Mad Bomber Melville (ii)

from Leslie James Pickering and Arissa Media Group

“Sam was born in 1934.” Sam, it says here, not Samuel. No family name, not the one on his birth certificate or the one he lived by.

No month. We aren’t casting a horoscope. No date. We aren’t planning a birthday party.

“Sam was born in 1934.” I would call him chú, junior uncle, younger than my father. The boomers, born from 1945, would have called him anh, older brother, as I (b. 1960) call those men.

Leslie James Pickering who wrote that sentence about Sam was born the year I graduated from high school. Unless his dad was 17 or younger in 1978, Leslie would call me chú.

“Sam was born in 1934.” Leslie is writing the annals, history unfurling year by year. Dorothy gave birth in 1934, not for instance 1924 when a son would have come out of latency at 5 years old for the great depression in 1929 then leave home to take back the Pacific in 1942 or invade Europe in 1944.

Instead at 15 in 1949 Sam caught the wave of prosperity to escape his mother’s home and make a living setting bowling pins, reading Moby Dick in his room at the YMCA. In 1950 he joined his father the Communist in New York City briefly before his old man went straight on Long Island.

His father was William. In the mid-1950s Sam married a Ruth, who Leslie says is a Jew. Himself the namesake of the prophet who vanquished the Philistines, our man soon left Ruth and their son Joshua. Sam’s own father died in 1968.

Sam had not spoken to his William, or Joshua, in years, says Leslie. Turn the page, and on the recto of the spread, the fourth page of text, after 30 years we meet the first character in this tale with a family as well as a personal name.

“It was also through the C.A.C. that Sam met Jane Alpert.” She would have called him anh, big brother, bubba, or nhà, my home. He would have called her em, little sister, unless they instead called each other đông chí, comrade, or mình, body.

Jane is the reason anybody has ever heard about Sam the nobody from nowhere with no people. Jane had a family. She graduated from Swarthmore, the Friends’ peace college, where the honors students write a thesis under outside review.

She proceeded to graduate study in journalism at Columbia University, still today a path to service in the publicity machine. She met Sam at the Community Action Committee where students allied with tenants the university evicted from Harlem.

There have been many mad bombers but Sam is the one who worked with black and white, rich and poor. Sam was the one with a woman of the sort who now run a Wall Street law firm.