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Imagine the WWII generation in Camden. It thought it had achieved middle-class status and then suddenly they wake up in the 1960s–working poor, trapped in an apartment with grubby furniture, kids whom they can’t afford to send to college smoking dope, a sick grandma living in the basement, siblings from Cherry Hill who won’t even send a Christmas card to the neighborhood! You could feel Cabal’s spirited mother vibrating out there, spinning. I was rocking to the whole metaphor commuting home from work on the Staten Island ferry when I got to the line, "Every face you see was once a baby’s face." He was looking at his mother’s body in the coffin, right?

Wow! The ferry docked and I automatically took my shuffling place in the mincing steps of the disembarking queue of the disgruntled middle class of 2000, of which I myself am not privileged to be a part. I was overwhelmed, thinking how some people have to live through some serious sad shit while others just sail through, and maybe it’s not all economics, but if it isn’t greed and corruption, how will I ever really know? And like that. I was busy remembering my own mother’s lifetime and all the bad luck...

What happened next was very weird and wonderful. A deckhand in the captain’s deckhouse quietly, in the most melancholy voice, announced over the speakers, "Happy birthday, Buddy Holly." Just that, nothing more. It was ghostly. I looked around. Nobody seemed to have heard it. But some fiftysomething dreamer remembered. It was like a Kurt Vonnegut minute in time, and so was Alan Cabal’s moving account of generations past.

Thanks.

P. Vitucci, Staten Island

Ames Perdu Hats off and best of luck to Jonathan Ames. Having read his stories in New York Press from a time before he was a columnist, when he would occasionally write about the perverted and strange things that he experienced as a child, I can say that "City Slicker" has been one of my favorite columns. Artists are always more credible, though, when they know when to quit, and it is probably for the best that he has decided to retire the column. I did tend to skip it with regularity during the recent Mangina phase.

Nonetheless, such a character deserves only success in future endeavors, and I hope that I might still see his work on occasion in this paper.

Brian Manning, Manhattan

Tom Was Kind To Spiders As a recent Columbia graduate, I can confirm that many of the generalizations you make about the Columbia jocks and fratboys are more or less accurate ("Opinion," 2/9). As a former friend of Tommy Nelford, however, I can tell you that he was atypical, and was neither, as you say, "a hypersteroidal ogre" nor a "lummox" who made fun of fat girls and chess players.

When I met Tommy, I found his personality refreshing and surprisingly unique among many Columbia students. He obviously was not exceptional in the traditional scholar/athlete way. He was, after all, kicked out because his grades were low. Nor did he have ambitious plans about working or getting back into school.

Instead, he traveled around the country, wandering from place to place, and then, when his camper broke down, returned to New York. He spent his time writing, reading, drawing, painting, playing music and simply talking to people. He had hardly any clothes. He didn’t care about grades, diplomas, money or material things. He had the courage and the ability to look beyond life’s and society’s objective standards. Above all, he was intelligent, articulate, introspective and artistic, much more so than not just the jocks he hung out with, but also most other Columbia students.

Though he may have entered Columbia a jock, he soon after quit the wrestling team because he decided it did not coincide with his pacifist philosophies. According to friends, in an article in a Columbia newspaper, when he found a cockroach or a spider in the house, he’d carry it outside, rather than kill it. Once he stopped wrestling, he didn’t look like a jock either. He looked more like a modern-day hippie, with long, shaggy hair.

One of the more bizarre details of the case was that he covered the victim’s face with a literary magazine featuring a Jack Kerouac portrait on the cover. Tommy and his girlfriend were both Kerouac fans. I wonder if he somehow identified with Kerouac. They had at least superficial similarities: both were artists, Columbia athletes and Columbia dropouts.

Though the New York Press article effectively assumes that Tommy shared the drinking habits of many of the jocks and fratboys, he was not, in reality, much of a drinker at all. He did have a penchant for drugs, though. His drug use, unfortunately, progressed over time way beyond the level of normal recreational use and became excessive. I imagine that his increasingly heavy drug use was the primary factor in this mysterious and tragic murder/ suicide.

In the future, if you want to write an article deploring the state of jock and fraternity culture at Ivy League schools, don’t hinge your allegations on someone who’s merely convenient because they’re in the news. Implicating someone based on an old picture and peripheral associations discovered by sleazy New York Post reporters is both irresponsible and inaccurate journalism.

Becky Smeyne, Manhattan

Tom Was a Talented Fellow If only all reporters and editors could cut corners so effortlessly in order to tell a story. Your 2/9 editorial "A Brutal Jock at Columbia" is uninformed, based more on a made-for-tv high school melodrama than on the reality of Tom Nelford’s life. If only we could script people’s lives to coincide with our own prejudices and stereotypes, then we could really shape public opinion.

Did you do any research before writing that piece? Did you read the Columbia Daily Spectator to learn that Nelford was more than an ox? Did you know that he was an artist? Did you know that he published a scathing, witty cartoon in a campus magazine entitled "Sid, the Ugly Kid," about an unaccepted high school nerd whose heart is broken by the most popular girl, ending in his suicide? He was no bully. My image of Tom, based on his art and on seeing him around, is that he wasn’t the brooding superjock, juiced up on steroids and ready to steal your lunch money. He was intensely quiet and, undeniably, crazy.

But your own version of this story is more comfortable for you to deal with. You want this to be about the date-raping frat thug who slipped through the cracks of an ivory tower to prey on his next victim. Oh, how much more interesting my reality is than your WB-inspired plot, which exploits the murder to knock Columbia’s uncouth rich kids. Shame on you.

Take your photograph of Tom sweating and foaming at the mouth on a wrestling mat and place it next to one of his paintings. Then maybe you’ll get more meaningful fiction, and you’ll better understand what made Tom tick.

Name Withheld, Manhattan

Why, You’re Welcome Why do you let Matthew DeBord write for your paper? It’s always blah, blah, blah about himself instead of the restaurant or wine he is reviewing. And he doesn’t really seem to know what he is talking about. Put his stuff in your "First Person" section. It fits better there.

Thank you for your time and for printing my last letter.

A. Munoz, Brooklyn

Filing from Rockford We have two million people in prison and no major candidate is discussing the drug war. Why?

M. Simon, Rockford, IL

Harvesting McCain John McCain’s strident support for the illegal and immoral bombing back into the stone age of Serbia–in the name of "democracy" and preventing a "genocide"–worries me. McCain, should he become president, is likely to continue the journey across the burning bridge to the 21st century built by the Clinton/ Gore administration. He may have spent many years in a Vietnamese prison camp, but it is obvious the experience taught him absolutely nothing about the futility of military interventions in the civil affairs of other nations.

John McCain is the yang to Clinton’s yin. Both are demagogues and charlatans. I guess that’s why the dullards and the utopian schemers who infest the news media fawn over both of them.

John Brandon, Urbana, IL

S. Is for "Sucker" Tireless and tiresome letter writer S. Dempsey has the nauseating gall to recklessly label New York Press columnists George Szamuely and Armond White anti-Semites ("The Mail," 2/9).

Let’s see if this week, he/she has the moral integrity to send in a letter castigating the self-described artists and "Russian New York Jews" Komar and Melamid. They contributed to the 2/9 issue ("Opinion") with statements aimed at the presidential candidates such as: "their tedious Christian campaigning"; "few things last 2000 years, and Jesus wasn’t one of them"; and "get down off the cross, we need the wood for the easels." In effect, this is true anti-Semitism, in a self-reflective sense.

Also, pseudonymous and pseudo-intellectual Dempsey should look to his own peevish letters for antireligious screeds, such as the 1/19 installment, in which he says the Virgin Mary perpetrated a hoax: "She was the Tawana Brawley of her time, except that she actually got away with it... Mary was no virgin when she gave birth to Jesus. It’s clear beyond any doubt that Joseph (or some other testosterone-crazed local kid) fathered Jesus by having sex with Mary." Nowhere do we see Dempsey’s denigration of Moses’ miraculous feats. One cannot be an arbiter of anti-Semitism while at the same time maligning another’s race or religion.

Dempsey goes on to criticize MUGGER and virtually every New York Press writer (and by implication their readers) as being dull and witless, and yet he seems to read the paper assiduously front to back to see just how much he dislikes it!

Nothing is more pathetic than the mindless critic who is in denial and who projects his own shortcomings and intolerance onto others. This sort of person isn’t just a hypocrite. For his malice he truly deserves to be called a screaming a-hole.

K. Schnellmeister, Manhattan