My first black friend was this guy named Ernie Butcher, who was in my Peace Corps group in Korea from 1967 to 1969. I called him “Ernie” because that is what he called himself, but previous to those years, and after them, he was “Ernesto”. He lived in Panama until he was sixteen, after that in New York, where he went to Hunter College.
I was twenty-two when I met Ernie. I have written in previous essays about my insulated (read “white”) childhood, but at Jason Lee Junior High School, in Tacoma, there were tons of black kids - probably half the student body. I, however, steered clear of them, both out of ignorance and out of a deep lack of self-assuredness.
In Korea, Ernie taught in the southern port city of Pusan (okay Busan, if we must!) while I lived over by the Yellow Sea. So we didn’t see each other much. But when we met in Seoul we went out to eat and drink, and laughed together until the curfew at midnight.
Ernie was a good runner in college - on the Hunter College track team, if I remember correctly - and he could also sing which, as you may remember from my Love Portion Number Nine essay (Money Well Spent, June 19) was a national pastime in Korea, especially when drinking.
When our two-year Peace Corps stint was up, everyone’s school had these huge, all-students-on-deck, assemblies, honoring us with speeches by the headmasters and teachers. And we, in turn, were supposed to give goodbye speeches in Korean.
I stumbled through mine, but do you know what Ernie did?
He stumbled through his speech, too, to be sure. But then, in front of hundreds of assembled students, he stood up and sang the Stephen Foster minstrel song Old Black Joe, for the simple reason that he knew they all loved it, and because he had a good voice.
After leaving Korea, Ernie and I decided to travel together through north and southeast Asia, before going back to the antiwar battles in America.
In a bar in Taipei, in fact, on June 21, 1969, the night after the American moon landing, we were - I’m NOT kidding - carried on the shoulders of our fellow Taiwanese drinkers, as if we had landed on the moon, when they discovered we were American.
We had wonderful travels until, in Cambodia, at Angkor Wat, the Vishnu-dedicated temple near Siem Reap, a mosquito bit me and gave me, a few days later, a full-blown case of dengue fever.
Oh, the pain! And such a high fever! And such hallucinations!
My symptoms started on the day we were suppose to travel from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh, in order to catch a flight to Thailand. But when Ernie bundled me into a bus, though it was ninety degrees, I was shivering like I’d just been pulled from an ice-fishing hole in Greenland.
The road outside the bus was a silver ribbon winding into LSD territory, if LSD also came with bone-breaking pain. I screamed and I glared at our fellow passengers when they looked at me, like Jack Nicholson did in The Shining.
But Ernie somehow managed to shepherd me all the way to the airport and onto our flight, and into a hotel in Bangkok at around midnight.
His plan was to take me to the Thailand Peace Corps doctor the next morning. Little did he know, however, that I had made a secret hallucinogenic deal with the hotel management which was this: I would not sleep in their hotel room until I built a cheese factory!
Lucky for me, the beds in our room had starched sheets, great for constructing a cheese factory. So off to work I went, building like a beaver builds his dam!
Each time I built a cheese factory, though, and the walls came falling down, I would burst into tears and run to the bathroom to empty my bowels.
And then I would start again so I might finally get some sleep.
This cheese factory business went on all night, scaring the shit out of Ernie. He thought I would die before morning, leaving him with nothing but a corpse to take to the Peace Corps doctor.
But though no cheese factory ever got built, I somehow survived, with a temperature of 105 (40.5 in Celsius) when we finally did get to the doctor. And after I was injected with about a million units of penicillin, everything but my utter exhaustion (and Ernie’s too) was manageable.
We spent a week recuperating in Malaysia, and then went back to carousing in Hong Kong, before heading to America and going our separate ways.
I became whatever I have become, and Ernie, now always “Ernesto” took a job at the New York Port Authority, working his way up to chief operating officer.
On September 11, 2001, he was the most experienced surviving member of the Port Authority hierarchy and took over everything.
When I last saw him, in 2012, he told me he attended eighty-four funerals after 9/11, and also that he gave eighty-four eulogies. That meant he spoke in loving ways about people he didn’t know well, and that, of course, reminded me of the love he showed by standing in front of those hundreds of earnest Korean students and singing Old Black Joe.
Ernesto Butcher died on May 15, 2014 during his daily exercise routine.
Here is some of what the New York Times said about him:
As chief operating officer, Mr. Butcher marshaled thousands of managers and employees scattered throughout the region, took charge of closing the gateways to New York City and established a temporary headquarters for the agency in Jersey City.
Two days later, while taking phone calls from frantic relatives of 150 authority employees initially reported missing, and with a go-ahead from the police, Mr. Butcher gave the signal to reopen the system: resuming operations at Kennedy, La Guardia and Newark Airports; the George Washington Bridge; two Hudson River tunnels; the shipping terminals of Brooklyn, Jersey City and Newark; and a dozen other facilities run by his agency.
“I’m here today to assure the people of New York and New Jersey, and throughout the world, that the Port Authority is open for business,” he said at a news conference on September 14.
The thing about it is, Ernie was “open for business” his entire life.
And he saved mine during those dangerous dengue fever days.
Postscript…
It is more than ironic that while I was busy writing about Ernesto’s heroics during the attack in New York on September 11, 2001, another attack should take place in that same state, from all appearances borne out of the same insanity, this time on the writer Salman Rushdie, badly wounding Rushdie and injuring my friend Henry Reese of Pittsburgh, a fellow fighter for the rights of writers to practice their craft freely and in peace.
In an email that I just received from Nobelist Wole Soyinka in Nigeria, he said:
“Rage. Undiluted rage is all I continue to feel. I don’t know Rushdie’s attacker, but his ilk are all over this nation. I know vast numbers of them are jubilating. The primitivism of this religious bloodlust will be with the world for some time yet, to the eternal discredit of mankind.”
Didn't know Ernie well, but I felt like I did because I heard about him all the time, even decades after our Peace Corps service. I remember he passed suddenly very soon after a reunion of his Peace Corps. You and several others remarked at how healthy and youthful he seemed. I guess we're at a time in our lives filled with goodbyes, often unexpected.
Hi Richard! Just wanted you to know that I've enjoyed all your writings, but this one is my favorite. What an amazing person Ernie was, and how fortunate you are to have known him. Your tribute brought tears to my eyes.