My Darkest Secret

I want to share a secret with you. I want to get it off my chest. I have kept this secret for a long time. It involves a powerful man. A man who could crush me, if it was his pleasure. And he is litigious. That shit is expensive.

I had an object, an object that I really liked, it’s gone now, like so many of its kind. A magazine. I have moved too many times, over long distances, boxes get lost, I couldn’t help it, if I had all of them back now I could be the king of e-bay. But I still have a color Xerox of the cover, and I treasure it. It has the original mailing label on it. And therein lies the tale.

In the early seventies I carried the mail all over Jamaica, Queens, from the main office. You may know how it goes, if someone has moved the mail gets forwarded, the first class mail anyway. The junk, and the magazines too, go to the dead letter office. They become waste. So if a good magazine was undeliverable, because someone had moved, I was young, I saw no reason to send it to perdition, I took it for myself, I took it home, and I was quite a packrat, I kept everything.

One such, I only have the color Xerox of the cover now, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it, was a copy of the January 17, 1972 Sports Illustrated Magazine, the Swimsuit Edition, one of the first. The theme was “City Life on the Water,” and the cover girl is a meaty old-fashioned cutie with a mod haircut and she has it all going on, just like you’d expect. It’s on the wall of my Bangkok apartment right now.

This would be a dull story, except for one thing. The name on the mailing label. His father was a big time developer in New York. He built lots of apartments on Hillside Avenue in Jamaica. The name on the label is his son, who lived then in one of the apartments. The name is . . . Donald Trump.