Meeting John Kasich in my New York Days

It was a Friday in ‘88 when I met a young John Kasich at a bar in German Village called Victory’s. Even then I followed politics enough to appreciate him as a fellow Alex P. Keaton, a conservative policy wonk who made it on merit and not hobnobbing - now, ironically, he spends his semi-retirement gabbing on feckless cable shows in between quixotic runs for president, a kind of X-ray inverse of his younger self. But he has certainly earned it unlike most of us. 

“Those were the days my friend...”. I had a crush on a local anchor named Carol Costello who later found fame on CNN. (Pardon the curse word. )  Ever the romantic, I wrote her poems about the Reds, our shared interest. I still have an autographed photo of her un-airbrushed self. Imagine there was a time before photoshop?  Of course she was beautiful sans touch up as all the young are. 

The star ascended on long drinking nights, stopped-time in the era before smartphones. A certain languor imbued, surely booze-aided, but the lack of viable alternative entertainments created an atmosphere of contentment or maybe a dreamlike reverie. Boredom was always near at hand, tis true, but so was the heightened quality of attention when juxtaposed against boredom. Feast and fast, as it was in medieval liturgical cycles. 

We’d play company softball games and then go to Planks Bier Garten, the avenue of evening bright with happy-go-lucky. Youth, so squandered they say but age is no less so in a time of ephemerals like politics and Facebook. Those summer eves, ripe with life, feel like they happened in a different century now. And so they did. 

I read the poetry of Diana Der Hovanessian, imprimatur’d by having been found at Gotham Book Mart, as well as New York novels heavy with longing like Bright Lights Big City. The bread at the end of the novel was Manhattan itself to me. I lapped up Woody Allen movies for the scenery and sophistication. Longing was ever a leitmotif; I never met a song as affecting as the The Impossible Dream from the musical Man of La Mancha and I was as smitten by the Kennedy Camelot myth as anyone. They all ran together, rhyming: Don Quixote, Christ, King Arthur, JFK in a romantic haze.