Dreamed the other night that I was in the Oval Office at the White House. It was a brief dream. I floated around in the office, which had no furniture. The walls were dollhouse-white with gold paint on the paneling. The floor was the kind of hardwood that exists in many Manhattan apartments, and I thought during the dream that this was the most familiar room in the entire United States, that this was Our Room, and that the very concept of this room lay deep within the consciousness of every American, and of America itself. But no one could ever claim that the room is theirs.

It had no warmth or personality outside of its nebulous possession of power. As I floated about in the room it felt starchy and unwashable, like an old, distracted tradition. For some reason I said in the dream that there is nothing like the real ownership of power to draw forth all that is good and all that is rotten in a person's character. Power is so demanding that you can only give it everything you have, and no less. I don't know who I was talking to, but there was someone else in the room with me.

At the time, the White House was under the Nixon administration. I always found Nixon to be dark and fascinating, but I had no particular reason to think anything of him at all for a great many years.

When he resigned from office I was 5 years old and living in Southeast Asia. When we returned to the U.S. in 1976 I never thought of Nixon as anything more than a frowning, unmentionable puff of gas that preceded the Carter years and somehow made those years possible. In my mind, he was always gone, but not exactly out of power; he was like a divorced father.

I know when I first became interested in him, though, and it had nothing to do with politics. I became interested in Nixon one afternoon at college, during the summer of 1989. When I was not washing dishes at the cafeteria I was passing innumerable hours in the college library ravenously reading old issues of Life Magazine and Time Magazine, and also things like Scientific American and National Geographic from the 1920's, and back-issues of Science.

It was in an issue of Life Magazine that I saw a picture of then vice-president Nixon doing a guest appearance on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. The picture showed Nixon playing the piano, and unless I misread the photo caption, it seemed that he was playing something of his own composition.

At the time I was very interested in learning about people who had become well-known in their discipline and who also composed music at some time in their life. It really was surprising, I thought, to learn that Leo Tolstoy and Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Nabokov (among others) had composed music.

(Some jerk on the upper west side composed a set of piano pieces called "The Hitler Suite," which I think was based on themes from an overture Hitler wrote when he was in his 20's. Not surprisingly, the composer of the Suite has never secured a single performance of this composition.)

Now, a certain part of me finds this interest of mine to be self-serving and slightly dispicible; any performer who would make some kind of crusade to resurrect the sallow piano music of Frederic Nietzsche or the chamber music of Benjamin Franklin must certainly have some extraneous agenda at work. And I look back on my interest in Richard Nixon with a definite feeling of disgust.

But I'll tell you why.

You see, what happened was this. After seeing (and possibly mis-reading) the photo caption which may or may not have said that Nixon was playing music by Nixon, I started writing letters to him. I wanted to perform his music, anything that he had written, on my senior recital. It fit in with my program, too, because I decided to play 26 pieces by composers for every letter of the alphabet. I had no 'N' composer (though eventually settled for a really stupid piece by Carl Nielsen), and thought it would be very unusual and spastically incongruous (and, therefore, perfect for an audience at my college) to include some piece of music by Richard Nixon.

I wanted people listening to the recital to see Nixon listed and then scratch their heads and ask the person next to them "this is by that guy who was the president?" And they'd look around and scoff slightly, there would be confusion, and some would assume a kind of smart-aleck grimace, and before they knew it I'd be playing the next piece in sequence, which was something by Leo Ornstein, and they'd be left wondering about it until the end of the show.

I've done this program several times since that first time, and usually with success, but it's never included anything by Richard Nixon, and I doubt it ever will, although I have found more concrete evidence that Nixon had once composed music.

After I moved to New York, I bought a book from a street-vendor. It cost me five bucks, and is called Music at the White House, a History of the American Spirit, by Elise K. Kirk. On page 318, paragraph 2, Kirk quotes The Memoirs of Richard Nixon with this:

"As a child I spent hours sitting at the piano and picking out tunes. . . . During my high school years, I played the piano for various church services each week. . . . Although only a freshman at Whittier College, I was elected the first President of the Orthogonians, and I wrote our constitution and our song."

It was that last line, "I wrote our constitution and our song," and the fact that I had a recital coming up which re-energized me in my quest for music composed by the former president.

I couldn't tell from the Memoirs comment whether or not Nixon had written the actual music for the song, or if he'd written only the words. I know that Nixon wrote a certain amount of poetry, so it seemed possible that he did in fact only write the words, while his dog Checkers carried the tune.

Finally having some real organization (Whittier College) to direct my question at, I wrote a letter to the music librarian at the college in which I explained my situation (New York recital, 26 pieces by composers for every letter of the alphabet, blahblahblah) and asked if there was any way of getting a copy of the theme song for this club called the Orthogonians, its music possibly written by Richard Nixon.

I decided that even if Nixon had only written the words to the song, I would still play it on my recital and credit it to Nixon/whoever. In that case, anyone who was curious could ask about the authorship could ask me later.

Another option that I seriously considered (in the event that Nixon only wrote the words) was to actually sing the song on stage, right out loud. I would not have been too terribly alarming to the audience, because my program included a number of other pieces which required me to speak while playing. But my singing is just ghastly, so I thought of hiring a choir to sing the song, but before my ideas got out of hand I figured I ought to wait and learn more about the Orthogonians.

Eventually, I learned that it was Nixon and his best friend (whose name I don't know) who had founded the Orthogonians, and that the club continued to exist until the 1990's. This was early 1992, and the club had recently disbanded (or as the operator at Whittier College explained to me, it had been "forced to cease operations").

Its discontinuance seemed to have nothing to do with the Orthogonians club in particular, it was just some new rule disallowing private all-male clubs or somesuch, this according to the operator at the college.

At any rate, the archives of the Orthogonians were entrusted to the custody of Nixon's best friend and co-founder of the club, and it was to this person that the music librarian at Whittier forwarded my inquiry.

As the librarian explained to me later, this friend of Nixon's was the only person who could possibly have had what I was looking for, because the archives of the club were considered secret. What the terms of that secrecy were I don't know, but I don't think it had anything to do with Nixon having been president. I think it was just an exclusive club, complete with initiation rites and hazing and all that.

I waited several weeks, in which time I heard nothing back from the Whittier Library. I wrote again, asking anyone who might have handled my request to please telephone me at work (I was so impressed with myself for actually having a job that I told everyone I knew to "call me at work").

This time, a couple of days later, I did get a call from the music librarian at Whittier College, and he said that he had forwarded my request weeks earlier to Nixon's best friend, and that he had cc:'d me on the correspondence, and that any further action on this matter was in the hands of this other person.

But for some reason which probably had something to do with my perilous living arrangements at the time (I lived in a transient hotel on West 75^th Street), this correspondence never reached me, and I moved to another apartment before ever hearing from anyone else.

I did leave a forwarding address with the hotel, but knew even as I wrote the address on a slip of paper that the effort was wasted. The desk clerk literally laughed at me as I tried to explain to her that I might be receiving a very important parcel, and could someone please forward it to this address.

I don't know now if, had I stayed at that hotel a few weeks longer, I would have received any material from that person to whom the librarian had directed my inquiry. In fact, it's been one of the most stinging irritations of my life to have come so close to finally knowing the truth about something so strange and inconsequential, only to possibly have the communication itself lost.

I could have inquired again, or asked the librarian to ask that person to resend whatever may possibly have been sent me, but something about the way he described the correspondence and his mannered tone of voice gave me a terrible feeling of having stepped over a certain boundary in this matter.

What if Nixon's friend received my inquiry, and upon receipt communicated with Nixon himself to ask how he felt about some kid in New York playing a song he wrote in college as part of a piano recital.

It gave me a bad feeling, because I had written to Nixon and to various Nixon archives several times over the past 2 or 3 years, explaining the nature of my recital program and why I wanted to play any music he might have written, and I never received any correspondence whatsoever in return from any of these institutions, or from anyone who might have known Nixon himself.

The idea that he would have learned of this last request of mine and specifically instructed someone not to talk to me, and not to write back to me or acknowledge my request but to just ignore it - all the selfishness of my persistence in this endeavor suddenly filled my mind, and I badly regret the intrusion I may have made into the life of someone who had certainly endured every possible intrusion of privacy that one individual could possibly tolerate. I had the definite impression from what the librarian told me that Nixon himself had been informed of my request.

I decided not to make another inquiry into the matter, and simply do not know if I ever made contact, or if Nixon's friend had tried to make contact with me, either to tell me to get lost or to say something more diplomatic and off-putting.

I do seem to remember, now that I'm typing this whole story out, that I did receive a letter from some Nixon archive, but I can't remember which one it was, or anything else about it except that it said something like "Our records show no indication that Richard Nixon composed music." Damn, I wonder if I'm just imagining that, or where I would have put such a letter. It would certainly not be here, but back in Tampa, in some box in some closet.

Between that last paragraph and this one I went out to eat and while walking to the diner I could see that letter in front of me again, though I still don't remember what Nixon archive or library it was that responded to me. I just remember holding the letter and thinking "Man, that is a pretty strange piece of mail."

I was sitting right here on this spot when Nixon died. I live 6 blocks from the hospital in which he died, and where Jackie Onassis stayed before her death. I think their co-existence in that place was truly surrealistic, and New York Hospital was, for a brief and indescribably strange time, a time-stained White House, as empty and crowded as the Oval Office is bulging with dignity and promises.