That's all I remember

Times were hard, we all barely got by, no one owned an automobile, except perhaps someone's rich girlfriend, or a Persian student among us, with the Shah's treasury, or his own wealthy family in Tehran footing the bill, but we lived, and sometimes loved, drank beer, smoked the evil weed, and enjoyed what little we could enjoy amidst the ever present misery of the world.

Grantley Cummings was from Barbados. Macarthur Johnson was native born, as were Robert Smith and Mary. Howie Klein was from Connecticut as was his pal Manny. Both were Jewish, students at a nearby private university, whose parents were wealthy factory owners somewhere outside the state. Jan, the bartender, was Dutch, and Fritz, another bartender, Austrian.

Macarthur, Grantley, and Mary had been hired by Robert. I hired Howie and his pal. The first night that Howie worked, I was already off my shift, we hardly knew each other then, he sent me with the key to his apartment, and specific instructions, to get his stash hidden on a back shelf somewhere. I went there on foot, found it, brought it back, and, standing in the back alley, we lit up. No one had trusted me as much before or since.

All of it happened a long time ago in another city. The names above are real, or as real as I remember them. I suspect that Robert, Macarthur and Grantley are all dead by now, from AIDS. Others, I haven't seen since then, and I'm unlikely to ever see again.

There were others. There was Johnny Pacheco, a short, feisty Bolivian Indian with a Beatle haircut circa 1965, who had sneaked into the country, adopted the name of a famous Latin bandleader, and aggressively pursued the American Dream. Whenever someone shouted "La migra!", Johnny and his Bolivian pal Ruben, a hispanic man from the upper classes of La Paz, would both rush to the back door and stay in the alley until the danger passed. Sometimes the danger was real, other times, it was somebody's cruel joke.

There were Dan, who worked for me, and his girlfriend Lorraine, who didn't work there, but came back daily to pick up Dan. After they broke up, and Dan not altogether unhappy about it, the rest of us would tease him by playing the Johnny Nash record "I Can See Clearly Now" on the jukebox, singing along with it, and changing slightly the second line of the song, which in the original went "The rain is gone". The teasing wouldn't make Dan altogether happy.

Robert, Grantley and Mary worked the kitchen during the day. The rest of us worked the floor. Robert, whenever he accidentally dropped a hamburger patty on the floor, and had to pick it up, would exclaim: "Soul food!" Mary made cold sandwiches and salads. Robert teased Mary, and so did I. She took it in stride.

We had daily lunch menu specials, and Robert would decide what they were. I sent one of my guys to the kitchen after 10:30 to find out, so we could place our handwritten index cards on the tables. On Fridays, the special was always Robert's incomparable chili, customers came specially to order it. But, as a training by fire drill, I would send one of my new guys to the kitchen on Fridays at 10:30 to ask Robert what the special was. Robert's answer, invariably: "Shit on spindles, motherfucker!"

Jan the bartender once told Fritz, who was stocky, square faced, of Teutonic build and rather humourless, that he had a simian face. Fritz walked around proudly for a week until he learned the meaning of the word. Fritz once pulled out his wallet and showed me a photograph of his famous 20th century countryman he was proud of. Jan kept bragging about the blowjobs he was supposedly receiving from some regular women customers. The rest of us could only dream.

There were also Charles I. from New York City, who had been adopted into a family of aristocrats, and Jeff L., his Jewish friend and Shakesperean scholar from Missouri, whose father was a dentist at a military base there. Charles was a closeted homosexual, whose jealousy over Jeff's friendship, a straight, cost me that job sometime later. Jeff then helped me get my next job. A few years later I saw Charles on public television, conducting a fund raiser. Years later after that, I ran into Jeff who told me he thought Charles was dead of AIDS. I don't know where Jeff, my best friend from those days, is now.

It took a while before I learned that Robert, a tall handsome, somewhat shy, masculine, deep voiced black man, was a homosexual, as were Grantley and Macarthur. It was probably Macarthur, the most extroverted and crazy of the three, who opened it up. There was no going back. While Macarthur played it perfectly straight when customers were present, in their absence, he exploded, showed his humour, his true persona, his vulnerabilities. He and I, a straight arrow boy scout myself, were close friends for a time. Despite our opposite sexual tendencies, we could read each other's joy and pain perfectly. In the presumably sexless after life, I would rather meet Macarthur than anyone else I've known. Robert stayed cool, Grantley would catch on Macarthur's irrepressible spirit. Macarthur and Grantley, were during off hours transvestites, cross dressers, drag queens, probably Robert's lovers.

Robert looked very much like a black soul singer popular at the time. Macarthur told me the story how the three of them, Robert, with Grantley and himself in full drag, on Robert's each side, all of three them dressed to the nines, Robert wearing an outfit that was reminiscent of what the popular singer would wear, a long fur coat, gold chains, how they all entered the auditorium of an elegant concert venue, and received a standing ovation from the audience that thought it was greeting the popular singer himself accompanied by his female entourage.

Grantley, who was quite a tailor in his spare time, made me a winter fur coat out of some synthetic fabric, one that I still own. (Recall that he hailed from a tropical island.)

I still remember how Macarthur and I teased each other, in front of all the others, gathered for staff lunch down in the basement dining room after all the customers were gone at 2PM. We had improvised theatrical performances that lasted an hour or more each weekday, to the amusement of the entire staff and sometime their guests too. Oh, others well fully participating, but the two of us were the provocateurs, jokesters and a duo like the Laurel and Hardy pair. Even if our lives outside were gray and sometimes full of resignation and despair, we looked forward to those 2 o'clock daily performances. "Miss Thing" he would address me. Or "Miss Do". And, unfortunately, that's all of his banter I can remember now.

There's a better place

I sit at the corner of the L shaped bar, Doug, working on his daily crossword, faces me sitting at the short leg of the L, next to him, leaning against the wall and the coat rack sits Linda, reading Roald Dahl's autobiography "Boy". I'm reading I Remember Like Now, The Odyssey of a Polish Jew, a rare find at a used bookstore. I'm on my first pint, after that, forget about reading, sentences make sense, but don't stick any more. Linda can read well into her third. I'm usually out of there after one or two pints.

The place is nearly empty, there are no championship games to draw boisterous crowds to the muted TVs hanging above the front windows. Outside, an endless stream of buses, cars, people. Workers returning home, students going to and from classes, street people pushing their shopping carts, beggars, bicycles, and no visibly pregnant women ever, come to think of it. We're on one of the main drags of the city.

The jukebox plays an old Animals song. Young Eric Burdon pleading:

I'm just a soul whose intentions are good,
Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood

Behind him, I remember, Alan Price on keyboards, Hilton Valentine on guitar, Chas Chandler, who would later discover and manage Jimi Hendrix, on bass, and John Steel on drums. Who could be playing this 44 year old record? Not the young Chinese and Indian students sitting at the front table, whose grandparents might have been being born then. The black clad punks of the pub's staff? Not me. I haven't dropped money into a jukebox since one could get three songs for a quarter, and Gene Pitney crooned:

If I didn't have a dime,
And I didn't take the time,
To play the jukebox

Well, not really that long ago. I think how inflation and technology wiped out a whole subgenre of popular music, songs about having (or not) and inserting dimes in jukeboxes and pay phones. What are our shared experiences now? We each walk around with a telephone and a jukebox, not having to share any modern conveniences.

I order my second pint, close the book, and gaze at the scene outside. Faces of people I know by sight move past the front windows. A middle aged man walks in, spots me looking in the direction of the TV screens, and asks if I know what time the game starts. I don't. He didn't mention a team name or sport, it could be baseball, basketball, hockey, or even indoor American football that I have seen displayed (and ignored) on these screens lately. He asks a waiter, who doesn't know either and walks out.

A waitress approaches and says there is a phone call for me. I take it behind the bar. It's home, there was an important call from an important person, do I want to call back. I look around, listen to the din of the place, and say, no, later. Important persons can wait. I return to my seat and wonder about the people I know who know I'd be here right now. At least half a dozen, who when pressed would answer, "Oh yes, 5:30, weekend afternoon, he must be down at the pub sipping his ale." Only one of them is a steady customer here, another has been here with me, another has been here once a long time ago. I imagine one of the six or seven waltzing in the front door to buy me a beer, or to slap my face, or to beg forgiveness, or to return a borrowed book, or to ask for a small loan. A sort of It's a Wonderful Life in reverse, with myself playing the Jimmy Stewart role of a desperate man who finds himself wanted after all. We'd call it It's a Rotten Life and play it on television after each Holiday Season, (as Christmas is now called), as a hangover antidote to the syrupy unreality of the Frank Capra classic, that incidentally, isn't recognized as such outside the gates of our current paradise.

Another Animals song is playing on the jukebox:

We gotta get out of this place,
If it's the last thing we ever do,
We gotta get out of this place,
Girl, there is a better place for me and you.

I gulp the last sip of the ale, pick up my book, and get out of that place.

Can we talk?

"Can we talk?" is the rhetorical question and the first line spoken by the non-stop talking American comedienne Joan Rivers as she enters the stage to perform her standup comedy routine.

I was talking to someone once dear to me, about some awful things, that we knew were happening somewhere right now to some we knew, and about how the quote you see below applied to that particular situation:

"The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves."

-- Dresden James , In Freedom

I told her we (as a society) are doing this to ourselves, right here, right now. We are hounding each other, sicking the state and private institutions on each other, destroying each other, all of that in response to passing slights, faux pas, and real or imagined historical injustices against the group with which we identify.

It's not 1984, she said. It is, I replied, just use your imagination.

"Then why don't you and her go to Cuba!", she advised me, and that was the end of the conversation. Just like that! Can we talk?

Spanked!

"Too many pop references", said my main man, having caught up on the reading of the, uh, gibberish.

"Well, Salman Rushdie and Nick Tosches have 'em", I stuttered back, "Murakami, too".

"Cut them down", the master ordered, sipping his margarita, and, to cheer me up, added, "But I liked the 'Lonely Avenue' piece."

We talked about Ray Charles' recording of it, its flaws (the song lacks a bridge), and about the legendary songwriter who wrote it, Doc Pomus (who also wrote Viva Las Vegas for Elvis.)

We then talked about coincidences in Paul Auster's fiction and Auster's explanations for it. We agreed that the explanations made more sense than the occurences of these coincidences in his novels. Jim Crace has a new book out, a dystopia in the vein of Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things, he told me. Will have to look for it.

And then he spanked me. "Your 'I' is unbelieveable", he said, "He's either super cool or hysterically emotional. Which is it?"

Knowing how highly he regards psychobabble, I decided to refrain from offering an amateur psychoanalitical explanation.

"Should I make him into two characters then?"
"No, cool the hot one off and warm up the cool one. Put more of your own self into him"

"This 'your own self' is too pedestrian, boring, predictable", I answered.

I told him about how I got in a small mess fictionalizing a response of one actual person with just one word, and how everything else there could put me into a bigger stew now. He said he had learned that lesson a long time ago. It's better to fictionalize your exes and your former acquaintances than the current ones. He cited examples from books I hadn't read, some of them by Tom Wolfe's Three Stooges.

"None of these precautions will prevent your wife to still think she's the prototype for the Evil Queen, or your lover, who's mad at you this week for one reason or another, to imagine that the relationship you're describing in less than favourable terms is hers with you", he said.

I nodded.

"You look like a cat who swallowed a canary."

"I'm the canary", I offered.

Looking at me with that penetrating gaze of his, he added, pointing his finger at me, "Don't forget now that prey being hunted tries to keep as quiet as possible. Good luck."

I took a quiet sip of my drink.

We proceeded to discuss the difficulty of incorporating one's ongoing travails into fictional stories. "That's why all writers keep journals", he advised, to go back into them after some time passes and search for story ideas. And "we never fully understand what's happening to us until much later". The problem with delaying your writing, I told him, and he agreed, is that by the time you're ready to write about something that happened to you, all the detail is gone from memory, incomplete in the journal, and has to be re-invented. "The detail, however sketchy and inaccurate, is less important than our understanding of the past event", he said in the final piece of advice he handed me.

Then he asked if he could fictionalize in his current work one present acquaintance of his, myself, and use a couple of episodes I had described. I said, sure, how could I refuse, but what if I wanted to use me and mine, too, later on? I'd be accused of plagiarism writing about me! His margarita finished, the master answered saying we'd go on Oprah to resolve it, which would give automatic boost to the sales of our respective tomes. Oh? OK.

Some other song

I walked the crowded lonely avenue again last weekend playing old songs in my head and thinking about criminal investigations and our adversarial culture. Do investigations stop when the suspect dies, or to they continue? If the suspect dies by own hand, is he then considered guilty of the crime? Men, unjustly accused of various offenses, have offed themselves, we all know. An old Waylon Jennings song, from his clean cut days played in my head:

Someone's gonna get hurt before you're through
Someone's gonna pay for the things you do
How many hearts must break,
how many will it take
To satisfy you,
just to satisfy you

Another love, another fool
To play your game
Another love, another fool
They're all the same

Today in America, when one is accused of some offense, the immediate and automatic assumption of the authorities handling the investigation, is that the accused is or will soon be planning retaliation against the accuser. Consequently, the accused is now being accused of two offenses, one in the past and another one in the future that, due to the strange way future usually works, has not happened yet. I kept walking the dirty avenue, a Ray Davies song playing in my head:

Gotta stand and face it life is so complicated,
Ladi dah di dahdah, ladi dah di dah dah,
Got to get away from the complicated life son,
Life is overated, life is complicated,
Must aleviate this, complicated life.

The Jesus freaks, with their megaphones, urged me to join them on the road to salvation, young girls were showing their chests and body tattoos, the beggars were begging, pizza smells, espresso aromas, music was playing in my head. The record stores were deserted and I wondered if they would survive this media and medium revolution. I walked into a bookstore and opened a volume of selected works by a 90 year old European poet. Here is a fragment:

Forget the suffering
You caused others.
Forget the suffering
Others caused you.
The waters run and run,
Springs sparkle and are done,
You walk the earth you are forgetting.

Sometimes you hear a distant refrain.
What does it mean, you ask, who is singing?

What is life about, he was asking at 90, as he had asked at 20. Russian Questions, as we call them here. Elsewhere, he referenced Greek and Roman myths, ancient artworks, literary figures, real and imagined, things largely foreign to the highly uneducated graduates of American universities in the last, oh, 40 years.

What are our points of reference? Those of popular culture, is the simple answer. Television, popular music, movies, which are not even called "films" any more. Too snobish. (Personally,I like the word 'talkies'.) I walked out of the bookstore without buying anything. Some other song was playing in my head now.

Love and honor

My friend M. was looking for an an appropriate movie dialogue quote to describe a situation he found himself in recently at the college where he teaches. I found it for him in Chinatown (1974):

Lt. Escobar: "How'd you get past the guard?"
Jake Gittes: "Well, to tell you the truth, I lied a little."

Then I thought of other memorable movie quotes, and Casablanca (1942) popped up. By the way, Humphrey Bogart, playing saloon keeper Rick Blaine, never said "Play it again, Sam" in the film. The actual quotes were: "Play it Sam, for old times' sake, play 'As Time Goes By'." - Ilsa Lund, played by Ingrid Bergman. And "You played it for her, you can play it for me. ... If she can stand it, I can! Play it!" - Rick Blaine. The line "Play it again,Sam" first occurred in the Marx Brothers' film A Night in Casablanca (1946), which is the possible source of the misquotation.

In any event, it then occurred to me that Casablanca's theme , among other themes, was a man's dilemma between honor and love, or between duty and love, if you prefer, (or whatever, but it was a dilemma), and one man's question of being able to look himself in the mirror.

Whereas J.J. Gittes in Chinatown, did not seem to face dilemmas. He followed his guts, his sense of right and wrong and he plunged into the plots without hesitation. Trying to do good, he ends up contributing to a disaster, as he had done sometime in the past, we learn from the dialogue. Where questions and dilemmas in Casablanca are in the open, in Chinatown they are implied and suggested, but one of its themes (again, among other themes) is to this viewer the mystery and impenetrability of human relationships.

At the end of Casablanca, Ilsa Lund and her underground fighter lover Victor Laszlo escape, Rick Blaine, stuck by himself in occupied Northern Africa, says to Captain Renault (Claude Rains): "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship". Rick Blaine's current dilemma resolved, all that is left, is a friendship between two men at a lonely outpost.

At the end of Chinatown, only dark, impenetrable enigmas remain. Evelyn Cross Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) dies, and J.J Gittes' partner Lawrence Walsh restrains him from further actions saying the line that in five words wraps up and sums up all the themes in the film: "Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown".

West, please meet East

Imagine yourself in a conflict you haven't invited, and stuck somewhere in between the East and the West. There must be some place on the planet located in between those two. Let's call it the Island of Em, or even En. On the Island of En, the spiritual leader of the West (or one of them, anyway) , Jesus, orders you to turn the other cheek, while the spiritual leader of the East, Buddha, or at least one of his disciples (as I have heard), says that sometimes you have to fight. What do you do? Which do you choose?

No joke this, as yours truly found himself there, alone on that island, just this week, just today. What do you do? What do I do? Which do I choose? Another Russian Question, you say?

All this, I should say, is really happening in the West, which is, as we all know, experiencing its times of doubt and guilt over the past real or imagined crimes against humanity. So, tell me, which do you choose?

More to come...

The Mystery of Nasty Habits

I was in the office kitchen yesterday afternoon a few minutes after three, pouring myself a cup of green tea, when a co-worker walked in, poured himself a cup of strong java, and remarked on my drinking tea. I responded saying "Yes, it's tea time, tea at three". He, who is a South American, said "I think the British have their tea time at four of five." Which immediately brought to my mind the first line of the Rolling Stones song from 1969, Live With Me, and I said it: "I got nasty habits, I take tea at three", explaining its origins.

And so, the mystery of nasty habits has been resolved for me after, what, 38 years. I had never thought about it much, but when I did, I thought the proper tea time on the Islands was earlier than three. I should have read more P.G. Wodehouse, I suppose. Anyway, here's the beginning of that song:

I got nasty habits, I take tea at three
Yes, and the meat I eat for dinner
Must be hung up for a week
My best friend, he shoots water rats
And feeds them to his geese
Doncha think there's a place for you
In between the sheets?

Come on now, honey
We can build a home for three
Come on now, honey
Don't you wanna live with me?

Widening circles

The cafes I visit all have small shelf cases or stands containing free newspapers, magazines, which are more often than not, spacey New Age magazines, repertory cinema programs, course catalogs of private and public schools, advertising flyers and stacks of coloured postcard ads. The postcard ads promote various events, small festivals, performances, concerts, from ballet to hip hop, gallery openings, political rallies.

Last Saturday, dropping by one cafe, I found on the shelf an unusually thick stack of postards, more than two dozen, containing on the front a small sepia coloured photo of a smiling middle aged man wearing eyeglasses, his name printed underneath, and his birth and death dates below:

July 29, 1952 - April 4, 2007

(I am omitting the man's name here, and changing it to 'John Doe' below.)

The face seemed somewhat familiar. I must have seen him on the street or at the cafe, or at the pub next door. Certainly not on television or in the newspaper. I turned the postcard over, and on the back side was this poem or excerpt of a poem, printed in two languages:

Ich lebe mein leben im wachsenden Ringen,
die sich über die Dingen ziehen.
Ich werde den letzen vielleicht nicht volbringen
aber versuchen will ich ihn.

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

Rainer Maria Rilke

And that's all. No other information on either side of the cream coloured postcard printed on thick rough paper. Later, at home, I googled the man's name. I got two interesting hits. The first one was a news item.

Man And Bovine Die In Bizarre Accident

A _________ (U.S. state name - A.) man was killed in a bizarre accident last night after hitting a cow near the_____/_______ border Wednesday. John Doe, 54, struck the cow on the _______ side of the border and ended up on the ________ side of the line. His S-U-V slid into a utility pole and landed on its roof. Doe was wearing a seatbelt. Police say excessive speed or alcohol is not being considered as factors contributing to the crash. Doe was pronounced dead at the scene.

The second item was a listing of faculty members of a local school (I changed its initals here to 'ABC'):

John Doe leads the mixed ensemble/band. Mr. Doe graduated from ______ with a B.A. with Highest Honors in Music, then obtained a Masters of Music Degree in Composition at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Prior to joining the ABC staff, he taught Theory at C_____ School. He has also given private instruction in Classical and Jazz (saxophone, clarinet, piano) for 22 years, and has taught Theory and Composition privately for the last 14 years. Mr. Doe has performed professionally in the area since 1972, playing saxophone, clarinet and bass clarinet in several distinguished orchestras, including the ______Symphony. He founded The _______ Philharmonia, for whom he served as Music Director and Conductor for six years. Mr. Doe joined the ABC staff in 1997.