Richard Grayson story & correspondence & interview

With Hitler in New York
by Richard Grayson

Hitler’s girlfriend and I are waiting for him in the International Arrivals Building at Kennedy Airport. Ellen and I stand in front of the West Customs Area. My brother is standing in front of the East Customs Area. He is waiting for my parents. My parents and Hitler have each landed at the same time, at seven o’clock. My parents are flying KLM from Saint Martin. Hitler is flying Laker from London and Manchester. He couldn’t afford any other airline. He had to book his flight forty-five days in advance. But Laker paid for the ferry to England and the train ride to London as well. It is, as Hitler has written me, “a pretty good deal.”

Next to us there is an old Englishwoman. She is clucking her tongue. We are watching the passengers of an Alitalia flight from Rome come out of Customs and hug and kiss and cry and carry on.

“These people are just disgraceful,” the old Englishwoman says. “You’ll see that the people from Laker will be much better behaved.”

Ellen and I look at each other and decide to move away.

Ellen gets worried because Hitler has not yet come out. She is playing with her long blonde strands of hair. When she puts a bit of hair in her mouth, I tell her to stop it. Then she sees Hitler coming out of Customs.

He looks handsomer than I remembered him as being. He is smiling. When he gets to us, he hugs Ellen. He is so much taller than she.

I ask Hitler if I can carry his backpack.

“No, no, it’s all right,” he says in English.

Ellen tells Hitler in German that it’s very hot outside and that he should take off his leather jacket. Hitler replies in English that he prefers to keep the jacket on.

When we go outside Hitler says of the heat, “It’s like a bathroom.”



On the ride back to Brooklyn, Hitler talks only English. It seems to be coming back to him now. Driving up Flatbush Avenue, we pass a bank that advertises its “Tellerphone” service, and Hitler asks what that is. I tell him it’s a checking account where you can pay your bills by phone.

“But don’t you have to say a code so they know it’s you?” says Ellen from the back seat.

“Sure,” I say. “Either a word or a series of numbers or letters.”

Hitler smiles. “A commercial mantra, eh?”

I am surprised Hitler is so quick. Obviously I have been underestimating him all these years.



Hitler has to stay with the Judsons because Ellen’s parents won’t permit him to stay with them. The Judsons are wonderful people. Libby teaches swimming at the YWGA; she is Ellen’s best friend in America, apart from myself. Mrs. Judson is a delightful woman, daughter of Ukranian immigrants, a happily deserted wife. The Judsons live in a brownstone in Park Slope.

When we get back to the Judsons’ house, Hitler finally takes off his leather jacket. It is about ninety degrees. He takes off his work shirt too. Underneath he has a T-shirt that has shrunk just a little bit. Hitler is very skinny but he is tall. When I ask him what the air smells like up there, he says “Dwarfs,” and we all laugh.



We watch TV for a little while in the Judsons’ living room. It is a pilot for a projected series starring Barbara Feldon. Hitler only likes the commercials. When he sees Senator Sam Ervin doing a commercial for American Express, Hitler really freaks out.

“Imagine Willy Brandt doing a commercial for Beck’s Beer,” he says to Ellen. She explains that German television is very different. All the commercials are on at one time, for only forty minutes a day.

Libby says we should all sit outside and eat ice cream. Ellen has dope that she bought from my brother and we all sit out on the stoop smoking a joint and eating vanilla ice scream. Hitler regales us with stories about his Sunday stopover in London. Ellen tells us that Hitler thinks the English people are so stiff and formal.

“It was tea everywhere, Hitler says. He has a nice air about him, as though he is so comfortable with his body. I think I would like to be like him. “We went to this pub, and then they took me to see this movie, ‘Black Emanuelle.’ It was so silly, no? There were strange scenes in the bathroom and finally I got up and said to Clive and Zbyczek, ‘You don’t really want to stay, do you?’ They said no, but really they did.”

We go back into the living room, the only air-conditioned room in the Judsons’ house. Mrs. Judson is watching “Eyewitness News.” They are still talking about the blackout and the looting.

Hitler says he is sorry he missed the blackout. “It would have been, sort of, an adventure,” he tells us, and then we say how awful it was.

“This heat wave is bad enough,” Libby tells Hitler, but he has started to doze off on the couch.

“Poor thing,” Mrs. Judson says. We bring down the foldaway bed and wake Hitler up so he can get in it.



“What do you think of Hitler?” Ellen asks me as I take her to her parents’ house. We are driving along the Belt Parkway at midnight with our car windows wide open, but there is not a hint of a breeze.

“I kind of like him,” I say. “I never realized he was so witty.”

Ellen kisses me on the cheek at her parents’ house. I watch to see that she gets in safely.



The next day it reaches 100 degrees, a record-breaker. Hitler is uncomfortable. He hasn’t slept much and he has jet lag. In addition, he seems to be getting a cold.

He and Ellen have gotten breakfast at McDonald's. Hitler likes fast food and there are no fast food places in Germany. When I get over to the Judsons’, Ellen and Hitler are watching a movie on Channel 9. Hitler is lying under the covers.

“I think I’m going to go to the Apex Technical School,” Hitler says. He has obviously seen the commercials for it. “To repair air conditioners in this climate must be profitable.” I chuckle.

The news comes on and all the talk is about the heat wave. A woman reporter asks an official if we will have a “water blackout.” Hitler gets out of bed, puts on his jeans, and we go pick up Libby at the YWCA.



Libby, Ellen, Hitler, and I have dinner at Shakespeare’s in the Village. It is air-conditioned. Hitler has a salad because he is not in the mood for meat. Libby has onion soup and bread because she is a vegetarian. Ellen and I have hamburgers.

When the lights flicker for a moment, Hitler gets excited. He so hopes for another blackout.

After dinner, around nine, we walk to Washington Square. It is almost cool. We sit at the edge of the fountain, facing outwards. Hitler and Ellen are holding hands; so are Libby and I.

A black man with no shirt on comes over to us and says we look stoned. We smile and he asks us if we need more dope to get stoned on.

“We are stoned on the evening,” Hitler tells the black man. He goes away shaking his head.



When I get home, I see my father in his bedroom. He looks very small. I come in to apologize to him for not seeing him since he got back from vacation. I have been spending most of my time with Hitler.

“Grandpa’s very sick,” my father tells me. “He had another heart attack. He’s in a coma.”

“Oh, no,” I say. I think about the phone call I got from my grandfather on Sunday, and how he begged me to visit him in Florida.



I pick up Hitler and Ellen at the Kings Highway station and take them back to my house, to my swimming pool. I am still worried about my grandfather.

Hitler and Ellen enjoy the water. He is so much bigger than she is that he throws her under constantly. She cries for help, and I know she doesn’t like it, but I pretend she is just joking. I do not want to spoil Hitler’s fun.

“You’re a sadist, you know that?” Ellen says to Hitler after they get out of the pool. Hitler shrugs. Then Ellen turns to me. “He did the same thing to me in Greece last year,” she says.



Hitler and I are going to Ellen’s parents’ house for dinner. I let Hitler take a shower and use my razor and shaving cream so he can impress Ellen’s mother, who has never liked him. My own mother seems to like Hitler. She is pleased that he doesn’t mess up the bathroom.

The three of us arrive at Ellen’s parents’, and Hitler and I have to wait outside because Ellen’s grandfather, visiting from Florida, has to put on a pair of pants.



Dinner is dairy: bagels, tuna salad, corn on the cob, lettuce and tomatoes and iced tea. It is too hot to eat a heavy meal. Ellen’s mother doesn’t talk to Hitler except to say, “Pass me that salt bagel.” Ellen’s father tries to joke around. Her grandfather tells us about his meeting with an old black woman customer of his from years ago, when he sold appliances on credit.

The old black woman’s name was Mother Brown. Ellen’s grandfather walked up four flights to see her, and when he opened the door, Mother Brown got so excited that she ran over and hugged him. Then she started crying. “Mr. Glass, I’m so old!” she said. And Ellen’s grandfather said, “Why, you’re only eighty, and I’m three years older than you.”

Across the table Hitler winks at me.

After dinner we go to visit Mike. Mike has just had corrective surgery for a separated shoulder. He comes down wearing no shirt, and the scar looks ugly. They only took the bandage off the day before.

Hitler and I have to shake Mike’s left hand.

Mike’s mother comes out and kisses Ellen. Later Ellen will say that Mike’s mother always wanted him to marry Ellen because they were both Jewish.

Mike’s mother practically ignores Hitler, so we decide to take a walk to the beach.



Above the Belt Parkway we smoke a joint. I cough, as usual.

“Look at all the cars,” Hitler says. “Each one of them has someone going somewhere.”

“I’m really stoned,” Mike says.

“I’m thirsty,” Ellen says.

“Let’s go have eggcreams,” I say.

And we do.



After our eggcreams, we go on the boardwalk. Ellen tells Hitler that there are many old people and Soviet Jews in Brighton Beach and cautions him not to talk German. Hitler nods.

We join a circle surrounding a fiftyish woman in shorts. She is very animatedly singing a Yiddish folk song. All of the old people are enjoying it. It seems like it’s supposed to be funny, or maybe dirty. Hitler is listening intently.

“Farshteit?” I ask Hitler

“Ja, ja,” he says. “She is telling about how not to have children.”

An old lady next to us smiles. She seems glad that Hitler understands the song. We walk away before she can recognize him.



Libby and Mike are sitting on a boardwalk bench, talking about old times.

Hitler and I are leaning against the rail, watching the dark ocean, the dark sand, talking about this and that.

“Giscard d’Estaing is so funny,” Hitler says. “The things he does to make himself popular.”

I nod.

I tell Hitler I can name all ten states of West Germany. He counts on his fingers as I name them. I can only name nine. I know the other one has a hyphenated name, but it is difficult.

“It’s where Stuttgart is,” Hitler gives me a hint.

Now I remember. “Baden-Wurttemburg,” I tell him, and Hitler smiles.

I wonder if I am beginning to fall in love with him.

On Friday night Hitler gives me a present, a book of Rilke’s poems. He tells me not to worry about my grandfather, who is still in a coma.



We eat dinner at a Szechuan restaurant in Brooklyn Heights, Hitler, Ellen, Libby and me. We order four dishes and take from each other’s plates. We eat with chopsticks. Hitler likes Cantonese spareribs, but we will have to get them another time. The oranges and fortune cookies make a fine dessert. We are very full.

When the check comes, we just divide it by four. No one seems to object. Libby, Ellen, and I give Hitler our share and he pays for the meal with a fifty-dollar traveler’s check. He forgets to leave a tip and they call him back for that.



The four of us walk off our dinner by the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. We look at that night view of the lower Manhattan skyline.

“The most gorgeous cliché in America,” I say.

It is actually chilly. The heat wave has broken.

Hitler is hugging Ellen and Libby. They come over to me and they hug me too. We are standing by the rail, all touching each other. It is a very fine moment.



We have walked off our dinner by looking at the brownstones on Hicks Street. We are ready for dessert. The four of us drive to Atlantic Avenue, to the Seeds of the Future Café, a health-food place run by young black women.

Hitler orders Asantiwa’s Carrot Cake and peppermint tea. They do not have Beck’s Beer, which is what he really wanted.

Someone at another table, a Filipino, recognizes Hitler. But everything is too mellow for him to make a scene.



My grandfather dies.

My father goes down to Florida to bring back the body for the funeral. My grandmother is coming back too.

It is Saturday night, the big party Libby is giving for Hitler. I cannot miss it.

I don’t tell anyone that my grandfather has died.

I get stoned with Hitler and Ellen.

The guests arrive.

Everyone seems to be getting along.

Hitler is making a big hit with everyone.

If I were capable of being jealous of him, I would be. But by now I love him too much.

Hitler drinks bottle after bottle of Beck’s Beer. He once worked at the brewery in Bremen. “Just think,” he says. “Maybe I once saw this bottle pass me by on the assembly line in Germany.”

I try my best to smile.

A fortyish ad agency executive, someone’s lover, comes by and says, “Look how that Nazi can drink so much beer and still stay thin.” He pinches the flab on my stomach. “Fatties like us,” he says, speaking of me and him, “just look at beer and gain weight.”

When he goes away, I tell Hitler that he has hurt my feelings.

“He did not do it voluntarily, I am sure,” Hitler says.

Ellen comes over and takes photographs of me and Hitler, our arms around each other.

Hitler gives Ellen many kisses.

We get drunk and I tell Hitler that we should plan to win the Nobel Prize the same year, he for Peace, I for Literature.

“We would have to wear ties,” he says.

“No, tuxedos,” I tell him. “And top hats and canes.”

“And we could get up on the platform and sing, ‘There’s No Business like Show Business…’ The Swedish Academy would be talking about us for a long while, eh?” Hitler’s nose is very red.

Libby gets sick and the party begins to end.

I drive Ellen back to her parents’, and Hitler comes along for the ride. I look away as they say goodnight. They are going back to Germany in two days.

Driving Hitler back to the Judsons’ house, I remember my grandfather’s death.

On Ocean Parkway I begin to cry.

“Do not have tears,” Hitler says. He asks what is wrong.

We pull over to a side street and I tell him.

He says he is sorry.

Then he tells me things to try to make me laugh. How a tattooed sailor in New Orleans once offered to support him for a year. How Libby’s mother used hair spray instead of antiperspirant after her shower that morning. How Ellen looks when she wakes up after an all-night drunk.

I feel a little better and begin driving back to Park Slope.

At the Judsons’ door I ask Hitler if he ever feels bitter.

“Useless,” he says.

I do not know if he is talking about anger or himself or myself. In the end it doesn’t matter.

Hitler puts his hand on my shoulder and tells me to sleep well.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
death-threat correspondence and interview; what i typed is centered

From: Richard Grayson
To: Tao Lin
Date: May 5, 2006 7:26 PM

Tao,

You should immediately remove the comment in which you threaten to kill that guy. I can tell you from experience as a law school administrator that the FBI takes things like that VERY seriously. It looks like a clear violation of federal criminal law, threatening someone via electronic communications. You can basically ruin your life and face, if not years in federal prison, an extremely harrowing experience. A student who made a similar statement on a student bulletin board had the FBI come and interrogate him, take his computer away, and come very close to arresting him until it was determined that the threat is not genuine, and that took weeks. It was a horror.

I am not kidding. It is very scary. You don't want to put your whole life in jeopardy for something so trivial.

Richard

shit, really?

but i've made many death threats against people on the blog before and nothing happened. i've made like five death threats.

that sounds terrible. but i make death threats all the time. thank you for emailing
me though. i have written down your questions. it is four good questions. i will
type them soon.

also, you might not believe me but i would welcome a few weeks of being interrogated by the FBI. that is a new experience. i would really welcome that as an interesting thing.

You should remove those death threats as soon as possible. You know when you say, "I am fucked," if anyone -- and anyone reading the page -- reports you to the police or FBI -- you will be totally fucked.

You can't go around threatening people's lives. The consequences can be horrendous.

oh. they aren't death threats really though. i don't think i'll remove them. can i go to jail? i'd like to go to jail for a while. people say 'i'm going to kill you,' all the time. i'm for that.

Well, if they aren't death threats, you need to post in the comments that you weren't serious. That comment appears perfectly serious. It really is very scary to me. Ask another lawyer if you don't believe me. I just don't want you to get into really serious trouble that will have terrible repercussions for your life.

You do not want to go to jail. Trust me. I have taught in a jail. You do not want to be raped.

Even if the law does not come into it, it is very harmful to you to make death threats (unless they are clearly humorous or non-serious). People will not want to hire you. People will not want to publish you. You know it is not right to threaten to kill people.

i thank you for your concern. what is scary to you? the death threat? the death threat will make the 'justin' person think about himself. he sees art as competition, people will be hurt by him. maybe now he will think a little. that is 'right,' given the assumptions i've made about life, which is that pain and suffering is 'wrong.'

i believe you, i'm just saying, i would welcome a thing like this. you don't believe me. but look at my blog.

i know people will not want to hire me or publish me. i have no intention of working within society, i would rather create something else. my blog says this in every post.

what level security jail will i go to for death threats? my dad is in low security for four years, he is one of three or four asians there, he is not raped. he has a good time, he is happy, healthy, etc. the people in jail are nice. they are mostly
drug dealers. in the waiting room i've talked to them, i've looked at them, in the visiting room. i welcome 'problems.' i would not want my life to continue without problems, that is horrible and interminable.

i expect problems to happen. if i don't want to censor myself, but create something else, then the 'other,' society, the new yorker, will have problems with me. my life is small. a human life is small, there are 6 billion people, i am nothing, and i will
treat myself as nothing.

i know you don't believe me. but really i am glad you care, people caring is good.

Okay. But if you think Justin needs to think about it, I think you need to think about it. I hope you will.

I won't mention this again. I'll just say I am afraid for you.

i will think about it. i have. i don't understand though.

really, i don't. do i need to stop making death threats? nothing is sacred in art, art for me is life, or rather life for me is art. or rather everything is just one thing. i really do not understand. a death threat hurts no one. hitting someone hurts someone. the person threatened becomes self conscious. a death threat hurts no one.

The law does not think that a death threat hurts no one.

And even if it did not, I feel a death threat at the very least hurts the person who makes it.

i know. please understand, i am not concerned for myself in the same ways that you are.

also, i just typed that i do not want to work within 'the law.' any kind of societal thing. you don't believe me, you think i'm stupid. oh well. if someone were to murder me tonight then i am murdered, what does it matter?

i post everyday on my blog that i am against almost everything society is for, it is strange for me when people, then, argue against me and call me stupid for doing things that might get me in trouble by society's terms.

i think at the very least, i would welcome 'problems' as nietszche said, as a way to contrast in the future 'pleasures,' and intensify the experience. at the most extreme, i would enjoy the 'problem's as a kind of pleasure. i think i've blogged about this. i have.

you are thinking that i will regret it. that when i'm being raped in jail i will regret this. no i won't. i am existentially against regretting it. which means i will regret regretting it even more than regretting the first thing, which makes it impossible for me to regret it.

Well, then, I guess I don't have anything any more to say.

You can use this correspondence as the interview about "With Hitler in New York." There have been different interpretations of the story, but when the book came out, I think the closest one to what I think I was writing about came from Jack Saunders (a terrific Florida writer who participated recently with the Underground Literary Alliance's protest over the "Howl" celebration in New York), who reviewed it in the Delray Beach News-Journal. He said the story was about the banality of evil -- Hannah Arendt's famous phrase from Eichmann in Jerusalem.

I don't want to talk about this anymore. I'm tired. I need to think about it too.

Okay. This will be the interview then. Starting with your email. This will be the most depressing interview about death on the internet. I hope. The previous emails will give context for your questions and my answers.

Here are four questions.

The ending of the story makes me think three things. I will put in parenthesis why it made me think each thing.

1. The present is all that is permanent, which means something like permanence is a meaningless word, since the present is not permanent, really; which means, at any given moment, all can be forgiven and a person's past can, if you want, have no affect on how you treat them in the present; or, for the person themself, how they feel in the present.

(Hitler's past, 6 million people killed, is not mentioned, and he is not punished for it; and does not seem affected by it.)

2. Death makes everything before it useless. If you build a house when you die there will be no house. The same with relationships.

("In the end it doesn't matter.")

3. Humans exist in a way that the two ideas I just typed will affect them, humans, by making them feel sadness; rather than making them feel, say, happiness, or solution, as a computer might; a computer or a robot might feel 'solution' or you could program it to feel 'happiness' when processessing those two ideas.

(The character cries.)

That was an attempt by me to describe why the ending of the story affected me. It was very sad to me. The story made me feel very sad, but in a way that destroyed my identity a little; made me feel like something might while meditating, for a moment.

Please describe in a same way why the ending of your story affects you, or why it might affect other people.

I just reread the story for the first time in many years. I wrote this story in August 1977, a long time ago. Once I finished it and submitted it to magazines, I probably didn't read it again until it came out in the fall 1978 issue of Shenandoah. Around the same time, my editor at Taplinger Publishing, the company that was going to publish my first full-length collection, decided to use it as the title story. We went over it again during the editing process. My editor, Wesley Strick – his dad, Louis, had recently taken over Taplinger (later on Wes would become well-known as the screenwriter of Cape Fear and many other movies) – suggested I change the ending somewhat from the magazine story, and we did that. I'm not sure of the original ending, but it wasn't all that much different.

Reading the story just now, the ending doesn't affect me one way or the other. Even though I wrote the story nearly thirty years ago, I still remember writing it. I guess I look on it nostalgically but sort of dispassionately. I mean, who reads their own work unless they're being forced to? Yeah, I was surprised at a couple of things when I read the story, like I didn't think there were any black people in the story, but then I see there's the man in Washington Square Park who tells the friends they look stoned, and the women who own the Atlantic Avenue restaurant where they have dessert (I actually do remember, with fondness, "Asantiwa's Carrot Cake") and Mother Brown, the former customer of Ellen's grandfather, who starts to cry when she says, "I'm so old!" I also did not remember so much marijuana smoking.

I don't have a good imagination, so I'm a highly limited fiction writer. Most of my stories are very autobiographical, and this one is, too. I was writing about it maybe a month after most of these events happened, so in reading the story, I also think of the real-life incidents the story is based on.

A writer is a very bad judge of her own story. You know the intentional fallacy. I have no idea what my intention was in writing this story. I do know that I did the formal writing in one sitting. In those days I used a typewriter and I hated to type second drafts so I would write the whole story in my head, pretty much, and then finally, when I was ready, type it up. That's how I wrote this one. I was 26 and still living with my family in Brooklyn, just like the narrator.

Alvin H. Rosenfeld, a professor of Jewish studies at Indiana University, had an interesting interpretation of the story in his 1985 book Imagining Hitler. His son, Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, a professor at Fairfield University, had a different interpretation in his 2005 book, The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism.

If a father and son, both with Ph.D.s, can't agree on what the story means, who am I to put my two cents in? Go know.

Anyway, I will respond to your thoughts about the ending:

(1) I don't believe permanence is a meaningless word. I don't believe any word is meaningless; if I did, I wouldn't be a writer.

You say the present is all that is permanent and yet the present is not really permanent. Well, this is a paradox, of course, one I think everyone recognizes. I don't know anything about philosophy and so am unequipped to discuss this, uh, meaningfully. I do believe in forgiveness.

To me the story was not so much about Hitler, but about my German friend, who was the first German friend I had. I was born six years after the end of World War II and I grew up in Brooklyn in a very Jewish world, so we were sort of always aware of the Holocaust although it was not talked about very much. World War II was something all of us kids knew about. When we played soldier, we would shoot at Nazis. But I don't have a family connection with the Holocaust; as far as I know, none of my relatives were killed.

Obviously some distant relatives must have been, but when we read the one "Holocaust" school book I can recall, The Diary of Anne Frank, I didn't think too much about it.

Many older Jewish people I grew up around would not buy Volkswagens or any German product.

There was a kind of anti-German prejudice – clearly understandable, given what happened during the Holocaust. And Germany had been America's enemy in two world wars.

In real life Ellen's mother – I changed everyone's names for the story, except for Ellen's mother's father: he actually was named Mr. Glass – once told me she hated her daughter having a German boyfriend because she disliked all Germans, including German Jews. (My own parents were younger at the time of the war, and my mom said she had no particular animus against Germans but grew up hating Japanese more because of Pearl Harbor.)

So when my German friend – Ellen's boyfriend whom she had moved to Germany to live with – came to America to join Ellen for a visit in the summer of 1977, I had the feeling that a lot of the Jewish people around me treated him like a representative of the Nazi regime rather than as someone who was born after the war and who to me and my friends was more of a fellow member of the baby boom generation. We all listened to the same music and read the same books and smoked the same dope.

As usual, I've gone on so long that I can't remember where I started out. Is the story about Hitler and the Holocaust? Not trying to coy, I really am the last person to ask.

(2) I don't believe that death makes everything before it useless. If you build a house when you die, why won't the house survive your death? There will still be a house.

In the story, Hitler stays with the Judsons in Park Slope. Mrs. Judson, in real life, got that house (on Ninth Street between Third and Fourth Avenues) at the death of her father, a Ukrainian immigrant who built it. That house still exists. I passed it last summer; Libby's brother and sister-in-law live in it. I suppose if Bruce
Ratner or some other developer offers them and their neighbors enough money to get out so he can build a skyscraper luxury condo, the Judson house will no longer exist. So what?

(By the way, Libby gets her own story in "Life with Libby," published online a couple of years ago at Blithe House Quarterly. It's going to be the final story in my next book, Dear Brain. Forgive this plug, but my publisher has told me to mention it whenever I can. I'm only following orders.)

Death doesn't kill relationships. I have relationships with dead friends and relatives. When the narrator's grandfather dies in the story – in real life, my grandfather had just had a heart attack but survived, brain-damaged, for many years afterwards (see the title story in my 1996 book I Survived Caracas Traffic) – his grandson still has a relationship with him, just as in the "Caracas Traffic" story where the narrator has a relationship with his ex-boyfriend who died of AIDS. The title story of my new book, And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street, has a narrative that alternates between the past – the narrator's long friendship with a gay kid he met in high school and who dies of AIDS in his thirties – and a day in the present, when he's accompanying his teenage son and the boy's boyfriend to a punk rock show. The past is always with us, just like hype.

To give a recent real-life example, a few weeks ago I was in Los Angeles and Libby's 18-year-old daughter and I were driving to get dinner. She was at the wheel and turned to me to say something and in that moment she looked to me like the image of her grandmother, Mrs. Judson, who died about 15 years ago, and whom I loved very much. (She was the only parent who'd let "Hitler" stay in her house.) Though dead, Mrs. Judson is still part of our lives.

In rereading the story, one thing I think it's about is friendship, which is probably the relationship I've explored the most in my fiction, because my friendships are really important to me. In real life, I rarely let more than a few days go by without talking to Ellen, and over the past year we were living in the same city, so we'd have lunch together most every week; I'd pick her up at the offices of the hospice where she works.

Yes, people are always dying. It doesn't mean people don't have relationships with them. I've known Ellen since we were kids, and I think she'll still be my friend after I croak. Dead people need all the friends they can get.

(3) Since I don't share your beliefs that permanence is a meaningless word, and that death makes everything before it useless, I am not sure I feel the kind of sadness that you do. Or maybe the sadness is beautiful and makes me feel happy, too. I don't find the story particularly sad.

Sometimes for some people when someone they know dies they stop their life for a while, and some people stop creating art. They say things like, "That puts things in perspective for me." Or they say things like, "I'm too sad to do anything," or, "Let's have a moment of silence, of respect, for what has happened." After 9/11 a lot of people questioned whether or not making art was 'important.'

To me this is absurd. People die every day. Perspective is always there, it's whether or not you ignore it. Also, it depends on what kind of art you are creating, I guess. If you are writing about death, and death happens, then maybe you will not say, "That puts things in perspective for me." If your writing does not block out death, then, then maybe you will never feel like you are "screwing around," or something, when something terrible happens, when people die (which is constantly). What do you think?

As I just said, I do agree that people die every day. But when it's your spouse or child or parent or friend who dies, it affects you in a very profound way.

Some artists may stop creating art when someone close to them dies, but this is probably because they are in shock or depressed or busy taking care of the many mundane things you have to take care of when someone dies.

Joan Didion took the death of her husband and wrote a terrific book about it. About eight years ago I was at the San Jose Symphony attending the premiere of an orchestral work by my friend, the composer Joelle Wallach; it was a response to the sudden death of her husband a few years before. Joelle told me that when she got that unexpected, shocking call that her husband had just dropped dead, she knew that one day she would create music about her loss. That is what artists do. They don't do it immediately because, yes, they often do need the perspective time gives them. I think any adult who has lost someone close to them understands this.

A few months after With Hitler in New York was published by Taplinger, I was having dinner with my friend Mark at a sidewalk café in the Village, and there was some commotion at the end of the block. I went over, and they said some woman had jumped or fell to her death from her apartment, and they told me I didn't want to look. The next day I read in The New York Post that the woman who killed herself was Mrs. Taplinger, who'd sold the company to Louis Strick after her own husband's death. I called Mark and he said, "She probably just discovered the company her husband founded published your book."

A couple of years later, when we were sitting shiva for his mother, Mark told me, "You know, Mom was too polite to say so, but she was totally offended by your making Hitler a hero."

Everyone dies.

Right now I'm between apartments and living with an old friend whose husband died just a few months ago, so I've been thinking about this a lot. I will probably write about him one day. His death was very sad. I can't deal with it now.

Did you consider anyone besides Hitler for this story?

You said in another interview that most of this is true, almost all of it, except that you made the character Hitler. Did you try anyone else instead of Hitler before using Hitler?

No, it was always Hitler. Some of my friends suggested I try writing stories like "With Stalin in Los Angeles " or "With Mao in Chicago," but I wasn't interested in that. My real German friend's name begins with H also. The name Hitler has a lot of power. See Marc Estrin's fine novel The Education of Arnold Hitler.

I'm writing this from my friend's house in Long Island. The Hitler brothers live nearby. They are Hitler's nephews, grandsons of his half-brothers. Everyone says that they are intelligent and gentle men. Some people speculate that none of them ever had children because they pledged to end the Hitler name with them.

In real life, my German friend who was the model for Hitler became an alcoholic who is unable to hold down a job. He has a very sweet Iranian wife who takes care of him. He calls me from Hamburg in the middle night when he is drunk and he sometimes gets abusive. I feel very sorry for him and sort of bad that I made him Hitler in my story.

What if Hitler read this story every day from ages 15-20, what would happen to him, do you think?

I think that if Hitler had read this story every day for five or six years, then he probably would have memorized the story and would be able to recite it word for word, without looking at the printed version.

If you are trying to ask me, would reading a work of fiction have changed Hitler and caused him not to be so evil, I would say definitely not.

In And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street, there's a story called "Land of Golden Giants," which I originally published as nonfiction online at FRiGG. It tells about the summer of 1980, when my other grandfather was in New York Hospital learning that he was going to die of lung cancer and across the street at Sloan-Kettering my friend Janice, a really talented visual artist, was dying of breast cancer. At Janice's deathbed, we're watching a Channel 13 documentary about Winifred Wagner, the composer's daughter-in-law, who supposedly devoted her life to music but who was an unrepentant Nazi sympathizer. Janice says (all of this really happened), "That woman loved Hitler so." Then I go back across the street to see my grandfather and his hospital roommate, the cartoonist Edward Sorel, who with his wife Nancy is looking at the galleys for their next book and my grandfather tells them I had a book published – With Hitler in New York – but I didn't make any money from it, and Ed says books never make money.

But we keep writing them anyway.

No poem or story or sculpture or aria ever made anyone who appreciated it a better person. As we can see in recent headlines about the provenance of many paintings in European museums, the Nazis appreciated art so much they stole it from the Jewish families they persecuted.

At law school, I had a brilliant professor, Walter Weyrauch, for Legal Counseling. He was born in Germany and got his law degree from the University of Frankfurt during the Nazi regime. One day he talked about Hitler's artistic ambitions and how, if he hadn't failed as an artist, if he hadn't been rejected from art school, he might not have become so evil. I don't agree with Professor Weyrauch (who, at 86, is still teaching law at the University of Florida).

People, including Adolf Hitler, could read this story – or any of the millions of much better stories – till their eyes were blurry and they'd still be the same rotten or wonderful people. You said that reading my story "destroyed [your] identity a little." I can't argue with your feeling that, but I really don't think it is possible for a story to change someone.

And in the long run, that's probably a good thing. Trust me, you don't want to give writers so much power.