House of Kill Repute

We interrupt our Blog Hiatus to issue this important update to a June 2, 2012, Lassitude Come Home post titled “Grim-Reality TV.” In that account of my fascination with the all-murders-all-the-time cable television channel Investigation Discovery, I noted that I pass many known homicide sites during my runs through the outwardly safe neighborhoods of Bethesda and Washington, DC.

So, my update is this: As I wrote nearly two years ago, it’s been known for decades that Brad Bishop left the building on March 1, 1976. But this week, thanks to the FBI and the Washington Post. I finally learned the building’s exactly location. And this morning, I saw the building.

Or, rather, I saw it with fresh eyes. Not as just another ‘70s-style split-level set back from the road on leafy Lilly Stone Drive in Bethesda’s Carderock Springs subdivision, but as the house where a 39-year-old officer in the US Foreign Service on that late-winter day 37 years ago left his Foggy Bottom office early, withdrew money from his bank, purchased a ball-peen hammer at a hardware store, drove home, and bludgeoned to death his wife, three young sons and widowed mother.

I’d become aware of the case several years ago, when the Post ran a story about the home’s grim history from the quirky angle of its subsequent longtime owner’s utterly unconflicted delight at having gotten such a great deal on the cleaned-up mass-murder scene. That piece—which maddeningly placed the homeowner’s right to privacy above my yen for a house number on the named street— led me to the Internet, where I found other articles and the inevitable Wikipedia page for William Bradford Bishop, which told the complete story (but again, sans house number!) of the multilingual government employee’s partially successful attempt to burn the bodies in a remote section of northeast North Carolina and entirely successful escape from custody—his blood-stained station wagon having been found in Great Smoky Mountains National Park on March 18, 1976, and Brad Bishop himself having been found and brought to justice never.

The thinking back then, and now, was that a smart guy who spoke five languages fluently might easily be living under an assumed name and an acquired tongue somewhere in Europe. Indeed, there were a few alleged Bishop sightings in Sweden, Switzerland and Italy in the early years by people who knew the fugitive and were pretty damn sure it was he who they’d fleetingly seen. But even pleas for pre-smartphone crowdsourcing help on such real-crime TV shows as America’s Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries yielded no significant leads.

For years, I’d run down Lilly Stone Drive and wondered Which House It Was, my Google searches having gotten me exactly as far at identifying the Death House as international law enforcement had gotten at tracking down the Bethesda Bludgeoner. I’d hoped forlornly for a momentarily icy wind, or a ghostly cry, or a couple of dog-walkers just happening to point at a house and remark within my earshot, “Who’d ever think five people would be pounded senseless with a household tool there!” Somehow, none of those things ever happened. The neighborhood pines whispered, but never any words I could understand.

Then, though, a few afternoons ago the Post’s daily headlines e-mail popped up on my office PC, coaxing me to drop what I was doing and to add a “hit” to the website’s numbers. This particular attempt succeeded, as one of the headlines proclaimed that, in an effort to revive interest and prompt new leads in this coldest of cold cases, Brad Bishop, now 77 years old (if alive), had been placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.

While this news of course was of great interest to me—beyond my grim fascination with the case, I of course would like to see the cocky narcissist (as I see him) pay for his crimes—the article itself told me nothing that I, voracious reader of all things Bishop, didn’t already know. Well, it did remind me that he is an “alleged” mass murderer—all devils leaving blood-soak trails in their wake being innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. But I’d long known all the other things. Like how Brad Bishop’s sons had been ages 14, 10 and 5, his wife was 37 and his widowed mother was 68. And how, in addition to speaking French, Spanish, Italian and Serbo-Croatian, Bishop was an “avid outdoorsman” who’d  presumably be at home in the Black Forest or the Pyrenees, not to mention the Smoky Mountains in which he might have lingered if not for all the unfortunate notoriety.

But then I saw it: a link from the FBI article to a much-earlier Post story. The piece, dated February 22, 1977, was headlined, “Brad Bishop Home Sold Year After Family of Five Slain There.” In the article, Carolyn Gneiser—wife of the homeowner whose quotes I would read decades later—noted, “We renegotiated the price a little bit” after learning from a neighbor the grisly details their realtor had been loath to share. (No kidding!) The sentence that riveted my attention, however, was this: “When the Robert H. Gneiser family moves into the contemporary split-level house at 8103 Lilly Stone Drive next month, their neighbors are hoping the event will remove the specter that has haunted the Carderock Springs development in West Bethesda for the last year.”

Finally, an address!

So, after my Saturday run in Washington this morning, I drove to Lilly Stone Drive, found the house, parked my car, and walked up the driveway to get close enough to take a few pictures. Yes, if you’re wondering, I did feel like a ghoulish intruder and an insufficiently respectful trespasser. I abashedly waited to take a photo of the front mailbox until the street had cleared of traffic. As I neared the house itself, I mulled my possible responses to the shouts of a furious and possibly gun-toting Bob Gneiser. I was braced for him to run out the front door screaming, “The damn FBI, putting this back in the news! Get the hell off my property!”

Only, one of the first things I saw, after noting the utter blandness of the dated home (you’re not missing anything from my technological inability to post a photo here), was the diplomatic license plates on the lone car in the upper part of the driveway. That, and the fact that today’s newspaper hadn’t been brought inside, suggested to me that Bob Gneiser, too, has left the building, and that the foreign renters who succeeded him might not even be home.

Emboldened by the likelihood that I wouldn’t be chased off the premises at gunpoint, I proceeded to walk right up to the house and took a few pictures. I even took one at the back of the house. No one said “boo.” (Although under the circumstances, that exact comment would’ve sent me running even more surely than would have Bob Gneiser’s imagined gun.) I completed my reconnaissance work, got back in the car and drove home, which took all of five minutes.

I of course had to immediately share my best shot of the house with a few friends who know well my preoccupation with lethal crimes, even though I consider myself a pacifist and the National Rifle Association to be a terrorist organization. In my texts, I repeated the same joke I’d used in the 2012 blog post, about how I’d resisted the temptation to ring the doorbell and ask the man or lady of the house to pose for me with a catsup-soaked hammer.

But why, really, is my knowing Exactly Where It Happened so important to me? Why do I so relish the fact that, on future runs on Lilly Stone Drive, I’ll know the history of that one particular house?

I speculated back in 2012 that violence somehow is part of our DNA as Americans, whether it manifests in sociopathic ways or just weirdly prurient ones. Anyway, it’s probably a harmless interest on my part. I hope so. I think so.

But I also know—and I’m not proud of this—that I’d have gotten a real kick out of that red-hammer shot, had Sven the Diplomat materialized and been up for the gag.

Hiatus

While it might seem to you that I’ve simply once again failed to post anything new for a month, I’m actually on a hiatus that I’m just now getting around to announcing. I’ve taken on a book-editing project for a friend that is commanding all the time that I might otherwise be spending writing blog posts. Or rather, that I might otherwise be spending thinking about writing blog posts, without actually doing so very often. As is my wont.

I want to make this clear so that no one thinks I’m dead or, more likely, that I’m being even lazier than usual. In fact, given the fact that I’ve been working on this editing gig (for real money, too), I’ve actually been less lazy that usual.

 

Anyway, before I disappear from this space for what easily could be another month or more, I’d like to survey a few things that have been going on.

One of those things is winter, a season that I genuinely like and will deeply miss when global warming renders it climatically meaningless, but that this year doesn’t know when to stop. (I see no contradiction there, by the way: As we say in the meteorology business, climate change Fucks Things Up.)

I’m off from work today, and this morning I spent at least 10 minutes layering myself in three pairs of thermals before driving into the District for a run. While necessary and effective, such laborious dressing is supremely annoying. I love the way Nat King Cole sang the word “eskEEmos” in his classic version of “The Christmas Song,” but I do not personally enjoy dressing up like an Eskimo. If I did, I would move to Nunavut. All that padding makes me feel like the Michelin Man when I’m running. Also, when I have to pee it takes a seeming eternity just to find and extract the source of the urge.

There’s been much to-do this winter, all across the country, about the polar vortex. Which allegedly is a longtime weather term that hadn’t ever really applied to conditions in the United States until this winter, but which I suspect was simply made up by the PR team that came up with the film The Matrix because it sounded fiendishly awesome. In the DC area, what the polar vortex has meant is that since December we’ve experienced far more teens and single-digit temperatures, wind chills of zero and below, and snowfalls of varying depths than we usually do. It’ll get seasonably warm or better for a few days, and people will walk around in shorts and T-shirts in the 45- or 50-degree weather just because they nominally can, although it’s premature and frankly kind of stupid. However briefly, hope prevails over reason. But then the mercury plummets once again, as a new wave of Canadian air proclaims, “Not so fast, hosers!”

Today is the last day of February. Spring is imminent and consistently warmer temperatures are inevitable. Baseball spring training games already have begun in Florida and Arizona. Soon enough, the dog will be panting and Lynn and I will be complaining about how hot it is, given this region’s tendency to go from spring moderation to summer heat in the span of a week or two. But at this point I have to say enough already. I don’t look good in knit hats. Also, in the car,  my CDs skip unless I give them an intense massage. I look forward to the days soon when I consistently can go hatless, when my car CD player doesn’t skip through a four-minute song in 30 seconds, and when I can urinate without first needing to dig around in my pants as if they were an excavation site.

So, what else is going on? The Oscars.

The Academy Awards are coming up Sunday night. Parenthetically, March 2 also will be my dad’s 86th birthday, but I’m guessing the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will not award him a public service statuette for a lifetime of infrequent movie-going, not to mention his utter distaste for the sex, violence and vulgarity that are Hollywood’s wheelhouse.

I’ve seen most of the nine films nominated for Best Picture, quite a few of the nominated acting performances, and, this year, even all the nominated short documentaries. This afternoon, I plan to take in the nominated short features, as well, which are playing on one bill at a DC theater. The only awards about which I have really strong preferences are Best Picture and Best Actor. I’d love to see 12 Years a Slave win because it’s the best rebuttal I’ve ever seen to those who romanticize the Old South, fly the Stars and Bars, and argue that those who fought for the Confederacy should be honored for defending Dixie's way of life from Yankee aggression. It’s a brilliantly conceived and acted film, and it's incredibly hard to watch. As it should be. My Best Actor nod, meanwhile, goes to Matthew McConaughey, for both his outstanding work in Dallas Buyers Club and for making a bona fide thespian of himself after years of dicking around in unchallenging pretty-boy roles.

I have to give a shout out to West End Cinemas in DC. It’s an aesthically dumpy complex of three theaters, with tiny screens and uncomfortable chairs. But West End’s  taste in film selection is outstanding, and I’ve spent many happy afternoon hours there over the past year. Most recently, that’s where I caught the Oscar-nominated short documentaries, which run the gamut from the reconciliation of a gay man and the ex-skinhead who nearly beat him to death, to a profile of a dying inmate in hospice care at a maximum-security prison. Another of the short documentaries showcases the world’s oldest living Holocaust survivor, an improbably optimistic one-time concert pianist who still was feeling joy at the keyboard at age 109. She was in the news this week upon her death at 110.

Polar vortex, the Oscars … February also has been about the Winter Olympics, continuing horrors in Syria, and upheaval and instability in Ukraine (which now  joins seemingly two-thirds of the world in those categories).

All I can think to say about the recently concluded Olympics are these things: 1) Sochi was an asinine place to hold the games both climatically and in terms of lending Vladimir Putin unearned legitimacy. 2) I found it difficult to get excited about competitions in which undetectable nanoseconds separated winners from losers. 3) I really liked, however, a line I heard somewhere, with reference to the biathlon, that for the next four years now, anyone seen skiing and shooting a rifle at the same time again simply will be known as a crazy person.

I must confess that I also enjoyed the dredging up of the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan knee-bashing incident upon that Olympic circus’s 20th anniversary. Tonya Harding is such a tragic figure—her own worst enemy, whose sad upbringing seemingly preordained her current state of denial. She says she’s happy now as a wife, mother and landscaper. That seems unlikely, given that her double chins shake with ill-contained fury at the ways she insists she’s been wronged by the press. But for her sake, I kind of hope so. Nancy Kerrigan achieved Olympic glory and seems to bear her former rival no ill will, to her great credit. But you wonder whether Tonya Harding ever will subdue her demons.

Ukraine? The economy’s in freefall, and disunity between its nationalist east and Russia-loving west threaten to rip the nation asunder. Syria is a humanitarian apocalypse, with no end in sight. Meanwhile, unspeakable violence continues unabated under the world’s radar in countries from Congo to Sudan to North Korea to Mexico. In South America, Rio de Janeiro is preparing for an Olympics for which it seems economically ill-suited by bulldozing its slums and leaving homeless its poorest citizens.

Wow, I am all over the place, literally and figuratively, in this post! All I meant to do was announce a blogging hiatus. It seems that I should add thanks that my biggest personal complaint is a transitory cold snap.

When I next post, the weather is sure to be warmer, but the world’s problems are just as certain to unchanged. It’s enough to make you want to huddle under a comforter, whatever the outdoor temperature.

Dental Dilemma

Everyone over the age of 40 likely has uttered the sentence “I’m too old for this” many times. At 55, I feel that I’m far too old for any number of things. The problem, however, is that most of those things aren’t going away anytime soon.

Take working for a living. Please! as the late comic Henny Youngman used to say, except that he was saying it about his wife. (Quick aside: As young reporter, I once covered an event that featured Youngman as guest entertainer. Somewhere in our attic there’s a black-and-white photo of the two of us, taken by my newspaper’s photographer. Henny is poised to play his trademark violin, and I seem to remember he’d just made a joke at my expense that had cracked up the furniture-industry executives he’d been paid to amuse.)

Anyway, take working for a living. I’ve been doing it for 33 years now, and I have to say, enough’s enough. That’s a huge chunk of my waking hours spent doing things other than pretty much nothing, which is the way I’d vastly prefer to be spending that time. And holding down a job necessitates many other things for which I feel too old, such as donning business-casual clothes at a pre-dawn hour five days a week, enduring tailgaters on two-lane MacArthur Boulevard because they’re late for work at Sibley Hospital, dealing with coworkers who are even more socially awkward than I am, being forced to adapt to technological changes in the workplace, et cetera and so on.

But there’s one thing for which I’ve long felt too old that I easily could do something about, except that I am a coward. That something is coming clean with my dental team on flossing. Specifically, on the fact that I’ve never flossed my teeth and I have no intention ever of doing so.

When I was a kid, flossing wasn’t even a thing. I went to this awesome dentist in Summit, New Jersey, named Dr Hill who’d been my dad’s dentist forever—since long before he married my mom. Dr Hill was a highly successful and incredibly dapper African American man at a time—this was the 1960s—when kids like me who grew up on suburban cul-de-sacs didn’t see many black men, period, let alone urbane black men who played the horses and sometimes sported a checkered vest and jaunty cap.

Dr Hill never mentioned flossing. He asked me about school and kickball and my life in general, and he displayed that classic dentist’s ability to understand my responses even when my mouth was open and filled with logs of cotton. (Were those part of the cleaning or the drilling process? I can’t remember anymore. In those days when water was unfluoridated and Rice Krinkles were my go-to breakfast cereal, I always had multiple cavities.) I loved Dr Hill.

Our family dentist in Greensboro, North Carolina, where we moved when I was 14, may have mentioned flossing to me, but that was the 1970s, and I had one hand, and the nascent disability empowerment movement hadn’t yet turned its attention to the inalienable right of every American, regardless of hand number, to floss his or her teeth. I don’t know if a device yet existed at that time to facilitate one-handed flossing, but if it did, my dentist didn’t know about it. As I recall, his aged hygienist laboriously flossed my teeth, then looked pityingly at me, as if to say, “Plaque may overtake your mouth and your gums may succumb to disease most foul in the months before you next see me, but there’s not a thing anyone can do about that, you sad, crippled son of a bitch.”

I think it was when I was living in neighboring High Point in the 1980s, working for the newspaper there, that my dentist and/or hygienist began telling me of the existence of a contraption I could hold in my one hand that would allow me to floss my own teeth. I of course had no intention of doing so, because a) it struck me as tedious thing to spend one’s time doing and b) I saw absolutely no evidence that my mouth was going to hell. I mean, the water was fluoridated by then, I was eating better and brushing nightly (whether my teeth needed it or not), and my cavities now were few and far between. Sure, my gums bled during those in-office flossings, but so what? They bled at no other times. Because I never flossed!

My next longtime dentist was Dr Schatz, a wonderful man who already was approximately 112 years old when I became his patient after moving to DC more than 20 years ago. He’d been Lynn’s dentist, and possibly Woodrow Wilson’s as well. His cramped office smelled like 1940, he kept his World War II uniform hung on a doorknob near the desk where Mrs Schatz served as scheduler when she wasn’t serving as hygienist, and he bragged that the Smithsonian had expressed interest in someday buying his dental equipment. Needless to say, the Schatzes didn’t nag me at all about flossing. Oh, they thought it was a good idea, but they knew that Woodrow Wilson hadn’t died of dental disease and that failure to floss wasn’t the end of the world. (Nor, for that matter, had it been the reason the League of Nations hadn’t worked out.)

But then there was this, too. As sweet and kind as the Schatzes were, their views of people with physical challenges weren’t exactly enlightened. I’m not making this up: Mrs Schatz once told Lynn how sad she was for her that I’d never be able to hold her in a two-handed embrace. I believe the Schatzes admired Lynn all the more for her stoicism in the face of such stunted marital intimacy. At any rate, what I’m trying to say is that I’m pretty sure they assumed I was incapable of flossing my own teeth.

Time ultimately waits for no dentist, however, and several years ago Dr Schatz finally retired. (I don’t know if the Smithsonian’s Division of Dental Antiquities ever got a hold of his equipment.) Making the transition to modern dentistry after all those years in the Eisenhower era was a shock to the system in more ways than one. This new office had computer monitors and kept electronic dental records. My new dentist ministered to my teeth from a sitting position—Dr Schatz hadn’t even had a chair. The office atmosphere was antiseptically professional, with no QVC-purchased dancing Santa Clauses on display, no mounds of moldering paperwork piled on the front desk, no ancient volume of Who’s Who in Dentistry sitting in the lobby bookmarked to the practice owner’s page.

I missed those personal touches, and the pure camp of biannual time travel, but I quickly saw the wisdom of entrusting my teeth to a team whose mental and physical faculties weren’t fading, whose professional knowledge was up to date, and whose database made unnecessary my bringing in a filled-out insurance form every time. The thing that bothered me from the get-go, however, was the staff’s insistence on—and assumption of—flossing.

This new hygienist always commented on my bleeding gums and gently urged me to do a better job of flossing, being of a modern mindset that assumed not only that was capable of it, but that I surely must be doing it (if inadequately), because who doesn’t floss in an age when its benefits are so well known?

For the first couple of years, I simply nodded at the sagacity of the hygienist’s advice, content to tacitly lie each time. Eventually, however, this recurrent bit of theater started feeling stale to me. It dawned on me that, hey, “I’m in my 50s and, yes, I'm too old for this!” Why was I engaging in this constant charade? Why was I blandly accepting the container of floss that always accompanied the new toothbrush and mini-tube of toothpaste in my parting “goody bag”?

Why could I not look that earnest hygienist squarely in the eye and simply say, “No disrespect, but I do not floss, and I frankly never will. I know you’re just doing your job and looking out for my optimal dental health, but I feel I’ve aged out of this conversation. I should very much like never to have it again.”

Or, since that would be a lot to verbiage to remember, why couldn’t I at least say, “I hope you won’t take offense, but I don’t floss and don’t plan to. My gums have lasted this long. I’ll take my chances.”

Since making this mental declaration of independence, however, I’ve never been able to make it a verbal, audible one. My most recent checkup and teeth-cleaning was a few weeks ago. I’d been pretty sure this was going to be the time I’d finally make my Flossing Speech. In fact, I’d envisioned a blog post in which I proudly told the story about how I’d kicked flossing tyranny in the ass. (And although I shouldn’t say so, my current hygienist has a substantial one.)

But damn if I just couldn’t do it! Again, as if we’d never had the conversation, she commented on my bleeding gums and urged me to be more diligent about flossing. I so wanted to tell her there can be no diligence where there is no effort or interest in the first place. But those words would not escape my lips. Once again, as I’d done so many times before, I meekly confirmed the wisdom of her advice with a solemn nod that suggested I’d get right on it. I hated myself a little as I climbed into my car.

When I got to the office that morning (it had been an 8 am appointment), I decided I’d seek counsel on the Internet. Surely I’m not the only flossing holdout, I reasoned. I’d do a few minutes of searching and find out how others go about expressing their defiance to their dentist’s offices. (And also, whether there are any consequences. I mean, is it a firing offense? Do some dentists tell noncompliant patients to take their grubby mouths elsewhere? Would I need to shop for a new provider?)

To my great surprise, however, no search combination I entered yielded a single fellow flossing foe. Not “refuse to floss.” Not “won’t floss.” Not “proudly united against flossing.” Nothing! When I Googled the search term “no flossing,” all I found was WebMD’s well-meaning but thoroughly unhelpful guide, “Flossing Teeth: No More Excuses!” Among other things, it hails “floss-holders”—the very device that has been suggested for the one-handed among us.

Where, I wanted to know, was the document titled, “Flossing Teeth: No Excuse for Extending This Ridiculous Charade. Here’s How to Stop the Madness”?

So, I don’t know if refusal to floss is the very last societal protest that lacks an advocacy group, or if I’m the last non-flossing dental patient in these United States, or what. All I know is that I feel entirely too old to continue playing this game, yet I'm too damn much of a wuss to put an end to it.

Christmas Exposed

It’s five days till Christmas, so I sort of feel like I should write something about the holiday. But I’ve also got a dead pornographer and naked chests on my mind as I settle for a one full, glorious week off from work.

So, first, Christmas. When I was driving home from my run in DC this morning, I passed one of the saddest snowmen I’ve ever seen. We’d recently had one of those typical Washington area winter-weather situations in which multiple inches of snow had been predicted but we ended up getting just slightly more than enough of the white stuff to cover the grass. It’s almost all gone at this point, and in fact the mercury is expected to rise to 70 degrees this weekend. But kids will be kids, and apparently one local child was determined to make a snowman or snowperson even if he/she had to use every snowflake in the yard to do so, and even though the location beside a busy road ensured that said snow-being soon would look as pristine as did coastal New York after Hurricane Sandy.

By this morning, the imagined child’s loving rendering—gleefully conceived on a day when local schools had been closed—stood forlornly, half-melted and brown-black, in the middle of an utterly snowless lawn. It was sort of like seeing the before and immediately after photos of that handsome Russian ballet director who’d had acid thrown on his face—or revisiting one’s tidy, well-kept childhood neighborhood and finding nothing but rubble and crack houses.

Why am I opening a discussion of Christmas with that image? I don’t know. I’m not a Christmas hater, and in fact I love Christmas music, and sending out cards, and that spiked eggnog the liquor stores sell at this time of year. (Note to self: A weekend trip to the liquor store is a must.) And snowmen aren’t so much a Christmas thing as they are a winter thing, although it’s not technically winter until tomorrow.

But, that sad snowman somehow was a reminder, to me, of the mixed bag that is The Holidays. Last night Lynn and I watched A Charlie Brown Christmas on TV for perhaps the 10,000th time. Alone among seasonal telecasts, that particular special never gets old for me. It speaks so poignantly to the ambivalence that I think most of us, in the West at least, have toward the contradictory crazy quilt of commercialism and generosity, of secularism and religion, that is Christmas. Sure, A Charlie Brown Christmas ends up coming down on the side of Christianity, but to my mind in a way that’s more hopeful than it is convincing. I’ve read a biography of Charles Schulz, Charlie Brown’s creator, and it’s clear that he was a conflicted and in many ways an unhappy man. In his Christmastime fable, with its less-than-reverent jazz score, Linus ultimately delivers to the sad-sack kid the savior that Charles/Charlie wishes he felt in his heart.

 

That’s my armchair analysis, anyway. Which is worth at least Lucy-the-Entrepreneur-Shrink’s five cents.

Christmas. There’s a lot to like about it, and a lot that’s problematic. Mostly, it’ll never again be as good for us as adults as it was when we were kids and it meant that anything was possible, including Santa. Come to think of it, that may be why spiked eggnog is so very attractive to me now.

So, let’s move on to the dead pornographer. I’m an aficionado of obituaries that are well-written and that truly seem to capture the essence of the deceased, for good or ill. Yesterday I happened to come across the New York Times’ recap of the vulgarly picaresque life of Al Goldstein, a native son best known as the publisher of Screw, a skin magazine that was, by all accounts, exactly as subtle and classy as its name suggested. Goldstein died in Brooklyn of renal failure at age 77.

I write “by all accounts” because I never actually saw a copy of Screw, which debuted in 1968, when I was 10 years old, and had ceased publication by the time I might have researched it on the web, solely in the interest of journalistic science. But here’s how the noted civil liberties attorney Alan Dershowitz, who sometimes represented Goldstein in the latter’s legal tussles, described Screw in the New York Times obituary: “Hefner did it with taste. Goldstein’s contribution is to be utterly tasteless.”

Elsewhere in the piece, its author, Andy Newman writes, “Sex as depicted in Screw was seldom pretty, romantic or even sexy. It was, primarily, a business, with consumers and suppliers like any other.” Indeed, Newman adds, “The manifesto in Screw’s debut issue was succinct: ‘We promise never to ink out a pubic hair or chalk out an organ. We will apologize for nothing.'”

As you might imagine, the obituary isn’t exactly a celebration of a redeeming life well-lived. In fact, it makes abundantly clear that the ugliness of Screw reflected that of its creator, who didn’t even describe himself in flattering terms, choosing instead such adjectives as “infantile” and “compulsive.” (Clearly Goldstein would not have objected to “repulsive,” either, but, rather, would have worn it as a badge of dishonor.)

The obituary's writing is darkly masterful. Consider these two paragraphs, which capture Goldstein in a nutshell:

“Apart from Screw, Mr Goldstein’s most notorious creation was Al Goldstein himself, a cartoonishly vituperative amalgam of borscht belt comic, free-range social critic and sex-obsessed loser who seemed to embody a moment in New York City’s cultural history: the sleaze and decay of Times Square in the 1960s and ’70s.

“A bundle of insatiable neuroses and appetites (he once weighed around 350 pounds), Mr Goldstein used and abused the bully pulpit of his magazine and, later, his late-night public-access cable show Midnight Blue, to curse his countless enemies, among them the Nixon administration, an Italian restaurant that omitted garlic from its spaghetti sauce, himself, and, most troubling to his own defenders, his own family.”

Much later in this tour-de-force biography—which prints out to four full pages, and which I urge you to seek out while it is still online if you appreciate great writing and have a reasonably strong stomach—Newman puts a fine point on that mention of “family” by recounting, “After his son, Jordan, disinvited him to his graduation from Harvard Law School, Mr Goldstein published doctored photos showing Jordan having sex with various men and with his own mother—Mr Goldstein’s third ex-wife, Gina.”

Not surprisingly, Goldstein’s final years, as chronicled by Newman, were as unpretty as had been his oeuvre. He was homeless for a time, and he spent his final years in a Brooklyn nursing home where, one gets the impression, he was not exactly besieged by well-wishers. His one late-life “highlight”? A Best Supporting Actor nomination at the Adult Video News Awards for his role in Al Goldstein & Ron Jeremy Are Screwed.

Yes, this was a sad, sad life. But it was one that Goldstein defiantly lived on his own terms, and that a New York Times writer has spun into bleak and darkly entertaining art. I’d heard of Al Goldstein before his death, but it’s only now that I feel I’ve truly experienced him. (Second note to self: While showering today, scrub particularly vigorously.)

Finally, my opening reference to naked chests has to do with an eye-catching headline earlier this week in my daily e-mail from Rolling Stone magazine: “Miley Cyrus Flashes Twitter to ‘Free the Nipple.’

Well, of course she does! was my first thought—given that the tediously rebelling former Disney Good Girl always is in some state of public undress or self-conscious outrageousness. The only question in my mind was whether “Flashes Twitter” was a reference to the social-networking tool or whether “Twitter” now has become a descriptor of an intimate female body part.

It turned out, however, that Cyrus had bared her breasts in support of an upcoming film called Free the Nipple that is part of a wider if loosely-organized campaign to give women the legal right to go topless in public, just like men can. Actually, apparently it’s not technically illegal in most states for women to go topless, but it’s nearly impossible to do so in most places without getting arrested on some charge or another. This even is so in New York City, where female toplessness has been legal since 1992—an abuse of law enforcement that no doubt made Al Goldstein apoplectic.

Did you know there’s even a “Go Topless Day,” which annually is observed on the Sunday nearest to Women’s Equality Day (August 26th) and is the creation of a group led (per Wikipedia) by “former French auto-racing journalist Claude Vorilhon, currently known as Rael, spiritual leader of the Raelian Movement, a UFO religion”? I discovered this in my own research (you’re welcome). Presumably Miley, the Nipples filmmaker and other toplessness advocates would consider association with whack-job fringe groups antithetical to their mammary-liberation efforts.

Anyway, you might think that, as a heterosexual male, I’d be all for women having the freedom to wave their unfettered breasts in my face should they so choose. But that is decidedly not the case. I actually, totally agree that it’s a horribly unfair societal double standard for men to be allowed to walk around shirtless on a hot summer day while women’s breasts must swelter underneath their bras. But my solution to this inequity is to make men put their shirts on.

I hate seeing guys walk around topless. And it’s not because I’m latently gay and plagued by temptation, although I’m certain Al Goldstein would’ve depicted me that way in compromising doctored photos had I ever crossed him in any way. It’s just that it really doesn’t seem fair to women.

And, OK, it’s also that I don’t want to see the exposed chests of flabby guys. (I’m reminded of a great New Yorker cartoon in which a bartender at a beachfront watering hole tells a male patron that the T-shirt he’s holding in his hand is courtesy of the woman at the end of the bar.)  Furthermore, I don’t want to see the exposed chests of ripped guys, either. They’re just showing off. And also feeding my insecurity about my own un-taut upper torso. I don’t need that.

As far as I’m concerned, guys should put their shirts on. And women should keep theirs on. I mean, let’s face it: Most people, regardless of gender, look better clad than unclad. (I certainly include myself in that number.) And here’s where I will speak as a heterosexual guy: There’s something to be said for a bit of suggestiveness and mystery. That’s all I’m sayin’.

Now, how do I bring this post full circle and tie these disparate elements together?

Ah, I’ve got it. That Rolling Stone item about Miley Cyrus noted, “On Saturday, she tweeted an almost topless selfie featuring two strategically placed hearts that read ‘Merry Christmas.’”

Again, this holiday truly is a mixed bag.