A brief, true story to illustrate what made Rick a Great Man (by Michael Herzen, his one-time employer and, much more importantly, his friend)
The scene: winter, in Moscow, at the Schneider’s apartment very near the Kremlin. Our family was visiting theirs, and at the end of the evening we discovered a car, a new high-priced car (commonly, although not exclusively, a perquisite of the mob), parked right in the middle of the courtyard, blocking the exit. Pursuant to my distress call, Rick came down from their apartment and believed he recognized the car as belonging to a Mafia type residing somewhere in the building.
After several minutes of incessant car horn blasts – blasts that echoed painfully off all the walls in that enclosed courtyard – finally produced the culprit, he sauntered over to his car as slowly as possible, asking why we wanted him, as though it was not obvious. We both, Rick and I (but especially me) assailed his obtuseness, and most of all his selfish thoughtlessness at blocking everyone in the courtyard. Would it be asking too much, we asked (with heavy sarcasm) for him to move his car? For this no-neck type (in Russian: krutoi), we had gone too far: we had evidently not begged and pleaded sufficiently – or, for that matter, at all – for a person of his exalted status. He announced he was going to show us how to behave properly, opening his trunk angrily, with a mob boss’ scowl. We were beginning to expect him to pull out his gun – these were anarchic days in Moscow when there was almost no police enforcement or protection for anything or for anyone – but fortuitously he didn’t find it there. He then snarled that he was going to teach us a lesson, jerking out his phone ostentatiously to request his friends, clearly his gangland buddies, to come to assist him with these all-too-voluble, insufficiently servile, foreigners.
He then left his car, and us, as we waited for the inevitable appearance of these gang members. What were we going to do? How were we going to avoid being beaten up, at a minimum? Desperate for a solution, we ultimately found one: by folding in the external mirrors, and by careful backing and maneuvering, with Rick’s guidance as we inched past, we were able to drive around his car without hitting it. By the thinnest of margins, we escaped!
Rick’s response to all this? He, Rick (who had been much cooler and more restrained than I), had not handled it well, he said. He should have approached this strutting, conceited bandit differently. Then this drama could have been avoided. When I asked what that meant concretely, he looked past me thoughtfully and responded: “I am sure there was a way. There is a lesson to be learned here. I just need to ponder it a bit longer.” This was Rick, analyzing the bellicose behavior of this repulsive thug and putting it to use, to improve himself!
Most, I hazard to say – certainly not me – would never do that. It is here, though, in this simple (yet fraught) scene, where we find an ingredient that went into making Rick a truly Great Man, a rare gem among the rest of us. His task was to see the human even in the lowest of us, and – when the time came – contact it in the most useful, helpful way. With his passing, another important – likely irreplaceable – agent to make ourselves, and our planet, a better place, is gone.