Two weekends ago my lovely wife Sarah participated in, along with her mother, aunt, and cousin, a three-day, 60-mile walk to generate a fairly large chunk of money for the fight against breast cancer. It was pretty danged awesome, and it also happened to take place in and around Dallas, where I had never been. I was kinda stoked. I was finally able to visit the scene of what has seemed to me for a very long time to be the shadiest of all shady shit gone down. There in Dealey Plaza, manning a table of pamphlets, books, photo albums, and DVDs, was Robert Groden, the man who had written the book that first intrigued me and got me into reading about all the gnarly crap surrounding that moment. We chatted for a bit and I bought a DVD of his and he signed a glossy little photo-album book he throws in. In the DVD extras you can watch Groden introduce the first public airing of the Zapruder film on the show Good Night America.
All this to tell you that Geraldo Rivera, March 6 of 1975, was a total badass.
For starters, check out that dude's hair. It reminds me a lot of my buddy Ted Kamp's. Ted's is certainly more luxuriant and full than Geraldo's, but Gerry's is pretty dope. He's also got a pretty sweet stash and a bitchin' suit, and he's very poised. I like poise. Ted Kamp's pretty poised. But I digress. The above photo isn't from the particular episode of Rivera's Good Night America I'm referring to, but it's around the same era and gives you an idea of the badassness Mr. Rivera was exuding at the time. Maybe without the same amount of poise as on March 6 of 1975, but hey.
Now let me be clear: I say "March 6 of 1975" specifically because I don't want to get into Geraldo's politics, or motivation, or controversies. And even though I have always been pretty pumped on things like his ability to take a chair to the face and still tell a skinhead to sit down and shut up, I'm not presently prepared to endorse the man as a great figure of journalism. But if you watch the clip of his show on which he airs the Zapruder film for the first time, you see a young journalist who seems very sensitive to his audience, guests, and the subject matter, and who has no qualms about saying things like "That's the most disturbing thing I've ever seen," and using hip words like "heavy" to describe what's going to be shown. He just looks like someone who would have been extremely cool to rap with at the time. Besides, he hung out with this guy:
Wait, let's try that again without the creepy barnacle lady attached to John's back:
Much better! That reminds me... Am I the only one who thinks Double Fantasy would have been infinitely better had it been Single Fantasy instead? If you don't know what I'm talking about, go buy the album and get back to me after a good listen to the songs by both sides of that terribly unbalanced union of "talent."
But again, I digress.
I remember quite clearly sitting in front of the TV with my entire family for hours waiting for Geraldo to bust into Al Capone's vault. The entirety of my life since that night has been colored on some level by Geraldo's colossal failure. We all grew up believing in the monolithic and enduring buffoonery of a man whom we all thought "got his" in the end when the wall came down to reveal nothing more than an old stop sign and a couple of gin bottles.
But having watched the end of that show again, I've got to give it to him: he owns up and takes it like a man worthy of that warehouse-broom of a mustache. Geraldo, twenty-three years later, has proved to be pretty danged okay in my book. And as the world's most famous Puerto Rican Jew, I think we would all do well to acknowledge him as the inspiration for this guy:
"Hey, Charles Manson, I got a note!" Okay, so maybe I made that inspiration thing up, but you never know.
Man, who remembers Dynamite magazine? I used to order that through the Scholastic book club! Sweet! Thanks, Geraldo, for helping me relive my past. Capone and I are both feeling pretty warm and fuzzy right about now.
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