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Norman Mailer's passing was reported today.

I met the writer in a restaurant around the corner of the Promenade Theatre Off Broadway in the west 70's of NYC when he came in and took a seat at our table.  He talked with Geraldine Paige and Sam Shepard.  Somebody told him that I played the character Jerry Rubin in The Chicago Conspiracy Trial in LA and Chicago.  He didn't give a rat's ass.  He knew Ginsburg and Kunstler and Kerouac; he'd covered the 1969 Chicago convention, walked the park in the teargas, seen the bloody attempts of Daley's troops to kill dissent.

I am now the age he was then and my greatest memory of the man that night was: jeez, this old guy could kick my butt.

Executioner's Song was a popular "read" at the time.  He wouldn't talk about his next novel, the one that took him 11 years to write, the one the bookstores returned to his publisher with the covers torn off.  Imagine his rage and sorrow seeing the faces of his children mutilated that way, if you can, Bakersfield.