Author Archives: chrislombardi

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About chrislombardi

Journalist, novelist, educator.

rape dimly recalled but not so gray

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I almost never think of my fiction these days: the real-life struggles of folks like Chelsea tenants, like the urban school principals I met this week, like the Committee of Sergeants are absorbing enough. But reading in Salon about this blog controversy, and a Cosmo piece calling certain kinds of encounters “gray rape,” brought me back to a memory I actually put into this story. My thinking on the use of the term can probably be summed up in a line from Susannah Moore’s The Whiteness of Bones that has always haunted me. I can’t locate the book this second, but it was something along the lines of:

It occurred to Mamie that the power equation between men and women could be contained in one fact: that he could, if he liked, lean over and snap her slim wrist in two.

That rule holds even if you’re drunk, like the women under Cosmo discussion, or just numbed for other reasons.

His body shaped like a guitar, thick honey-colored hair and tattoos on each ankle: I dove for both. …Carl raped me one lazy Sunday morning, as I shut myself down rather than wake the landlady’s kids. He turned out to have some other name entirely, which I only learned after I’d made a key for him. Jerzy, who had broken up with me the week before because he felt too bipolar, showed up with power tools and changed the lock so Carl couldn’t get in.

Even though I wasn’t under the influence one bit, it took me until 2002, a full 11 years after the events described, for me to use that word even in my head. I can’t imagine why anyone, especially writing for a magazine that supposedly speaks to sexually empowered women, would want to make it harder for young women to sort that out.

too many stories, too little time

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Having just finished my fourth article about tenants in the Hotel Breslin, I told my editor Wednesday night: “Here’s hoping they don’t make news next week!”

Not that it’s not an absorbing tale, one that I was both thrilled and stupefied no one else had discovered; it combines elements of the better-known and quite different sagas of the Hotel Chelsea , with its community of artists, and 47 East 3rd Street, the tenement whose new owners want to turn into a private house. I was both thrilled and a touch wary to see it on this site, and positively paranoid when I heard the Times had finally sent a reporter sniffing around. And I certainly want to be the one covering the next stage, whatever that is.

But I think my brain and heart are kind of tapped from it all. I need to take a rest, and make room for other stories. First and foremost, this weekend, the story that I think will begin my book, which takes place in Princeton, New Jersey in 1781.

just change the country name?

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“One of the House leaders who thinks the Marines should continue as cannon fodder between the feuding war lords of Lebanon for 18 more months abjures having the Lebanon issue come up ‘in the middle of the presidential election.’ In other words, the American people ought not have much to do with the decision. Eighteen months? Eighten minutes? Mr. Speaker, an incoming round can tear a person to pieces in a second. The time to stop the madness of America’s accidental interention in Lebanon’s 300-year old religious war is now.”

— Rep. Andrew Jacobs,Jr., Marine Corps veteran of the infamous “Hill 902” during the Korean War, who spent about 22 terms in the U.S. Congress, much of it trying to stem the damage of presidential Congressional warmaking. (One day, in a locker room at the House gym, a hawkish colleague said “Oh, it’s one of the doves? But at least you’re a fighting dove.” Jacobs looked over at the man, who had had better things to do than serve, and said “Better a fighting dove than a chicken hawk,” inventing a term you may have used all the time.)

Jacobs made the above statement in 1981, as Robert McFarlane was announcing that the U.S. was about to weigh in in Lebanon on the side of the Christians (“not mission creep but mission leap,” Jacobs calls it).


the words of young men sounding old

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Now here I was, all prepared to write what I think will be the first actual scene in my book — painting Princeton in January of 1781, with General George Washington contemplating taking the trip to confront 11 protesting brigades — when I saw this op-ed piece, entitled “The War As We See it.”

If you didn’t notice from the bylines that the authors were active-duty sergeants, you’d know it from the measured, carefully damning opening:

VIEWED from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day.

Read the rest: it’s worth it. But when you do, know that actual realities are underneath every understated, precise, somewhat abstract sentence, if not the rage those realities provoked:

At the same time, the most important front in the counterinsurgency, improving basic social and economic conditions, is the one on which we have failed most miserably. Two million Iraqis are in refugee camps in bordering countries. Close to two million more are internally displaced and now fill many urban slums. Cities lack regular electricity, telephone services and sanitation. “Lucky” Iraqis live in gated communities barricaded with concrete blast walls that provide them with a sense of communal claustrophobia rather than any sense of security we would consider normal.

I wonder if they’ve yet dared make contact with these veterans, or these, or thought about signing this.

a jury of their peers

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On the current war news front, I’m interested in the choices being made by the military jury in this case. Perry at the LA Times is careful to note that the jury was composed completely of Iraq veterans. I so wonder what was in their minds and hearts as they listened.

P.S. That goes double now. I wonder if I could, as a reporter,  be as dispassionate as this Reuters story, even so long after the events/

the wisdom of old men, not all of them dead

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August 3

Time goes by so fast! Two weeks now since I set up the site. That day at the Schomburg, I mostly found material on the Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service, and squinted at seemingly endless microfilm loops of Frederick and Lewis Douglass’ newspaper the New National Era. The latter less illuminating than I’d hoped, but that’s partly because newspapers in those days were so crammed with type, and the microfilm effect can make it even harder to glean what’s useful.

That day I also snapped up, at the Harlem Book Fair, a copy of this amazing narrative history of the black power movement. I finished it last night; historian Peniel Joseph is actually incredibly good. I feel now as if I were a living, thinking near-participant in events I only half-witnessed as a child, or in the distorted mirrors of media reports.

Though when I see that this book, which covers a span of about 35 years, is the product of two year-long fellowships plus, it makes me a bit more frantic about my own project spanning 200 years, to be done in much less time amd with fzr fewer resources. (Of course, first the book was a dissertation, published by Routledge as simply The Black Power Movement, and then Joseph got a bigger contract and another year to make it sing.)

The following weekend, I interviewed the Korean War vet who invented the term “chicken hawk,” who then sent me a copy of his book 1600 Killers, and a guy who ran a London safehouse for deserters during the Vietnam War, who says he doesn’t often think of himself as a World War II veteran.

During the ensuing week, as if to continue the conversation by any means necessary even while I was supposed to be newspapering, I learned while researching another story entirely that W.E.B. Du Bois was arrested for his anti-Korean War activism at age 83. (It happened in the Breslin Hotel — see my story in Chelsea Now if you like).

a few notes to start

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I’d sworn off blogging after this graphomaniac exercise, but here we are.

Today is typical. As I sit here, trying to sort out today’s work, between the transcription I need to finish for next week’s stories at the paper and my trip today to NYPL’s Schomburg Library, news old and new shouts for attention:

  • The Nation’s Chris Hedges, of course, has begun compiling the Iraq war’s Winter Soldier testimony, in this must-read. I had coincidentally just begun to spend time with the 1971 testimonies, since I’m shifting my research focus more directly to the Vietnam era; the stories out of the Iraq vets offer eerie echoes and some lucid differences. I’m having to pace myself as I read both.
  • Meanwhile, the court-martial of Lt. Ehren Watada is now set for October 9, despite a mistrial declared this spring. Will the Supreme Court end up hearing this case? Do we want this Court to do so?
  • On a much lighter note, this tireless group of “garmentos” I’ve been chronicling hit the big time with their “Pin Day.” They got the attention of Women’s Wear Daily, Newsday, the global textile newswire Bharattextiles, and even the Times‘ Sewell Chan! I’d say it’s not my story any more – which makes sense, given my rather spectacular lack of a fashion sense – except that almost all the stories either ignored crucial parts of the story or got them literally wrong. (Perez at AM New York, for example,writes as if the glitz was already in the Garment District, and limits her definition of “apparel industry” to the disappeating factory floors.)

Time to go to the library and dig into manuscripts and letters from”Negro” soldiers in World War II. Their dissent had so many layers and notes, it’s like a piece of modern music.