THE KING OF BABYLON

The road to hell is paved with good intentions; indeed, that is the adage most appropriate to my story. Surely I meant to do the most good when I took the first step that ultimately led me on my path to perdition. Those I wished most to help were my most blatant victims. Judge me, citizens of the world, not on the monstrous disaster I wrought, but rather on what was in my heart.

It all began innocently enough on a steaming summer day in July of 1983. I was between marriages, down on my luck, and badly in need of a soft shoulder to cry on. I was a survivor of many torrid love affairs and three failed marriages. Neither type of relationship had worked for me. A love affair is for pleasure, so when the pleasure ran out, so did I. A marriage is supposed to be a life commitment with one's mate as one's prime concern. My marriages were doomed before the ink dried on the marriage certificates because, selfishly, I could never make my wives fit into my life.

My predilection for women carried with it the appellation "wolf," but this is a misnomer. The wolf is one of God's most maligned creatures. When a man is referred to as a wolf, he is characterized as rapacious, womanizing, vicious, and untrustworthy. A wolf, unlike his Homo sapiens counterpart, mates for life and is an equal partner in raising the young. Would that man were more like his lupine friends!

I have digressed. These reflections on my relationships have little to do with my story except to point out my pleasureless frame of mind. My depressed sense of self-esteem clung to me like the sweat-laden shirt I was wearing on that scorching summer day that changed my life forever.

I was living in the second floor of a New York City brownstone built around the turn of the century. My apartment was starting to show its age. Whenever a truck lumbered past, a rumbling would occur that varied in intensity depending on the size of the truck much like earthquakes vary on the Richter scale. This one must have been an eighteen-wheeler because the walls shook so violently that three pictures flew off their hangers and shattered on the hardwood floors. Cleaning up the mess, I noticed my old "Certificate of Excellence in Mathematics" behind one of the pictures. Of the years I have spent on this planet, there are precious few accomplishments of which I am proud. This certificate was at once the symbol of my proudest achievement and my most egregious waste of a God-given gift. I carefully extracted it from the glass.

My mind drifted back to a beautiful June day in 1955 when I graduated from George Washington High School in New York City. As though it were yesterday, I remember the words of Mr. Ellison, my mathematics teacher, as he handed me my diploma and my mathematics certificate. “John, you have a gift given to few people on this earth. In my thirty- two years of teaching, I have not seen your grasp and understanding of mathematics. It would be a mortal sin to waste such a gift.”