Voices

Found art. I  found this poem (?) on the narrow path which cuts across parking lots and a park leading from the train station through and to the residential areas. It was written on the  inside (!) of a torn blue envelope, one of those that are sent to all addresses every several weeks containing "valuable" coupons from car repair shops, smog check stations, pizza parlors, hearing aid vendors and other local businesses. There was no room to write anything on the envelope's face or back which contained more advertising, and even one half of its  inner side was covered by small print explaining the rules of some sweepstakes, so the clean inside had to suffice for whoever wrote this text.  I picked it up, read it, started walking, then thought better of it, stopped, pulled out  an old envelope out of my backpack, copied the poem to it, and set the original on the utility box by the path, a small rock on top of it, the owner might return to retrieve it, as it didn't look discarded and only lost.  I'll come back later to see if it's still there.  It said:


You ask if I speak to voices in my head
I have no voices in my head
No voices anywhere
I  speak to ears that don't hear
To heads that won't listen.

Emotional Megaphone

People seek a way to express their strong emotions. A release valve. And sometimes they find an emotional megaphone.   Thanks to modern computer technology a megaphone may be used over long distances, across continents and oceans. Megaphone is not a  tool of dialogue, it goes without saying.

She said, wrote on a computer keyboard "We must talk." I answered, also via a keyboard, "Talk, I'm listening."  Some people, even in face to face encounters, will approach you to say  "We need to talk" and wait for your answer, assent, or god knows what. Well, we're talking already, why the prelude?  And so, I answered "Talk, I'm listening."  But that's not what she had in mind. "Call me on Skype!" she demanded in Arial font.  Skype is a computer program, one of several such programs available,  which allow people to communicate face to face across distances using a computer camera and microphone. A visual telephone.  Listen to the other person speak while staring at his pimples, bad teeth, thinning hair, and judging his reactions to what you say by studying the pattern of his blinking.

I don't recall how I came to suspect what was up, it all happened a long time ago, I do remember that there were no other hints, but I decided that it would be prudent to avoid a face to screen confrontation, and I wrote that the camera of my computer wasn't operational, please write instead.   And she did.

She wrote on Skype, which can be used to pass written messages, awkwardly but it is possible, so why not use e-mail?!  And it was as I had anticipated a stream of angry  accusations, threats, warnings, all in semi-literate sentences, from this highly educated family member who took upon herself to judge my behaviour in matters which did not concern her, or affect her in any way, and was (my behaviour) innocuous, moral and perfectly legal.    I didn't respond, knowing that an emotional megaphone can only be provoked into greater fury if one only peeps a shy reply.

That was only a beginning, a prelude to a longer saga which is itself  a sad story for another occasion.

63 Friends and Other Dreams

I have 63 friends.  I'd prefer that the number were a prime number, but at least it is divisible by 3, and it'll change sooner or later anyway.  Actually, both words, 'have' and 'friends' ought to be surrounded by double quotation marks.  These are, if you haven't already guessed, Facebook "friends".  I know and have met a handful of them, and most of those reside thousands of miles from here.   Several of them are my former workmates residing in the area,  they're mostly inactive online, none of the active ones will communicate with me directly,  one's reputation after leaving a workplace takes a major hit.

Two I have known for decades.  Two are younger brothers of old friends who I hadn't known had brothers, one of them my oldest friend who passed away three years ago, the other a public figure who cannot expose himself on online social media.  So I have those two guys' brothers!

Most of those friends are people who asked me to friend them, on recommendation of some other friend, especially the hyperactive brother of the public person.  A man from Switzerland asked to friend me last week, I don't know who he is, he posts in German, and I figure must be a friend of my Swiss friend.   Others who asked to friend them have been musicians,  none except one widely known, all excellent and underappreciated, and I feel honored that they decided to connect, even if motivated by commercial reasons.   Two of these musicians are quite active, and we've had some lively exchanges, that could theoretically lead to actual friendships if we ever met.

And the one musician who is widely known and who asked to friend me a few weeks ago is none other than "Bob Dylan", if you can believe it. I can't and suspect it is an employee or a grandchild of the artist.  

I joined Facebook only because a member of my extended family named Carmen, the only name of a friend I will mention beside Bob Dylan's, with whom I had a one time business transaction, told me that she communicated via Facebook and I could take it or leave it.

All of the above leads to a darker conclusion, which was actually a preamble that started this arithmetic meditation late last night, long and sleepless for whatever reasons, and as I often do I reverse the order of things.   The conclusion was the cold hard truth that I have lost everyone, or that everyone has lost me, and that is a plain fact without any tears, regrets or accusations.

Someone in the house told me that she had phoned me during my absence and that my brother-in-law Tommy took the message.  I found Tommy in the basement hanging up his laundry on the line.  She told him to ask me to call her back.  Why, I wondered, we had broken up, there was nothing more to say, no leftover business to conduct.   I decided to call her only because I think one should  return all phone calls.  I had trouble finding her number on my cell phone, dialed it, she answered, noise on the line, sound of music, I had to say "Hello" three times before she spoke up and asked me if I understood why we had broken up?  More static on the line, a singer in the background singing in Portuguese, I could barely hear her and asked her to repeat the question.  She said that I should understand those reasons.  She didn't say what they were, and I answered asking rhetorically why it mattered, it didn't matter to me if I understand or not, no I don't understand and don't know why, and I realize that knowing and understanding won't change things, won't affect history, present or future.  The singer was singing another song, she didn't say anything, where are you I asked, who are you with, she didn't answer, the song continued, I waited for her to answer but she didn't and I woke up with the song ringing in my ears, not knowing where I was, who she was, and why Tommy was so young. .

Then I decided to write her a postcard.  I knew she wouldn't read a letter, so it had to be an open postcard.  What should be on the picture side? All black? No. Not a tourist view, how about a photograph of the ocean, nothing but the ocean to symbolize the distance between us.  Where would I find such a card? It would be unsigned, but she would know from the postal stamp,  I'd have to decide on the color of the ink, and it would read:

"I don't miss nostalgia.  

I don't miss anyone but her."

Aunt Sara

My parents were long dead by then, when a woman showed up at my doorstep, dressed in black, sunshades on, a violin case in her right hand, and while I was staring at the case wondering if it contained a submachine gun, yes, I've seen too many gangster movies, said, "Hi, I'm your aunt Sara!"

I said, "Uh, I don't believe I have an aunt named Sara!"

With her free hand she removed the sunglasses and asked, "And now?"
I must have opened my mouth wide, as I saw in front of me a picture perfect face of my mother's twin.  Is it makeup, plastic surgery or what, I thought,  trying to examine her features.  She looked more like my mother than my mother's older sister, my deceased aunt.  I invited her and her violin case inside.

She was a violin player, she said with the Q_______ Quartet, a world famous ensemble, that even I had heard about, and in the case was a 150 year old Italian made instrument that she didn't want to leave in the car.  She opened the case and invited me to pick it up, but  remembering my bad luck and tendency toward clumsiness in such situations I declined.   Aunt Sara then told me that she was born after her and my mother's father was killed, and her mother decided to give her up for adoption.  I realized that my mom and her older sister, my other aunt, kept this a secret from me, and they certainly must have known it themselves.  Aunt Sara said that she had found me through Red Cross.

"You're my only living blood relative!" she said.  That wasn't exactly true, as I had several cousins from my mother's side who would be her cousins as well.  In any case, I learned that she and the string quartet traveled the world, were based in Sydney, Australia, where two of the members were from, her husband was their manager, and they owned several apartments around the world, including one here in the city.  She promised to send me tickets to one of their appearances.

And as promised, a week later, a pair of tickets to a concert at the symphony hall arrived in the mail.  I went to see the quartet.  I called my mom's elderly  cousin, a distant aunt, to report all this, and she confirmed that indeed there had been a girl infant given up for adoption.   Then I heard nothing from Aunt Sarah for six or seven months.

She showed up again, this time without a violin and without sunglasses, dressed colorfully, and when I opened the door, said, "I need your help, my husband's dead!"

I invited her inside, and she explained that she wasn't a grieving widow because the marriage was merely a business arrangement.  She asked me to provide her with an alibi for the previous evening.  No, she didn't murder him, but there was another man involved, and she wanted to avoid a scandal.  I was on the spot, and I tried to persuade her that it wasn't a good idea, as the investigators would look for any inconsistencies in our stories and we just couldn't coordinate everything between us.  Besides, I had three guests here the previous night, so now I'd have to lie that no one but her was present.  But she begged me, and eventually I relented, we agreed on a story line, time, circumstances, details, conversation topics, menu, everything I could think of, knowing full well that it still wouldn't be enough for a skillful investigator to demolish.

Sure enough, a  couple of days later a police detective called me asking to verify her story.  The conversation was brief and he appeared satisfied with my answers.  As it later turned out, aunt Sara's husband was accidentally  murdered by a local impresario who negotiated with him the purchase of a 40 or 50% interest in the Quartet, and for some reason or another spiked his drink with a dose of sleeping pills that proved fatal.  The man went to prison, the Quartet continued touring.

Then, about a year later, a New York journalist asked me to speak about the case and I reluctantly agreed.   I told him our version of the story, he recorded it, and I asked that my name not be used in print, or I'll sue.  The story appeared in a national magazine a couple of months later.  In it, without mentioning my name the writer accused me of lying and being in cahoots with my aunt Sara, who had been allegedly in cahoots with the murderer, in a plot to take over the management of the Quartet.

Red Army, Cadillacs, and Blue Plates

My friend Mac paid me a visit, and brought with him as he always does a couple of stories. I didn't have a story of my own, so I made one up on the spot.  We settled on a bottle of California Sauvignon Blanc, corked, not screw-topped, as I didn't have any beer or his favorite red wine.

Mac told me how he once visited the town of Modesto, an agricultural center in California Central Valley.  He was short of funds and someone suggested a church where the homeless and poor were fed every evening.  All you had to do is listen to a preacher's sermon before they fed you, an old tradition dating back to Charles Dickens' London..   Apparently this was a training ground for fundamentalist Christian preachers, because the fellow preaching that evening was a real young greenhorn.

And he went on about how out of clay God created a perfect human machine. If you take a fine automobile like  Cadillac, he was extolling, in ten years the paint will be peeling, the seats, transmission and engine wearing out, the tires going flat.

A young country cowboy was sitting next to me, said Mac,  and he raised his hand and said, "Excuse me preacher, forgive the interruption, but people too break their arms and legs, and they lose their teeth and hair, their sight and hearing get weak, they just wear out."

At that point, I started laughing uncontrollably, said Mac, couldn't stop, and pretty soon the whole room joined me.  A couple of burly security guards approached from both sides, and escorted me and this cowboy out the door. We didn't eat there that evening.

Mac then asked me about Stalin and I told him that no,  Vissarionovich Jugashvili wasn't Russian, and that his army was called the Red Army, a detail that Mac forgot . This led to the second story.

Mac is an independent man for hire, a handyman, music teacher (he's a keyboard player) or whatever comes along.  One recent job that he picked up was driving cars and merchandise from the city of South San Francisco to Los Angeles, then returning in the truck of the second driver.   It didn't take long for him to realize that he was transporting stolen goods for loading on ships headed to the Far East or South America.  He politely resigned without giving any hints that he would notify the authorities, but it turned out that once you're in, it's not easy to get out.   The head honcho of the operation, the fence, made some threats.

It came to him in a dream the previous night. He and his brother were Red Army soldiers  during the war, and a man who looked like this fence approached somewhere in the trenches, demanding something.  He was in civilian clothes, like a secret police officer.  Not getting what he wanted he threatened Mac that he would shoot his brother, and eventually did, shooting a hole in his heart.  Mac's brother, who is a fireman in another state, was born with a hole in his heart. 

My story? It's not even a story.  There is a dour looking man living at the very end of my street, where after a gentle 15 degree turn it merges with the street that until then ran parallel to the north, so that his house may even have that other street's address, he drives an old brown Nissan 240Z, which is parked in front of the house and has blue handicapped registration plates, a sports car with handicapped plates,  though the owner, like many others with such plates, looks perfectly able, this man, who's been there for decades, could be anywhere between 40 and 70 years old, always dresses the same, in guerrilla chic,  not in an obviously military uniform, but a somewhat discrete, ready for the revolution getup, head covered by a canvas cap which he always wears that looks like a museum piece from a century ago, World War I period, brown or dark green, and when it wears out he buys a another somewhere, an identical one, his newest is for the first time bright red,  perhaps the revolution is expected soon, this man has a goatee beard that together with the cap makes him look like Lenin, and I've wondered for ages if he considers himself a Lenin heir, a Lenin double, a Leninist, or something of the sort, nothing unusual in this town,  but what am I going to do, approach him and ask, "Excuse me, Comrade Lenin, I presume?" ?

Adams Meets Eve

I'll tell you how we came to hire Eve.  I don't know if you've ever played the role of a hiring manager, but it is a crap shoot, a bet, and we, my partner Jack and I did not like doing it.  But we had to do it quite frequently.  The bar we ran did not have professional staff, no 60 year old waitresses named Mildred.  Only the chef, and he wasn't a gourmet cook, stayed with us for an extended period of time.   All the others came and went, starving students, starving artists, moving on to better things, graduating from college, all of them young and most of them good workers.

Eve walked in the place one slow afternoon, when Jack, the bartender and myself were cleaning the place.  She was a tall, thin young woman with mounds of dirty blonde hair that she seemed to have trouble managing,  sharp face features, long nose, high cheeks,  not bad looking, but in her own eyes she must have thought herself below average.  She said she wanted to talk to us about something, and before telling us what it was, asked directions to the bathroom, to wash her hands.  We watched her walked across the room, and when she was out of sight, Jack said "She moves like mama panther," "Or a zebra," I added, lacking a better comparison. Jack shook his head at me, but we both knew that whatever her business was we were buying.

She came out of the bathroom, shook our hands and said they had been sticky because she had been eating ice cream.  There was no ice cream shop for a mile from our place, and I asked her if she lived in the neighbourhood. No.  Her business was asking for work as a waitress.  She was a student, graduating next summer, had no work experience of any kind, other than running a lemonade stand when she was ten, and without much ado we hired her.

We always liked situations such as the one with Eve, when we knew from the start whether to hire the person or not. First impressions, you know.   Asking probing questions, interrogating people was not our style. I didn't like doing it to others any more than I liked when others, government bureaucrats or bar customers did it to me.  And so, what I told you about Eve's past here, came from here voluntarily, not through our  questions.  And the people we interviewed knew fairly soon in the process without our saying so that they had the job.  Or in some cases were confused by our lackadaisical interview style.

We trained Eve, and she proved to be a good worker, reliable, courteous, efficient.  And that hair, man.  She didn't like it and didn't know what to do with it, but she wouldn't cut it short.  She would dye parts of it, pink or purple,  this was the time when rock punks were starting to do such things.

There was a regular customer at the bar named Hermann Adams.  He was an engineer of some kind, construction, or ventilation, oh yes, he designed air duct systems for office buildings.   And he was known as an ardent atheist, getting in discussions with other customers who often teased him, mocked him, but he put up with everything like a good sport, or like somebody who did not understand the jokes.

I was away on vacation then, when Adams talked Jack into allowing him to bring a movie projector into the bar one afternoon to show a film titled "The Atheism Alternative".  I don't know how Jack had agreed to it, he later apologized, our rule at the bar was no religion, no politics from the owners and staff.  The safe route chosen by most businesses of this type.  But the showing of the film happened.

Adams promised Jack to bring along a crowd of customers for the showing, and indeed, 20 to 25 people showed up, none of them seen previously at the bar, some wearing Che Guevara T-shirts, and one fellow looking like Lenin himself, with the beard and a cap that revolutionaries of Lenin's era wore.  The projection was setup in our overflow room which we called Le Deluge Room, and which was seldom used during afternoons.  Drinks and sandwiches were served to the customers, who didn't order very much, but after the film started and she saw what it was about, Eve, with tears in her eyes, refused to continue serving this crowd.  Jack took over, though there was hardly anything to do any more.  After the film ended, Hermann approached Eve and asked her what was the matter. She threw a glass of Calvados in his face.  He demanded that Jack fire her, Jack refused and we never saw Mr Hermann Adams again.

Mr Matthews' Cul de Sac

He didn't remember me. We passed each other in the shampoo and hair color isle, neither one of us shopping for anything stocked there,  when recognizing instantly  his face older by decades since I last had seen it,  his posture slightly stooped now, I said, "Hello, Mr Matthews!". He stopped, I stopped, gazed at me for ten seconds before saying, "You must be one of my students."  I was, I had been. I took two classes from him, drawing and the next semester after that painting, and I would have taken more if he had taught them, and if my college major had been, as it should have been in art, and I wasn't just fulfilling some liberal arts requirement.  Decades later we know for certain what we should have done instead.

Mr Matthews was an art teacher, but he was primarily a full time artist with regular showings at galleries, and a cartoonist whose work was printed in the New Yorker, Playboy and other magazines.  He was now long retired, but still active in art, still submitting and receiving rejections from the New Yorker, he informed me laughingly. He was surprised at how close to his age I seemed to be now, and I had to explain that I wasn't 18 in his class like all his other students. "We could both use these products now", I said, pointing to the shelf filled with hair dyes, "What's your pleasure?"  "I have to remember this", he replied chuckling, and "Oh yes, now I recall, you are the one who gave me a lot of cartoon ideas".  I had never heard that before, and I doubt it was 'a lot', but it must have been a few, when we exchanged jokes, puns and bon mots, bending cliches and twisting common sayings, so much so during those times in class, that I wonder how I ever  managed to do any drawing or painting.

Mr Matthews invited me to his house for coffee, about two blocks away up the street,  and we drove there in my car, after making our purchases.  "I walked here," he told me, "my housekeeper says I need more exercise."   We stepped inside, Mr Matthews made us two espressos from his Italian machine,  sprinkled some brandy into them, we sat down at the window of his living room overlooking the street below us going straight down in the Western direction  from his house all the way across the residential section of the city toward the railroad tracks and the freeway running North - South  along the Western edge of the city.  He pulled a notepad and wrote down what he promised himself to write down while we were conversing inside the drugstore.  He would continue to jot down ideas while we talked.

Now, the street and the house. His house was at the end of the street where my house stands about a mile and a quarter away Westward down the gentle hill.   I know the approximate distance, because years ago I measured it using the odometer of my car when the odometers were still analog, those little turning wheels, like some gears, and included tenths of a mile, so that you knew when to start and stop measuring.  Nowadays, with computer technology, the odometers could probably measure distance down to a hundredth of a mile, and yet the ones that I have seen measure it only by a full mile, making such distance calculations practically impossible.

And so, the distance from my house to the edge of the shopping center was exactly one mile, from there to Mr Matthews house at the end of this street, I would estimate is almost a quarter mile.   Going the other way, from my house downward to the end of my street is another quarter mile.  And so the street is about a mile and a half long. It has two 15 degrees turns, one halfway down in the southern direction, and an eight of a mile before it ends in the northern direction.  At its West end, that is below my house, it merges into the parallel street to the North of it, which after another eighth of a mile merges into the parallel street that ran to the South of my street, which then goes for another half mile to end at the road running alongside the freeway.   This is an unusual funnel topography for East West streets in this city, no other streets merge this way, although, interestingly enough,  some North South streets do merge, or split up, and all of them just beyond the borders of this town.

In a modern metropolis of course, one city turns into another invisibly, before you notice it, and I for example, living as I am not far from the Northern border of the city don't know where it ends exactly and where the next city starts.  And there have been houses build on parcels that cross city borders.  Only the tax collector knows, and maybe not even he, since he collects real estate taxes for the entire county.

But let's get back to Mr Matthews' house.  My street ends as I said at his house, though it doesn't really dead end, because you can turn left or right from it on the cross street which goes on at least a mile in each direction. And so, Mr Matthews's house is you could say the center top point of a 'T' shape of two streets that meet in front of it. Here is where the story gets interesting.   It wasn't always this way, Mr Matthews told me.   My street crossed the present cross street, which wasn't yet developed or even paved, and continued for almost another 35 yards where a steeper hill started. A house stood on each side of it, and another house at the end facing the street down from a cul de sac.   That house still stands and is occupied by Mr Matthews' tenants.  He owns it.

The man who built that house later bought the two other houses on the dead end of the street, demolished them, tore down the street between them and built the present big house where Mr Matthews and I were sitting.  And after that he wanted to keep the street address of this house, and his old house behind it with the old street name.  But the house he built became part of a new street, that forms the roof of the 'T', and the city resisted.  The man fought the city hall, Mr Matthews thinks he didn't like the name of the new street, the last name of a patriot general, and he lost the battle.   There is still a plaque above the front door, which Mr Matthews showed me,  with the name of my street on it and a house number that doesn't exist in city or county records, and the post office won't recognize. A fantasy number.  The builder eventually sold the property to Mr Matthews' parents.

Rose

You'd recognize her name, but it is a stage name, nome de plume, pseudonym, she'll always be Rose to me. A week ago I received a postcard from her, signed 'Rose', so I guess she never changed her name legally. I'll have to ask next time I see her.  She got her start at the bar I was running with my partner Jack.  She was waitressing there, and one day asked us if she could bring her guitar in the evening and sing on a small stage where an old beat up piano stood and which was never occupied. After closing the place one night we gave her an audition, and afterwards Jack said to me, "Wow, she's almost as good as Joni Mitchell", to my reply "That old bag?"  "You're too young to appreciate real artists", he scolded me.

Rose brought her guitar and after her shift ended would sing the songs she had written, all of it for tips, which in time have gotten larger, so that she reduced the number of days she worked as a waitress. I called the bar owners I knew in the area and told them about Rose, and she got gigs around town.  "You're my manager now!" she told me.  "I don't know anything about music business", I replied, and kept doing what I had been doing just for the fun of it.   I borrowed a Nagra tape  recorder from our customers who were filmmakers, and we recorded six of Rose's songs in her living room, with me picking the bass strings of another guitar, or attempting to play a mandolin along with her voice and guitar.  I transferred the recording to a cassette tape, made several copies and sent them to artist agents in Nashville.  We got lucky, and two of the songs were recorded on albums by established artists, I had co-writing credits on them, which Rose insisted on including because I helped her polish these songs, and then I mailed the tapes to record companies in New York and Los Angeles.

We received three responses from agents in L.A. asking Rose to travel to L.A. for auditions with them, the agents.  "No way!" I advised her, and she agreed, agents are dime a dozen, and singers are in the thousands on Hollywood Boulevard.  I had business stationary printed with a gold header and the address of the bar, and typed up responses to these three saying that "my client appreciates your interest, but she is currently booked up for the foreseeable future at local and regional venues, and will not be able to travel to Los Angeles.  However, you would be welcome to come see her perform at one of her concerts."  Needless to say, Rose's "concerts" were her gigs for tips at local bars and clubs, but one of the fish bit the bait and came from L.A. to see her.  Before I knew it, and before I met him,  she signed a contract with this slick guy wearing Italian suits and shoes, name dropping, making all kinds of promises.  She told me she had had the contract looked over by a lawyer before signing,  and I responded that she needed to consult  an entertainment lawyer not a neighbor specializing in real estate.

"Tony told me to change my name," she informed me. "Why?" I asked, "Your own name sounds perfectly acceptable on stage. Helen Shapiro, when she was 14 refused to change her Jewish sounding name!"

"If it was up to you, Frances Ethel Gumm would have never changed her name," Rose retorted.

"And her over the top singing would have fit her so much better," I said.  "Tony Curtis will always be Bernie Schwartz to me."

She wouldn't listen and adopted the stage name. Rose traveled to Los Angeles, where her manager, whose name was Tony, put her up in a nice hotel and arranged an audition with a record company,  which she passed, got a recording deal, recorded an album, while Tony assembled a backing band for her and booked her for appearances across the country. The album was met with great reviews by critics, the audiences were a bit slower coming around to it, but the record company kept promoting it, the radio played it and Rose was appearing in major venues and at various rock festivals. Soon she traveled abroad, Europe, Asia, Australia.   Whenever she returned home she would bring small gifts for Jack's and my families.

Meanwhile here, a local developer named Albert Kennedy, yes a Kennedy, though unrelated to the Boston Kennedys, decided to develop the neighbourhood, or really just two city blocks along one street where our bar was located.  He bought some properties, built and rented out stores which filled with expensive boutiques, brand name beauty shops, a jewelry store, a take out deli with prices unseen on this continent, gourmet restaurants.  Jack and I then had an offer (not from Kennedy)  to sell our bar, an offer so high we couldn't believe our eyes, we had to accept it, or else turn our neighbourhood establishment serving locals, students, artists, into a pretentious upscale watering hole, which was an idea that Jack rejected at the outset. And that is exactly what the new owner did.

There was no non-compete clause in our sale contract and we reopened two and a half blocks away, our clientele, which could never afford to patronize  the old new place, followed us, and I decided to  became a silent partner at the bar, concentrating my efforts on stock investments using the proceeds from the sale.

Rose's second album followed, almost as good as the first one, and then something happened.   Tony started booking her in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Reno, upscale red velvet lounges, private parties at millionaires' estates, where the audiences were older, wealthier and drunker. The money was still there for Rose, even if Tony was getting kickbacks on the side, but her old audiences weren't, and Rose was disappearing from sight, with no radio interviews, no TV appearances.  She rebelled, while Tony waived the contract in her face.  She consulted a lawyer, an entertainment lawyer this time, who told her that it would take a large sum of money to get her from under that contract.  She had several years left on it.

She recorded her third and last album to fulfill the record company contract, and it was a sad affair.  Melancholy, depressing songs, tired voice, the critics hated it, the buyers and radio ignored it, three years after her initial success she was a has been.  The only bright spot was that a famous pop singer recorded one of the songs off Rose's third album, made it a giant international hit, and royalties kept flowing in, even as Rose, confessed to me that she hoped not to ever have to meet him to thank him.  She didn't like him, and neither did I.

Then relief came as suddenly as the fall.   Tony had other business ventures, mob connections, and one of those ventures was exporting stolen sports cars, Porsches, Jaguars, BMWs to the Middle East.  The crowd with which he ran was rough, and one night Tony was shot down in his Mercedes on a street in Las Vegas. Rose's contract with him had a non-inheritance clause,  meaning no one could inherit it, she was free at last,  and his former associates didn't even bother contacting her.

She came home and called me with the question first expressed a long time ago by Vladimir Lenin, "What is to be done?"  We huddled down and brainstormed.  "Now you're my manager!", she said.  "I still don't know anything about music business," I answered as before.  I arranged for her to sing for the yuppies at our old bar, and at other places, including our new bar, for tips once again, once more she was starting from the bottom.  She had no recording, no management contracts, no booking agency.  I knew people who owned a local record label called Tuff Records, which put out punk music, and I could have arranged for her to release records through them. But they had no national distribution, no promotion money, only a studio, and no funds to pay studio musicians to accompany her.   I borrowed that Nagra recorder again, we taped eight songs, and again sent cassettes to Nashville.  Three of the songs got recorded on albums, I had co-writing credits on them, that became my entire financial reward (which I never asked for or demanded.)  Using the royalty payments from the huge pop hit of the world famous heartthrob, Rose bought my wife a brand new Honda minivan.

I also  learned that Rose was still popular in Japan and the Far East, and I contacted a booking agency here, Stateside to arrange bookings for her.   She traveled there, stayed for over six months performing in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and North Korea, the only places where her third weakest album sold reasonably  well, she recorded and released a live album from a concert in Japan, which is a collector's item here in the States, though it was picked up by a German company and released in Europe.   Which led to our next step.  Rose spoke fluent French, and she moved to a base in France, from which she traveled to various countries of Europe to perform.   Last week I received a postcard from her stamped in Paris, written in French, where she says she's recording a new album, half in French, half in English.

I'm thinking of returning to running my bar with Jack.  Maybe now that I know something about the music business  we'll discover another international star, you never know.

Memory Hill

One other thing that the blind man next to whom I sat down on the bench at the Shoreline Park said, was "Tide is high today".  Without thinking, I agreed, saying "Yeah", not really knowing at that moment if the tide below our feet was high or low,  because the man made shoreline there is steep, an almost vertical wall of boulders, with  no beach, and seawater several feet deep right where it meets the rocks, so that low or high tide at that spot the level of bay water is always about the same.

Only then did I ask myself, "how does he know?"  From the sound or smell of the sea?  I made sure to check what I could check a few days later when the tide was low and couldn't hear or smell the difference. Perhaps he heard a weather report on the radio, they always mention tides.  No, the tone of his voice suggested it was something he discerned then and there. Whatever it was,  somebody must have taught him to distinguish between low and high tides using one or two of his senses, and he committed this lesson to memory.

Behind our bench was a paved hiking and bicycling path rounding the twin hills which as I had written before had been built from the ground up out of garbage, and turned into parkland once the city trash disposal site was closed some two and a half decades earlier.  Several feet of dirt cover must been hauled and dumped in there on top of the refuse, which was compacted by machines to prevent its settling down in the future, and vegetation planted on top of it all, to make it look as natural as the distant hills of this city.

My garbage from years gone by is buried there. That which the city garbage service picked up every week, and that which I loaded into my car, drove there, paid a fee, and dumped myself (most likely because the weekly service would not handle it.)  What was it? Furniture, a broken TV set, dead garden plant?  I don't remember, but it is there buried, crushed and it remembers.  Like everything else inside these hills, it remembers.  Sure, there aren't likely to be any archaeological treasures to be found here 2,000 years from now. We throw away mostly mass produced objects, rarely unique artifacts. But let's say that a future archaeologist digs up an empty Coke can, the one and only because we've recycled all the others?  Silly questions.

Objects remember and speak of us, even if our names are forgotten.  Just like those ancient objects of the Egyptians and the Romans speak of their owners.

The American Question

I went to see a psychologist. (It's been a good while.)  I no longer remember if I was forced, ordered to do it, or if I agreed for the sake of peace among nations.  Knowing that I had discovered genealogy of my family reaching all the way back to the 18th century,  and how he knew it, again I don't recall, I certainly would not have volunteered to tell him myself, he asked me a question.  I remember it (the question), which once more shows you how selective our memories can be.  I also remember that his office was located on the first floor of one of the two residential houses surviving on the so-called Pill Hill, where several giant hospital and clinic structures had been built, along with the usual ugly multistory concrete parking skeletons, while the second floor was occupied by the house's aged owner, and I also remember that at the Western foot of this hill, where I parked my car in the free parking zone of a marginal neighbourhood  (contrasting that, on the Eastern side was the auto row of multiple car dealerships),  was a small grocery store owned by some Middle Easterners, and that next door to it opened a honey shop owned, I think, by the same people, its name a pun of some sort,  "Bee Well", or something similar, and I knew that I owed it to myself to walk in there and ask this other question, even though I had already anticipated the answer, but hope springs eternal, doesn't it, "Do you sell Tupelo honey?" "What? No!"

The psychologist's question referring to my discovery of the family tree was "How does it feel?"   I don't turn on the  TV any more, but when I did, one thing that always assaulted the senses when watching the news broadcasts, and this is by no means an original observation, others have made it a long time ago, was the picture of the pretty faces and pompadour hairdos of TV reporters sticking microphones under the chins of people, often victims of natural disasters standing in front of the ruins of their houses, tastefully framed in the background by the cameraman, and asking them, "How does it feel?"

"How does it feel?" goes the first line of the refrain of Bob Dylan's most famous recording.  In least in Dylan,  it is a rhetorical question.

I was surprised by this question and I laughed. "How does it feel?  How should it feel?  It doesn't feel at all.", I answered.  The psychologist, a decent, intelligent man, decided to help me. "Well, did it make you feel happy, proud?"

I found this genealogy on the Internet, and not through any of the family root services, but on a webpage of a university professor in an unrelated discipline, whose hobby was compiling family trees of families from a certain region.  My ancestors' family on my father's side happened to be one of them.

"When I found it, I was a little surprised," I said, "because none of it was known to me through my parents.  But the contents itself of this chart don't make me feel anything.   Those ancestors could have come from Macao, South Africa or Patagonia, and knowing it wouldn't make me feel anything and wouldn't make any difference to me one way or another. It just wouldn't.   But the disclosure shocked my sister, who despite having some physical proofs among family papers verifying this finding, denied it, which denial and anger (hers) contributed  to a split between us."

Their graves are long paved over,  their descendants, if not lost to war and disease, are spread throughout the world, and I don't know any of  them, nor do they know me; I thought I found a cousin once and contacted him by e-mail, but he did not reply.  I found the location of my grandfather's grave through a cemetery map posted on Internet, I never knew him and I will probably never visit it, it is probably overgrown with weeds (I would feel a shock if I saw it was being maintained!), and where are the graves of his wives (he was a widower who remarried)?   There is no person alive who remembers him, and while there are records of the scientific papers he wrote, and other documents in some forgotten archives somewhere, scanned copies of old newspapers where his name appears, one among thousands of others,  I am the last person alive to remember his name and his existence,  Après moi, le déluge?

Strangers on a...

What do you do when a stranger confesses to having committed a crime?  Proceed to execute a citizen's arrest, call the cops, shrug and walk away? There is no statute of limitations on murder. And there is a million of unsolved crimes in the naked city.

I took a train downtown to pick her up at the end of her shift.  What I didn't know was that her relief telephoned the theater to report that he'd be two hours late due to family problems.  She had to stay at work, and I had two hours to kill.  She was working at one of the three movie theaters remaining downtown, three out of eight, during the days when there were no VCRs, no DVDs, plenty of parking and people drove to the center to shop and seek entertainment.  Two out of three have been split up into multiple screens and the third one with the most screens was built anew on the site of a former department store, so in the number of screens it's all evened out. Some of the auditoriums are as small as the screening rooms in Hollywood where the producers and actors watch the dailies each evening, and that's not too bad for viewing films either.

I told her she'd find me after she gets off work either in the city library next door or at the cafe on the corner across the street.  I went to the library first.  Whenever I visit the library with nothing in particular in mind, my mind goes completely blank, I forget the names of my favorite authors and wander aimlessly until something catches my attention or the memory improves.  I spotted on a moving cart a tape of a Hitchcock film which made me think of Patricia Highsmith  and her stories, which I had stopped reading years earlier after becoming bored and irritated by their sameness.  All genre stories are, I discovered, formula driven and predictable,  even those written by better authors.

And so, I picked up a copy of  Patricia Highsmith's novel "Strangers on a Train" and took it to a row of tables located in the wide open area in between the stacks.   There was only one person there at those six tables , a Chinese student with a laptop, it was quiet, good light right at the table, I sat down and began to read. My peace didn't last long, as a man about 45 sat down opposite me, holding a magazine, said 'How ya doin'", opened the magazine,  and apparently finding nothing of interest inside, asked, "Whatcha readin'?"  I showed him the cover.   "Ah," he said, "a movie was made from it. Good one too."  I nodded, hoping to return to my book, but he continued.

"Done it once myself." he said. "Before I ever saw the movie or read the book. But it wasn't strangers on a train, only on a bus!" He laughed.  "Greyhound bus in Nebraska. I'll tell you more,  but this is a library, silence is the law here, and I try to avoid breaking the law."

"Let go to the cafe across the street," I suggested, suddenly interested in the man's story.  I set Patricia down on the table, no need to return her to the shelf, the library staff will do it, we walked out, crossed the street, ordered two cappuccinos at the cafe, sat down on stools by the window counter, and he continued his tale.

"I don't know if the fellow who proposed this deal had seen the movie or read the book, I couldn't ask about something I didn't know existed, and when it was all over, and I discovered the source of the idea, he was long gone. I was a greenhorn, 19 years old, he was about 30.  We did it and we got away with it.  I was to kill his wife's brother in New York City, who encouraged her to divorce him, and he was to kill my girlfriend's new beau, a jock who stole her from me, a geek at the time.  The jock, a football player, died first, under suspicious circumstances that might have been an accident, and eventually was judged by investigators to have been an accident,  but my "partner" claimed it was his doing.  I had to keep up my end of the bargain, and I traveled to New York where I shot this man in a fake street robbery which brought me nothing except 50 dollars, a cheap watch and an American Express card both of which I threw away.   Did you ever do terrible things because of a woman?"

"I don't know, if I've ever done terrible things it wasn't because of a woman, as far as I can remember."

It was at that moment when my date showed up, called me by my first name, interrupted our conversation, and the man, who never introduced himself, quickly got up, said Goodbye and left.

"Who is he?" she asked.
"I don't know, I've just met him at the library"

We went to dinner at a downtown restaurant as planned.

Exactly two weeks later on a Wednesday,  she called me at work to say that "This friend of yours came to the theater looking for you, asking that you call him back, left a number, and explained it was about your father."

Yes, it was the man I had spoken to at the cafe, she confirmed, and, as I told her, no friend of mine.

"About my father? What did you tell him about my father?" I asked
"Nothing," she said, "You've never told me anything about your father."
"Did you tell him my last name?", I asked, remembering that the man had heard my first name spoken.
"Nope!"

When I saw her that evening, again for dinner, she handed me the business card the man left with her.  It showed nothing but a telephone number which looked like it was handwritten, but turning it to light I saw that it had been printed using a cursive font.  The area code indicated the suburban county behind the hills.

"Is there something to be concerned about?" she asked me as I examined the card.
"No, nothing at all", I lied.

What to do? What could he want?  Is the man bluffing? Or did he recognize my close resemblance to my late father?  If he had not known where Donna worked, I could safely ignore him, but now, without realizing it,  she became involved, like it or not.   I could probably find her another job somewhere, except that this job was at her uncle's theater.  I had a few things to consider  before deciding.

Anna

I haven't told you about Anna, my cousin by way of my mother's grandmother's half-sister.  She found, located and contacted me herself, I didn't know of her existence, and my mother had by then passed away.. This was before Internet, you wonder how people managed to find one another; nowadays my unique name is stored in thousands of databases out there, and no one finds, locates or contacts me.

Anna was living alone in the city at the time and seeking a companion outside of her professional circle.  I happened to fit the bill.  She was an actress rehearsing a stage play, and she talked the director into allowing me to sit in on the rehearsals.   I started coming on my free days, sitting quiet as a church mouse in the last row of the auditorium, until the director asked me to move in closer and I sat in the row behind him and his assistant.  The play was an obscure melodrama from the 1930s that he decided to modernize, saying that its themes were universal and always up to date.  That was certainly true, but these themes got lost in the fog of archaic dialogue and bourgeois sensibilities of its age.  That is at least what  I thought without ever saying so to anyone.

The director would occasionally turn around and ask "Whadya think?" or "Howz that look?", and I'd answer, "Fine", "Looks good", until I discerned that such answers were insufficient and unsatisfactory to him, and then I'd try to say the same thing, saying nothing,  only in  longer sentences.  During one scene he had the main male character stand and speak with his back to the audience, much to the protests of the actors, which he ignored, and following the premiere, criticisms of the critics, which he considered before deciding to change the staging of the mis en scen.

Anna played the female lead, did an exceptional job, recognized by everyone, which led to an offer for a screen test from Hollywood, and small roles in films being shot here (without screen tests!)  She was happy, we spent much time together, in a non-committal but intimate relationship.  I'd have married her, but the rules were rules and "we can't marry, we're cousins!", she insisted.  She was strong but also very sensitive.  There were times when after a rehearsal she would come to me crying, not as a result of some conflict or disagreement, but out of the intensity of her work.  I hugged and comforter her. So that's what my role was there.

Then something bad happened. (Would I be telling this story if nothing bad happened?)  The play ends with the character played by Anna shooting her stage husband.  (And the gun doesn't even appear as in Chekhov until then.)  On the last day of the run which lasted six months, the gun that Anna fired had a live bullet instead of a blank.  Panic, pandemonium, ambulances, shouts, tears, police.   The actor survived in the end, but in the meantime police had to investigate.  Anna was in shock.  Naturally, she was a so-called 'person of interest' at first, though this didn't last more than a few days, she had no motive.  It turned out, soon enough, that the actor's recently divorced wife talked a stage hand, the prop man, into exchanging the guns, paid him $1000 which was almost a princely sum at the time, and helped him arrange a suitable alibi.   The scheme was ridiculously amateurish, and the pair ended up in prison for a good stretch of time.

Anna in the meantime couldn't recover from the experience.  She blamed herself for not noting that the prop gun had been switched,  she gave up on the promising Hollywood career, packed her things and moved back with her mother in France - she had a dual citizenship.   Other than once a year Christmas cards I haven't heard from her.

If Memory Serves, Part 2

When soul singer James Brown was alive, he released 45 RPM single records with a vocal track on side A, and an instrumental track by his crackerjack band the Blue Flames on side B.  (And when he was dead, he stopped releasing anything at all!)  The B side recording often carried the title of the A side song with the suffix "Part 2".  There were times however, if I remember correctly, when the B side tune had that suffix attached to a name that was completely different from the name on the A side of the record.  And this is what inspired me to concoct the above title, as the B side of  the earlier  blog entry seen somewhere below that promised these two stories, which  blog entry you should read first before reading what follows here.

The Bus Tour

We decided to take a bus tour.  I was never too fond of such group adventures, but I agreed.  We were young and could afford it.  It lasted four of five days, and on the last day, returning to our point of departure, the bus stopped in the middle of nowhere at some museum, of flora or fauna,  subjects of no interest to me.   I wasn't and aren't fond of museums either, finding them boring, overwhelming and tolerable only if I focus on one or two items exhibited within them.  And so, while everyone filed out of the bus, I decided to stay behind, because in addition to all these objections  I was experiencing a migraine headache or a stomach ache, and didn't wish to spend the whole time in the museum's bathroom facilities, or to vomit on its floors.

It was a mistake.  After everyone left me and the bus driver, who wasn't very talkative, I wanted to take a nap, couldn't sleep, my pains were soon gone and I took a walk around the parking lot.  And then walked again.   The party eventually returned, and my girlfriend reported it was a fun trip, the museum proved to be modern and interactive, I should have gone with her.

After we came back to the city, the relationship was soon over.  I don't know if the museum unadventure was the cause, but I suspected it contributed to it.   We eventually reconciled for a brief time anyway.

Rejuvenation

I used to take my dog to the popular dog park on the shore.  Right next to the parking lot was a water fountain with a couple of bowls beside it from which the dogs could get their drinks, and at which most owners stopped before returning back to their cars.  As expected, the shared bowls were a source of various dog illnesses, according to the park personnel, and my dog, as if he knew it, seldom drank from them unless I completely refilled them fresh or allowed him to climb on this back paws up to the water spout from which he'd take a direct hit of fresh water.  (Like every dog owner I was convinced my pooch was the smartest being on the planet.  Still am?)

But that isn't what this story is about.   One time at the water fountain, an older woman, whose dress and speech pattern unmistakable identified her as a member of upper class (most of us dress like bums around here),  called out to her purebred pooch to encourage it to approach the water bowls back from the hillock behind the water fountain where he was busy playing with some mutts, before they both  headed back to her Volvo or Lexus:

"Come Winston, rejuvenate yourself!"

Rejuvenate? Holy Lassie, what dog would  understand the word 'rejuvenate'?  Winston eventually came, had his drink and they departed.

*

This concludes my musings about things we happen to remember without understanding why we remember them and not other experiences that have been perhaps more significant, more meaningful and worthy of a place among our precious brain cells.

Unreliable

So you think I shouldn't have started that story in the middle, descending a staircase in an unidentified building and proceeding to tell the end of the episode only to return to its middle and then beginning?  I could have started it thus:

On Tuesday morning I took a train to an Ophthalmology clinic to have my eyes checked. I decided not to drive because... etc.  At the registration desk I learned that I had three not two appointments scheduled  within the next 70 minutes.  Etc, etc.

I thought the story wasn't worth telling in that form, though when speaking it rather than writing, the order suggested above would have been more appropriate, I suppose.  Note that the second story proceeds chronologically, perhaps unexpectedly and unpredictably so after the strange order of the first one.

I recently finished reading a long bestselling novel recommended by many press reviewers, where the narrator starts out seemingly in the present, recalls events from 14 years earlier up to the time of the novel's beginning, all of it chronologically related, only to then move forward and end up two years later than the time in the opening chapter. And it all works just fine.

What doesn't work, and this is, if you allow me, a separate though related subject, are historical references in this novel, which have left me puzzled.   The character uses an iPhone before the device was introduced by the manufacturer, and his friend nicknames him 'Potter' before the Harry Potter series of books was published. There are other such errors.  (While the novel doesn't explicitly list years of the events, certain assumptions can be made, such as that it isn't happening in the future, and that 14 or actually 16 years earlier had to occur at the latest calculating back from the year of the book's publication, and considering that it was being written over a decade, even much earlier than that.)

None of this has been noted by the press reviewers whose pieces I checked, or most of the readers who made it a #1 bestseller, but then, to most readers, a bestseller is a sufficient proof of other people's good judgment.  A bestseller feeds itself, in other words.  So what's up with that? The reader reviewers who agree with my dismayed reaction point to many other problems with the novel and we all concluded that it is a sloppy, unedited work.

I'm still scratching my head, not completely certain of such judgments.  Is the author telling us that the narrator is a unreliable, a liar, a fantasist, it occurred to me just a few days ago?  I recall reading book reviews where this kind of observation is made of a novel's narrator, though at the moment I don't recall reading such works.  How would the author hint to us of the narrator's unreliability?  I see no such hints in this novel.  Why would the narrator invent a housing crisis in Las Vegas of the 1990s reflected in the state of the community where he resides,  when no such crisis occurred (as far as I know)  until in the late 2000 decade?

And just today, I picked up a novel by a Brazilian writer to find on its first two pages how it's done.   Before we know who the narrator is, he is revealed slowly, gradually, as we learn whether to trust him or not. On page 2 he describes his mansion to which he proposes to move with his unidentified listener, saying:

There are palm, avocado and almond trees in the garden, which became a parking lot after the Danish Embassy moved to Brasilia.

Come again?  And in case there are any doubts, four sentences later, he says:

In fact, they built an eighteen-story medical centre on our land, which reminds me, the mansion isn't there any more.

And so, that is how a competent writer handles his narrator unreliability.

Days of Ophthalmology and Dentistry

That's not very poetic, but these cold January times are certainly not the days of wine and roses.  Of whine and diagnoses, perhaps. What follows happened one such day.

I took the stairway down to the second floor, sat down in the waiting room and picked up a copy of the New Yorker laying around to look at the cartoons.  "There is a blue dot  next to your name, they know you're ready, don't have to check in."  Sure enough, a nurse soon appeared rescuing me from futile efforts to read cartoon captions with my dilated eyes. She led me through several corridor turns to a small room, where without much ado and with few words she took two more photos of my eyes with a machine older looking than the one upstairs.  "You're all done, free to go."

That was the last one of my appointments that early morning at the clinic, two of them seventy minutes apart that I had known about,  and a third one in between them that I learned about while registering. All about my eyes, which are fine, thank you, just requiring a checkup every six months or so.  Coming out and rushing to the shuttle bus which rushed me to the train station to wait at the cold outdoor platform longer than for all those clinic appointments and due to an "unexpected delay", for which the loudspeakers didn't offer an explanation or apology, I was still glad I hadn't decided to drive, concerned not so much about the dilation of my eyes, which  I cluelessly had failed to anticipate, as about finding parking and then reaching my car back before the two hour street parking limit expired.

The second of those three appointments, and the reason I'm reporting this, was with a nurse who first measured pressure in both eyes, despite the interference from my eyelashes (!), and then squeezed drops in them, while I prayed that he didn't by mistake pick up a container of Crazy Glue, then had me wait 20 minutes even, and took two sets of stereoscopic photographs of each eye.

He then showed me the results on a large computer screen explaining what was what, optic nerve, blood vessels. "The doctor will look at these photos and send you an e-mail," he said. "Using old fashioned stereoscopic glasses". "Like they did 50 years ago,?" I interjected.  "Like it was done in the 1940s, 30s", he explained.  Oops, that's 80 years. "All this digital technology, " he continued, "and the method of viewing hasn't changed a bit." He pointed to the sturdy 3D glasses sitting by the machine.

It just happened that I was during this week  reading a mystery novel which takes place in Kansas and San Francisco of  the second half of the 19th century, with the main character a saloon keeper, and a photographer, who takes stereoscopic photographs as early as the 1870s.  How they were viewed is not described in the novel, and I'm not especially motivated now to research the matter.

Later on that day, (if you're still with me, remember,  there was that dentistry part), I stepped out of the house just before sunset to cover the car, when R. spotted me or I spotted him from 20 yards away, he was walking the neighbours' rather unfriendly German shepherd mix dog.  He approached and we began to chat.  The neighbours are on a ship cruise to warmer seas and he's housesitting for them.  Listening to the radio he learned that some woman had jumped from that ship committing suicide, and he was hoping it was not the neighbour.  It couldn't be, the victim was 54.  Why would anyone go on a cruise to commit  suicide,  we both wondered, when there are so many popular places around here to do it? "Maybe something happened on the ship," he speculated, "A breakup". "Or a toothache," I added, an angry Internet exchange fresh in my mind, where the angrier man ended up apologizing and blaming his bad temper on a toothache which no intake of aspirin could relieve. R.  then related his recent visit at a dentist's office, having a molar extracted, saying he's been on ibuprofen diet the past several days.   Which in turn reminded me of my own recent jaw pains when chewing a crunchy ciabatta with my left jaw.  Fortunately, I have a dentist appointment scheduled  in two weeks time. Do dentists handle jaw problems in addition to pulling teeth?


P.S. The two stories promised a couple of days ago are still brewing.

What You Remember

"What do you remember?" he asked, and before I had a chance to answer he told me what he remembered himself.  Not detailed stories, but rather categories of things that he remembered.   I haven't told this story which happened a good few years ago, because I didn't want to remember. Not the topic of the conversation itself, just the memories that it provoked. That is to say, what the conversation provoked me to remember, if that makes any sense.

My dog was still young and vigorous at the time, and we drove to the shoreline park, which, if memory serves, was actually called The Shoreline Park.  Its two high hills had once been the city refuse dump which was closed then covered with dirt, seeded with grass and turned into a park.  There are pipes emerging vertically from the ground in places there installed to release the gases that the garbage underneath produces. (Imagine, a garbage dump on a beautiful shoreline. Different times different thinking.)  A lot of memories are buried there, some of them mine, as I remember driving there at one time and dumping some refuse that the neighbourhood garbage pick up didn't or wouldn't handle.

We walked and played, my dog and I, then came down to the path along the shore.  It must have been a pretty day, because I decided to delay our return and sit down on a bench overlooking the Bay.  There aren't many benches in American parks to sit on, Americans prefer to be active,  moving, running, biking,  and those (benches) that are present are often unoccupied even on busy weekend afternoons. The benches in my neighbourhood park are most often taken by bums.

And if an American wants to sit on a park bench, he will choose a bench that is unoccupied over one where someone is already sitting.  At the Shoreline Park, there was a man sitting on a bench which I had chosen. The next bench was 200 yards away.  I sat down on the end of it and watched my dog chase a ground squirrel, a barely tolerated pest in this park. Then I turned to face the man and noticed that he was blind, his white cane between his knees, and a tear on his face.  How did he get here, I thought?  We were a quarter mile from the parking lot, almost a mile from the city.  Someone must have brought him here and left him.

"Are you all right?" I stupidly asked.   That's when he answered with the question "What do you remember?" Then he told me how the things that he remembered most from his life were failures, mishaps, roads not taken, mistakes, opportunities missed.  "And you, what do you remember?" he finally asked, waiting for an answer.

I told him, that yes, I remembered those same things, inexplicably, adding faux pas and stupid decisions to the list, but there were also incidents that were either entirely neutral or amusing, that I remembered for no discernible reason at all.   I didn't give him any examples, but I will relate tomorrow or when I get around to it two incidents, one of them a bad mistake, and the other a silly thing that I should have forgotten but haven't.

That's All She Wrote

"What happened next?"

"I don't know, I wasn't there," I answered.

"But you told the story," he insisted.

"The teller does not have to know the future."

"It can't end like this,"

"It can end in any way.  Have you heard the phrase 'That's all she wrote", which dates back to the 1940s, and probably originated with the reaction to the "Dear John" letters that some American  G.I.s received while serving in Europe? And "The Story of Sir Thopas" told in the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer himself, appearing as a character in his own collection, is interrupted by the Host and doesn't end.

"Forgive me, Mr Chaucer. I must speak my mind. Your story is not worth a shit. What's the point of it? You are doing nothing but waste our time." 

(From " The Canterbury Tales, A Retelling by Peter Ackroyd", 2009, page 347.) 

"The story you've just told leaves us hanging.", he said, stubbornly hanging on to his complaint.

"When novels were printed in installments in popular press during the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, they often left the readers hanging to encourage them to buy the next day's edition of the newspaper.  One writer, I forget who, recalled ending a day's piece by having the hero jump out of an airplane without a parachute (it must have been a 20th century story then.)  The next day he lands safely, or else forgets the jump ever happened.  Didn't one of the heroes of the "Dallas" television series die, only to come back to life the next TV season,  his death explained as another character's season long dream? Yes, that was another famous screen shower scene (the "dead" character emerges from a shower and is seen by the other character just waking up from the dream.)  (Incidentally, the character's "death" was caused by a dispute over the actor's salary, which even in those days reached a million dollars per filmed episode, and was obviously later resolved.)  Didn't Sherlock Holmes once die and was later revived?

"I still want to know what happened next.  Did she call him or not?"  (He would not give up.)

"I don't know, I really don't.  But think a minute.   If she didn't call, and the storyteller knew it and told you, then the story told is about futility of it all, and not really worth telling.  If he (the storyteller) knew it and declined to tell you, then he's dishonest.  But if she did call, then another story started, a romance perhaps, and that story would be irrelevant to the story I told you. Or uninteresting, typical, tragic, maudlin, too long to tell, or anything at all. Or she called and another story was not started. A telephone call followed by nothing more."

"There must be a finale, a clincher, a capper, a punch line or a moral."

"Maybe in Aesop's Fables or in Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales, yes, but in life endings are rarely neat like wrappings on your Christmas gifts.  I recently finished reading a lengthy contemporary novel, which ends, you might say, neatly.  Still, if you read the reader reviews on Amazon, some are curious what happens to the main character afterwards.  Will there be a sequel?  Probably not, this is "serious" literature, not the Star Wars saga which only ends when the leading actors become too old, die or refuse to continue, and then "prequels" are made."

"Will there be a sequel to this story?"

"Nope! Maybe a prequel.  Read it again. Or better yet, read another story or novel that leaves you unsatisfied with the ending wishing you knew what happened next.  Then start backwards from that ending. Perhaps what you were looking for, the gist of it, the pearl, so to speak, the meaning, however profound or plain silly, was already within the story and you missed it. Some stories are like that. Some stories are not worth a shit."

Climate Changes

Cold. Inside, outside.  Not just here in the sunny lands of milk and honey and 800 new laws effective January 1, but everywhere across the Continent. The coldest winter in 40 years, report the media, believable for once when spouting about climate.   Don't start a novel with weather, warned one popular and now dead writer of crime potboilers.  The postman just delivered one that does that. Its cover mimics the covers of potboilers, penny dreadfuls.  Critics loved it, I ordered it on a calm day of the rainy season. The rain started with no warning, reads the first sentence.  I bet the author was aware of the advice, and consciously disobeyed it. Good for him.  In another, 771 page novel I've just finished slogging through, the author has her hero walking through pouring rain of New York, somewhere around page 500 (I'm not going to search it for the exact page number, are you nuts?) There is no reason for the rain there then, no symbol, no metaphor, no consequence.  It's that kind of book. The marquise went out at five, kind of book.  It was a dark and stormy night. Speaking of rain, Phil Everly just died, two weeks short of his 75th birthday. I remember when he and his older brother Don,  who like their mother Margaret is still alive, sang  their gorgeous song Crying in the Rain after I timidly requested it sitting at a table right in front of the stage of a  small club, next to a date who worked for the CIA.  Raining in My Heart, sang Buddy Holly, not just for me though, for everybody. Martin England, another favorite, has written at least two songs about weather, and the covers of his albums are weather related.  There is a lot of weather in popular songs. Not climate, though. The wind has stopped blowing, said a friend to me (I just made it up.) That wind is gone, dead, there will be another one, I replied.  Why do people worry about things that are long gone, ceased existing?  The thought that started it, waking me up late on a sunny cold Sunday of the dry rainy season.

Return to Sender

Two weeks  ago I picked up my early Christmas present sitting unwrapped on top of a low wall in front of a Victorian house across the street from my local  supermarket.  It was a 773 page novel from a highly acclaimed and reclusive author, whose previous or later books  I hadn't read (this one has Copyright 1997), although I think I've seen his most famous tome (they are all tomes, doorstops), 784 pages of it, around the house, which work I don't remember ever buying  or reading, perhaps it was a gift or the darn cat dragged it in, or perhaps I don't even own it (I've looked up the number of pages on Amazon.)

I carried this brick walking down the hill home, a full  mile to be exact, sat down in a chair and tried to read it.  I noticed lines  underlined in thin black ink, and some paragraphs similarly bracketed on the margins,  this on the first few pages that I checked, the book must have been read by whoever was giving it away.

I am a badly read reader, who hasn't read the right classics, and doesn't read the mainstream critics' favorites, the East Coast establishment writers, or Tom Wolfe's Three Stooges, though I have made attempts , and have read Tom Wolfe himself.  I do read some critics, though not the godawful New York Times female critic, and follow some of their recommendations, preferring unheralded writers and debuts. I think I must have read three or four first novels last year, all of them excellent. I stay away from crowd favorites, from topical novels of misery among the poor, oppressed, violent and drugged here and in the Third World, novels about divorces of the authors' (those Three Stooges again) obvious standins, who are invariably in these books college professors or some other academics. Call me a snob.

And so, I made another attempt, and I lasted all of  two pages.  Incomprehensible and unreadable.  I just scanned the book now, and the last pen marked  bracketed paragraph I see is on page 22.  Somebody lasted longer than I.  I am going to return this book to the place where I found it, if I can identify the house  (several houses on that block have similar walls in front)  inserting perhaps a note between the pages which says "Unreadable". Or let the next luckless reader find out for himself.  Yes, that'll learn 'im!

Beh Beh and the Fists of Fury

Bert was trying to make it in the stand-up comedy circuit.  It's an enticing prospect, like a career in popular music, and like it, it is a highly competitive field.  In the 1960s, there were folk clubs where budding singers would strum their Sears & Roebuck guitars trying to catch an ear of a record record scout. Nowadays, the folk clubs are all gone, but comedy clubs have grown like mushrooms after the rain.  Audiences pay money to spend an evening sitting in a crowded room, thankfully smoke free this time, and listen to three hours of bad jokes.  But then, most people like to boo and hiss along with their peers, it gives them the assurance that others think the same politically correct "progressive" thoughts, and like themselves disdain the forms of comedy they all implicitly agree are out of date and unfashionable.   How modern! Or post-modern.

Such affairs are sometimes competitions where the audiences choose via some applause-meter the winners, who will be invited the following week and paid a small fee.    Bert, like most aspiring comics, had a day job, and wrote and practiced his act (often with myself as his only audience) during off hours and weekends.  I helped him with the material, we wrote some jokes together, and with the delivery.   Some stand-ups fire off  a line after line without stopping, most, Bert among them, practice timing and silences.  We worked really hard on calibrating Bert's silences for the greatest effect.

Bert took on a stage name, the veracity of which he was able to support with an old fake ID, Bert Bukowsky, in honor, he told me, of the writer Charles Bukowsky.  He wanted to appear as a Jewish comedian. "Bukowsky sounds Polish or Russian," I informed him. "Well, aren't all Jews Polish or Russian?" he shot back.  (He incorporated this line into his act.) "And I tell jokes about my Jewish mother!"  (Bert's mother was native French.)

As he introduced himself on stage, he'd say, "Just call me B B" (pronouncing it 'Beh Beh'), "like the French call Brigitte Bardot". That line earned him the first laugh.

One time at a club competition he told the audience of an incident that happened to him, a public park ranger up in the hills during daytime.  He had to hand a ticket to a woman who was walking her dog without a leash, as required by park regulations. "Had to", because he did it reluctantly, normally issuing a verbal warning, but this time his supervisor was in the truck with him, and he had no choice.  The woman's dog was a pitbull, and the faces of the woman and the dog looked similar, as often happens with dog owners, men and women, so much so, he said, that he wasn't sure whether to hand the ticket to the woman or to the dog (audience laughs.)

It just so happened that this woman was also in the competition, somehow he didn't recognize her, or neglected to alter his act, she appeared before him, received almost no laughs, and when he returned backstage, unhappy as she already was at the cool  reception of her act, after words were exchanged, she attacked him with fists.  He hit her back just once, and broke her nose.  Police were called, there were witnesses supporting Bert's story, she was arrested, and in the end he declined to press charges. (The ticket, and no laughs at the club were enough punishment for her, he told me.) The incident became the talk of the town, was incorporated in various versions into other comedians' acts, though Bert wisely chose to remain silent on the subject. The nose eventually healed.