Doug Payne 1951-2009

We've lost our most critical reader. Poet, writer and human rights activist. Doug Payne wrote prose with a style tight as a drum and with a fluency in images that brought issues home with an impact. Doug was my friend for 53 some odd years and died on Wednesday July 29th from a two-year struggle against lung cancer. First diagnosed in 2007, he underwent surgery and chemo and had a positive prognosis. On July 19th I e-mailed him a clip about the famous Commandante Cero--Eden Pastora--threatening to invade Honduras to free it from the golpistas. Apparently in the ensuing week his condition deteriorated and finally he died in the Bronx.


His last monicker was "author lives in the Adirondacks". For me he will always be associated with my childhood on the Jersey Shore where we went to grade school in Asbury Park and later with Manhattan, where he lived for over a quarter of a century before he and his wife bought a home near Saranac Lake. By coincidence both of us ended up at William College, where we found ourselves as roommates. Now it can be told, Doug was involved in the capture of the Administrative Building during the protest by black students and comveniently stole the files secretly maintained on his friends, including me. During the protests against the invasion of Cambodia during 1970, Doug spoke at local colleges in Western Massachusetts and participated in the strike movement. He began writing poetry at Williams and won honors from the Yale Younger Poets program.



When I was at Harvard, Doug drove a cab and lived in Belmont, Massachusetts. We later rented a house in Newton with my wife and an actor Ed Barron. Doug and I "tutored" a young man, whom Harvard Medical School literally called "the sickest human being we have ever examined." A man prone to violence, incoherent ravings who communicated in pop lyrics. We convinced his mother to let us ween him away from the massive doses of thorazine. The experiment ended with a semi-articulate man, who no longer punched through the mindclouds created by the drug. At his worst, Richard could knock you out while you drove him in a car or break a solid oak desk in half during one of his rages. Our experience with him would provide a catalog of private phrases and codewords we would use to communicate in the years ahead.



With my wife at Duke and me at the University of Chicago, Doug moved to Manhattan and worked first in the mailroom of a law firm to allow himself time to write. He was assembling a book of poetry with another Williams Alum Jamie James entitled "Today's Problems",the title of a well-known history and civics book used in the 1950s. The book had such classic images as Hitler riding in a car with the caption "Not Our Style". Doug started writing sports columns for Andy Warhol's Interview magazine. After I moved to New York in the mid-1970s, we had lunch with Andy who graciously showed us his silk screening technique and proudly showed off to Bob Collicello several pages of his book--a single page xeroxed several times.



Together we created Pachyderm Productions, a multimedia company that sought to publish Today's Problems, write screenplays and produce documentaries. I went off to Angola with David Smith to produce a documentary on the UNITA guerrilas fighting the Cubans in southern and central Angola. The film "Bullets into Rain" was shown at MOMA and caught the eye of the now late Walter Cronkite, who showed it on the CBS Evening News, which we all watched at a neighborhood bar. We also wrote a screenplay with David Shepard and Jamie James called Zungu Whiplash, a spaghetti Western set in Kenya, which was supposed to be a vehicle for the late Tony Perkins. Years later, I thought I saw a grade C production of it on television overseas. After a few years, we abandoned our 26nd Street offices with a second-story picture window that showed a parade of streetwalkers late at night and moved everything into Doug's apartment.



On a dare by a publisher--could we produce a book in a month--Doug and I wrote "Where have They Gone--Rock and Roll Stars". The Tempo paperback made the bellseller list for a month on the West Coast. The project entailed tracking down old time pop stars and interviewing them about their lives. A few moments were worth it. Herman of Herman's Hemits--Peter Noone told us he actually had saved all his money from those years, lived in Malibu, had a studio built near the pool and was enjoying life. Tony Williams would call and talk for hours on heroin, asking us to get royalities for him. And we met Ronnie Spector at a diner near the old Coliseum Bookstore where she told us she couldn't be interviewed for fear of her ex--Phil. Friends of ours heard about this and suggested the both of us contribute to a book on Fast Food. This led to our interview with Parliment and Funkadelic leader George Clinton and the strange graphic of the United Nations made from chocolate that appears in the book.



After a few years of freelance writing, I went onto Freedom House and became the resident scholar. After a stint as a bartender, Doug called me from the train station to say he was going into rehab after a a ten day bender, which nearly killed him. What's amazing today is that he stayed absolutely straight for over a quarter of a century and smoke free for the last fourteen years or so. As events were happening in Latin and Central America, I hired Doug first as my assistant and then later he took my position as head of Latin America at Freedom House. After I left there, he eventually served for a short time as the executive director.



He became a regular contributor to Freedom at Issue and for many years virtually wrote up the country reports for all of Latin America, the Caribbean and Central America for the Survey of Freedom, something unheard of today when academics produce the reports.



During these years, Doug and I travelled alot--often together. For years, we basically commuted to El Salvador. He was a popular speaker at labor union functions in the region. We were together at the historic elections in Chile, which saw the end of the Pinochet regime. We also travelled to Suriname where we had the bizarre moment of watching missionaries baptize locals in the motel swimming pool. Paraguay was probably the strangest trip because of the country itself. Prior to an audience with then General Rodriquez, who had toppled Stroessner, we found ourselves in a British beef house decorated with English prints and ghastly furniture. But it was Haiti where Doug got into his old revolutionary spirit. This was before Rev. Aristide got corrupt and it was in the middle of the popular revolution against the military government. He spent hours on the street becoming involved in the demonstrations and parading around Port-au-Prince.



After both of us left Freedom House in the 1990s, Doug developed the dossiers for political asylum cases from Central America and actively persuaded the INS to become more deliberate and moral on these issues. He also began to write for Dissent and new magazines on topics ranging from the border wars along the Mexico-Texas frontier to the corruption in our native Asbury Park. For years, he worked closely with the Socialist International secretariat crafting their position papers and making the arrangements for their meetings. During these years, he finally got to travel to Africa and to India. His analysis of Caribbean politics for CSIS provoked the ire of the Bird family in Antigua as Doug detailed the levels of their corruption. In the last few months, we have shared a few e-mails over the arrest of the ponzi scheme artist, Sir Stanford, and the complete collapse of the Antiguan banks and the total impoverishment of the local citizens.



Shortly after 9/11, he and his wife Nancy, who is a licensed vet, bought a home in upper New York State. Nancy was one of the vets who took care of the dogs during the immediate aftermath to the Twin Tower collapse. You can see some of Doug's last works on http://www.wordriot.org/ . With my dreams of moving to Maine, Doug exchanged his views on wood-burning stoves, the proper snowshoes to buy and the problems of getting wired in rural America. He loved where he lived, except when all the yuppies would fly up for summer days on Saranac Lake. Over the last few years, he travelled to Oklahoma to meet with distant relatives to study the outlaw background of some of his family in the 19th century. He went fly-fishing in Montana and Pennsylvania with his brother Roger, and would alert me to his travels to the Jersey Shore where he loved to stay in a motel run by a Hindi couple.



Doug took time to critique my son's band and forward his recommendations of favorite old bluesingers, which he listened to. He was looking toward Ian's new CD to be cut this month. He thought Ian had wrongly moved from a punk-style, which reminded Doug of the days going to CBGB's and listening to the Ramones, to a more jazzy style, which he always called noodling. He preferred the unvarnished rock without decoration--much like his prose style.



Years ago, we said when our rides were about over we would get together again and compare notes. Unfortunately, it won't happen. There were a lot of hits and moments. An endless stream of memories. As our favorite phrase coined under the influence of acid, it was a 'remembered state of mind that has never been."



Goodby, old friend.