GARGOZO MANUSCRIPT

A potentially significant scientific breakthrough took place less than three feet in front of me but I never realized it at the time.  I was sitting on the toilet watching a handful of ants travel back and forth via a ten-foot-long path that I’d seen them use often during the summer.  They entered the bathroom by way of a window, crossed over to the shower, proceeded down the side of the shower door and then traversed westward along the edge of the bathtub before disappearing into the faucet. Photo by Alex Wild I assumed at the time that the ants were out to retrieve water from the faucet.   I later learned a nts have a separate stomach which they can use to transport water back to their nest which accounted for the two-way traffic on the path.   As I watched the traffic, certain patterns of behavior became clear.  When an east-bound ant, heading back to the nest, encountered a west-bound ant, there were two things that took place more than 95% of the...

Liberace as coffin specialist Mr. Stark from The Loved One . If I’d never seen Liberace in The Loved One , I might have taken the job.   After Ingrid and I were married at the end of 1971, I spent the better part of the following year trying to find work.   I had used seven years of fine arts in college to string along the draft board until I stumbled onto a legal way to avoid it altogether.   However, the same strategy that enabled me to bypass the Viet Nam War left me completely unqualified for anything other than day labor.   On one of several visits to my new in-laws in San Diego that year, I met Wally.  He showed up at a large Dutch-Indonesian picnic on Shelter Island one afternoon and like me, was among the few white Anglos that made up my in-laws’ large circle of friends and fellow immigrants.  Wally asked me if I liked clams, I said yes, and twenty minutes later I was pulling them out from under his feet.  Wally was born and rai...