finished product rolled off The

Crimson‘s Goss Community offset press.

I hadn’t worked in the production department of a newspaper for

over two years, since my part-time gig as a typesetter at The Athens

News, the biweekly locally owned newspaper in Athens, Ohio. But until

the day I die, I will know that there are 12 points to a pica and six picas

to the inch, and that an em is equal to the square root of the body

type.

HE LOOKED UP, A scowl coming naturally to his face. “Yes, I am.” He

looked like he was bracing himself for a challenge. Did he think I was a

private detective or bill collector? Despite his guardedness, I could see

that he was proud that someone recognized him.

“I read the article in Clifton about you,” I said. “I’m glad to finally

meet you.” I stuck out my hand to him. A little hesitantly, he shook it.

I was tempted to lie and tell him I had read several of his books, but

the truth was that I had searched, in vain, to find any of them in

Cincinnati’s bookstores. At the Public Library of Cincinnati and

Hamilton County, they were kept in the Rare Books and Manuscripts

Division, whose hours coincided with my working hours. I said, “I can’t

really say I’ve read anything you’ve written, but I’m glad to finally
 - 14 -

meet you, sir.”

“You go to the University of Cincinnati?” He looked up at me. He

saw a 27-year-old, slightly overweight and modest-sized man dressed

in a rumpled, un-tucked work shirt and faded blue jeans, with hazel

eyes, dark eyebrows, disheveled brown hair, an untrimmed reddish

beard, and fingernails bitten down to the cuticles.

“No, I don’t go to U.C.,” I told him. “I went to Ohio University.”

This seemed to delight him. “Oh,” he said, “up there in

Columbus?”

I managed to keep my equanimity. I had attended Ohio

University in Athens, nestled in the Hocking Valley of Southeastern

Ohio. Although I had not graduated, and had spent more time in bars

than in classrooms, I was still zealously loyal to Ohio U. I had little

patience with anyone who would confuse O.U. with OSU. It was

definitely not Ohio State University, the football powerhouse in

Columbus.

“No,” I said flatly. Normally I made no effort to hide my irritation

about this. “That’s Ohio State, in Columbus. I went to Ohio University.

That’s in Athens.”

He nodded. He stubbed out his cigarette on the edge of the

cement bench, and reached into the crumpled pack for another Pall

Mall. “Did you see Clifton at the library?”

“No. I live in Clifton, so it’s all over the place there. I never miss
 - 15 -

an issue.”

“You from Cincinnati?”

“No, I’m not. I’m from Marietta.” I wasn’t sure he would know

where my hometown was, so I explained. “It’s down in Southeastern

Ohio, close to the West Virginia border.”

He smiled, and I saw the row of upper teeth slip a little. Robert

Lowry seemed accustomed to the bad fit of his dentures. When he

pushed them back into place, it seemed such a habitual gesture that

he wasn’t conscious of it. “My dad was from West Virginia, originally.”

“So was mine,” I said. “My dad was from Wheeling. I was born

in Parkersburg.”

“My dad was from Gap Mills,” he said. “Little town in Monroe

County. He came up here to work on the railroad. You probably never

heard of Gap Mills.”

I had to admit this was true. “Only reason I was born in

Parkersburg was because Marietta had no gynecologist in 1963. That’s

the year I was born,” I added.

“Just a kid,” he said.

I didn’t want the conversation to run out of momentum, so I

plumbed my memory for information from the Clifton article. “Why did

you name your magazine The Little Man?”

“Because of FDR,” he said. “I liked Roosevelt, and he was always

talking about ‘the little man’ in his Fireside Chats. So I named my

 - 16 -

magazine and my press The Little Man. Can you believe U.C. wanted

to change the name of the goddamn magazine to Profiles?”

He had mentioned his small press. I saw this as an opening. “I

read about that. Can’t believe that U.C. cut the funding for your

magazine. That was a hell of a thing you did, though. Dropped out

and set up your own magazine and your printing press in your parents’

basement.”

Robert Lowry seemed pleased that I had committed some of

these facts to memory. I wasn’t interviewing him for a newspaper or a

magazine, so I had no reason to “cram” for a meeting with him

beforehand. Now I was out to prove to him that we could talk the

same language. “What I don’t understand, though,” I went on, “is how

you managed to get a Linotype machine into your basement.”

Lowry’s face at that moment was a mixture. On the one hand,

he was pleasantly surprised that someone under 30 even knew what a

Linotype machine was. On the other, I seemed to have suggested

something totally outlandish in my question.

“I never got a Linotype,” he said. The question seemed to have

perked him up. “All that type, all that copy, I set it by hand.” He shook

his head in disbelief, and looked up at me again. “You ever see a

Linotype machine?” he asked.

“Only in the Smithsonian,” I told him. The sentence was out

before I realized that this wouldn’t make Robert Lowry feel any
 - 17 -

younger. “In the early 1980s, I was a typesetter for a newspaper in

Boston, and my boss had started work there as a Linotyper before he

became foreman of the print shop. He told me about them. Molten

lead, molten antimony, matrices--all that stuff.” I wasn’t going to

invoke the name of The Crimson unless he asked me specifically for

the newspaper’s name. I didn’t want to seem arrogant.

“I never even considered setting the type any other way,” Lowry

said. “Just bought a flatbed and the type. How did you do it?”

“It’s all done by computers now,” I said. “They gave me the

copy, I punch into the machine the point size and the leading, what

font I’m using, and how many picas wide the column is, and then I type

it. The machine looks like a cross between a typewriter and a

television set.”

By the early 1990s, my job as a cold-type compositor had gone

the route of the blacksmith and the wheelwright. Desktop publishing

was becoming all the rage, and personal computers made it easier for

would-be writers and publishers to make their finished products look

like they had been done by a job printer.

This had led me to lose respect for the self-published manuscript.

While walking the streets of Athens, Cincinnati, and Columbus--

especially streets where the campus bars were located--I couldn’t walk

more than a few steps without encountering Xeroxed flyers stapled to

fences, telephone poles, and houses. These flyers varied in content.

 - 18 -

Some were ads for bar bands. Some were announcements of political

rallies. Some were religious tracts. But they were ubiquitous.

In the 19th century, Walt Whitman hand-set and print Leaves of

Grass at his own expense after no publisher would touch it. Robert

Lowry took all the profits from the first issue of The Little Man and

bought a printing press so his magazine could continue autonomously.

In 1990, if you looked around the streets and clear spaces in

town, it seemed that anyone who could scribble on a piece of paper,

and who had access to a Xerox machine, could consider himself a “self-

published” writer or artist.

I HAD YET ANOTHER CARD TO PLAY, one which I knew would rivet Lowry for

awhile. “Mr. Lowry--”

“It’s Bob,” he interrupted.

“Bob,” I amended. “Can I buy you a beer?”

He thought about it for about ten seconds. Like most heavy

drinkers, he didn’t want too appear too eager.

“Sure, what the hell?” he said. He raised his hands into the air

briefly, and then let them fall. With a little effort, he pulled himself up

from the bench.

“Got a place in mind?” I ask him, although, if the Clifton article

was accurate, I knew where he wanted to go.

“The Bay Horse,” he said. He pointed southward, where the

 - 19 -

rusting BAY HORSE CAFÉ sign projected from a gray-blue building down

Main Street.

“That’s your HQ, isn’t it?” I said with a smile.

“Yes,” he said. “I come here all the time when I can afford to.”

I knew that this wasn’t always a sure thing. When Alma Collas

Lowry died in 1987, her will allotted $100 a month to Bob. The rest of

his meager income came from Social Security and a pittance payable

to honorably discharged World War II veterans.

“Are you still living at the Dennison?” I asked him. At the time

“Writer’s Cramp” had been published, Robert Lowry was living at the

Dennison Hotel, a cheap hostelry (“105 ROOMS, 60 BATHS, FIREPROOF,”

boasted the sign painted on its south-facing wall) which the Skid Row

poet laureate Charles Bukowski, would have called a “losers’ hotel.”

“Nope. Got kicked out of there.” He didn’t volunteer details, and

I didn’t ask any. We passed Acres of Books, and drew up to the door of

the Bay Horse. He points just across the alley next to the bay horse to

the Fort Washington Hotel. “That’s where I live now.”

The Fort Washington Hotel, at 621 Main Street, was a seven-floor

hotel much like the Dennison. It looked like the stereotypical “fleabag

hotel” made famous in noir detective movies and paperback mystery

stories, where a hunted man nervously sits on a bed with a tattered

blanket in a dilapidated room, smoking cigarettes and daring to peek

out the window around a ripped shade to see if the cops or hit men had
 - 20 -

found him.

It was a home for the working poor, single men and women who

lived on meager Social Security checks, lived hand-to-mouth on day

labor jobs, and lacked the money for utilities and down payments for

more comfortable apartments. Bob gestured toward the hotel as we

make our way inside the bar. “You ever read Carson McCullers’ book

The Ballad of the Sad Café?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but went

on. “If I ever write a book about the Fort Washington, I oughta call it

The Ballad of the Sad Hotel.”

“What’s your room like?” I asked.

“Bed, dresser, sink, table. Bathroom’s down the hall.”

Inside the bar, I ordered two cheap draft beers for us. He

ordered Hudepohl; I ordered Christian Moerlein, both distinctive

Cincinnati beers. We took seats along the wall, and I waited for my

eyes to adjust to the darkness. The sunlight was bright outside, but in

here, as in many barrooms like this, the world seemed to be in

perpetual dusky gloom. Several men were seated at the bar, sipping

mixed drinks, smoking cigarettes, and casting cursory glances at the

dusty screen of the color television set over the bar. It was Saturday,

so naturally they watched football. That fall, the Cincinnati Reds had

won the World Series, and sports fans were grudgingly shifting their

interests toward the gridiron.

“Cheers,” I said, and we raised our glasses a little and clinked

 - 21 -

them, both of us taking deep sips and setting them down.

Lowry frowned at the sounds of the bar. The volume on the TV

was so low that it was almost subliminal. “Do you have any change on

you?”

I patted my pockets and I said yes, I do. “Can you go over to the

jukebox and put on 136 for me?”

“Glad to,” I said, walking toward the jukebox which sat by itself in

one corner of the room, by the picture window overlooking Main Street.

I scanned the list of songs--136 was Frank Sinatra‘s “Something

Stupid.” I dropped coins in, and punched 136. I had two more

selections.

I decided to respect Lowry’s era, and every other patron in this

saloon who was old enough to be my father or grandfather. I chose

Ray Anthony‘s “Bunny Hop,” that annoyingly ubiquitous conga dance

so popular at wedding receptions, and my last choice was the Glenn

Miller Orchestra performing “Pennsylvania 6-5000.”

“You been doing much writing these days?” I asked Lowry, as Old

Blue Eyes’ voice overrode the football game. No one raised any

objection, even in this town where all eyes had been on the National

League Pennant and the World Series.

“No. I’ve been doing lots of reading up there in my ’cell,’ you

know.” He pointed to the wall next to our table. I knew he was

gesturing toward the Fort Washington, and I nod. “I’m reading My Life
 - 22 -

in Court. That’s by Louis Nizer. And this summer I finally read the

entire Bible. I started at Genesis and went all the way to Revelations. I

never did that before.”

“I still haven’t,” I admitted. I considered pointing out to him that

he, a man whose anti-Semitism short-circuited his writing career, and

who tried to recruit his soon-to-be erstwhile friends into the American

Nazi Party, lately seemed to be partial to books written by Jews.

Lowry raised his head attentively as the song reaches its bitter

refrain: “And then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid/Like

‘I love you.’”

“That’s me all over,” he said broodingly. I nodded in

commiseration, although I couldn’t truly relate to it the way he could.

He had been married and divorced four times, and had three sons by

two of these women. All of his sons were older than I was. At the time

that I knew Lowry, I was a childless bachelor, with every intention of

remaining so for life. But like Bob Lowry, I had always been quick to

say those three words to women with whom I was smitten. And like

Bob Lowry, I had driven off more women than attracted them with

those three words. And when I was a child, and heard the song on the

radio, I would say, righteously indignant, “Nothing stupid about saying

‘I love you’!”

HE LOOKED AT THE WRINKLED brown bag that I had been carrying with me.
 - 23 -

“You got stuff in a plain brown wrapper?” he asked. He looked up with

a knowing smile, and took a thankful sip of the beer.

“Just before I saw you, I was at the Ohio Book Store,” I said. “I

just got paid, so I was buying books.” I pulled out a paperback edition

of the Warren Commission’s Report on the assassination of John F.

Kennedy, which Lowry only gave a cursory glance. The other book in

my bag held his interest a little more. It was a green trade paperback,

published by Penguin. It was Memory Babe, the definitive biography of

Jack Kerouac written by Gerald Nicosia.

“Did you ever meet Kerouac?” I asked him.

“Not in person,” he said. “He wrote to me a couple times.” I

wondered if he was now beginning to name-drop, to hold my interest

or earn more respect. But next he said, “Y’know what was odd about

Kerouac? He never signed his letters ‘Jack,’ or ‘Jack Kerouac.’ He just

signed them with a cross. At the bottom, he’d draw a crucifix, or a

Christian cross.”

Lowry’s career was already in its nadir when Kerouac published

his enthusiastic, adrenaline-charged On the Road. However, Lowry had

laid much of the groundwork that the Beat writers--Kerouac, Allen

Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlenghetti, and William Burroughs--would

immortalize in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Like Kerouac, he had

burned out, and had retreated to his mother’s house and into the

bottle.
 - 24 -

“You read a lot, don’t you?” Lowry asked me. I nodded. “How

about writing--do you do any?”

“Not as much as I’d like,” I told him. “I work a 40-hour work

week, and by the time I get home I’m usually too tired to do anything

creative.” I was committing what an attorney would label as “perjury

by omission.” Lately, I had lacked the energy to write, but always

seemed to find time to go to the bars in my neighborhood. Maybe

being in the presence of this man, who had published several

successful books, can motivate me, I thought. But even he wasn’t

writing these days.

Our conversation flowed a little more freely. Once the beers

were gone, he reached into his worn leather wallet and shuffled up to

the bar to buy the next round. He was often broke--or close to it--but

when he had money, he was generous. If he was flush, he would pick

up at least one round. This was a point of pride with him.

“You like living in Clifton?” he asked me.

I nodded. “Quite a bit. My job is close to Christ Hospital, and I

go to the U.C. library quite often, so it’s a great place to live.”

“Where do you live in Clifton?”

“I’ve got a little apartment on West McMillan Street. Just me and

about a million books.”

“Whereabouts on McMillan do you live?”

I wanted to show off my knowledge of Clifton and Cincinnati past.

 - 25 -

“Do you know where Shipley’s Bar used to be?”

He smiled and nodded his head. It came as no surprise to me

that he did. “That still there?” he asked incredulously.

“No. It’s long gone. It’s a great bookstore now. It’s called

Duttenhofer’s Book Treasures. Anyway, I live next door to that.” I had

made a vain search for his books at Duttenhofer’s, and I was forever

badgering the long-suffering owner, Russell Speidel, about whether any

had come his way.

“Sounds like a place where you can get a lot of writing done,” he

said. “Next to a bookstore, close to the U.C. library. You published

anything?”

“Not since I was a typesetter in Boston. The Crimson published

some of my articles, but nothing since then.” I tried to sound matter-

of-fact, but I’m sure the tone sounded bitter.

“What’d your dad do?”

“He’s an English professor at Marietta College. He teaches about

Chaucer, Milton, Pope, and Samuel Johnson.”

“I always liked the Russian writers best,” said Lowry. I wondered

if he was thinking of “The Diary of a Madman,” Nikolai Gogol’s short

story. He had too much first-hand experience with madness, and its

treatment. He had been committed involuntary several times to

psychiatric hospitals. He had undergone insulin shock treatments.

The shock treatments (and the four marriages) were something

 - 26 -

he had in common with his idol, Hemingway. But while Hemingway

was discharged from the Mayo Clinic, only to retreat to his Ketchum,

Idaho home and commit suicide, Lowry kept writing. He had kept on

writing, even though no one would publish, even though very few

would read what he wrote. Hemingway had taken his own life, even at

a time when the mere appearance of his name on a book or article

guaranteed millions of readers around the world.

The shadows of the afternoon lengthened, and after I paid for a

third round of beer, I was feeling good. Not only was it the high from

the beer I had drunk, but it was also from talking about books, and

about writing, with someone who was intimately familiar with that

world.

He looked at his watch, a cheap Timex on a stretch band, and

said, “Gotta go. It’s time to call Ruth.” He wasn’t sure I knew who

Ruth was, so he explained, “She’s my sister in Connecticut. Always call

her around this time.” He thanked me for the beer, and began his slow

walk toward the hotel.