God bless you, Dr. Kevorkian (17 page)

"I paid my dues along with everybody said.

It is his hope that a modest monument, possibly a stone cross, since he was a Christian, will be erected somewhere in his memory, possibly on the grounds of the United Nations headquarters in New York. It should be incised, he said, with his name and dates Underneath should be a two-word sentence in German: Roughly translated into English, this comes out, "I Your Pardon," or "Excuse Me."
46

luring

s

experience, I spoke to

Wesley Joyce, dead at sixtyfive, former cop and minor league ball player, owner of the Lion's Head Bar in Greenwich Village from 1966 until it went bust in

His was the country's most

famous hangout for heavy-drinking, non-stop-talking writers in America. One wag described the clientele as

"drinkers with writing problems." The late Mr. Joyce said it was the writers who made it their club of their own accord, which hadn't pleased him all that much. He said he installed a juke box in the hopes it would interfere with their talking. But they kept coming. "They just had to talk a lot louder," he said.
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WNYC's reporter on the Afterlife. During yesterday's controlled near-death experience, I had the pleasure of speaking with Frances Keane, a romance languages expert and writer of children's books, who died of cancer of the pancreas this past June 26 at the age of eighty-five. It seemed to me that her generally laudatory obit in the
Times
cut her off at the knees at the very end with this stark sentence: "Her three marriages ended in divorce." I asked her about this and o