It is little known, even by those who remember him, that two of Frank Sinatra's illegitimate children were born with Harlequin-type ichthyosis. Their skin appeared brittle, shattered into diamond-shaped scales which revealed the deeper inwrought tissue undulating at every breath like cold bacon. It is a hideous congenital disease that is almost always fatal within days of birth. But Sinatra had the means to keep the children alive; in fact, the drug Isotrex (the only effective treatment for the disease) was largely developed through his funding.
With constant love and medical care the children lived into adolescence and it came to pass that Sinatra got it into his head to bring the two stricken youths together in a platonic matrimony of like creatures, celebrated at great expense in a hidden region of New Jersey close by the water in Paulus Hook. There are many such privately owned portions in the area, estates not mapped and made impenetrable by illusionistic barriers and mazes of false paths both physical and psychological. Check your GPS machine the next time you take a long walk near the water there, you'll notice coordinate jumps of an unnaturally turbulent character.
I myself had walked a path previously hidden to me that day, a path strewn with authorial interferences as predictably ubiquitous as chopsticks in an abandoned uranium mine. These circumstances left me at the end riding along on an unscheduled gypsy cab ride in a helicopter. The bargain I'd struck for my safe return to the city island included silent participation in a contract job that would claim a mere hour of my time before I could be deposited at my intended destination. The pilot didn't know the purpose of this particular job but it was too lucrative to pass over for my excursion alone. He'd been hired to go up slowly at certain prearranged times in a New Jersey grassland and float from point to point, creating micro bursts of hard-winded weather by the effort. During one lift he became distracted by our conversation and we drifted over the secret Sinatra family wedding.
