Dan Leo

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 177: big splash

2009-12-09T05:50:00.012-05:00

When last we saw the rhyming brakeman Arnold Schnabel his nemesis (well, one of his nemeses -- for such a nice guy he seems to have a lot of them) that hot-blooded novelist Gertrude Evans was dragging him by the shoulders toward the door of her apartment in Arnold’s aunts’ big old rooming-house in Cape May, NJ, at approximately 3:30 AM on the 11th of August, 1963...

(Click here to read our previous episode, or go here to return to the first chapter of this Gold View Award™-winning memoir. “Surely a masterwork to which people of all creeds -- and even those who have none -- may turn for wisdom, inspiration and comfort as our world goes merrily to hell in a hand basket.” -- J.J. Hunsecker, in The Catholic Standard & Times.)

Uselessly my fingers scrabbled at the scrupulously polished floor.

I may not have known much but what I did know was that I couldn’t allow her to get me into her room.

I went limp, hoping to lull her into a false sense of victory as she pulled me along like a sack of potatoes, and I waited till she let go her left hand so that she could open the door, which like all the doors in my aunts’ house, had been left unlocked. Then, as she pushed the door open, I twisted out of the grasp of her right hand, and turned onto my knee -- unfortunately my more badly-injured right knee -- and, stifling a grown of agony, once again I collapsed, this time face-first onto the floor.

“Stop struggling,” she whispered. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

She took hold of my left arm with both her hands and quickly dragged me across the threshold, and although I tried to grab onto the door jamb with my free hand, she simply gave my other arm a sharp twist and a good yank and I lost my grip.

Once she had me well in she shut the door with her foot and then hauled me over next to her bed.

“All right,” she said, “now let’s take a look at your boo-boos." She tossed her purse to the floor. "Come on, help me get you onto the bed.”

I got up onto one knee, my less-damaged left one this time.

“Can’t we have a little light?” I asked.

“What for?”

“So you can see.”

“See what?”

“My, uh, boo-boos?”

“Oh, right.”

I was hoping to make a dash for the door while she switched on a lamp, but she kept hold of my left arm with one hand while she reached over to the tasseled lamp by her bed and pulled the cord.

“There,” she said. “Light. Now get onto the bed like a good boy.”

With her pulling my arm I got up and sat on the side of the bed.

She finally let go of my arm and stood before me, stretching and flexing the fingers of her hands.

“At long last,” she said.

“Miss Evans,” I said.

“Gertrude.”

“Gertrude. I have to tell you something.”

“No need to tell me, Arnold. Words fail at moments like this. Should I get some iodine and a wet rag now or should we wait until after.”

“After what?”

“I think you know what, you great brute.”

“Gertrude, I’m engaged.”

“What?”

This kind of lie had worked a month or so ago with that Rhonda or Mona woman, whatever her name was, it was worth a try now.

“Elektra and I, we got engaged tonight.”

“You. And that Greek girl.”

“Well, she’s Jewish actually, but yes, her. And me.”

“And does she know about you and me.”

“What? What about you and me?”

“Our special bond.”

“Um -- no,” I said.

“Then it will be just our secret. Lie back now.”

Crossing her arms, she reached down, grabbed a bit of her silvery dress in each hand, and pulled it up over her head.

I figured that the fraction of a second that her garment was over her head would be my last of my last chances, and I made a break for it.

However, even with her eyes covered she was way ahead of me, sticking a foot in my path, sending me once again sprawling to the floor, which at least at this spot was covered with an old woven rug.

I turned over on my side, I saw her toss the dress away, and then, clad only in what I suppose must be called panties, and not unlike the wrestler Haystacks Calhoun performing his dreaded “Big Splash” coup de grâce, she threw herself bodily in my direction.

Meaning no one harm, especially myself, but acting instinctively as God will surely bear witness, I rolled quickly to one side and out of her way as she landed with a thump.

I was about to drag myself to the door, when, glancing back, I saw that Miss Evans was not moving.

Pushing myself up and onto my haunches I made a silent prayer. Josh I knew was no doubt still asleep, and so (never feeling comfortable addressing the Holy Ghost, or Spirit) I addressed his father.

“Please, dear God,” I said (again, silently, I wasn’t that far gone), “please don’t let her be dead. And, if you can find it within the purview of your mercy, also let her not be paralyzed or otherwise seriously injured. On the other hand please let her remain unconscious, but not comatose, until the morning. Amen.”

I shuffled on my aching knees over to her, leaned over.

Thank God, she was breathing.

I ran my hand along her neck. All felt normal. I leaned over farther and, fingering her hair away, I examined her face. She had a very small bump on her forehead.

“Mwa,” she said, her eyes half-opening. “Mwa?”

“It’s okay, Miss Evans,” I said. “We’re just going to put you to bed.”

“Mwa?”

I got to my feet, and then, reaching down, I lifted her up with my hands beneath her shoulders. For such a strong woman she was really very light. She didn’t struggle, and soon I had her in her bed, her nakedness covered up with a sheet.

“Mwa,” she said again.

“Good night, Miss Evans,” I whispered.

“No, kizz me,” she mumbled.

I relented, gave her a quick kiss on the cheek, she said “mwa” again, and I put out the light and left the room, closing the door behind me.

I limped slowly down the hall. It was a miracle that the whole house was not awake. Come to think of it, the whole house probably was awake.

I made it to the bathroom.

Using wet toilet paper (I didn’t want to leave blood on washcloths or towels) I dabbed at my various scrapes, dropping the wads of paper into the toilet.

I urinated, flushed, washed my hands, and then for good measure I brushed my teeth.

As I brushed I looked at my face in the old mirror, the sort of mirror that makes your face look even more alien than it normally might, as if you’re looking not at your reflection but at a different version of yourself in some other world looking into a similar mirror and seeing this somewhat dubious version of myself that was me.

I rinsed out my mouth, switched off the light, and then waited for a moment before opening the door, listening, just to make sure Miss Evans hadn’t revived and was waiting outside ready to pounce. I heard nothing, only the faint faraway breathing of the ocean from the open bathroom window.

I opened the door, went out and across the hall and up to my attic room.

(To be continued, come hell or high water.)

(Please look to the right hand side of this page for a scrupulously up-to-date listing of links to all other available chapters of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train To Heaven©, soon to be available in a 24-volume handsomely-bound edition from Funk & Wagnall’s, sold exclusively at better Woolworth’s 5&10s everywhere. Food stamps accepted.)

“Uncle Buddy’s House”, Chapter 27: bro and sis

2009-12-05T04:22:00.006-05:00

Let us join Philip and Liz in the kitchen of their father’s Mission/Tudor house on North Ivar Avenue, in Hollywood, USA...

(Click here to go to our previous embarrassing episode, or go here to return to the first chapter of this “shocking saga of lust’s labor’s lost in Lala Land” -- (J.J. Hunsecker, in the International Herald Tribune.)

“Dad’s got a babe upstairs.”

“Fuck off.”

“Word. I saw her. Naked. I barged into Dad’s room without knocking and --”

“Oh my God --”

“-- there she was, just standing there.”

“For real.”

“For rizzeal.”

“Naked.”

“Naked, baby.”

“Oh my God. You mean, like, young?”

“Yeah, pretty young. Twenty--”

“Twenty?”

“Twenty-something, dude.”

“Oh my G--- wait. Philip. Are you fucking with me?”

“No. Go look.”

“Wow. You saw her, fucking naked.”

“Not fucking, but naked.”

“Wow. Did she have a nice body?”

“Yeah. Built. Nice breasts, natural --”

“Was Dad naked?”

“Yeah, but he was in bed and he had the covers over him a little bit.”

“Oh wow. Did you -- see his penis?”

“No. Thank God.”

“What should we do?”

“Finish bringing your stuff in.”

“But Philip --”

“What?”

“We can’t. We’ve got to go away for a while.”

“He didn’t --” Philip paused (Buddy had guessed right, Philip was high; after doing without pot the whole trip, on the way home he had stopped the U-Haul at a taco vendor’s he knew on Highland over near Hollywood High and bought a ready-made spliff.) --”say we had to go away.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I mean he’s already been busted. Unless -- wait --”

“What?”

“Maybe they didn’t finish screwing.”

“Eww. Just -- eww, Philip.”

“Maybe they’re up there screwing right now.”

“Stop. I do not want to think about dad screwing some bimbo.”

“You don’t know she’s a bimbo. You’re such a priss, man.”

“I’m not a priss. I just don’t want to think about Dad fucking. Yucko. What are you doing?”

“I’m getting a beer.”

“Philip.”

“What?”

One thing about Dad, the motherfucker always had good beer in the fridge.

“Philip. I think we should split.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.” He pulled out an Anchor Steam. “You want one? Oh, right, no beer, right?’

“No. I’ll take some Diet Coke.”

Philip put his beer down on the counter.

“One Diet Coke, coming up.”

“Oh my God.”

“What?” Philip upended a glass from the dish rack and filled it from a plastic magnum of Diet Coke. “What?” he said again.

“What if she’s a prostitute?”

“A prostitute?”

“Yes! I mean --”

“I hadn’t thought about that.”

“Think about it, dude.”

Philip handed her her Diet Coke.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Liz drank some of her soda, holding the glass in both hands. Philip popped the top off his beer and took a pull.

“Yeah, we should book,” said Philip.

“Except now I want to know who she is. What did she seem like?”

“Just -- you know, a chick. A nice chick.”

“Nice?”

“Yeah. She was -- very -- polite.”

“Wait -- you talked to her?”

“Just a little.”

“While she was naked?”

“I told you she was naked.”

“Oh my God.”

“She --”

“What?”

“She had a cool voice. It was, like, wet.”

“She had a wet voice.”

“Yeah.”

“She’s a whore.”

“Well, if she is I’d say she’s a pretty high-class whore.”

“Oh. Really.”

“What I mean is she wasn’t just some, you know --”

“Crack whore.”

“Yeah.”

Liz sipped her soda

“Fucking Dad.”

“Can’t leave him alone for a minute,” said Philip.

“Like a little kid.”

“Fucking Dad.”

“Dad, fucking.”

They both snorted.

“Shit,” said Philip, “the beer came up through my nose.”

“You’re gross. All men are gross.”

“Fucking Dad, fucking.”

They both snorted again.

“Oh, hi,” said Philip.

“What?” said Liz.

“Hello,” said Cordelia.

Liz turned around.

“Oh. Hi.”

“Hello.”

Cordelia was dressed now, with her red backpack slung over one shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” she said, to both of them.

“Hey, no,” said Philip. “I should be sorry. I’m the one who barged in.”

“Well, I just wanted to say I’m sorry anyway.”

“No problem,” said Philip. “Where’s Dad?”

“He’s -- he’s --”

“Hiding,” said Philip. “The coward.”

“Well, I’ll go now,” said Cordelia.

“Wait, don’t just go,” said Philip. “Have a beer. You want a beer?”

“I don’t really drink beer.”

“Philip,” said Liz, “let her go.”

“Yeah, I’ll go.”

“No, wait,” said Philip -- “what’s your name?”

“Cordelia.”

“Cordelia. I’m Philip.”

“I know.”

“And this is Liz.”

“Hi Liz.”

“Hi.”

“Don’t just rush out,” said Philip. “I’m sure Dad doesn’t want you to just rush out.”

“I don’t know. This is weird.”

“Philip --” said Liz.

“What?”

“I really better go,” said Cordelia. Ming came in, jumped up on the table, looked at Cordelia. She patted Ming’s head. “Hi, cute cat. What’s your name?”

“Ming,” said Liz.

“Hi, Ming. Hi, Ming.” Ming jumped down from the table and trotted away. “’Bye Ming. You’re moving from Milwaukee, Liz?”

“Yeah.”

“I love Milwaukee. I did a show there once.”

“Really? You’re an actress?”

“Yeah, that was my one real road tour.”

“What was the show?”

“Sound of Music? With Richard Chamberlain?”

“Wow,” said Philip, “did you play the like Julie Andrews part?”

“Oh no, I was the little twit, you know --” she sang, “’I am sixteen going on seventeen --’”

“Ah,” said Liz. “I love that show.”

“Hey, how was Richard Chamberlain?” said Philip.

“Oh, he was nice. So what were you doing in Milwaukee, Liz?”

(To be continued, no matter what the Nielsen ratings say.)

(Please go to the right hand side of this page to see a listing of links to all other available chapters of Uncle Buddy’s House™, soon to be a major motion picture produced and directed by Larry Winchester, provided George Clooney will come down ten mil in his asking price, although we’re open to giving him points.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 176: let’s go

2009-12-02T04:46:00.018-05:00

In our previous episode that poet-saint Arnold Schnabel (still trying to get home to his aunts’ place after the longest night in recorded history) found himself once again dragooned by the terrible trio of the hot-blooded lady novelist Gertrude Evans and those Shnausers from hell, young Mr. and Mrs. DeVore...

(Click here to return to the first chapter of this Gold View Award™-winning memoir. “It’s a family tradition in my home to sit by the fire and read Schnabel aloud throughout all twelve nights of Christmas.” -- J.J. Hunsecker, in Town and Country.)

Finally we made it to my aunts’ house on North Street, and our little troop went through the gate, up the front path and around to the side entrance steps. My female relatives (despite their obdurate thriftiness) had kindly left the little light bulb burning over the doorway. I turned to the Devores. I knew that they had the room on the ground floor left rear, which meant that here was the perfect place to divest myself of them. (Miss Evans, I knew, would be a different and far more difficult matter.)

“Well, good night, uh --” I couldn’t remember DeVore’s first name, and I had never known his wife’s name, although I had the vague notion that it possibly sounded like some sort of tuber or vegetable. “Good night, Mr. -- uh --”

Suddenly his wife leaned over one of my aunts’ azaleas and began to vomit.

“Let’s go, Arnold,” said Miss Evans, pulling on my arm.

Mr. DeVore, ignoring his wife, held out his hand to me.

“Good night, pal. This is the best night I ever had in my life. And I really mean that.”

I shook his hand quickly, then pulled my hand away.

His wife continued to vomit.

“Would you two like to stop back to our place for a little nightcap?” he asked.

“No,” said Miss Evans.

“No thanks,” I said.

“You’re sure?” he asked. “I got a bottle of Four Roses --”

“No,” said Miss Evans.

“Yeah, it’s a little late,” I said.

His wife continued to vomit still.

“Hey, we should do something tomorrow, Arnold,” he said. “Just you and me.”

“Do something?”

Miss Evans pulled on my arm.

“Yeah,” said DeVore. “What do you like to do, Arnie? You like to fish?”

It had been such a long night. I confess I was on the verge of beginning to lose my patience. Mrs. DeVore, still vomiting prodigiously, had fallen to her knees, her sweat-soaked back buckling violently with each spasm. One would not have thought this smallish woman’s stomach capable of producing so much vomit, but it kept bursting out with no signs of diminishment.

“Listen,” I said, “Mr. DeVore --”

“Bob, call me Bob.”

He took out a pack of Kools from somewhere, gave the pack a shake, and several cigarettes flew out of it.

“Bob --” I said.

“Or maybe we could play a round of golf,” he said.

“Let’s go, Arnold,” said Miss Evans.

“Do you play?” asked DeVore. “Golf I mean.”

“No,” I said.

“What about miniature golf?”

“Oh my f**king God,” moaned Mrs. DeVore.

“Honey,” said Mr. DeVore, putting a cigarette into his mouth, “watch your language.”

“Sorry,” she moaned.

“Sorry about that,” said DeVore to both me and Miss Evans. “She’s not used to the booze.” He was trying to light a cigarette with a Zippo that wouldn’t light. “So, Arnold -- y’know what we should really do? What we should really do tomorrow is just sit in a bar and watch the Phillies on TV. They’re playin’ the Giants. What do ya say? Just you and me, us guys.”

He smiled the way a puppy smiles.

How could I tell him I would rather die?

“Come on, Arnold,” said Miss Evans.

She was squeezing my arm so tightly that I could feel the blood to my hand being cut off.

“I want to show you my etchings,” she said.

“Etchings?” said DeVore. “I’d like to see your etchings too.”

"I think you should attend to your wife," said Miss Evans.

"Oh," he said, glancing down at the heaving and gasping small woman, "yeah, I guess you're right. Well, then, Arnold, how about it?"

"What?"

"How about you and me, tomorrow. We'll get a little crazy. What do you say?"

You can imagine what I wanted to say.

But then an odd thing happened, to wit, DeVore suddenly turned into Jesus Christ. Not the Josh I had just left passed out on a couch at the Chalfonte, but a shorter and much more mundane-looking Jesus, but Jesus all the same.

“Yes,” he said. “Even the most boring man has something of me in him. Remember that, Arnold, and be kind.”

Then just as quickly he changed back into DeVore.

“Okay,” I said then. "Uh, look, Bob, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

This seemed vague enough.

“When?” he asked, shaking his lighter.

“Um, in the morning,” I said.

“In the morning it is, then buddy!”

He clicked his lighter again. It failed to light.

“Good -- night -- Arnold,” moaned his wife, hunched over, holding her hair back with one hand, and looking sideways up at me.

“Good night --”

What was her name?

No matter. She vomited again.

“Ta ta,” said Miss Evans and then she pulled me up the steps, threw open the screen door and yanked me inside.

The hallway in there is narrow, as are the stairs, and she finally let go of my arm. Not standing on ceremony I headed up the stairs first. I didn’t want her blocking my way.

I climbed the steps as quickly as I could with my injured knees and made it to the second floor without incident, but halfway up to the third floor Miss Evans could no longer restrain herself and she grabbed at my rear end, causing me to leap involuntarily, trip, and flop forward onto the steps, with my right knee taking the hard brunt of the fall.

“Oh, dear, are you okay, Arnold?” she said, from below me on the stairs, and yet above me.

“Sure,” I said, and I pushed myself up to a standing position again. I took another step but my knee gave out, and I collapsed to my slightly more functional left knee.

“Are you quite sure you’re all right, Arnold?”

I didn’t answer, but, putting my hand on the bannister, I hauled myself up again. Going very slowly, one halting painful step at a time, I pulled myself up the rest of the way to the third floor.

I stopped to catch my breath, and to prepare myself for the walk down the hall to the attic door, when she came up beside me and took my arm once more.

“You poor thing and it’s all my fault.”

“No, I’ll be fine,” I said.

“You’d better come to my room. I’ll put some ice on that knee.”

 “No thanks, Miss Evans.”

“Clean you up a bit.”

“I’ll take a shower in the morning.”

I took a step, and almost but not quite fell. Miss Evans skipped forward and grabbed my arm.

“Here, let me help you.”

I took another painful step.

“There there,” she said. “Easy does it now.”

A few more steps took us abreast of her door.

“I can make it from here,” I said.

“Oh can you?”

“Yes, thank you,” I said, through gritted teeth.

“Well, good night, then.”

“Good night, Gertrude.”

Don’t ask me why I tossed her the bone of addressing her by her first name. I felt sorry for her. But I shouldn’t have done it. Next thing I knew she had her arms around my neck and was kissing me.

It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want her to kiss me, although it’s true, I didn’t want her to, but the thing was that with my bad knee I could barely support my own weight, forget about the addition of hers, and so the combined action of my trying to pull away from her and of my right knee collapsing sent us both tumbling to the floor, with me on my back and Miss Evans lying on top of me.

“You brute,” she whispered. “Do you intend to take me right here in the hallway?”

I shoved her off, turned over, tried to get up, failed, fell to my knees, in great pain.

She grabbed my belt at the back, yanked, and pulled me to the floor again.

I was on my back again, she was on her knees straddling my chest, staring down at me. She had her hard black purse slung over one shoulder, and both her hands were free to press down against my shoulders. Her face seemed enormous looming above mine, and even in the dim light of this hallway her eyes glittered with tiny bright flames.

“So,” she said, “you like it rough, do you?”

“Please, Miss Evans,” I whispered. “We’ll wake up the whole house.”

“That’s true,” she said. “Can’t have that.”

Two seconds later she was dragging me by the shoulders back toward her door. I had not known before this night that a mortal woman could possess such strength.

(Continued here, and indefinitely, due to contractual obligations.)

(Kindly turn to the right hand column of this page to find a putative up-to-date listing of links to all other previously broadcast episodes of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train To Heaven©. Farther down you will find a listing for many of the fine poems of Arnold Schnabel, suitable for quoting on Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa cards.)

“Uncle Buddy’s House”, Chapter 26: busted

2009-11-28T03:01:00.005-05:00

In our previous episode our hero Buddy Best was about to join the enigmatic Cordelia for lunch at Hollywood’s storied Musso and Frank Grill when she makes a startling suggestion...

(Click here to return to the first chapter of this “rollicking and ribald romp through the lower depths of today’s Tinsletown” -- (J.J. Hunsecker, in the Cape May Star and Times.)

It seemed like he had almost forgotten how nice it could be.

But then come to think of it maybe it never had been this nice.

“Um,” he said, “I guess we’re supposed to use a condom, right?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“Uh, do you have any?”

“No,” she said. “Don’t you?”

Okay, he had gone through tons of condoms in his life up until his dry spell of the past year, but like any good philandering husband he had always bought them on an ad hoc basis. And so, not being entirely forthcoming:

“No, I don’t. Joan was on the pill. Not that she needed to take the pill as far as I was concerned, since we didn’t -- or at least we hadn’t in a long time, but -- are you on the pill?”

“No,” she said.

She turned her head and looked away, biting her lip. She had let her hair down and her curls were exploded all over the pillow. Okay --

No. He owed it to her not even to suggest, not even to --

“Y’know, I could -- just put it in for a little while, and then -- you know --”

She quickly turned her face to his, her eyes wide open.

“Oh my God, I’ve never done that.”

“Oh. Well, it’s not that much fun, really.”

“I mean, I’ve never -- I’ve never had sex without a condom.”

“Oh,” said Buddy. “That --”

“Sucks. I know.”

She looked up at him. He looked down at her.

“Um --”

“Yeah?” she said.

“Uh -- there’s other ways we can enjoy ourselves,” said Buddy.

“Oh really?”

“Possibly.”

“You’re such an old pro, huh?”

“That’s me.”

A minute later, “Oh, no,” she said. “Oh no. Oh no.” Buddy stopped doing what he was doing. “Why’d you stop?” she said.

“Oh, sorry,” he said, and he went back to it.

Then:

“What’s that?” she said.

Buddy stopped again.

“What’s what?”

“That buzzing sound.”

Buddy listened.

“Oh, it’s my cellphone.” Which was in his pants, which were on the floor. “It’s on Manner Mode. It buzzes and vibrates instead of ringing, for like when you’re in a restaurant.”

“Like we are now?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t need to answer it?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

The buzzing stopped.

“Okay,” said Buddy.

“Wait!” said Cordelia.

“What?”

“Wait, I think I might have a condom.”

“Oh. Great.”

She swung her leg over his head, and got out of the bed.

“Don’t look at me,” she said.

He looked at her. Okay, body nowhere nearly as toned or as muscular as Joan’s, hips and backside fuller and softer, breasts a bit smaller but much more -- realistic, because they were real. She looked human.

She picked up her red backpack, which she had dropped to the floor halfway from the door when they came in. She brought it over to the bed and sat down with it on her lap.

“There might be one in here somewhere. I was seeing this dude for about two minutes back in New York, and I think -- but then we’d better check the expiration date, but, wait -- no --”

Buddy put his hand on her hip and watched her as she rummaged through the pack.

“I said don’t look at me,” she said.

“Okay,” said Buddy.

He sat up behind her, and put his hand on her breast. With his other hand he moved her hair away from her neck and then he kissed her neck. She moved her head up and around in a circle.

He leaned down around her shoulder and kissed her Saturn tattoo. She put her hand on his hand which was on her breast. She smelled like -- what -- warm honey, warm honey and --

Then Buddy heard Philip yelling downstairs and, more faintly, Liz yelling from out front.

Cordelia turned her face to his.

“Who’s that?”

“My kids,” whispered Buddy.

“Your kids,” she whispered back.

“My two grown kids. By my other marriage.”

“Oh. Why are they here?”

“Philip moved back in a couple of weeks ago. Now Liz is moving back too and Philip is helping her.”

“Oh. Philip and Liz.”

“Yeah. They were in Milwaukee. I didn’t know they’d be getting here today.”

“I see. What should we do?”

“Well, we could hide in here.”

They could still hear Philip yelling downstairs, and now they could hear Liz’s voice indoors too.

“The door’s open,” Cordelia said.

His bedroom door. They hadn’t been very discreet as they tumbled in from the hallway.

“Should I close it?” she said.

“Yeah, why don’t you close it while we -- whatever.”

She put the backpack on the floor and got up and tiptoed over to the doorway. (And Buddy memorized her doing this.) She gently closed the door and tiptoed back to the bed. She had one knee up on it and Buddy had his hand on her thigh when he said:

“Oh, wait, you didn’t put the bolt on.”

“The bolt -- oh --”

She got off the bed again and took a step, but there was a thump, thump, rapid thumping on the stairs, and she froze -- thump, thump, thump -- then she tiptoed forward but right before she reached the door it opened and Philip was there, saying:

“Yo! Dad! You here? Oh -- oh -- oh -- wow --”

Cordelia stood there on her toes, her hands half raised.

“Shut the door, Philip,” said Buddy.

“Ah, shit, Dad, I’m sorry. Hello,” he said to Cordelia.

“Hello,” she said.

“Phil --” said Buddy.

“Oh, sorry --”

And Philip started to close the door, but as it was almost closed he said:

“Dad, you want us, I mean me and Liz, you want us to like, you know, disappear for a while, or --”

“I don’t care, Philip.”

“I just had to use the head, Dad, and I figured you were home ‘cause I saw your car, and your door was open, and, I don’t
know --”

“It’s okay, Phil, just close the door, okay, let us get dressed.”

“Okay,” he said, through the crack.

“Sorry, miss.”

“That’s okay, Philip,” said Cordelia. “You didn’t know.”

“I know. I just had to take a pee.”

“It’s okay,” she said.

“Well, I’ll see you guys,” said Philip.

For some reason the maniac hadn’t shut the door yet. Was he high?

“I’m really sorry,” he said. He was high. “Really --”

“Philip, it’s okay,” said Buddy. “Just shut the fucking door.”

“Okay. Nice meeting you, miss. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” said Cordelia.

And, finally, he shut the fucking door.

(Continued here, despite the cries of the nay-sayers.)

(Please see the right hand side of this page for a listing of links to all other published chapters of Uncle Buddy’s House™, recently awarded the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 175: jealous

2009-11-25T10:52:00.009-05:00

Let us return to that fateful long night in August of 1963, and to our hero, Mr. Arnold Schnabel -- bruised, battered, bloodied and only slightly bowed, wending his way homeward (or at least to the boarding house of his three maiden aunts, to which he and his mother have resorted for the summer) through the streets of that ancient seaport of Cape May, New Jersey...

(Go here to read our previous episode, or here to go to the first chapter of this Gold View Award™-winning epic, styled by the noted scholar Harold Bloom as “a book for all seasons, but particularly appropriate for gift-giving during the pagan winter-solstice festivities”.)

I made the left turn at Carpenter’s Lane. As empty as the streets were, it still seemed prudent to avoid the main drag of Washington Street, along or near which so many of tonight’s shenanigans had transpired. But when I got to the crossing of Jackson Street I couldn’t help but look to my left and up to that second floor above the jewelry shop: the windows of Elektra’s room were dark, but I saw lights in the apartment’s other windows along the side of the house.

I walked over and around to the side pathway and into that dark nighttime smell of ivy and of sleeping roses. I paused beneath a window and heard music, jazz music, a saxophone playing a sad song that seemed like it had started years ago and still had a long way to go.

And then I thought, no.

Enough was enough. And, besides, just look at me. God knew I knew next to nothing about women, but if I knew anything at all about them then Elektra would not leave unmentioned these scrapes on my every possible hand and arm and knee, not to mention a pronounced limp. It would be bad enough dealing with my mother and aunts in the morning.

But then I hesitated, because it occurred to me that of course Elektra would only see the scrapes tomorrow.

(Unless -- unless I went over to Buddy Kelly’s again, and asked him for another swabbing with that scarlet medicine…)

What to do.

I turned and walked back to the sidewalk. But then I stopped again, looking obliquely up at those inviting second-floor windows, hearing that soft music.

Would it be so terrible after all to let Elektra fuss over me a little bit?

And then I saw the lights go out in those windows, and retroactively I became aware that the music had ceased also a few moments before. So even my bohemian friends were finally calling it a day, unless one or more of them should still be sitting up, staring into the darkness and silence, something I had done often enough in my life but hadn’t done lately.

So I continued my way homeward, turning down Carpenter’s Lane again. Up ahead was Perry Street, and when I reached it I would be in the home stretch, just a couple of blocks from my bed.

However, as I reached Perry I saw out of the corner of my eye three people all the way down near Beach Drive.

It couldn’t be, could it?

I quickly turned right, hunching my shoulders and lowering my head, but then I heard it: three voices, one male, two female, all of them shouting my name at the top of their lungs.

My impulse was to run, just to break into a run and not stop running until I was back in my aunts’ house, but unfortunately with my banged-up knees running was out of the question; it was all I could do to shamble, and painfully at that.

I stopped, and turned, and waited, and soon I was joined by Miss Evans and Mr. and Mrs. DeVore, all of them out of breath and panting after stampeding up the street.

“I knew I would find you,” said Miss Evans.

“Arnold, old buddy, what the hell happened to you?” yelled Mr. DeVore.

“He’s been beaten up,” gasped Mrs. DeVore. “Or were you hit by a car?”

“Neither,” I said, responding directly to Mrs. DeVore. “I fell.”

More nonsense was spoken, by all concerned, I won’t bore the reader or myself by trying to dredge it up and transcribe it, living through it once was bad enough. But pretty soon we got moving, myself and Miss Evans leading the way, Miss Evans hanging tightly onto my arm and the DeVores yapping away right on our heels.

“I knew I would find you, Arnold,” said Miss Evans, for about the ninth time. She was now speaking in an almost-English accent, sort of like the way Katharine Hepburn talks.

“It was meant to be,” she said. “I can’t wait to get you home. Oh, wait.”

She stopped, pulling me to a stop. The Devores almost ran into us.

“Stand back, you two,” said Miss Evans.

They both said sorry and stepped back a yard or so.

“Where did you go, with that Joshua fellow?”

She still held her arm tightly in mine.

“That’s a long story,” I said.

“You two,” said Miss Evans to the DeVores, “step back farther!”

This they did, a few more steps.

“It was them, wasn’t it?” she said, not quite whispering. “They were boring you silly, so you and Joshua ditched the lot of us.”

“Well --”

“Say no more. You poor man. Come on.”

She gave my arm a yank, and we resumed our progress.

The DeVores continued to follow us, keeping to a respectful few feet behind us.

“By the way, old bean, what’s up with those other friends of yours, that Mr. Arbuthnot and that Jack fellow?”

“Just some guys I barely know,” I said.

“What about this other chap, friend of this Jack blighter -- 'Lucky'. Do you know him?”

“I’m afraid I do,” I said.

“What do you mean, you don’t like him?”

“No, I can’t say I do,” I said.

“So you don’t think I should sign with him?”

“Sign with him?”

“His management company. He and that Jack bloke say they can get all my books made into movies. Do you think they’re full of ordure?”

“Of what?”

“Caca. Feces. Of the bovine sort.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes. I do in fact.”

Now it was I who stopped us. I held out a warning arm to the DeVores, and without a word they stopped and withdrew to the same distance they had held to during my immediately previous tête-à-tête with Miss Evans.

“Arnold, what’s come over you.”

“Miss Evans, you didn’t sign anything, did you?”

“What? What do you mean. Ha ha. Would I sign a contract with someone I had just met in a bar somewhere? Ha ha.”

“Did you?”

I peeled her arm from its steely grasp on mine.

“You’re being very rude, Arnold.”

“Listen, Gertrude --”

“Oh.”

“What?”

“You called me by my Christian name. You’ve never done that before without my prompting.”

“Miss Evans --”

“I do believe you’re jealous, Arnold.”

With one red-nailed finger she touched the open neck of my polo shirt.

I pulled her hand away.

“Oh, my, so forceful. I love you this way, Arnold. You beast.”

“Miss Evans, did you sign a contract?”

“No, you silly man, I didn’t sign a contract. Oh, they wanted me to but I played hard to get. That Lucky fellow said he’d take me to luncheon tomorrow and try to, as he put it, ‘ply me with champagne and oysters’.”

“She’s telling the truth, Arnold,” called DeVore.

“Yeah. Truth,” said Mrs. DeVore.

“We heard it all.”

“Heard all.”

“Now may we go home?” said Miss Evans.

She slid her arm back into mine, gave me a tug, and off we went.

“Oh, yes, I do believe you’re jealous,” said Miss Evans.

She continued to speak nonsense the rest of the way back.

(Continued here, because that nice new doctor says it’s harmless to do so and possibly even good therapy.)

(Feel free to cast your gaze to the right hand column of this page where you should find an allegedly current list of links to all other available chapters of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train To Heaven©, the first six volumes of which will soon be available in handy pocket-sized editions from the The Big K Press, exclusively at K-Marts everywhere at the special low, low holiday price of $1.99 {US} apiece; quantities limited.)

“Uncle Buddy’s House”, Chapter 25: call-back

2009-11-23T14:20:00.009-05:00

In our previous episode our raffish hero Buddy Best found himself in an odd but strangely enjoyable compromised situation with the lovely and strange Cordelia, daughter of the bad actor who has absconded with Buddy’s wife...

(Go here to read the first chapter of this “sweaty submersion in a sultry sea of sin and snideness” -- (J.J. Hunsecker, in the Hollywood Reporter.)

Two days later Buddy was going over a revised music budget with Harvey and Debbie in Harvey’s office when Marlene came in and shut the door behind her.

“Buddy, there’s some girl here for you.”

“Some girl?”

“She says her name’s Cordelia. She didn’t give me her last name. She says you know her.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Do you want to see her?”

Marlene and Debbie both were all over him. Harvey just looked amused.

“Uh, okay,” said Buddy, “ask her if she can wait fifteen --”

“Buddy,” said Debbie, “you can go talk to her for a minute. Don’t be a jerk all your life.”

So Buddy went out into Marlene’s office. Cordelia was standing there, staring at one of their trashy promo posters. She had a red backpack on. She turned.

“Hi there,” he said.

“Hi,” she said. Her hair was pulled up on top of her head, most of it was, some of it curled down. “I was kinda sorta in the neighborhood so I thought I’d drop by. But you’re busy, right?”

“A little --”

A dress -- a sun dress? Red-and-white checks --

“So, do you want me to come by later? Or --”

Marlene was looking at them over her computer screen. Harvey and Debbie were looking at them through the open door.

“No, let’s go in here,” said Buddy.

And he opened the door to what was nominally his office, but which he hardly ever used. Cordelia stepped in and Buddy followed her, closing the door behind him.

Sunlight blazed in through the windows from the parking lot outside, and he looked at Cordelia in daylight for the first time.

“So,” he said.

Red lipstick, a little make-up --

“So,” she said.

“So, what’s up?” said Buddy.

He might have offered her a seat but the three chairs in the room were piled with videocassettes, DVD’s, CD’s, books, scripts, trade papers...

“I wanted to see you in person.”

She seemed so serious all of a sudden that he wondered if her father had come back and done something weird or hateful or both.

“Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, in fact I’ve just come from an audition, and I have a call-back tomorrow.”

Oh --

“Oh, that’s great,” he said.

“Yeah, out of nowhere I get this call this morning, can I come to the Paramount lot and read for this movie.”

“Great,” said Buddy. “Super. Cool.”

“I thought it was a joke,” she said.

“So it went okay.”

“Yeah. It’s for this Northwest Mountie movie with this guy Christopher Lambert. Do you know him?”

“Oh, yeah, I’ve worked with Chris.”

“Really?”

“Oh, sure. Five, six years ago, picture called Dead Vengeance? No it wasn’t, it was Dead Betrayal. Dead Vengeance was -- who -- oh, Eric Roberts, right, Eric --”

“Ah. Is he nice?”

“Eric Roberts?”

“No, this Christopher Lambert.”

“Oh -- very nice. He wasn’t there?”

“No. Just the director, this weirdo Joe guy --”

“Uh-huh. So -- Northwest Mountie --”

“Actually it’s a Northwest Mountie vampire movie. At first they had me read for this saloon girl who gets killed by a vampire, but then they didn’t seem to really care about that part so they read me for a featured role.”

“No kidding.”

“Yeah, this lady doctor on an Indian reservation. She hooks up with this Northwest Mountie guy who’s investigating these murders.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Vampire murders.”

“Well, y’know, that doesn’t sound like just a featured role, that sounds like the female lead --”

“Buddy, did you set this up?”

“No --”

“Okay, I know you did, I can tell. Can I smoke in here?”

“Sure. Give me one.”

Getting the cigarettes meant she had to take off the red backpack and open it and root around in it.

“Okay,” said Buddy, “before I went to sleep the other night I watched your movie, or some of it.”

“I know, it’s bad.”

“That’s true, but there’s good stuff in it, and you were excellent.”

“Really?”

“Really. By the way, the credits --”

“I know, the credits sucked.”

“No, I mean, your name -- you just go by ‘Cordelia’?”

“Yeah. Do you think that’s pretentious?”

“No. I think it’s cool. Like a French actress...”

She had finally come up with the box of cigarettes, maybe the same one from the other night, but she didn’t open it.

“So, anyway,” he said, “next morning I had the tape copied and sent the copy over to, uh, weirdo Joe. I knew he was looking for a new female lead for this Christopher Lambert picture they’re doing because the girl they had fell off a horse and broke her leg.”

“Oh my God, that’s terrible.”

“Well, it’s only a broken leg.”

“Yeah, but still --”

“Well, anyway, so I phoned him and asked him to look at the tape. I told him you’d been on One Life To Live, I said you were a nice person, and if he liked the tape, maybe he could give you a call. Don’t you want your cigarette?”

“Oh. Yeah.” She dropped the backpack to the floor with a thud, and opened the cigarette box. “You didn’t tell him to give me a part?”

“What do I look like, Sam Goldwyn?”

She took a pause here. Buddy suspected she hadn’t gotten the reference. Then she said:

“I told you I wasn’t looking for any favors from you.”

“I didn’t think you were.”

“But you did me a favor.”

“Why not?”

She looked very seriously into the cigarette box. She looked up.

“I hope you didn’t think I would go to bed with you because of it.”

“Never crossed my mind.”

“Right.”

“In a million years,” said Buddy. “On the other hand, this guy Joe, Joe Morrow --”

“I know.”

“You do? Already?”

“I could tell. He’s a lecho. A lecho-weirdo.”

“I mean, he’s legit, decent director, but --”

“Right.”

“Just --”

“Don’t worry. I can handle him.” She gnawed her upper lip for a second. “Tomorrow I read with this Lambert guy.”

“Chris you’ll like. He’s French actually. Christophe -- Lom-bair.”

“Oh no.”

“No, he’s cool.”

“He’s not weird?”

“No. And he’s a good actor.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen him in anything.”

“He’s in those, uh, Highlander movies?”

“Never heard of them. But what do I know. I just watch old movies. Bette Davis. Barbara Stanwyck. Deanna Durbin. Have you had lunch yet?”

“No.”

“Do you want to -- I mean, some place cheap this time -- and you have to let me pay --”

“Okay -- look, give me like fifteen or twenty minutes --”

“All right. I’ll just walk around --”

“No, don’t walk around around here -- look, go outside, go left and walk down to the corner, you’ll see this joint called the Musso and Frank Grill.”

“Buddy, I grew up in L.A., I’ve heard of Musso and Frank’s.”

“Oh, okay, sorry.”

“I mean, I’ve never actually been there --”

“Oh. Well, would you like to try it?”

“I’d love to.”

“Okay. Go around the back and go in and tell the guy you’re waiting for me. Tell him I said I’d like a booth. Then order a martini.”

“Well --”

She had that furrowed brow look again, even though her brow wasn’t really furrowed.

“What?”

“I’ll have an iced tea maybe.”

“Okay, iced tea’s cool. Don’t you want your cigarette?”

“No.” She closed the box. “I’ll save it for after. I mean after lunch. Do you still want one?”

“No, maybe later.”

****

“So, who’s your little friend?” said Debbie.

“She’s not my little -- she’s -- the Ancient Mariner’s daughter.”

“Oh my God.”

“Yeah.”

“What did she want?”

Harvey sat there, taking it all in.

“She, uh, it has to do with her old man.”

“And Joan?”

“Uh, yeah. It’s -- it’s personal stuff, Deb.”

“Sounds odd to me. Why is she coming to you?”

“I don’t know. She’s got a maniac for a father. My wife ran off with the maniac. We’re related in an weird way.”

“A very weird way.”

“Okay, look, let’s wrap this shit up, guys,” said Harvey. “We got the dude from HBO --”

“Showtime,” said Debbie.

“Thank you. The idiot from Showtime at what?”

“2:30.”

“So let’s grab some lunch. What’s the special at Musso’s today? Is today corned beef day?”

“Uh, look, not Musso’s,” said Buddy.

“Why not?”

“Because I’m having lunch with the Mariner’s daughter at Musso’s.”

“Oh, my God,” said Debbie. “You are busted. You are so busted.”

“What?” said Buddy. “We’re having lunch.”

****

She was standing on the sidewalk outside of Musso’s. On Gene Autry’s star. She had sunglasses on.

“Why didn’t you go in?”

“I felt funny.”

“Oh. Okay, well --”

“Buddy.”

“Yeah.”

“You live near here, don’t you?”

“Yeah, pretty close, up on Ivar. Why?”

“Is there anybody home right now?”

“At my house? No, not that I know of --”

“Let’s go to your house.”

It was hot on the sidewalk. Tiny beads of moisture glistened on her upper lip.

“Okay,” he said.

(Continued here, because the literary world demands it.)

(Please refer to the right hand side of this page for a listing of links to all other available chapters of Uncle Buddy’s House™, recently shortlisted for the Maury Povich Book Club.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 174: just a man

2009-11-19T03:44:00.007-05:00

In our previous episode our hero Arnold Schnabel was nice enough to walk the inebriated and battered Buddy Kelly home to Buddy’s apartment; Buddy repaid Arnold by healing Arnold’s scrapes with a mysterious and foul smelling scarlet liquid…

(Go here to return to that long-ago first chapter of this Gold View Award™-winning multi-volume masterpiece, which the noted critic Harold Bloom has called, “by way of being not so much a memoir, nay, but rather a way of life”.)

“Here,” he said, offering me the brown bottle. “Take this with ya. I got more.”

My immediate thought was how would I ever explain this bottle and its contents to my mother, who was unfailingly aware of every single thing I might bring home.

“Oh, no, that’s okay, Buddy, thanks.”

“Ya never know when ya might need it.”

“I’ll just try to be more careful in the future.”

“You’re a funny guy, Arnold.”

“A barrel of laughs,” I said.

“I mean here ya go turning down this shit for free, gratis and for nothing that could go for a thousand bucks an ounce if I ever put it on the market.”

“Maybe you should,” I said, wondering if it would be untoward of me to ask for one of his Dutch Masters Panetellas instead.

“Nah, the time ain’t right,” he said. “Mankind ain’t ready. And just between you and me and the wall I don’t know if it’ll ever be ready.”

“Well, I really should be pushing off now,” I said.

“Mass in the mornin’, huh?”

I had completely forgotten about mass, which certainly was an issue.

“The nine, right?” asked Buddy.

“Well, I don’t know if I’ll make the nine,” I said.

“Yeah, me neither,” said Buddy. “Unless I decide just to pull an all-nighter.”

He turned his head and gazed as if longingly at the TV screens.

“Okay, then,” I said. It didn’t look as if he was going to offer me a cigar. I turned and opened the screen door. “Good night, Buddy.”

“Good night, ya bum.”

I went out onto the landing, then safely down the steps. At their foot I paused, my hand on the rail. Up in Buddy’s apartment a pale glow flickered from the windows and from the doorway, accompanied by that multitudinous humming, as if all the universe with all its living and its dead and its still to be born were contained in that one room.

I went around the side of the house and back through the front gate, and set off again down Hughes Street.

Although my scrapes and their pain had been healed I was very tired, almost as tired as after one of my brakeman trips from Philadelphia to Binghamton, New York, and back again on the old Interstate Express in bad winter weather. I wished I could just fly home.

I came to the spot where Buddy and I had fought Mr. Lucky. There was no sign of the battle, not even a trace of his smell of corruption and death.

Impatiently I quickened my pace, broadening my strides. This was how my ancient ancestors survived and thrived I thought, hairy barbarians jogging relentlessly though hill and dale, through swamps and forests, chasing the mighty wooly mammoth. I’ll bet those fellows got tired too after twenty miles or so and before the invention of proper footwear. They too wished they could fly. And so imagine my surprise then when I actually did start to fly.

At first it was just a few feet or so, and I only rose up a couple of feet at that. But on touching down to the pavement I pushed off on one foot with greater vigor and now I rose up several feet and described an arc through the air extending perhaps ten or twelve feet. I was getting the hang of it now, and when I landed this time I kicked off from the sidewalk as forcefully as I could, and now I sailed up to the height of six feet, straightened my body out parallel to the sidewalk, and with my arms slightly open at my sides I flew steadily along at what I would estimate to be a healthy speed for a ten-year-old bicyclist.

Not as impressive as what Clarissa could pull off, but not bad at all for a beginner, I thought.

This was a restful and soothing way to travel, but I could see how unwise it would be to employ it in the daytime, especially for one such as I who has always preferred to blend into the scenery. No one was about now, though, the streets were quiet and empty, the only movement besides myself being that ocean breeze through the little leaves of the bushes glinting in the streetlight and sliding away beneath me like millions of stars.

At the corner of Ocean Street I touched down again and, turning inland, immediately sprung off deftly and smoothly to my previous altitude and speed. At this rate I would be back in my narrow army cot in no time.

My narrow cot.

The thought of it made me think of Elektra’s bed, that large comfortable bed smelling of flowers and of her, and I thought of her in that bed, sleeping soundly. Would she mind if I were to fly up to her window and drop quietly in? How nice it would be to sleep next to her warm body. All I had to do was make a left turn up at Carpenter’s Lane, and sail down to Jackson Street…

I briefly closed my eyes, thinking of Elektra, of her soft skin and her smell like warm peach pie when suddenly I felt a terrific jolt as my shoulder banged against the unsympathetic iron of a streetlamp pole and I crashed down to the pavement.

I lay there for a few moments, painfully aware of brand-new scrapes on the heels of my hands and my elbows and knees, of a wholly-new throbbing in my left shoulder, and of a painfully-enforced fresh sense of humility.

It occurred to me that perhaps just because I was able to do something did not mean that I should do it.

I turned over and lay there, breathing deeply, letting the new pains settle in, staring up through the barely stirring leaves of an oak tree.

But then again, how should I know what I should or shouldn’t do, except by trying?

I felt the earth turning beneath me, with me on it, and blinking among the oak leaves above I saw stars in their millions.

Despite my new array of pains it was almost restful lying there on the hard pavement.

I closed my eyes again.

But no.

This wouldn’t do.

If a cop should come along I would not be a personal friend of the savior and a conqueror of the devil but just another drunk lying on the pavement.

I pulled myself up by easy stages to a standing position.

Nothing seemed to be broken.

I took a step, did not fall down, although I winced and grunted.

I took a breath, and then another step.

I would walk home.

Like any normal man at the end of a long Saturday night, I would walk home.

Or at any rate I would limp home.

Not like a normal man, perhaps, but like a man.

(Continued here, because not to do so would constitute a crime against civilization.)

(Kindly look to the right hand column of this page for what may very well be a current listing of links to all other published chapters of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train To Heaven©, #99 {preceded by Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and followed by The Plague by Albert Camus} on The Ladies’ Home Journal’s “One Hundred Inspiring Books for the Holidays”.)

“Uncle Buddy’s House”, Chapter 24: going there

2009-11-16T16:25:00.009-05:00

In our previous chapter our hero Buddy Best found himself having dinner with none other than Cordelia, daughter of the Ancient Mariner, that ham actor who is now enjoying a holiday in Brittany with Buddy’s wife...

(Click here to return to the beginning of this “lewd and lubricious saga of love and lust in La La Land” -- (J.J. Hunsecker, in The Catholic Standard & Times.)

Of course she offered to take the bus home and of course Buddy insisted on driving her. Because he had been drinking he drove carefully through quiet streets. Neither of them said anything for a while and then she said, “I like driving through the streets. The freeways suck. What’s the big hurry anyway?”

“Dig it,” said Buddy.

Blocks and blocks of silence. Which was okay, in fact it was more than okay, it was kind of nice, but then Buddy said, “So, you gonna tell the Mariner we had dinner?”

“The who?”

“Oh. The Mariner. Short for the Ancient Mariner.”

“Is that what you call him?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh my God, that’s so perfect. Did everybody --?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Oh my God. Did he know you called him that?”

“I doubt it.”

“That’s just so perfect. Anyway,” she said, “no, I’m not going to tell him you and I had dinner. He would be -- weird about it.” She paused. “And I guess it is weird, but --”

She sighed.

A long moment passed and then she began to talk, in a dreamy warm voice, about not belonging in L.A., about her love for the world of the stage, her plans to move back to New York...and after a while Buddy only half-listened, minding his driving, enjoying being with her and the strangeness of the evening.

“Don’t you think?” she asked.

Uh-oh.

“Yeah,” he ventured.

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“So I’m not just -- some fruitcake.”

“No, not at all.”

“Thanks. That means something to me coming from you.”

“Oh, well, you know --”

What the hell was she talking about?

“Yeah,” she said.

She didn’t say a word the rest of the ride back until he stopped the car in front of her house -- well, the Mariner’s house.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay,” said Buddy.

“Thanks. For the dinner.”

“You’re welcome.”

“It was -- I think that was the best meal I’ve ever had.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

She looked away. He couldn’t tell for sure but he suspected she was gnawing on her upper lip. She turned back to him.

“Hey,” she said, “do you want to come in for a bit?”

“Well, to tell the truth I have to pee like crazy.”

“Oh, my God, so do I.”

So they went in, and she clicked on an overhead light.

“You go first, Buddy.”

“No, please --”

“No, you’re a man, men pee quick.”

“Okay.”

Unlike the last time Buddy was here he used the bathroom.

He came out and she went in, and he stood there in the big living room, surrounded by all the Mariner’s antiques and curios.

He heard the toilet flush, but she didn’t come out.

He just stood there. The big fat black cat appeared, came over and rubbed himself against Buddy’s leg and then walked away. Still no Cordelia, so Buddy went over to a tall bookcase made out of ostentatiously rough-hewn planks and old red bricks. He took off his driving glasses and put them away. Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, Faulkner. Raymond Carver, Tom Wolfe, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon. In the middle of one shelf were a bunch of framed photographs, most of them of the Mariner, at various stages of his career, in some of them he was in costume and make-up. In one picture a younger Mariner was standing with a very young version of Cordelia, aged twelve or so, on a pebbly beach on a grey day. The Mariner wore Speedos and rope sandals and a beret. Cordelia wore a plain light-colored dress and she was looking away from the camera, one hand brushing her dark hair away from her face. There was another one of a much younger Mariner, wearing hiking shorts and a straw hat and a peasant smock, posing by a thatched cottage with a dark haired, somber-looking young woman wearing a black turtleneck and jeans. Cordelia’s mother? The dead wife.

Buddy looked away, he could hear Cordelia’s footsteps finally coming back down the hall from where the bathroom was. For some reason he put his hand on the spine of a book, as if he had been checking the title, which in this case happened to be The Fountainhead.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Hey, no problem.”

“Are you looking for a book to steal?”

“Should I?”

“No, you’d better not. He would notice and then I’d catch hell.”

“Yeah, well,” said Buddy.

He looked at the books, or at least in the direction of the books.

“Well,” she said.

Buddy turned and looked at her.

“Well, I guess I better get rolling.”

She paused for an oddly long moment and then, very suddenly:

“Oh, Buddy, come around the back first, I have to show you something.”

Now what?

“Well, okay,” he said.

They went through the house, through the kitchen, and out the screen door in the back and onto the deck. The beach was moonlit, cool and windy.

“Do you see that forbidding mass over there?”

“Yeah,” said Buddy, thinking, Oh, right, the thing I didn’t bother pissing behind last time I was here.

“Come on, you have to see this.”

She took off her shoes and left them on the deck, and Buddy followed her down the steps. They walked together over the scurfy sand to the mass, which, instead of being a dead baby whale appeared to be a boat covered by a big rotting canvas tarpaulin. Cordelia set to work yanking and pulling off the canvas and revealed what was in fact an old wooden boat reeking of mold and tar.

“Do you know what this is?”

“A boat?”

“But what kind of boat.”

“A wooden boat.”

“But what kind of wooden boat.”

“A stupid wooden boat.”

“No. It’s a stupid Breton fishing boat. From Brittany. Bretagne.”

“Your father’s insane, baby.”

“I know. He inherited some money and so he had this thing shipped all across the Atlantic and all the way across the country, but that's not the best part."

“No?”

“No, because he took it down to the marina and tried to sail it and it immediately started to sink.”

“Fuckin’ hell.”

“Absolutely. And I was in the boat. But It was just as well it started to sink because he doesn’t really know how to sail a boat. So he had it hauled back here and it’s been here ever since, for like seven or eight years. He’s always supposed to be fixing it up and patching it up or whatever, but he always makes some excuse, and so here it sits, because he’s secretly afraid to ever take it out again.” She stood quite close to Buddy now and he could tell she had just brushed her teeth. “So you see, he really is the Ancient Mariner.”

She leaned back against the boat. She had buttoned the top button of her cardigan. But only the top button.

Next thing Buddy knew he was kissing her. They kissed for a full minute, then paused and looked at each other in the moonlight, she didn’t say anything, he didn’t say anything, then more kissing, here in the cool ocean air, pressing against and kissing this warm voluptuous girl with amazingly soft lips and this nice smell she had, like, like --

“Ow,” she said.

Buddy drew back.

“What?”

“You were pressing my back against the boat.”

“Oh, sorry.”

She had her hands on his waist.

“You’re not in bad shape for an old guy.”

“Thanks.”

The top button of her sweater had come undone. (In fact Buddy had undone it.) Her lipstick was blurry. She looked at him with those eyes, oh Christ --

“Do you have a Kleenex?” she said. “You’ve got my lipstick on.”

Buddy found several Kleenex in his jacket pocket, including at least one that seemed fairly clean. She took it and licked it, then wiped his lips.

“There, good,” she said. “How do I look?”

“Give me,” said Buddy.

He took the tissue and wiped Cordelia’s lips. And this got him so aroused that all he could do was let the Kleenex flutter away on the ocean wind like the sweet bird of youth while he put his arms around her and brought her around so that his back was against the boat, and kiss her again. He put his hand on her backside which was larger and softer and nicer than Joan’s, and she pressed against that part of him that had gotten him married to Joan and before that to Madge, but forget them, they were in the past along with all the other ones, and this was now, of course it was always now, but this was really now.

After a while she whispered, “Let’s go inside.”

Buddy thought, Um, no, I’d better not, but what he said was, “I can’t stay long. Deirdre, my daughter -- my stepdaughter, is home alone. Well, she has a girlfriend with her, but still --”

“How old is she, your stepdaughter?”

“She’s -- uh -- what, fifteen?” -- he was pretty sure --“fifteen going on sixteen?”

“That’s a dangerous age.”

“Yeah.”

“So should you go home now, or --?”

Buddy hesitated, then took out his cellphone, speed-dialed. (Philip had recently put in all his speed-dials for him.) Deirdre picked up.

“Hi, baby, how ya doin’? Uh, look, are you cool if I’m another uh hour let’s say?” With his free hand he caressed Cordelia’s hip. “No, I’m not. It’s a business dinner. I’m schmoozing, networking. Yeah. Okay, don’t burn the place down, I’ll be back by midnight. Behave. Call my cell if anything --”

He closed up the phone and dropped it into his jacket pocket.

“She’s okay,” he said. “She and her friend are watching --”

“Let’s go inside.”

“Okay -- wait -- let’s kiss some more.”

They did that.

After a while he said, “Wait, wait.”

She stopped and looked at him.

“Wait,” he said.

“Okay.”

She put her forehead against his shoulder, and something about this gesture was almost more than he could take. But --

“Look, Cordelia, I can’t go in there with you. It’s -- I just don’t know if it would be a good idea.” Right, no kidding.

She raised her face and looked at him.

“We wouldn’t have to have sex. I didn’t necessarily mean to have sex.”

“I know. I mean, no, I didn’t know, necessarily, but still, I don’t know --”

She took a long beat. Then --

“Well -- I guess you’re right,” she said.

“I mean, it’s -- I don’t want to--”

“No, I understand. You’re nice.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

She gave him a kiss, on the lips, but a quick one this time.

“Hey, can I give you something?” she said.

“Uh, sure,” he said.

“Okay, come on.”

She took his hand and led him toward the back of the house. He had trouble walking, for biological reasons. He followed her up the steps, and on the deck she reached down and got her shoes. She went over to the screen door, opened it, and turned toward him.

“Hey, Cordelia, I’m not going in there.”

“Scaredy cat.”

She went in. He waited and a couple of minutes later (and three decisions to go ahead and have sex with her anyway and three decisions not to think with his dick for once in his life) she came out.

“Sorry,” she said. “I forgot where I put it.”

She handed him a videocassette in a cardboard case.

“It’s this stupid movie I was in.”

“Oh, thanks.”

“It’s not good. And it’s got a nude scene but it’s from when I was thin.”

“Okay, I’ll bear that in mind.”

“It’s this arty low-budget black-and-white thing --”

“Good, I’ll take a look at it.”

“It was in a couple of film festivals, but -- oh my God!” She put her hand to her mouth. “You think I’m like my dad. You think I’m giving this to you to try and get a job.”

“No --”

Actually the thought had flickered into the back of his mind.

“Give it back to me.”

“No.”

“No, Buddy, give it back. I don’t want you to think that.”

“I don’t think that.”

“Give it back.”

“Uh-uh.”

She tried to grab it and Buddy held it behind his back.

“Buddy --”

“What?”

“I just, I just wanted you to see something I did. I mean I know you saw me that one time on stage --”

“And you were great.”

“But -- I just -- I don’t know -- the movie’s not real good but some of my scenes are okay, I mean I could’ve done better.”

“Look, I really want to see this movie.”

“Well, okay.”

“I mean, hey, just for the nude scene alone --”

“Yeah.” She looked away, toward the ocean. “Whoopee,” she murmured.

And Buddy looked at her.

A few seconds passed by, the surf gently crashing.

“All right,” said Buddy. “Look -- I’ll --” what? “I’ll call you.”

This time she actually furrowed her brow. She turned to Buddy.

“No, don’t call me. That’s too -- bizarre.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t know when my dad’s getting back, and --”

“Yeah.”

“But I could call you --”

“Uh, sure --”

“Maybe.”

They looked at each other.

“This is weird,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“I can’t wait till I save up enough to move out of this house --”

She was feeling the material of the seam of his shirt with her fingers.

“Look, Cordelia --”

“Yeah?”

His fingers were touching her hip.

“Look -- even if you weren’t who you are, I’m not -- I’m not looking for a -- a girlfriend. And -- even if I was looking for a girlfriend -- but I’m not. I’m just not -- uh, what am I trying to say -- just --”

“Buddy.”

She gave a little pull on his shirt.

“What?”

“It’s okay. I’m not looking for a boyfriend. And even if I was looking for a boyfriend it definitely wouldn’t be some much older old fart boyfriend.”

“Oh. I’m an asshole.”

“I’m not looking for any kind of boyfriend.”

“I’m a jerk.”

“No. You’re a dork.”

“Yeah. I knew that.”

She looked at him. Then she licked her fingertip and began wiping around his lips with it.

“You still had a bit of lipstick on,” she said.

“Thanks.”

She smoothed his hair back.

“I look okay now?” said Buddy.

“Yeah,” she said. “So, I’ll call you --”

“Yeah, sure,” said Buddy. “Oh, wait.”

He took out his wallet, opened it, and found a business card. Then, feeling like this was taking way too long, he got out his pen and wrote his cellphone number on the card.

“Here, this has my work number, but I wrote down my cellphone number. It’s probably better if --”

“Okay.”

She took the card and then started to give him a quick kiss, and then it got not so quick and then she stopped.

“Okay,” said Buddy.

She looked at him, then she went into the house and closed the door. Buddy stood there alone on the deck for a moment, then turned and went down the stairs, stepping slowly to favor his erection.

When he got home Deirdre and Trish were sitting on the couch with Ming, watching a movie in the dark. The movie was The Wages of Fear.

“Hey, Uncle Bud, you have a good time?”

“Yeah.”

“You were on a date, weren’t you?”

“No. Hey, Trish, shouldn’t you be getting home?”

“Uncle Bud, for the millionth time, Trish is staying over. Her mom gave permission.”

“Oh, right, okay, well, look, uh, hit the hay when the movie’s over, okay?”

“No, we’re gonna stay up all night.”

“Okay, I’m going up now.”

“Oh, Uncle Bud, Shakira called. She wanted to talk to you.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Good night, Mr. Best.”

“Good night, Trish.”

Buddy went upstairs.

He had almost reached relief when the phone rang, and he picked it right up before Deirdre could get it just in case it was Cordelia, even though he had asked her to use his cellphone number, but no, it was Madge, Shakira, wanting to talk about Liz, and he let her talk, filling in his own occasional lines on cue, lying in bed naked under the covers in the dark, not listening very closely, which he was used to doing with Madge. She was calling from that gas station phone booth again, and after a while he had to call her back because she said she was out of change. It occurred to him that it was pretty late for her even to be up, let alone calling him from a public phone a couple miles of dark mountain road from the ashram, and he thought about mentioning this but didn’t manage to. He began touching himself again, not thinking very much at all about Madge or his daughter.

(Continued here, because it’s too late to turn back now.)

(Kindly go to the right hand side of this page to find a listing of links to all other published chapters of Uncle Buddy’s House™, absolutely free of charge for a limited time only. All contents vetted and approved by the Commissariat of Patriotic Epics.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 173: subjunctive

2009-11-12T03:23:00.011-05:00

Once again our hero Arnold Schnabel has done battle with and conquered the Dark Lord, AKA “Mr. Lucky”, on this historic night in August of 1963, in the quaint seaside resort of Cape May, New Jersey...

(Go here to go to read our previous chapter, or click here to return to the beginning of this Gold View Award©-winning memoir, which Harold Bloom has called “immensely long; would only that it were longer”.)

Well, Mr. Arbuthnot had said the ink was special.

I removed the cap from the barrel of the pen, replaced it onto the front section, put the pen back into my trouser pocket.

The back of my head hurt, my arms and chest ached from where Mr. Lucky had been respectively squeezing and shoving, my re-scraped knees throbbed, but I was breathing and alive, the soles of my Keds solidly upon the homely concrete of Cape May as opposed to the eternally burning coals of hell.

I heard Buddy groaning. Which was good. Dead men don’t groan.

He was lying on his stomach, on the pavement, his body moving slightly.

I went over to where he lay, and leaned over.

“Buddy?”

I reached down and tugged at his shoulder.

“What is it?” he said.

“Buddy, you okay?”

He pushed himself away from the concrete, and I helped to pull his body up into a sitting position.

He rubbed his crewcut head. He didn’t look so bad, considering. He probably looked a lot better than I did, I’ll tell you that much.

“What hit me? I feel like a f***ing bus run over me.”

“You were in a fight,” I said.

“Where’s the other guy?”

“He, uh, took off.”

“Did you kick his ass, I hope?”

“Well, let’s just say I got rid of him.”

“Good man, Arnold. Help me up.”

I did this, and he stayed on his feet.

“So you sent him packin’, huh?”

“Yeah, sort of.”

“Well, see ya later, Arnie.”

“Where do you live, Buddy?”

“Just right down the block here.”

“I’ll walk you.”

“All right, pal.”

By now I was more or less resigned never to get home, or at least not this night, which seemed more and more likely never to end.

At first Buddy staggered wildly as he walked, but pretty soon he settled down and only occasionally bumped into me.

We turned in through the front gate of one of the big old gabled houses on Hughes, and Buddy led me around to the back.

At the side rear of the house a set of wooden stairs led up to the second floor.

“I’m just right up there,” said Buddy.

“Well, good night then,” I said.

He put out his hand, I took it, he squeezed it with a grip only slightly less steely than Mr. Lucky’s.

He started up the stairs. He missed his footing on about the third step and almost fell, so I went up, took his arm, and helped him up the stairs.

We went in through a screen door, and, amazingly, nothing too weird happened, at least not right away. It’s true that Buddy’s one-room apartment was lined with instrument panels and television screens, the televisions showing various scenes, in black-and-white, from around the earth and even from what appeared to be other planets, a speaker next to each screen emitting its own separate sounds, the sum of which sounded like the humming of a great beehive, or that sound a crowd of people makes when leaving a sports stadium after the home team has been humiliatingly defeated.

“Okay, Buddy,” I said, “I guess I’ll be heading home now.”

“Look at them scrapes you got there,” he said. “They’re gonna get all infected and shit.”

“Oh, I’ll be fine,” I said, my hand on the handle of the screen door. “A little bit of iodine --”

“Iodine? What are we, in the 20th century?”

“Well, actually --”

“Stay right there. I got somethin'.”

I sighed, but I stayed, while Buddy went off into what appeared to be a bathroom.

I looked at the various TV screens. On one of them I saw my own bloodied and baleful self, standing by Buddy’s screen door. I looked around but I couldn’t see a TV camera. Well, no matter.

Through the open bathroom door I heard through the ambient hum the unmistakable sound of someone urinating, and then I heard Buddy singing: “Lady of Spain”.

Slightly bored, I looked at myself on the TV screen again.

Looking a little more carefully I saw beyond myself the image of myself on a smaller TV screen, looking in turn at the image of myself on a yet tinier screen, and so on.

Finally I heard the toilet flush. I heard no sounds of Buddy washing his hands however, and he came right out, still humming “Lady of Spain” and carrying a squat brown corked bottle and a hand towel.

“All right, Arnie,” he said, “Sit down and I’ll take care of ya.”

“Y’know, really, Buddy --”

“Sit down.”

There was an arm chair there, another wicker one, with a Racing Form on the seat. I picked up the paper and sat down. There was a small table with a lamp next to the chair, but it was cluttered with an overflowing ashtray, an opened half-full box of Dutch Masters Panetellas and five or six presumably empty pint cans of Schmidt’s beer.

“Just throw the paper on the floor, Arnie,” said Buddy.

I did as he said, dropping it onto a great pile of Racing Forms and Argosy and True and other more lewd and lurid men’s magazines of the sort I had always wanted to purchase but in my cowardice posing as virtue had not.

“All right,” he said, pulling the cork out of the bottle with his teeth, “let’s get to work.”

Laying the cork on the table, he upended the bottle onto the towel, which I could plainly see was not 100% clean to begin with. Nor even 50%.

“Buddy,” I said, “shouldn’t we maybe get a cleaner towel.”

“Nah, it don’t matter. This s**t will disinfect anything it touches.” The towel was turning blood red in his hand. “Besides, I ain’t got a clean towel. Lemme see them scrapes on your arms and hands.”

I held up my arms and he leaned closer.

“Christ, they already look like they’re infected. What did you do, roll around in a pile of dogs**t?”

“No,” I said. But then I remembered wiping my wounds with the water from that gladiolus vase in the Chalfonte’s Magnolia Room just as, simultaneously, I vaguely recalled something I had read in “Hints From Heloise” about the potential toxicity of such water.

“All right,” said Buddy, “let’s get to work,” and he started on the big scrape running from my right elbow down to my hand.

As he swabbed my wounds I gritted my teeth and looked away at those ubiquitous TV screens, including the one containing me gritting my teeth and looking at myself in the tinier screen and so on, and I listened, or pretended to listen, while Buddy babbled on about creatures from some other dimension and flying saucers and whatnot. I was in rather a lot of pain, and so I was paying even less attention than I normally do when someone else is talking. Also, that stuff he was swabbing my wounds with further distracted me by its intense odor, reminiscent of the smell of a recently bombed building in the rain.

“Needless to say, Arnie,” I became aware of Buddy saying to me, “alla shit I’m tellin’ ya is on the Q.T., strictly.”

“Oh, sure, Buddy,” I said.

He was squatting in front of me, holding the wadded up towel against my right knee. I had to admit that the pain had already lessened considerably in my arms and hands.

“So,” I said, just to bring the conversation back down to earth a bit, “where are your wife and kids, Buddy?”

I had often seen him and his family at mass, four or five apparently mentally-disturbed young scamps of both genders and a beleaguered-looking thin woman.

“Oh, they live in the house over on Broadway,” said Buddy. “But I usually sack out here. More privacy, ya know? My wife prefers it this way, too. Hey, get me out one of them Dutch Masters, will ya?”

I unwrapped one of the cigars, gave it to Buddy. There was a box of Sid’s Tavern matches on the table also, and I gave him a light as he continued to hold the towel against my knee.

“These screens are all set to present time of course,” he said. “If you like I can switch ‘em to the past. Anything you want to see? Anything ya want, Battle of Gettysburg, Columbus discovering America -- or maybe you want to see some episode in your past life?”

“No thanks,” I said. I'd had enough of this sort of thing for one day.

“The only thing they can’t do is show the future. We just ain’t got the technology yet. But I’m workin’ on it, believe you me.”

I was tempted to ask him for one of the cigars; his smelled pretty good.

“On the other hand --” He was working on my other knee now. “I could change the channel and show ya what might have been. Like, say one day in your past life you just decided to hop a freighter for Timbuktu instead of working on the railroad your whole life.”

Why was it that everyone in this town knew all about me? And I knew so little about them.

“Your whole life might have been different,” he said.

“That’s true,” I said.

“Not to say it would have been any better.”

“No, I suppose not --”

“What if your ship sunk. Or what if when you got to Timbuktu you got trampled by an elephant?”

“Yeah --”

“Ya want me to change the channel?”

“No, that's okay, Buddy, thanks,” I said.

He went back to humming, smoking all the while and occasionally singing a phrase of “Lady of Spain”, holding the scarlet towel against my knee.

Finally he stood up. He tossed the towel onto the floor, took the cork from the table top, and stoppered the bottle.

“Take a look,” he said.

I looked at my arms and hands, at my knees and shins. The affected areas were slightly pink, but the scrapes and cuts were gone, as was the pain. All that remained were slight tingling sensations as if those areas of my epidermis had been doused with witch hazel.

“Not bad, huh?” he said.

It certainly wasn’t bad. But I immediately wondered what I would tell Josh tomorrow. How would he feel knowing that an inebriated and apparently insane automobile mechanic was able to do what he could not? It must be quite disconcerting realizing that your own creations were more powerful than yourself.

I hauled myself up

“Well, thanks a lot, Buddy,” I said.

“Don’t mention it, pal.”

“I guess I really should be going.”

“Okay. You ever wanta stop by and watch the TVs, just come on by.”

“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”

“Not your cup of tea?”

“Well, I prefer other types of shows. You know --”

“Oh, like intellectual shows probably, huh?”

“Oh, no, just, you know, M Squad, Johnny Staccato. Naked City.”

“Yeah, intellectual type shows.”

“Well -- uh --”

“Stop by anyway. I don’t usually meet bums who got a brain. You know. A bum I can talk to.”

“Okay, Buddy.”

That seemed noncommittal enough.

Buddy was a nice guy and all, but I wasn’t so sure about his room full of televisions.

(Continued here; and don't worry, we still have 1,987 of Arnold’s notebooks to transcribe.)

(Please go to the right hand column of this page for what on many days is an up-to-date listing of links to all other published chapters of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train To Heaven©, absolutely free of charge, although donations will be accepted in aid of the Arnold Schnabel Society’s Literacy Project.)

“Uncle Buddy’s House”, Chapter 23: revelations

2009-11-09T09:52:00.009-05:00

Our hero Buddy Best, that self-described “middle-aged Hollywood hack”, finds himself in the strange position of having dinner with the lovely Cordelia, daughter of the Ancient Mariner...

(Go here to see our previous thrilling chapter, or click here to return to the beginning of this “blatant and unashamed pot-boiler” -- (J.J. Hunsecker, in Daily Variety.)

So they started with what turned out to be very good artichoke croquettes and something that Buddy thought was going to be a shrimp paté but which turned out to be more like shrimp paté turnovers, but they were good too. The croquettes had truffles in them somewhere, which meant they were probably absurdly expensive, and they came with a bowl of some white sauce that was delicious and probably ninety percent butter, and so Buddy would probably die of a heart attack that night; on the other hand the turnover stuffing was only about fifty percent butter.

They had been talking in a free-associative way, about the Los Angeles public transport system and L.A.’s racial stratification, about SARS, about the war in Iraq, and terrorism, and the Palestinian question, and neither of them had said anything interesting. There was a pause in the conversation. Buddy was a little bored, and he could tell she was too. Of course from Buddy’s point of view all this blather was bearable because she was a good-looking girl with a rocking body; he had put up with hundreds of far more excruciating conversations in the past as part of the price he had to pay to have sex with bimbos -- and, hey, come to think of it -- oh, but wait, this chick with the body was the daughter of the asshole his wife had run away with, so just fucking forget about it.

She looked at the appetizer plates, which were both empty. A waiter came and took them away. Buddy took a sip of wine. Cordelia looked at him and cocked her head.

“So -- how are you holding up, anyway?” she asked. “I mean really.”

“Holding up?”

“Yeah.”

“You mean with Joan leaving me?”

“Uh-huh.”

“The million dollar question.”

“Oh. You don’t have to answer,” she said.

“I don’t mind.”

“Really?”

“Really,” he said, although he did mind a little.

“Okay,” she said. “So --”

“I’m holding up okay.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t -- miss her?”

Buddy paused here. He was thinking about his answer but he was also thinking about the way her question had dissolved into a watery growl. His first impulse had been to be glib, but --

“Do I miss Joan. At first I did. Which is kind of weird really, because Joan -- I don’t know how well you know her, but -- Joan is -- kind of a -- a --”

“A bitch?”

“Well, I wasn’t going to say that --”

“Sorry. What were you going to say?”

“I was going to say ‘piece of work’.”

“’Piece of work.’”

“Right.”

“But you missed her anyway.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah what?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“You said yeah in a funny way.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Funny how?”

“Funny like you weren’t so sure.”

“That I missed her?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” said Buddy.

“What?”

“Well -- I wonder now if -- oh, forget it, who gives a shit.”

“I do,” she said. “Tell me.”

“Okay,” said Buddy. “I wonder now if maybe the biggest thing that bothered me about her leaving was that, was that, was that it was with, uh --”

“My father,” she said.

“Yeah,” said Buddy.

Her face relaxed into a picture of complete understanding, her head nodding.

“I mean, it’s tough enough playing the cuckold,” said Buddy.

“Mm-hmm.”

“But when the one who’s cuckolding you is --”

“Someone like my father.”

“Uh, yeah.”

“That must have been really tough,” she said.

“Well --”

“So what about now?”

“What about about now?”

“How do you feel about it now?”

“Well --” Buddy was the sort of guy who didn’t like to talk about how he felt. But now for some reason he didn’t mind. Too much. “I guess the main thing that bothers me now is my stepdaughter. Deirdre.”

“Why does she bother you?”

“She doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is that Joan is no doubt going to take her. That bothers me.”

“So you’re -- fond of Deirdre?”

“Uh, yeah, sure.”

“That’s nice,” she said.

“Yeah, well.”

“So,” she said.

“So,” said Buddy.

“You’re probably wondering.”

“Am I?”

“Yes!”

“About what?”

“About why I needed to talk to you. Or wanted to talk to you.”

“Oh, right,” said Buddy. “I forgot. So, what’s up?”

She looked down at her wine.

All in good time, thought Buddy.

She looked up at him, then brought her face closer over the table.

“It’s about my father.”

“Yeah?”

Another pause. She was breathing deeply, and the way she leaned across the table Buddy couldn’t help but notice again the beauty of her breasts, that tiny dime-sized tattoo of Saturn that didn’t really look like Saturn --

“My father and Joan --” she stage-whispered.

“Yes?” Buddy tried to keep his eyes on her face.

“Well --”

She sat upright. The waiter was there with their main course, skinny spaghetti with vegetables for Buddy, fatter spaghetti with little meatballs for her.

“Oh, wow,” she said, “This looks great.”

And she dug in.

The meatballs did look good. But a year before Buddy had decided to cut out red meat, and he mostly had done this. Like an asshole, he thought, because now he really wanted some of those meatballs. He tasted his pasta. Surprisingly it was okay, they’d done something good with the sauce. Usually pasta with vegetables was incredibly boring, just something the chef tossed out to keep the veges happy and the women of course and pathetic middle-aged men who wanted not to be middle-aged. What was it about the sauce? Oh, right, butter. And garlic and pine nuts and whatnot. But butter, and lots of it. So he was definitely giving himself a heart attack anyway. He should’ve just lived it up and gone for the meatballs.

“What was I saying?” she asked after eating about a quarter of her dish.

Damned if Buddy could remember. He’d been thrown off by those meatballs. He could smell them across the table and they smelled damn good. But you couldn’t just tell someone you couldn’t remember what they were talking about just a few minutes ago. The thing to do was to stall.

“Well, let’s see, you were talking about, uh -- hey, how’s your food? Okay?“

“Oh my God, it’s great. Hey, you want some?”

Normally Buddy despised the American custom of everyone offering everyone else at the table a taste of every fucking dish -- it drove him crazy in fact, but he was a man full of contradictions among other things and so he said, “Uh, I wouldn’t mind trying one of those meatballs.”

“Help yourself,” and she held out her bowl, and he did. And --

“Wow, these are good,” he said.

She took a good drink of wine and smiled at him.

“You can’t remember what I was saying, can you?” she asked.

Fortunately the meatball had cleared his brain.

“Um, something about your dad?”

“Right, well --” She had popped a meatball into her own mouth, and was chewing. “God, these meatballs are good.”

“Yeah, they are.”

“Do you want another one?”

He did, but he said he didn’t.

She finished chewing and swallowing and then took a healthy drink of wine.

“My dad didn’t want Joan to leave you for him.”

“What?”

She leaned her face forward.

“He didn’t want her to leave you. That’s what I wanted to tell you over the phone. Why I asked you to meet with me.” She leaned back again, and said, ”He didn’t want her to move in because he was hoping he’d get more parts in your movies.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Nope.”

She went back to work on her pasta. Buddy had laid his fork down.

“He actually thought I would hire him again?”

“Well, obviously not after you found out about him and Joan. That’s why he didn’t want you to find out, why he didn’t want Joan to leave you.”

“Okay. Y’know, no offense, Cordelia, but I would’ve never hired his sorry ass again in a million years, not even as a fucking extra.”

“I love hearing that.”

“So your dad got more than he bargained for.”

“He sure did. You should have heard him the night Joan came over and told him she’d told you about them and that she’d left you. And then you should have heard her.”

“So -- you heard all this?”

“I was hiding in my room, my head under the covers.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He tried to tell her what he tells all his girlfriends, which is that he’s never gotten over my mother dying, which is bullshit, but women are such idiots they usually swallow it.”

“But not Joan.”

“No, she just told him that it was high time he fucking got over my mother and stopped acting like a little faggot pussy and made a commitment to a real living woman.”

Good old Joan. Even after fifteen years in California she was still a hard-nosed Nebraska girl when you got right down to it.

Buddy noticed his wineglass, with wine in it. He took a drink.

“So that’s what you wanted to tell me?”

“Yeah,” she said. “What?”

“Uh --”

“What?” she said.

“Well, I was just wondering -- why you wanted to tell me all this?”

“Why?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Well, um, because, like -- I don’t know -- maybe you would want to get back with her? And -- if you knew, like, that my father never really wanted her to leave you and move in with him, then, uh --”

“Oh, I see. But I don’t want to get back with her.”

“Oh.”

“He can have her.”

“Oh.”

“But, hey, thanks for the thought, Cordelia.”

“You’re welcome.”

She had stopped eating. She glanced at him and then looked down at her plate. She started to gnaw the lower right quadrant of her upper lip.

“Hey, eat your spaghetti,” said Buddy.

She picked up her fork and started eating again.

She seemed upset, and Buddy wanted to cheer her up. Flattery worked with women about a hundred percent of the time, so he said, “Y’know, Cordelia, at the risk of sounding like our mafia friend, you know you really are an unusually beautiful --”

“Oh, stop it,” she said, chewing.

“No, really, you really are a very, uh --”

“Please, stop.”

“Well, okay.”

“I mean,” still chewing, “thanks for the compliment. But I know what I look like.” She swallowed her food and took a drink of wine. “Men,” she said.

“Men what?”

“You know men what.”

“You mean we -- like women?”

“Women’s bodies.”

“Well -- sure.”

So, was she going to get all feminist on his ass now, and wearing that dress, with that fantastic décolletage, that little tattoo Saturn that really didn’t look like Saturn --

“See? Right now you’re looking at my boobs.”

Buddy looked up.

“No, I was -- just thinking,” he lied.

“Oh, I’ll bet. Is this thing too low-cut? I bought it when I was skinnier, but now I’m so fat the only way I could get it on was by lowering the straps --”

And she buttoned the top two buttons of her cardigan, damn her, and went back to work on what was left of her spaghetti-and-meatballs.

Buddy took a drink of the wine. It was good. But even better was the buzz.

“Y’know,” he said, “if I can say so -- and please don’t take this the wrong way --”

“What?”

“You -- you looked -- very -- different that night of your father’s party.”

She got that stricken look again.

“In what way? You mean I looked skinnier?”

“No --”

She looked conditionally relieved.

“So I was fatter then?”

“No!” And he very quickly added, “I mean, it had nothing to do with how fat or skinny you looked --”

“Well -- do you think I’m fatter now --?”

“Cordelia, I was talking about how you -- looked that night -- and it had nothing to do with your --”

“You mean I looked ugly.”

“No!”

“Plain?”

“No, not at all --” although she actually had looked kind of plain now that she mentioned it --

“Oh my God it really showed, didn’t it?”

“What?”

“I was miserable. I’d had this awful thing with my father. He accused me of fucking up his precious food somehow, of not following his precious recipes to the letter, God, I was in tears, I really didn’t want to be there. And the thing was I did follow his recipes.”

“Did you?”

“To the letter!”

“Well, you shouldn’t have. The food sucked.”

She smiled.

“I’m so glad you said that.”

She’d finished all her spaghetti and meatballs and now she broke off some bread and swished it around in the sauce.

“So,” said Buddy -- he felt the need somehow for a major subject-change -- “what do you do?” He got a fairly blank stare so he elaborated: “I mean, for a living, you know. Unless you’re still in school, or --”

“Oh, no, I’ve finished school. I mean I still take classes, but -- well, anyway, right now I’m working part-time in a coffee shop.”

“Ah.”

“And in the meantime I’ve been trying for a lot of jobs, but, well, you know what it’s like.”

She took a bite of the bread.

“Yeah,” said Buddy, ready to be bored again, but what the hell. “What kind of jobs?”

“Anything. I’ve even been going for industrials, radio voice-overs --”

Buddy felt his mind lurching toward some great revelation. And his expression must have showed this, because Cordelia said, seeming slightly alarmed:

“What?”

“You -- you’re an actress.”

“Well -- yeah --”

“Would -- you have been in anything I’ve -- anything I would have -- seen?”

He had a falling sensation.

“You’re kidding, right?” she said.

“I -- I don’t think so --”

“Mr. Best --”

“Buddy --” he said, weakly.

“Buddy, you’ve seen me act. You saw me in the showcase. In La Voix Humaine. God, was I that forgettable?”

“Oh Christ.”

“What?”

“Cordelia, don’t take this the wrong way --”

“What?”

“That was you?”

“Of course it was me. Who did you think it was?”

“I -- I -- shit.”

“Oh my God you didn’t recognize me.”

“Well, you had blond hair, and all that make-up, streaked down your face. And you were speaking French.”

“You are weird.”

“I didn’t know that was you.”

She looked at him.

“I’m going to take that as a compliment.”

“It is a compliment. I thought you were great. I thought you were French, and blond, and -- and -- and really sexy for one thing --”

“Really? Even in that slip? I was so worried about that slip.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because of my fat ass and fat thighs of course.”

“You didn’t have a fat ass and fat thighs. You looked great. And you were great in the piece. You were -- you were very authentic.”

“Really? I thought I overdid it a bit that night.”

“No, you were great.”

“Well, thank you.”

“Have you -- have you done much other work?”

“Mostly stage stuff. I went to school in New York and I did some Off-off Broadway and one Off, and I did one musical tour. The stage is what I really truly love, but I did have a pretty good part in this one low-budget movie that never went anywhere as far as I know, and then I had a recurring under-five on One Life to Live for a couple of months until my character got murdered, but then I had to move out of my apartment because my roommate got married, and I was offered a part on a sitcom here in L.A., so against my better judgment just to make money for a new apartment in New York I came back and moved back in with Papa, and then the sitcom got canceled after two weeks. That was last fall, and all I’ve done since is collect unemployment and work in the coffee shop and -- oh!”

“What?”

“Oh my God please don’t think I asked to have dinner with you just so I could ask you for a job!”

“I didn’t think that.”

“Oh my God!”

“Hey, Cordelia, it’s okay. I mean, I wouldn’t have minded anyway.”

“Really?”

“No. I mean, it’s hard to get acting jobs. Schmoozing is all part of the game. I do it all the time.”

“Really?”

“I’m fucking shameless.”

“But that wasn’t the reason I wanted to talk to you.”

“I didn’t think it was.”

She looked at her plate. It was empty and clean and the bread basket was empty. Then she looked at Buddy with a very serious expression.

“How was your pasta by the way?” she asked.

“Pretty good. I can’t eat any more if you want some.”

“Well -- maybe just a bite.”

Buddy picked up her spic-and-span plate and replaced it with his own one-third-full plate. And she dug in again. And he sat back and sipped his wine.

“But there was another reason,” she said after a minute.

“A reason? For what?”

“For why I asked you to meet with me.”

Twirling that spaghetti.

“Oh. I mean, ‘Oh’?”

And forking it in.

“It’s because when we met at that stupid party, you just -- impressed me.”

“Oh really?”

God this girl could eat.

“I thought you were really -- cool.”

“Thanks. I thought you were -- cool, too.”

“No you didn’t. You already said I was weird.”

“Well, I didn’t --”

“I wasn’t cool. I’m not a cool person.”

She’d cleaned the plate. She demurely patted her mouth with her napkin, and -- Buddy thanked his three drunken personal gods -- she absentmindedly unbuttoned those two top buttons of her cardigan and sat back. She looked around the restaurant with a satisfied air.

“I think you’re cool now,” said Buddy, making sure to look at her eyes and not at her breasts.

She met his gaze. Then she put her hand over her mouth and let out a little belch.

“Oh! Excuse me! That’s how cool I am.”

“That’s okay. In Arab countries belching is considered a compliment to the host.”

“Really?”

“Beats me, I heard it in some movie. Hey -- would you like some dessert --?”

There was a space in the last sentence because for an awful moment he forgot her name again. She picked up on this space but luckily for Buddy she misinterpreted it. A look of despair came over her face.

“Oh my God, you’re thinking, ‘How could she ever eat another morsel in her lifetime.’”

“No, not at all, I just thought maybe you would like
some --“

“No. I’m stuffed and I’m too fat.”

Fat, sprat, Jack, lean, David Lean, Lawrence, Arabia, labia, Lydia, la, la --

“Cordelia,” he said, triumphantly.

“Yes?”

And now having said her name he actually had to say something.

“Have some dessert.”

“No. I’m way too fat.”

“You’re not fat.”

“I shouldn’t have ordered those meatballs.”

“They were --”

“I could barely squeeze into this dress. I do look fat in it, don’t I?”

“No, you --”

“Okay, let me ask you a question. Mr. Best --”

“Please, Cordelia --” Ha, he’d remember that fucking name now if it killed him -- “call me Buddy. Buddy Buddy Buddy. Or Bud.”

“Okay, Bud -- but you have to promise to be absolutely honest with me.”

“Right.”

“I mean it.”

“Sure.”

“Okay, here’s my question. Buddy, if you saw me walking down the street -- and you didn’t know me -- would you say, ‘Hmm, she’s a little pudgy’?”

“Uh --”

“Or would you say, ‘She looks okay, but she’d look a lot better if she lost fifteen --”

“Cordelia?”

“Yes?”

“Uh --”

“Or -- would you say, ‘Okay, she’s all right, I mean she’s not absolutely hideous, but -- she could lose oh, say, ten --”

“Wait.”

“What?”

“Cordelia.”

“What?”

“Can we stop this?”

And suddenly she snapped out of it.

“Oh my God, I’m sorry -- I have these body-image --”

“Sure.”

“Issues.”

“Right. But look. You’re not fat and you do want dessert. Women always want dessert.”

“Do you know women all that well?”

“I know that they always want dessert. Other than that, well --”

“Go on.”

“They all think they’re too fat.”

“True. What else?”

“Well, I think that about sums it up, really.”

“That’s all you know about women? Or is that all there is to know about women?”

“Well, let me see --”

“Okay,” she said. “I think I’d like something chocolate.”

(Continued here, on the chance that something will actually happen.)

(Please go to the right hand column of this site for a listing of links to all other possible episodes of Uncle Buddy’s House™, serialized Monday through Friday at six PM {Eastern Standard Time} on the DuMont Radio Network, starring William Bendix as Buddy.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 172: altercation

2009-11-05T03:33:00.009-05:00

It’s the weary butt-end of a strangely long and just plain strange Saturday night in August of 1963, and a man called Arnold Schnabel -- poet, brakeman and possible saint-- is finally wending his way home through the streets of the quaint seaside resort of Cape May, NJ, when he runs into the local inebriate Buddy Kelly, who, suddenly pointing past Arnold, indicates the approach of none other than the Dark Lord, also known as “Mr. Lucky”...

(Click here to go to our previous episode, or go here to return to the first chapter of this Gold View Award©-winning masterwork, which Harold Bloom has called “the closest thing we shall ever find to perfection in this hopelessly imperfect world".)

“Oh, no,” I groaned.

“Whatsa matter,” said Buddy. “You know that nut?”

“I’m afraid so,” I said.

“Schnabel!” yelled Mr. Lucky, shaking his fist, forging, limping steadily closer.

“Why’s he yellin’ at ya, Arnold?”

I couldn’t very well tell Buddy that I had marooned Mr. Lucky two days in the past.

“He’s mad at me,” I said.

Mr. Lucky, attempting to charge I suppose, tripped on his dragging leg and fell forward, cursing like a sailor -- no, to say that does an injustice to the maritime profession now that I think about it. I had never heard anyone curse the way Mr. Lucky now curse as he struggled to get up, not even my old army drill sergeant when I would intractably start daydreaming during close-order drill and poke some other poor recruit in the face with the barrel of my rifle.

“Guy’s got a mouth on him,” said Buddy. “He a friend of yours?”

“No,” I said. “We only met tonight.”

He was back on his feet now, and he continued hobbling forward, cursing and calling my name, that steam or smoke still drifting up from his body and from his head, as if he had just been dipped in acid.

“What’s his *****ng problem?” asked Buddy.

This question was more than I could answer, then, now, or ever.

“It’s hard to explain, Buddy,” I said. “You should go home. I’ll deal with him. He’s just had too much to drink.”

“He looks like a ****in’ nut to me. And what’s that smoke or whatever it is comin’ off him?”

“Well, I don’t really know,” I said. “There must be some, uh, rational explanation.”

“You are doomed!” yelled Mr. Lucky, who was now about twenty feet away.

“What the ****,” said Buddy. “Now he’s scaring me.”

“So, really, you head on home,” I said.

“F*** that noise. This guy is a f**king lunatic.”

“No, stay out of it, Buddy,” I said.

“F*ck that. You’re my pal, Arnold.” That was news to me. “Anybody fucks with you they fuck with me.”

(Sorry, Mother, I just got tired of all those asterisks. Forgive me if you’re reading this.)

“Let me take care of him,” said Buddy, and, tossing away his cigar stub, he strode forward like a small human tank, and I’m afraid I let him do so, not out of cowardice but because I had been thinking about asterisks and ignoring the problem at hand.

Although I am by nature a peace-loving man the vicissitudes of my part-time avocation of bar-fly have put me in the presence of many fights and brawls, and I will state that the one thing every one of these altercations has had in common is their resistance to verbal description. What happened next was no exception.

Buddy and Mr. Lucky collided with much shouting and cursing on both their parts, Mr. Lucky performing gestures that seemed at least reminiscent of those judo moves I had seen in the movies, whereas Buddy simply plowed right in head-down like a pint-sized Marciano with the old piston-like one-two, one-two.

I stepped forward, although I’ve never been a good man in a fight. The multifarious double-beast that was Mr. Lucky and Buddy bashed into me, I fell over into the gutter, re-scraping my scraped knees. I got up again, and attempted to grab Mr. Lucky’s arm, but he threw me off with the strength of ten men and this time I staggered back into a wooden telephone pole, striking the back of my head against it, I saw a flash like a flash bulb popping in my face, I lost consciousness.

It seemed like only a second or two later, maybe it was, and someone was lifting me to my feet by my armpits and shoving me back again against the pole. It was Mr. Lucky.

“Thought you could fool me,” he said.

Ink-black blood oozed and bubbled from his nostrils and mouth. His breath smelled of feces, his eyes were black as tar, as empty as the night. The smoke or mist rose up from his shoulders, from out of his ears, from his bloodied nostrils and mouth.

Behind him Buddy’s body lay crumpled on the pavement.

I tried to pull away but Mr. Lucky grabbed the upper parts of my arms in his hands and pushed me back, harder, against the pole.

“You humans,” he said, “You’ll never learn.”

“Well, uh, maybe we could sign one of those contracts now,” I said.

“Oh, you would like that, wouldn’t you?”

“Well, sure,” I said. (And believe me, I was willing. Damnation seven years from now seemed a far better alternative than damnation in seven seconds.) “No hard feelings --”

“Perhaps not on your part.” He squeezed my arms tighter. Vice-like would not be inaccurate in describing his grip, cliché or not. “But do you know how I’ve spent the last half hour of your earthling time?”

“No,” I said, quite frankly.

“Crawling and scrabbling my way through the uncountable dimensions of time, through the lives and deaths of galaxies, through unending black holes, through exploding supernovas, through the chill silent endless reaches of universes not born and never to be born.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“But now I’m back, and I am taking you, Arnold, taking you down to the deepest and most foul burning pit of hell.”

“So we can’t make a bargain?”

“You’re joking, surely.”

“I could become one of your, uh, servants.”

“You coward.”

“I could do better than Jack Scratch,” I said.

“You probably could at that.”

“And I do have an inside track with Josh.”

“You mean Je-”

“He likes to be called Josh down here. Just like you like to be called Mr. Lucky.”

“Simply Lucky will do.”

“Why don’t we try a seven-year contract,” I said. “Then we’ll see how it works out. Maybe you could give me an extension if --”

“Don’t try to trick me, Arnold.”

“I won’t. I just don’t want to be dragged to hell.”

“Not yet, you mean.”

“Right. Not yet. Do you have any of those contracts on you?”

“I suppose I might.”

“Go ahead, bring one out. I’ll sign it.” 

Keeping one hand firmly on my chest he reached into his inside coat pocket and pulled out a scroll. It looked just like the other ones that he and Jack Scratch had tried to get me to sign. I suppose they all came from the same factory or workshop.

“All right. Seven years,” he said. “But I expect you to work for me.”

“Sure. But I get good luck during those seven years, don’t I?”

“You never give up, do you?”

“Well, I’m only human,” I said.

“This is our standard contract. You’ll get your seven years good luck, but only if you recruit me at least one victim a month during that time.”

“I can do that,” I said.

“You know," he said, “I think you can.”

Finally he took that hand of steel off my chest, and I was able to breathe a bit more freely.

He patted his pockets.

“Damn, I’ve lost my quill. Probably lost it when I was escaping the fire demons of Alpha Centauri.”

“Who?”

“Don’t ask,” he said. “Don’t even ask.”

“I have a pen,” I said.

“Get it out, then.”

I reached into my pocket and took out the fountain pen that Mr. Arbuthnot had given me.*

“You’ll need to draw some of your blood with that,” he said.

“Oh, sure,” I said, taking the cap off the pen. Its silvery nib sparkled in the streetlamp light.

“And no funny business.”

“No funny business,” I said, putting the cap back onto the shank of the pen.

He gave the scroll a flick, and it unfurled, revealing that now-familiar incomprehensible handwriting.

“Did you want to add that codicil about me bringing in one recruit a month?” I asked.

“Don’t worry about that. Just sign the damned thing.”

“Okay. Could you turn around?”

“I’m serious, Arnold, none of your tricks this time.”

“Of course not. Just turn around so I --”

“I will not turn around. Use the goddam telephone pole.”

“It’s awfully rough.”

“I don’t give a damn. Use it, before I change my mind.”

“Well, okay, give me the contract.”

“Here.”

He gave it to me. Again, it had that feel and even the dry warmth of an old person’s skin.

I turned and put the parchment against the coarse wood of the pole.

“Hurry it up,” said Mr. Lucky, over my shoulder. “Poke your wrist there and get some blood in the pen.”

“Right,” I said, but instead of poking my skin I quickly turned the paper around to its blank side and scrawled the words:

“Go to hell.”

“No, damn you!” howled Mr. Lucky as just as quickly I signed my name.

I turned.

He was gone, leaving only a whiff of foul smoke, the faint stench of burning compost, of backed-up sewers, of death.

He wasn’t so smart.

I tossed the parchment up into the air, it burst into flame, and its ashes and its sparks drifted away on the soft ocean breeze.

* See Chapter 127.

(Continued here, because it’s not up to us.)

(Kindly go to the right hand column of this page to find a rigorously up-to-date listing of links to all other extant episodes of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train To Heaven©. Be sure to put in your orders now for the special holiday “Arnold Schnabel Lunch Pail”, made in the USA of high-quality laminated tin, available in blood-red, sky-blue, or ghostly-white.)

“Uncle Buddy’s House”, Chapter 22: raging fury

2009-11-03T01:54:00.004-05:00

In our previous chapter our hero Buddy Best, having agreed over the telephone to dine with Cordelia -- offspring of the ham actor who has absconded with Buddy’s wife -- is gobsmacked with the revelation that the dowdy young woman he has met only once before has been transformed into a shimmering beauty...

(Click here to read the first chapter of this “steamy soap opera swarming with enough sin and snideness to make Jackie Collins swoon” -- (J.J. Hunsecker, in the Cape May Herald.)

“So,” said Buddy, an octave too high -- bring it down -- “how about a drink?”

She almost seemed puzzled by the question, but then she said:

“Okay.”

“What would you like?”

“A Diet Coke?”

“No,” said Buddy, before he could stop himself. “Come on, you don’t drink Diet Coke in a joint like this. Right Lou?”

“I don’t serve that shit,” said Lou.

“Well, okay --” she said.

“Uh --” Buddy suddenly realized he was spacing on her name -- Olivia? Rosalind? -- “what would you like?”

“Wine?”

“Great. What color?”

“Red?”

“Okay, Lou, bring us a bottle of Barolo, something good, something under a thousand bucks, okay?”

“Of course a.”

Lou smiled and went away.

She was wide-eyed. And opened-mouthed, showing a lot of very white teeth.

“A thousand?”

“I was kidding.”

“Oh. I’m so stupid. I’m sorry, I don’t get out much.”

Her eyes remained wide open, just as her mouth remained partially open, and it occurred to Buddy that this was perhaps their normal state, making her look more nutty than she really was. Or, maybe she really was just nutty and that was why her eyes and her mouth --

“So, you took a bus?”

“Yeah. I either ride my bike or take buses everywhere. I have a license but my father won’t let me drive his car. I don’t mind. I hate to drive. It’s dangerous, you know?”

“It sure is.”

“Do you think I could smoke here?”

“Why not? We’re outside, and besides, they’re Italian, they don’t give a shit.”

“What if someone complains?”

“Then we’ll deal with it.”

The waiter who had been so hard to find a minute before now stood with his tongue hanging out about three feet away. Buddy made a smoking gesture and pointed at the table.

Funny-name-girl already had her enormous shiny black purse open on her lap and she came up with a semi-crushed box of Marlboros. The waiter was there in two seconds with an ashtray, helping himself to a look at her breasts as he put it down. She got out a cigarette, and waiter-boy dashingly pulled a lighter out of his pants, bowed over her with his butt jutting out, begging to be kicked, and gave her a light.

“Thank you.” She exhaled luxuriously and then gave a start, staring at Buddy -- “Oh! would you like one?”

She thrust the box to within a few inches of Buddy’s nose.

“No thanks.”

She dropped the box into her purse, clicked it shut and put it on the floor, door, snore, core -- Cordelia --

“I just smoke one a day usually,” she said, Cordelia, that was her fucking name, “which means they’re usually pretty stale. And which also means I spend the entire day thinking about that one cigarette.”

The waiter was still standing there.

“Thanks,” Buddy told him, “we’re good now.” And finally, after just one more quick fond glance at Cordelia’s bosom, the guy went away.

Buddy wondered if she’d had sense enough to keep her sweater buttoned up on the bus, even if this was L.A., and because this was L.A. And he was trying not to be as obvious as Lou or the waiter, but just above and to the left of her left breast there was a tiny odd tattoo, about the size of a dime. It was green, red, blue...

“What is your tattoo there?”

“It’s Saturn.”

“Oh, of course.”

“It’s kind of weird ‘cause I did it myself.”

“Ah. I see.”

She pulled the edge of her cardigan over it. Too bad.

Lou came over with the Barolo, no five-minute wait this time. He jabbered on about the vintner and the vineyard and about how the wine was a little young but still drinkable (and thank God it was only a ‘97, with any luck it’d be under a hundred bucks). Finally he opened it and poured a little into Buddy’s glass, but Buddy waved him on. “That’s all right, Lou, pour away, I trust your judgment.”

Lou filled the glass, then sidled over next to Cordelia so as to appreciate the aerial view of her cleavage again while he filled her glass; as he lifted up the bottle with a show-bizzy little turn of the wrist he gave Buddy a nod of approval. He held onto the bottle.

“Where you meet such a beautiful young lady, Mr. Best?”

“Um -- well --”

“You very beautiful,” he said to Cordelia. “You Italian?”

“No.”

“You got such beautiful dark hair. You must have some Italian blood.”

“Well -- maybe -- I mean --”

“Italian or not, you beautiful anyway.”

“Thanks.”

“You make sure he treat you right.”

“Okay.”

“He treat you bad I get my friends to break his legs.”

“All right.”

“I mean it.”

“Okay,” she said. “Thanks.”

Lou finally put down the bottle and went off. Cordelia carefully stubbed out her cigarette, pushed aside the ashtray, and then leaned forward to whisper.

“He’s weird.”

“Yeah, he’s into this whole leg-breaking thing.”

“He’s like a character in some old movie. Do you think he’s always that Italian or is he just that way in his restaurant?”

“I’m not even sure he exists outside of this restaurant.”

She lifted her glass and tasted the wine. Her eyes expanded.

“Wow, that’s good.”

Buddy tasted his.

“Yeah, it’s okay.”

She looked slightly stricken, so Buddy amended:

“I mean, it’s really okay. Okay okay.”

“Okey-dokey,” she said, and she opened her menu.

“Oh my God, Mr. Best --”

“Buddy --”

“Buddy, it is expensive. I thought --”

“Yeah, I know, I’m an asshole.”

“But, I wouldn’t’ve minded a cheap place -- really --”

“Well, what the hell -- it’s pretty good here --”

“But I thought you preferred cheap places.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“So why --”

“I don’t know. I’m nuts.”

“You wanted to impress me.”

“Well -- I figured you probably don’t get much of a chance to, you know --”

“I don’t, really. Ever. Get a chance to. All I practically ever eat at are like pathetic greasy taco joints.”

“Yeah, so, what the hell --”

“Well, I think you’re really nice. It’s -- nice here.”

“Good.”

She was looking around with those eyes.

“It’s really nice,” she said.

(Buddy had a theory about expensive restaurants, which was that women actually liked them. A lot of men convinced themselves that they liked all this bullshit, but what they really liked was validating themselves by proving they had the money to spend on it; but women really did like these joints, it was in their genes. There were exceptions of course, like good old Madge or Shakira, she didn’t give a damn, give her some raw groats and turnips and she was happy, but Joan -- Christ, Joan and her restaurants -- how was the Mariner going to afford that bullshit? How many thousands of dollars had Buddy spent taking Joan to trendy restaurants? And it was all bullshit. But, here he was, like an asshole --)

“Hey,” she leaned forward over her menu and spoke low. “Don’t look, but who is that older guy at that table to your left. ‘Cause he’s been looking at us.”

Buddy glanced to his left.

“Don’t look!”

“It’s okay. That’s William Shatner.”

“Who is he?”

“Uh, he’s an actor. Star Trek? Captain Kirk?”

“Oh. I never saw that show.”

“Ah.”

“Is he still like a big star?”

“Well -- he’s -- sort of an icon.”

“Oh,” she said. “So why’s he looking at us?”

“He’s probably not looking at us, he’s looking at you.”

“Oh right. All the pretty women in here? Do you know him? Has he been in your movies?”

“Yeah, we did a picture once.”

“What was it called?”

“Um, Raging Fury.”

“Ah.”

“Y’know, Richard Gere’s over there to your left if you want to see a really big star.”

She glanced over. She didn’t seem too impressed. Or maybe she didn’t know who Gere was either.

“Have you made movies with him?”

“Uh, no. He’s a little out of my league. Or I’m out of his league.”

She turned to her menu again, with a grave expression.

“Oh my God, It is all so expensive though. Maybe I’ll just have a salad --”

“Oh, no, none of that,” said Buddy. “That’s not allowed. Here, give me your menu.”

She did this, and Buddy folded up both menus and laid them on the table.

“Okay, now we’re going to order like real Hollywood assholes.”

“How do you do that?”

“I got it from an Elmore Leonard book. The trick is not to look at the menu and just to torture the waiter with questions. Then he tells you stuff you could have learned just by looking at the menu in the first place. Then you ask him to ask the chef to make all sorts of adjustments on dishes that the chef has spent decades perfecting.”

“Oh, okay. But why?”

“It’s fun.”

She gnawed her lower left lip for a moment.

“Actually you just want me to order food I really want instead of just ordering the most inexpensive meal possible.”

“Well, yeah.”

“Okay. I usually order your way anyway,” she said.

“Good. Now I want you to hold your own here.”

“I will. I can be really weird about food.”

As can any woman worth her salt, thought Buddy.

(Fear not, fans of tortuous dialogue: continued here.)

(Kindly refer to the right hand column of this site to find an up-to-date listing of links to all other published episodes of Uncle Buddy’s House™, a Danny Thomas Production for the DuMont Network.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 171: the Cana gig

2009-10-30T05:22:00.024-04:00

In our previous episode our hero Arnold Schnabel at long last dragged the slightly inebriated Josh back to his suite in Cape May’s lovely Chalfonte Hotel; Josh immediately passes out on the couch and Arnold is about to take his leave when who should then enter but a man with a trumpet-case who introduces himself as “Gabriel”...

(Click here to return to the first chapter of this Gold View Award©-winning memoir, which, in the words of that noted scholarly wag Harold Bloom, “would be the only book I should need or want were I ever to be shipped off to Guantanamo”.)

We shook hands over the coffee table.

“Josh never was much of a drinker,” he said.

He laid his case on the table, then reached a hand into his inside jacket pocket.

“You should have seen him at the marriage feast at Cana, man. A scream and a half.”

He brought out a thin hand-rolled cigarette, and with his left hand he brought up a slim gold lighter from his side jacket pocket. He lit the cigarette, drew in a long slow drag, held in the smoke with his eyes closed, and slowly exhaled, slowly opening his eyes. It wasn’t tobacco he was smoking.

“You want a toke, Arnold?”

“No, I’d better not,” I said.

“It’s good stuff, man. Mellow. Help you sleep.”

“Do you think so?”

“Yea, verily, I say unto you. And dig: no hangover.”

“Well --”

He was holding out the reefer. It did look inviting, especially considering the no-hangover factor.

“Well, maybe just a puff,” I said.

The next moment I remember as a moment we were sitting in wicker rocking chairs out on the balcony, although I had no clear memory of going out there nor of how much time had passed.

Jazz music played in the living room, the sort of jazz that Elektra and her friends listened to. Apparently Gabriel had put a record on.

“He had his load on,” Gabriel was saying.

In a mild panic I glanced at my watch, but its radium dial read only five past three; so it was okay, I’d only lost ten minutes or so. I could spare that.

“So the man comes up to Josh, and he’s like, ‘We’re sorry, sir, we’re out of wine. You dig?'”

I paused, mulling, and then said, “Yes, I dig.”

My words felt like large wads of bubble gum, but apparently Gabriel understood them.

“No, man, I know you dig. I mean the old cat at the wedding said ‘You dig’. Pass the joint, brother.”

I passed him the reefer.

“Wait,” I said. “I thought it was Mary who told Je-”

“’Josh’, man. Be cool. He wants to be called Josh down here.”

“Sorry. But I thought it was Mary who told Josh about the wine running out.”

Now my words seemed like bubbles from bubble gum, floating through the warm dark air, but again I was understood.

“Not true, man. It was the old cat, the father of the bride. Don’t believe everything the Bible tells you, Arnold. Half that shit is bogus. Two thirds. At least. Where was I?”

“The old man told Josh they were out of wine.”

“Right. Dig. So Josh pulls out his pouch, and, as usual, he’s loaded with shekels. He reaches his hand in, pulls out a fistful. ‘Here,’ he says, ‘send somebody down to the wine-merchant, and tell him to bring back the good stuff this time. None of this Mogen David shit either.’ But the old cat, father of the bride, dig, he says, ‘O Lord, you don’t understand, we’ve already bought out the wine-merchant. There is like no wine to be had in all of Cana. But that’s cool, O Lord, we can, you know, brew up some frankincense tea --” But Josh won’t hear of it, ‘cause he’s got his load on, dig, and now he’s got his load on he wants to keep it on. So he says, ‘That pitcher, bring it here.’ ‘That pitcher of water, O Lord?’ ‘Yes, that one.’ One of the man’s sons brings it over. Old Josh he just waves his hand over the mouth of that pitcher, then he picks up his goblet. ‘Okay,’ he says, ‘now pour me a drink.’ The boy picked up the pitcher, gave it a shake, and then filled Josh’s goblet with the smoothest red wine you’ve ever tasted.”

It seemed as if I should say something here, but I couldn’t think of anything. Perhaps if I had been given an hour or two I might have come up with something.

But Gabriel continued.

“The thing is, Josh just didn’t want to call it a night. You’ve seen him in action.”

“Yes,” I said.

“His first miracle,” said Gabriel. “Thing was, his father and the uh --”

“The Holy Ghost?”

“Well, he goes by the the Holy Spirit now, but, you’re right, back then it was the Holy Ghost. Anyway, they had all agreed, the three of them ahead of time: no miracles. They figured if mankind couldn’t get the message without parlour tricks then the hell with ‘em, dig?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“But Josh forgot, ‘cause he wanted that wine. And so, well, after that first miracle, you know, man, you gotta give the crowd what they want. And next thing you know it’s raising Lazarus from the dead, multiplying the loaves and fishes, walking on the water, you name it.”

I was trying to get the energy up to say my goodnight and leave, but I didn’t want to seem rude, or as if I didn’t appreciate getting all this inside information.

“Now you take the last supper,” said Gabriel.

He looked at me with narrowed eyes from under his porkpie hat. He seemed to want just a little response before going on.

“You were there?” I managed to ask.

Now my words looked like the dialogue balloons in a comic book, floating there above and to the side of my head.

Gabriel filled his lungs, then passed the reefer back to me.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, exhaling a great cloud of smoke that blew away my word balloons. “I was leading the band again that night, same as at the Cana gig. Now don’t get me wrong, ninety-nine nights out of a hundred Josh is the most steady cat you can imagine -- one, maybe two glasses of wine -- cool as ice, but every one-hundredth time, I don’t know, the pressures just get too much for him. And that supper was one of those times. He knew what was coming.”

“The crucifixion?”

“Dig. Imagine having that bulls**t hanging over your head.”

“I’m sure I would drink too,” I said.

“So he gets his load on, and then all of a sudden he points at Judas, and he says, like, ‘You, man, you. I thought you were my brother. How could you, man?’ Judas is just getting ready to stick a piece of bread in his mouth, and he’s like, ‘What?’ And Josh just goes, ‘You, man.’ The band was on break. You could’ve heard a pin drop. Judas just puts his piece of bread down, gets up, and walks out. Everybody thought Josh was just being drunk and paranoid. Turned out he may have been drunk but he wasn’t paranoid."

He reached into his inside jacket pocket again, and brought out a whiskey flask. He held it out in my direction, but I shook my head no, decisively. He shrugged, unscrewed the cap, took a drink. He re-capped the flask and put it away.

"And then," he said, "he starts talking about the bread being his body, the wine being his blood. And everybody’s just staring at him, like, ‘Man, what the hell are you talking about, brother, because you sure ain’t making any sense.’ You dig?”

“Do you mean do I dig?” I asked. “Or was that everyone asking the, uh, silent question to, uh --”

“That time I was asking you, Arnold.”

“Oh.”

And now I forgot what the question was. I also didn’t care. But to be polite I told him I dug.

“Dig it,” he said. “Nobody knew what the hell he was talking about.”

I realized that I had been holding the reefer, and it was lit, but that I had not been smoking it. So I took a drag as Gabriel continued to talk. He had a very soothing voice, a gentle and rolling voice, and it seemed to flow in harmony with the jazz music and the warm night's breeze, the night sky, that enormous dark ocean out there...

And then I wondered, wasn’t this music keeping the other guests of the hotel up? I was thinking of suggesting to Gabriel that we turn the record off, or at least lower the volume, when he said, again:

“You dig?”

I didn’t want to admit that I hadn’t been paying attention, so again I said I dug.

“And so that was it, man,” he said. “The meaning of life, and of the whole universe. He said it just that once, and he made everyone there swear not to tell anyone and not to put it into the gospels. You won’t tell him I told you, will you?”

“No, no,” I said, and truer words I’ve never spoken.

“Thanks, man. I mean, it’s probably cool anyway, ‘cause I know he digs you.”

I stood up. The rocker I had been sitting in rocked against the back of my legs. The ocean beyond the rooftops moved like something breathing in the darkness, and the warm dark breeze smelled of the ocean. I remembered going over on the troop ship in 1943, standing on the deck at night, the ship and the whole convoy blacked out, I remembered looking out at the emptiness all around, this convoy of dark boats filled with human beings hell-bent on killing other human beings, I remembered wishing that I was back on the railroad, riding the trains back and forth through the countryside, and at the end of my trips going back to my mother’s house at B and Nedro by the factory. That was all I wanted then, just to go back to Olney and my job, to my mother and my neighborhood.

“You okay, man?” said Gabriel.

“Oh, sure,” I said. “But I should take off.”

“Sleep tight, man. I’m gonna sit out here and smoke some more of that joint if you’ll pass it over.”

I hadn’t realized I was still holding it. Oddly enough, even though I was pretty sure that we had been smoking it all this time, the reefer hadn’t burned down at all. I gave it to Gabriel.

We shook hands again.

“I’ll probably catch you tomorrow, man,” he said.

“So you’re staying here?”

“Oh, sure, I have my own room in there. It’s kind of my job, to keep an eye on Josh.”

“Okay. Well, good night, then,” I said.

“I’ll be jamming with those cats at the Mug again tomorrow night if you want to drop by.”

“Maybe I will,” I said.

“You know your way out?”

“Oh, sure.”

I went back in, Josh was still sound asleep on the couch. I made it to the door, and out.

Once I closed the door I noticed that the jazz music was no longer audible.

Like a ghost I floated down the stairs, through the lobby and down the front steps.

I turned up Howard. Soon I would be home, at last. It had certainly been an interesting day, but I was glad to bring it to a close.

I turned left on Columbia, turned right when I got to Stockton. The old town was finally quiet. They had probably thrown out the last of the revelers from Sid’s, from the Pilot House and the Ugly Mug and from the King Edward Room, perhaps even from Pete’s Tavern. Nearly everyone had drunk their fill and had finally collapsed into their beds if not into a convenient flower bed.

I turned left on Hughes, and a shuffling small figure made itself visible coming up the sidewalk from the other direction. It was too late to turn and run, or to jump behind a bush and hide. I continued forward, prepared for another demonic encounter, or as prepared as I could hope to be.

Fortunately it was only Buddy Kelly, someone I think I’ve mentioned in these pages before, but if I haven’t, then I’ll say he is a local fellow, a mechanic, somewhat troll-like in appearance, but an amiable-enough sort. It had been odd to find him in the company of Mr. MacNamara and Dick and Daphne and Steve at the VFW the night before last, but after all this is a democracy we’re living in, ostensibly, and those in the upper echelons of society are free to associate at will with those of the lower, although those of the lower do not enjoy the same freedom to associate at will with those above them.

“Arnold!” yelled Buddy, and he pumped my hand. His grip was powerful, despite his short stature, and he was quite drunk.

“Hello, Buddy,” I said.

“Damn, you look like s**t, Arnold.”

I had completely forgotten my scraped knees and elbow and hand. I’d also forgotten the pain attendant upon these contusions, but now that Buddy had brought attention to them I became aware again of the pain.

“Out on a spree?” he asked.

“That’s putting it mildly.”

“Ha ha!”

Did I mention he was smoking a cigar? Well, he was.

He wouldn’t stop shaking my hand, so I put my left hand on his right and managed to prize it away from mine.

“Well, good night, Buddy.”

“Wait! The major was looking for you, pal,” he said, as if pretending to give me a warning, or perhaps giving me a warning under the pretence of pretending to do so.

“Who is the major?” I asked.

“Major MacNamara.”

“Oh. Mr. MacNamara?”

“Him.”

“What did he want, do you know?”

“He wanted to know what you did with his daughter.”

“His daughter?”

“Daphne. His daughter.”

“Oh. Daphne.”

I flipped back through the chapters of my memory about four hundred pages, and finally hit on the appropriate passage.

“I left her at Pete’s Tavern,” I said. “But it was okay. She was with that old guy, Tommy?”

“Mrs. Biddle’s friend.”

“Right,” I said. “And they were with this nun, Sister Mary Elizabeth.”

“A nun, huh?”

“Yes,” I said. “But she was dressed in civilian clothes.”

“Well, that’s okay then. I mean priests go out in civvies some times, right?”

“That’s true,” I said. “In fact, come to think of it there was a priest in civilian clothes there, too.”

Why was I dragging Father Reilly into this? I didn’t have time to recount my entire night to Buddy. I needed my sleep.

“Who’s this joker?” said Buddy.

“Pardon me?”

Buddy pointed past me.

“That joker. He looks in worse shape than you do, Arnold.”

I turned. Halfway down the block but determinedly shambling toward us, dragging one leg, came Mr. Lucky, his ash-colored suit rumpled and torn, and a pale mist or smoke swirling up from his head and shoulders.

(Continued here, and well into the middle of the century at least.)

(Please look to the right hand side of this page for an up-to-date listing of links to all other published episodes of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train To Heaven©, deemed “acceptable, with reservations” by the Commissariat of Inspirational Literature.)

“Uncle Buddy’s House”, Chapter 21: boom

2009-10-27T03:09:00.011-04:00

Our hero Buddy Best has agreed to have dinner with the enigmatic Cordelia, the daughter of the Ancient Mariner, the preposterous ham actor whom Buddy’s wife Joan has run off with...

(Go here to see our previous chapter, or here to go to Chapter One of this “searing indictment of the loose morals that run rampant in contemporary Hollywood” (J.J. Hunsecker, in the Olney Times.)

Buddy got there first. He slipped the maitre d’ a twenty and got one of the good tables on the back patio.

Lou the owner came over to chat.

“You expecting a Mrs. Best?”

“No, not tonight, Lou. A young lady.”

“Ah, a young lady, sure.”

Lou smiled slightly and touched the wing of his nose with his finger.

“No, it’s not like that, Lou. Mrs. Best and I have separated. We’re getting divorced I think.”

“Oh? You sad?”

“Devastated.”

“No!”

“No, just kidding, Lou. I’m okay, really. Hey, how about a glass of --”

“So this a young lady, she the reason you and Mrs. Best,
uh --”

“No, no, not at all.”

“Ah, but life a goes on, and now you have dinner with a nice young lady.”

“Right. Um, how about a --”

“Man not made to sleep with a just a one woman. Is bad for the health, I firm believe that. You look at me, Mr. Best, twenty-eight year I been married and I always got a girl on the side.” He slid his eyes back and forth around the room, as if to make sure he wasn’t being eavesdropped on by private detectives. Then he made a series of quick short jabs with his right fist. “Is natural. Good for man, good for woman.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right, Lou. Hey, ya know what I could go for --”

“I know I’m right. So why you get a divorce? Why don’t you just keep you young lady friend, and, you know --”

“Well, you’re not really following me here, Lou, this young lady was not my lady friend. She isn’t my lady friend. She isn’t why I’m getting divorced.”

“So why you getting divorced?”

“Well, I’d really rather not get into it now, Lou, it’s kind of complicated. Hey, do you think you could get me a glass of wine? Something white to start, a little Frascati maybe --”

“Sure -- so you wife she leave you for anudder mudderfucker?”

“Uh, yeah, Lou, she did.”

“She didn’t!”

“Well, no, she did --”

“Porco dio!”

“So, you know, if not a Frascati, maybe --”

“Mudderfucker.”

“What?”

“Mudderfucker. Any man who sleep with another man wife.”

“Well, you know, it happens, Lou --”

Lou slid his eyes side to side again, looking for the detectives. Then he leaned forward and down toward Buddy, who had rarely wanted a glass of wine more than he did at this exact moment.

“You know I know people, Mr. Best.”

“People?”

“I know people who know people.”

“Pardon me?”

“You like I get this guy’s legs broke for you. Cheap. Like a couple hundred bucks. Hundred bucks a leg.”

“No, that’s okay, Lou.”

“I mean it.”

“I’m sure you do. But, really, I’m -- I’m bearing up.”

Lou pursed his lips and nodded his head a few times.

“You doin’ the best thing. Dinner with nice young lady --”

He slid his eyes around the room again, then once more made a quick series of short jabs with his fist.

“Boom," he said. "Boom."

“So,” said Buddy, “how about that Frascati?”

“I get you a nice Avellino,” said Lou. “Is better.”

After only five minutes the glass of wine came and it wasn’t cold enough but it was wine. Some irritating song by Sting played and Buddy sipped his wine and looked around at all the other assholes who obviously had too much money to spend or else they wouldn’t be here. There were a few big shots: like Richard Gere, whom Buddy had met once on the Sony lot; Buddy gave him an index-finger salute and Gere waved back, although Buddy would have bet his house that Gere didn’t have the slightest fucking idea who he was. Tony Scott; a couple of years back at some party Buddy had had a chat about spaghetti westerns with him, but Scott was deep into a confab with a young actor whose name Buddy couldn’t quite summon -- Stephen Dorff? Skeet Ulrich? Buddy did the reciprocal-wave thing with Tom Rothman, who had been his boss for a few months back in the early 90s; Rothman was there with some agent and what Buddy thought might be a novelist guy he had seen for a few minutes on Charlie Rose once, Dave Eggers or David Foster Grant or whatever the hell his name was...

And, ah, someone Buddy actually knew to talk to, good old Bill Shatner, looking tanned and fit, sitting with what looked like a table of out-of-towners. Buddy went over to say hi. Shatner wasn’t a bad sort -- and besides, if they couldn’t get Delon or Lambert or Franco Nero, he just might be good for that head bad-guy part in their untitled August project. Sure enough, Bill asked Buddy when he was going to give him some work again, and Buddy asked Bill when he was going to lower his asking price. Bill introduced the yokels; they were his relatives from Canada. Buddy told Bill he’d stay in touch, then he said his wine was getting warm (or warmer, he should have said), told the relations it was nice meeting them, and went back to his table.

Okay, he’d done his little B-list schmoozing. He knew Bill Shatner, look out.

Buddy sat there, a middle-aged Hollywood hack, surrounded by other Hollywood hacks and the jackals of the hacks, and the jackals of the jackals -- what the fuck was he doing here? Oh, right. Waiting for the nut-bird to show up. And twenty minutes later he was regretting he hadn’t brought a book -- and trying and failing to catch the eye of someone who might possibly bring him another glass of wine, or, better still, a bottle -- when Lou himself -- not the maître d’ -- brought out this curvy brunette in a shiny pale green dress and an unbuttoned off-white cardigan and carrying an enormous shiny black purse in both hands, and Buddy thought, Okay, now that little number I wouldn’t mind waiting for, and then he realized he was doing just that, as Lou delivered her to his table with a sweep of his hand.

“I’m so sorry I’m late. I got off at the wrong stop. Thank you so much.”

The last sentence was to Lou, who was old-schoolishly pulling her chair out for her. And Buddy saw Lou glance down her décolletage as she sat down. And he didn’t blame him. Taking off and putting away his glasses to see better Buddy saw that her dress left uncovered almost one-third of her bosom, which was not only larger and more shapely than what he would have expected if he had thought about it at all beforehand, which he hadn’t -- but then again it had pretty much been hidden by that modestly-tailored potato sack the one other time they had met -- but which, if he was any judge, and Buddy considered himself a judge, was also -- amazingly for the circles Buddy moved in, amazing for L.A., really, and amazing anyway -- real.

Buddy had stood up, he was old-school too, and now he sat down again, forcing himself to look not at her body but at her face, which was magically resolving into that of the daughter-of-the-Mariner chick from a few months back, but with make-up and red lipstick.

She was beautiful.

Who knew?

(Continued here.)

(Please look to the right hand side of this page for an up-to-date listing of links to all other available episodes of Uncle Buddy’s House™, a Selmur Production. Minors must be accompanied by actual parent or legitimate guardian.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 170: fut. perf.

2009-10-23T03:55:00.017-04:00

Let us rejoin our nimble-witted hero Arnold Schnabel, who has just vanquished the dark lord “Mr. Lucky” in the men’s lavatory of the King Edward Room, in Cape May’s lovely Chalfonte Hotel, on this warm night in August of 1963...

(Click here to go to our previous chapter, or here to read the beginning of this Gold View Award©-winning memoir, which, in the words of the noted scholar Harold Bloom “wreaks havoc with all our notions of time and space and sanity, but in a possibly beneficial way”.)

I turned and continued toward the door and through the minutes and the hours, his shouting and cursing voice fading into the past behind me.

Before pulling open that door I took a last deep breath of that close men’s room air, its stench of scorched flesh; and, closing my eyes, I tried to concentrate on the time I wanted to be in.

Opening my eyes I opened the door, and glancing back just one more time at the now empty lavatory, I went out into the hall.

There was Josh at the end of the bar, hunched over his drink, a cigarette between two fingers of his right hand. A lot of other people were still in the bar but Marootha and Bethimba were gone, and so also were myself and Dick Ridpath down at the other end of the bar.

I went over and sat down next to Josh, who jerked his head up suddenly. I think he had been dozing.

“Oh, hi, Arnold. I was beginning to wonder what was taking you so long. I ordered just one more Old Fashioned, hope you don’t mind.”

“No, I don’t mind,” I said. I took a sip of the drink I’d left at my spot. It had gotten considerably diluted from the melted ice, but that was okay. “So, the ladies left,” I said.

“What ladies?” said Josh.

“The two ladies who were just sitting there next to you.”

In their place were sitting two dapper young men in summer suits.

“Ladies,” said Josh.

“Yes," I said.

"What kind of ladies?"

"Blond ladies?"

“Arnold," said Josh, "there weren’t any ladies sitting next to me. I’m not that drunk. It’s just been these two fellows,” he said, in a quieter voice, so they couldn’t hear.

“Oh,” I said. “Uh, let me ask you a question, did we see me and my friend Dick Ridpath down at the end of the bar there?”

“What the bloody hell are you talking about?”

I took another sip of the watered-down drink.

He stared at me.

“All right, Arnold, what happened? In the parlance of our Miss Magda: the beans. Spill them.”

Briefly I filled him in on what had occurred since we had entered the bar not ten minutes ago, or, depending on how you looked at it, two nights ago.

“Amazing,” he said, finally. He stubbed out his Pall Mall. “So you just left him there. Lucifer.”

“Or Mr. Lucky,” I said.

“Man of a thousand names. Stuck two days in the past.”

“Let’s hope so,” I said.

“This is slightly disturbing,” he said.

“That’s one way of putting it,” I said.

“No, I mean it’s really disturbing from my point of view. I’m starting to feel less omniscient and omnipotent by the second.”

“Unless I’m just imagining it all.”

“There’s one way to find out. What’s the bartender’s name again? Larry?”

“Jerry,” I said.

Josh turned away toward the bar, but Jerry was already standing there. 

“May I help you, Josh?” he asked.

“Yes. Jerry, this might seem like an odd question, but were my friend and I in here two nights ago?”

“Of course, sir.”

He said this smiling, but with a question in his voice, as if worried that somehow he had unknowingly done something wrong.

“We were,” said Josh.

“Yes, sir. You were sitting in these same two seats.”

“Okay,” said Josh. “And were there two ladies sitting next to us?”

“Yes, I believe there were, Josh. In fact, well, I suppose perhaps you fellows did have a slight overabundance of Old Fashioneds if you don’t remember --”

“Remember what?”

“Well, you and your friend -- Arthur?”

“Arnold,” corrected Josh.

“You and Arnold left with these ladies. Heh heh.”

Josh took a drink of his Old Fashioned, then shook the ice around in his glass.

“Blondes?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. Quite handsome ladies they were, too.”

“Oh. Okay.” Josh drank some more of his drink. “Now this one’s a long shot -- Jerry?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Jerry, do you also happen to remember a couple of other guys sitting down at the other end of the bar there, and one of them looked like my friend Arnold here?”

“Now that you mention it there was a gentleman who bore a certain resemblance, although I didn’t notice it at the time. Quiet fellow. A little --”

“What?”

“A little nondescript.” Well, thanks a lot, Jerry, I thought. “Would you like another drink, Josh?” he asked.

“I’m fine, Jerry, thanks.”

I wanted to ask Jerry for that large seltzer water I had never gotten, but he was already walking away. Josh waited till he was out of earshot, and then turned to me.

“This is really flipping my lid, Arnold.”

“Don’t feel bad, Josh,” I said. “You had had quite a lot to drink that night.”

“But that night was this night.”

“Oh, right,” I said.

“Oh my God.”

“What?”

“What if I did something with one of those women?”

“Oh.”

“Maybe you did too.”

“I doubt that,” I said.

“Why?”

“I wasn’t that drunk, Josh.”

“Oh my God, were they that bad?”

“Not in the physical sense,” I said.

“Oh no.”

“Not that I’m anyone to be critical,” I said.

He finished off the last of his Old Fashioned, and put down the stubby glass.

Up to then it had been me doing all the deep sighing, but now Josh sighed, deeply.

“You know, Arnold,” he said, “I really think I need to go to bed.”

“That’s probably a good idea,” I said.

“Oh, but you hardly touched your drink,” he said.

“That’s okay, Josh, I really didn’t want it. Let’s get you to bed.”

I stood up and patted him on the shoulder.

Josh got off his stool and swayed backward, but since my hand was already on his shoulder I was able to steady him.

“Woops. Oh, wait, let me pay for these,” he said.

He reached his hand into his pocket.

Jerry was magically standing there again.

“What do I owe you, Harry, I mean Jerry?”

“Oh, on the house, Josh.”

“Jerry,” said Josh. He had pulled out a wad of his seemingly inexhaustible crisp new twenties, he peeled one off and laid it on the bar. “Thanks for taking care of us, Jerry.”

“Oh, sir --” Jerry pushed the twenty toward Josh. “That’s way too much.”

“Buy your kids some treats,” said Josh. “Let’s go, Arnold.”

He staggered away toward the exit.

I looked at Jerry and shrugged.

“Good night, sir,” he said, taking the twenty and folding it.

“Good night,” I said.

I confess I wondered if I would get free drinks myself if I came in here without Josh.

I caught up with him in the lobby.

“I’m good from here, Arnold. You go home.”

“I’ll just see you safely to your room, Josh.”

“Oh, a chair. I think I’ll just sit a while.”

He was referring to a rather comfortable-looking wicker armchair with a green corduroy seat cushion.

I grabbed his arm.

“No, Josh, let’s get you to bed.”

This wasn’t entirely easy, and I won’t bore myself or the scholars of the future with the details, just suffice it to say about five minutes later I had Josh outside his room on the second floor. He got his key out, dropped it to the floor. I picked it up and unlocked the door, opened it, and let Josh step through. I followed him, then turned and closed the door.

Josh had left all the lights on. The way this night was going I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a palatial suite of rooms, but Josh’s accommodations proved to be reasonably modest, although still not what one would have expected at an old “family” sort of place like the Chalfonte. There was a living room, with a wooden TV-and-Hi-Fi console, a brown leather couch, a glass-topped coffee table with some magazines and newspapers on it, a few wicker arm chairs. Off to one side was a dining table, and beyond that a kitchenette with a little bar and some high stools. There were paintings of what looked like jazz musicians on the walls, the players in elongated black silhouettes against backgrounds of blue and green and red, with black musical notations flying around the musicians like birds.

French windows were opened onto a balcony, looking out toward the ocean a few blocks away, and translucent white curtains stirred in the soft warm breeze that smelled of seashells.

The door to a bedroom was open, and the lights were on in there also. I could see a big four-poster bed, unmade, with some clothes strewn on it.

I heard a soft sort of sound. I turned, and Josh was lying sprawled out prone on the couch, his face turned toward the back of the couch, one arm trailing to the floor.

I walked over.

“Josh? Hey, buddy, let’s get you to bed.”

He was out cold, breathing deeply through his mouth.

Oh, well, he seemed to be comfortable enough.

I had done enough for one night.

Then I heard another sound behind me, that of a key in a lock. I turned. A Negro man had opened the door.

“Oh, hello,” he said. “I was wondering why the door wasn’t locked.”

He pocketed his key. Under one arm he had a black musical-instrument case.

“You must be Arnold,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“I’m Gabriel.”

He closed the door. He wore a sharkskin suit, a porkpie hat.

“I was just down at the Ugly Mug, jamming with those cats. How’s Josh doing?”

“Sound asleep,” I said.

“Good old Josh.”

He came over, extending a hand.

(Continued here.)

(Kindly refer to the right hand side of this page for a list of links to all other available episodes of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train To Heaven©, recently short-listed for the Regis & Kelly Book Club.)

“Uncle Buddy’s House”, Chapter 20: disturbing

2009-10-20T02:59:00.009-04:00

In our previous episode, our hero Buddy Best found himself talking on the telephone to none other than Cordelia, the daughter of the dreaded Ancient Mariner, the man who stole Buddy’s wife away...

(Those who have arrived late to the party may click here to go to the first chapter of this “this hard-hitting melodrama of the lurid lower depths of La-la Land” -- J.J. Hunsecker, in The Reader’s Digest.)

A slight pause. Then --

“So, how are you?” said Buddy. “Make any cheese puffs lately?”

“No.”

“Okay,” he said. “So, um, uh, is your father --“

“They’re still in France. In Brittany.”

“Right. Good old Bretagne. In his little, uh, whatchamacallit --"

“-- chaumière.”

“Right.”

“By the sea. That he goes to every year.”

“Yeah. With the well.”

“Except he couldn’t get the chaumière this early so they’re staying in a hotel.”

“Oh. Well, I, uh, hope it’s a quaint hotel.”

“Oh, you can be sure of that,” she said, and Buddy was just about to say, well, okay, nice talking to you, when she suddenly said, “How are you?”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“Um, I’m okay --”

“Good,” she said, sounding pensive. And then even more pensively, or maybe just psychotically, “Good.”

“Well, uh --“

“Yes?”

“Um -- well, when they get back, uh, just tell ‘em I called.”

“Right. I sure will.”

“Okay -- so --”

“Mr. Best --”

“Yeah?”

“Listen, I’m sorry if I was weird that night at my father’s party, but I wasn’t having a very good time at all, and plus I felt a little weirded-out talking to you --”

“Weirded-out? Why? I’m a nice guy.”

“I know, but it was just, just --”

“Oh.”

“Just --”

“Because you knew about my wife and your father?”

“Yeah. It was -- weird,” she said, the weird sliding up and down over two syllables.

“Yeah, well --”

“Stop it!” she yelled.

“Stop what?”

“Sorry, I was talking to the stupid cat. He was scratching the sofa.”

“Oh.”

“I should just let him scratch it. I hate this house.” Pause. “I suppose you hate it too.”

“I -- don’t know that I hate it,” said Buddy.

“You don’t live here.”

“That’s true.” He could hear her breathing. “Well -- look, uh --” what was her name -- “Cordelia -- I’ll, uh --”

He ran out of words, and she also said nothing. He hadn’t really thought about her since that night of the Mariner’s party -- he was remembering her serious face with those big dark eyes, and that odd feeling of familiarity, and now he was having some sort of déja vu, except he didn’t know exactly what he was déja vu-ing --

“What are you doing?” she said.

“Doing?” Déja vu-ing? “Right now? Besides talking to you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Just sitting here by my pool, drinking a beer.”

“Cool. You have a pool.”

“Yeah, it’s nice.”

“Do you swim in it much?”

“Well, not as much as I should. But I try.”

“That’s great.”

“Yeah. Just trying to hold off the inevitable.”

“What’s that?”

“Decrepitude. Senility. Death.”

“That’s -- great,” she said.

“Uh-huh. What are you doing?” said Buddy.

“I was reading.”

“Great. What are you reading?”

“What Maisie Knew? By Henry James?”

“Ah, good old Henry,” said Buddy. “Hank the Tank.”

“Do you like him?”

“Well, I never actually got around to reading any of his books --”

“I like them.”

“Great.”

A slight pause.

“Isn’t it weird how people always say everything is great all the time?” she said.

“Yeah,” said Buddy. “It’s great.” She didn’t laugh. “Okay, so --”

“Yeah.”

“All right --”

“Wait.”

“Pardon me?”

“Wait,” she said.

“Okay.”

He waited, sitting there in his damp bathing trunks, holding the phone to his ear. Ming had gotten out and was stalking through the newly trimmed-down garden. Buddy became aware of the humming of the freeway, the humming which of course was always there more or less, unless traffic was completely jammed up, in which case other sounds --

“Okay, sorry,” she said. “Never mind.”

“Sure.”

“You think I’m weird.”

“Not at all.”

“Yes you do.”

“Well, yeah. But that’s okay.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” said Buddy.

“Okay. Well -- I’ll tell them you called, when I hear from them.”

“Gr- good. So -- you don’t know when they’re getting back?”

“No. My father likes to keep things mysterious.”

“Right. Well --”

“Okay, then,” she said.

“I’ll see ya.”

“’Bye,” she said.

“‘Bye,” he said, but she’d already hung up.

Buddy pressed the off button, and stared at the pool water.

The phone rang again, and this time Buddy had a feeling it really was the weirdo who’d called earlier.

“Hello,” he said, coldly, ready to rip the creep a new asshole.

“It’s me,” she said. “Cordelia. Sorry.”

“Oh. Hi. What’s up?”

“Listen --”

He listened. To the sound of her breathing?

The freeway hummed like -- a freeway?

“There’s something I would like to talk to you about,” she said.

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, go right ahead.” She didn’t go right ahead. “Cordelia?”

“I don’t know if I can get into this on the phone,” she said.

“Afraid the lines are tapped?”

“No.”

“Is it something about Joan and your father?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Oh, forget it.”

“Well, okay.”

Another pause, and then, very quickly:

“Are you free for dinner tonight?” she said. And then, right away, “Oh, what am I saying, you don’t want to have dinner with me. But maybe we could meet for some coffee, or, I mean, if you’d like to have some coffee. Or -- a drink? Or --”

“Oh, dinner would be cool,” Buddy heard himself saying.

“Are you sure?”

“Uh, yeah --”

“’Cause we don’t have to.”

“Well, that’s true.”

“So, would you rather just meet for a drink, or a --”

“Well, no, as I said, dinner would be fine.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Well, only if you’re sure.”

Buddy was getting less sure but he said he was definitely sure.

"I’ll pay my own way,” she said. “I mean, we could eat somewhere cheap -- or -- oh, but you probably like nice places. I mean, not-cheap places.”

“Actually, I prefer cheap places.”

“Really?”

"Yeah. I mean, fancy restaurants, sometimes the food’s pretty good, but the over-all experience, you know, you just feel a little -- sullied, somehow. Or at least I do."

“Oh.”

“So where ya wanta go?”

“I don’t know. I hardly ever go out to dinner. We could go someplace near where you live. You’re in Hollywood, right? I mean it’s my idea, so -- but then, if you didn’t want to -- or -- I mean if there’s some place you --“

Buddy suspected that this was one of those conversational threads that could easily go on for hours, so he said:

“Okay, right off the top of your head, what’s your favorite type of food?”

“Chinese?”

“Okay --”

“No, French. No. Italian?”

“Cool --”

“Italian.”

“Okay, great. I mean, good.” Right down the street from Buddy’s house there was Mama Maria’s, which was simple and reasonable and also very good, and he really liked it there, but he found himself saying, “There’s this place called Locanda Luigi I haven’t been to in a while.”

“Oh -- but that’s expensive isn’t it? I mean, I’ve never been there, but --”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s on me.”

“Oh, no --“

“Okay, look, you know your way around Hollywood?”

“Well, sort of --“

He told her where the joint was, and after only a little more nonsense he was able to press the button. He sat there finishing his beer and thinking about it all and then Deirdre came out of the house with what must have been her friend Trish. They both carried backpacks slung over one shoulder, and they both wore shorts and skimpy tops, which seemed okay for Deirdre but a little disturbing in Trish’s case, who looked like a small but fully-developed and slightly world-weary twenty-four-year-old.

“Oh, there you are, Uncle Bud. Uncle Buddy, Trish and I are gonna lay out and do homework now, and then we thought later we could watch movies.”

“Okay, great,” said Buddy. “I mean good.”

“Good but not great?”

“Hi, Mr. Best.”

Jarringly she had a sixteen-year-old voice.

“Hi, Trish. So, your parents know you’re here, right, Trish?”

“My mom does.”

“Trish’s parents are divorced, Uncle Buddy.”

“Oh, sorry.”

“Do you want us to make dinner for you?”

“No, I’ll be going out, sweety. You guys want take-out, I’ll spring for it.”

“Sure,” said Deirdre.

“Sure,” said Trish.

“Okay, I’ll leave some bread on the kitchen table for you.”

“You rock, Uncle Buddy.”

“Oh yeah.”

Buddy got up and went into the house, successfully combating the urge to look back at Trish.

(Continued here, on the off chance that a plot might develop.)

(Kindly turn to the right hand column of this page to find a perhaps up-to-date listing of links to all other published episodes of Uncle Buddy’s House™, a Jonathan Shields Production.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 169: Mr Lucky

2009-10-17T01:33:00.010-04:00

In our previous episode of this Gold View Award™-winning memoir our hero Arnold Schnabel -- having seen himself chatting with a friend in the King Edward Room of Cape May’s lovely Chalfonte Hotel -- has beaten a hasty retreat to the men’s room, where his predicament is only deepened by the sudden appearance of the Prince of Darkness himself...

(Newcomers may go here to read the first chapter of this multi-volume masterpiece. “The only desert island book you’ll ever need.” -- noted critic Harold Bloom, in Woman’s Domain.)

What was it with these infernal creatures and men’s rooms? For that matter what was it with men’s rooms? It seemed as if I had spent a quarter of my night in these foul chambers. No, what am I saying? It was more like a quarter of my entire life, half a lifetime’s worth of my waking hours wasted either heading to or escaping from lavatories. It was enough to make you never want to leave the house. Not that I was safe even in the bathroom of my aunts’ house, as I had learned all too well. Perhaps I should just go in the bushes from now on. How bad could that be? You didn’t hear dogs and cats complaining.

The above thoughts and a dozen more flickered by in the space of two seconds, after which the smiling man said:

“So, at last we meet, Arnold. My name is Lucky.”

“That’s not what I heard,”

“Heh heh. Call me Lucky anyway.”

“Yeah, well, Lucky, I have to go,” I said and I made to step around him.

He side-stepped, moving directly in front of me. He was still smiling, and he took a puff of that fat and rather foul-smelling cigarette. (I think it was French.)

“Oh, please don’t go yet, Arnold. I’ve heard so much about you.”

“Oh. From Jack Scratch?”

“No other. He’s most upset. Afraid I’ll demote him for failing with you.”

“Demote him?”

“Oh, yes. He’s terrified, poor fellow.”

“I didn’t know you could go any lower than being a devil,” I said.

“Oh, there’s always another level down, I assure you.”

“Well, don’t be too hard on him. He gave it a good try. Now I really have to go.”

“Oh no you don’t.”

“Oh. You’re going to stop me?”

“Yes. And you wouldn’t be the first human being I’ve dragged screaming hellward to the eternal flames. You are in a state of mortal sin, you know. Don’t think I wasn’t watching you with your friend Astra in that hallway just a couple of hours ago.”

“Elektra,” I said.

“Pardon me?”

“Her name is Elektra.”

“Well, whatever the hell her name is -- it really doesn’t matter, you’re in a state of mortal sin.”

It was true, he had me there.

“But don’t I have to be dead first?”

“That can be so easily arranged, my friend. A quick judo maneuver on my part and you’re just another silly drunken fool who’s slipped on the tiles and smashed his skull on the sink. Happens every day.”

I have to say he looked pretty formidable. Even his diminutive minion Jack Scratch had exhibited what could quite literally be called supernatural puissance. If this Lucky fellow really knew judo I would be a twenty-to-one underdog in a fight. I wished I had paid more attention in that unarmed-combat course I had sleepwalked through in the army.

Once again I would have to think quickly and act decisively.

“I wonder if we could make a deal,” I said.

“I was hoping you would say that, Arnold.”

Leaving his cigarette between his lips he took a scroll out from the inside of his suit jacket. It looked like the same one that Jack Scratch had tried to get me to sign earlier in the men’s room of the Ugly Mug.

“I’m pleasantly surprised that you’re being so sensible,” he said.

“Well, I might as well be -- if you’re going to drag me down to hell if I don’t sign your little contract there.”

“Your logic is unassailable, Arnold. Believe me, once you sign this document you’ll be joining a most impressive panoply of humanity from all through the ages down to the present day (or night as the case may be): popes and potentates, princes and princesses, most of your own country’s presidents as well as dozens of senators and congressmen --”

He gave the scroll a flick and it unfurled. It had the same sort of strange handwriting all over it as the contract Jack Scratch had tried to get me to sign.

“I hope you’ll still give me a good deal,” I said.

“How’s seven years good luck sound?”

“Jack Scratch offered me some much better bargains than that.”

“Mr. Scratch was desperate. Seven years is standard, trust me.”

“Make it thirty,” I said.

“Thirty? You are greedy, aren’t you?”

“Well, I figure I’ll be seventy-two then, you know, ready to die anyway…”

He smiled, shaking his head.

“Even Adolph Hitler didn’t ask for thirty, Arnold.”

“That’s what I’m asking,” I said.

He pursed his lips and stared at me with his dark eyes through his cigarette smoke. As foul as that smoke was I would gladly have taken one had he offered it. Which he didn’t.

But all the while I was thinking that in movies and books people were always meeting the Devil, and sometimes they outsmarted him. So unless those stories were mere propaganda I still might have a chance.

Finally he smiled, then shook his head again.

“I’ll grant you this, Arnold, you’ve got chutzpah. All right, we’ll make it thirty.”

He took a quill pen out from inside of his jacket. It was a nicer one than the one Jack Scratch had, with black shiny feathers.

“Nice pen,” I said.

“Isn’t it? From a black swan. Okay, if you will be so kind as to hold out your arm, we’ll need just a few drops of your life’s blood.”

“You’ll make the change about the thirty years’ good luck?”

“Of course.”

“Well, I’d prefer if you write it in first.”

“Oh, okay.”

He poked the quill into the inner wrist of his left hand. A pearl of black blood emerged from his pale skin, and the nib of the quill sucked it up.

“Here, turn around if you don’t mind,” he said. “Just want to use your back for a desk.”

“Sure,” I said, and I did as he asked.

I felt him hold the thick paper against my back, felt some quick scribbling through the thick paper and the thin cloth of my polo shirt. It felt as if a rat were scrabbling at my back.

“Okay, you can turn around now,” he said, and I did.

“You can read it over,” he said. “But I assure you it’s all in order. Oh, you do read medieval church Latin, don’t you?”

“After a fashion,” I lied. “I’m a little rusty, but let me take a look at it.’

“Of course, take your time.”

I took the sheet and pretended to read it, nodding my head. I hated the way the paper felt, like the dry skin of an old person.

“I assure you, this is the standard boiler-plate, Arnold. And, right there,” he touched one part of the paper with the quill, “you can see I’ve amended seven to thirty, ‘triginta’. No tricks, no fine print. All in order.”

“All right,” I said. “I guess it looks okay. Oh, but what about the date?”

“The date’s not necessary, Arnold. We’re dealing in eternal matters here.”

“I’d still prefer it if you put the date on.”

“Christ --”

“And you should sign it, too.”

“I sign it after you sign it, Arnold.”

“I’d prefer if you sign first.”

“Jesus Christ. Al Capone didn’t give me this much trouble.”

I said nothing, holding out the contract.

“Oh, all right,” he said, taking the paper, “turn around again.”

I did so, and once again I felt that rat-like scrabbling between my shoulder blades.

“All right.” he said. “Done.”

I turned and once again he gave me the sheet.

“Right there at the top,” he said “’undecem --’”

“Oh, eleven, right?”

“Yes, because it’s after midnight. Eleventh of August. And there’s my John Hancock at the bottom.”

“’Lucifer.’”

“Right.”

“Okay, Lucifer --

“Please, call me Lucky. On earth I like to go by Lucky.”

“Mr. Lucky.”

“Lucifer sounds so pretentious. And Satan is so sinister.”

“True,” I said. “But here’s the problem, Mr., uh, Lucky?”

“Just call me Lucky. All my friends do. And I hope we’ll be friends now.”

“Here’s the problem, Lucky. It’s not August the eleventh. In fact it’s August the ninth, I believe.”

“I’m afraid you’re mistaken, Arnold.”

“No, I’m not. Because I have gone back in time two nights. And apparently I’ve dragged you along with me. If you want proof, just look out the door and down to the end of the bar there. You’ll see me with my friend Dick Ridpath, two nights ago.”

“But that’s not possible.”

“Oh, yes it is. This document is inaccurately dated, and, therefore, meaningless.”

I crumpled it up, and, aiming carefully, I tossed it into a urinal, at the bottom of which it burst into flame, giving off a distinct smell of burning flesh.

He put the quill back into his jacket.

He looked very serious. But then he took a drag of his cigarette and smiled.

“It looks as if we’ll have to do this the hard way, then.”

“I don’t think so, Mr. Lucky.”

“And why is that? I hope you don’t think you can take me in a fair fight?”

“I don’t have to,” I said. “Because I’m leaving you here.”

“Where? In this men’s room?”

“In August the ninth,” I said. “I’m leaving you two days behind me. See if you can catch up.”

“You’re mad.”

“So I’ve been told. Goodbye, Lucky,” I said. I stepped to the side, to his left, and he tried to put his hand on my arm.

His hand went right through my arm and came out the other side.

“Shit,” he said.

I could feel myself moving forward in time. But now was the tricky part. I didn’t want to overshoot and go too far into the future, and I also didn’t want to go not far enough and wind up at yesterday morning, or, even worse, the morning of my present day, and have to go through that awful nicotine-withdrawal fit again.

“Come back,” he said. “Don’t leave me here.”

I looked back. He was fading away, like a shadow disappearing in the bright men’s room light.

“Good luck,” I said, “Mr. Lucky.”

(Continued here, because it’s too late to turn back now. Please look to the right hand column of this page to find an absurdly long list of links to all other available episodes of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train To Heaven©. An Ambrose Wolfinger Production. Nihil Obstat, Bishop John J. “Big John” Graham, SJ.)

“Uncle Buddy’s House”, Chapter 19: “...and dance, like nobody’s watching...Ciao.”

2009-10-14T17:42:00.008-04:00

Our hero Buddy Best has entered a new stage in his life. A batch of concurrent personal calamities has resulted in both his son Philip and his daughter Liz rejoining Buddy and his stepdaughter Deirdre in the familial Hollywood manse only recently vacated by Deirdre’s mother, Buddy’s wife Joan, who has run off on a romantic interlude in France with her lover, the despised ham actor known as the Ancient Mariner...

(Go here to see our previous chapter, or click here to see the beginning of this “seething, sultry, sex-soaked soaper” -- J.J. Hunsecker, in The Ladies’ Home Companion.)

A few days later Philip showed Buddy his new work on Return To Death Island Part III. It was good. They worked together on it one more day and that was pretty much it. Buddy told Philip that he was going to give him a screen credit and the Writer’s Guild minimum for a polish (less what he had already paid him) and Philip was happy.

In the meantime Liz cleaned up the house and the garden, but something had to be done about her stuff in Milwaukee. All her clothes, her stereo, her books, etc. Philip offered to help her move the stuff back home, and the day after he and Buddy finished the script Philip flew out to Milwaukee with Liz.

Harvey and Buddy had a talk after Harvey read the Death Island III rewrite. Harvey had a few minor suggestions, all of which Buddy agreed to, and --

“You’re on a roll, pal,” said Harvey. “It’s great. Even better than Triggerwoman II.”

“Thanks. Philip deserves a lot of credit, too.”

“Buddy.”

“Yeah?”

“I had this wild idea.”

“Shoot.”

“We’re all agreed Triggerwoman II is too good to just be another sequel.”

“Right.”

“So what we should do is make it a stand-alone pic, with a new title.”

“Why didn’t I think of that?”

“But wait, it gets better. What also I think we should do is make Return to Death Island Part III not a sequel to Return to Death Island Part II but a sequel to the as-yet-to-be-renamed Triggerwoman II.”

Buddy needed two seconds to take this in, and then he said, “Good idea.”

“I mean, it could work. The characters aren’t that much different. You got the ballsy but sexy tough girl, the raffish soldier-of-fortune guy -- and I’m pretty sure we can get Sally and Milt to play the leads again.”

“Right, right, all we gotta do is tweak it a little and change the names.”

“Y’know what else I’m thinking, Buddy, we get some good buzz from Triggerwoman II or whatever we’re calling it we just might get a mil or two more from Sony for this next one.”

“That’d be cool. I’d love to use some of that for our above-the line talent.”

“Dig it,” said Harvey. “Get a really cool heavy this time.”

“Just what I was thinking,” said Buddy.

“Who ya got in mind?”

“If we get some more dough? Shit, I’d fucking love like -- you know who I’d love? The guy’s supposed to be foreign, right? Fuckin’ Alain Delon.”

“Love that guy. Or like Franco Nero?”

“Very cool,” said Buddy. “Or Chris Lambert maybe? Just saw him the other day over at Carlos & Charlie’s, he’s getting ready to do something with Joe Morrow, with that chick what’s-her-name, the one from ER?”

“Not any more, she just broke her leg in a riding accident.”

“No shit.”

“Yeah, it was in Variety, she was practicing riding for this picture they’re gonna do, some kind of Canadian western vampire movie, and she fell the fuck off the horse, so now Joe’s gotta replace her like this week.”

“That’s tough,” said Buddy.

“Yeah,” said Harvey. “But even if we don’t get more dough, if we could try for Bob Forster again maybe, or Mike Parks, those guys can do foreign --”

“I’m cool with either of those guys.”

“Dig. Well, whoever we get, at least it ain’t gonna be --”

Harvey let it trail off, but Buddy said:

“It ain’t gonna be the fuckin’ Mariner.”

“Dig it,” said Harvey. “I’ll get Marlene to get scripts to all those guys’ agents.“ New subject, any subject but the Ancient Mariner: “So, ya wanta give this one to Iggy again?”

“Sure," said Buddy, "if he wants to do it.”

“Okay. Just thought maybe you might want to get back to, you know, directing --”

“Nah, not if Iggy wants it,” said Buddy. “So what’s our new franchise title?”

“Fuck if I know,” said Harvey.

“Okay, I’ll try and think of something.”

“Cool. So,” Harvey lowered his voice a bit, “what’s up with you and the women around here? Are you and Debbie boning?”

“No.”

“No?” Harvey lowered his voice even more. “Are you and Marlene boning?”

“No.”

“For real?” he said, back to his normal voice.

“For real.”

“I mean not that it’s any of my business.”

“No boning, Harve.”

“No boning at all? I mean --”

“No. No boning. At all.”

“’Cause they’ve sure been acting a little weird around you, Buddy.”

“Yeah, I know. What about you?”

“What ‘what’ about me?”

“I dunno. How is Phoebe?”

“Phoebe’s fine.”

Phoebe was Harvey’s wife, although she wasn’t Heather’s mother. Harvey also had a couple of kids by Phoebe, boy and a girl, eleven or thirteen years old, in that range.

“Still going to that Asian place, Harve?”

“Yeah, you know me,” said Harvey, “creature of habit. It’s nice. I’ve been going to the same girl for months now. She’s very nice, goes to hairdressing school.”

“Do you think -- do you think Phoebe knows you go there?”

“Christ, not that I know of.”

“So you guys -- you know, you get along okay?”

“Yeah. We have our ups and downs. But, all in all -- Phoebe’s great, she really is.”

“What about -- oh, never mind.”

“What about sex?”

“Yeah.”

“About once every three months, usually after we’ve gone out and got a little loaded.”

“So that’s uh, you know --”

“Buddy, come on, we’ve been married a long time. Once every three months is good.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“I mean, this is the real world we’re living in here, right?”

“So I hear.”

“Thank God for the Asian place, though,” said Harvey.

“Yeah. But what about Phoebe?”

“What about her?”

“What about her sex life?” said Buddy.

“Christ -- maybe she’s got an Asian place too,” said Harvey.

****

Next day, two dreaded meetings -- Buddy had deliberately scheduled them for the same day: first his accountant and then his divorce lawyer. He asked them both the same basic thing, to please help him not go to the poorhouse. The accountant told Buddy he should talk to his divorce lawyer about that. This was the same dude who had handled Buddy’s divorce from Madge.

“You gotta help me out here, Dave,” said Buddy to his lawyer.

“You got a great case, Bud. Don’t worry about it. She left you for another man.”

"I just don't want to lose the house."

"I'll bear that in mind."

"She can have every other fucking thing."

Dave pretended to write something on a legal pad.

"’Every other fucking thing.’ But from what you've told me your accountant tells you, you don't really have a lot of other assets."

"Well, you know the movie business, up and down. Always hoping for that elusive out-of-left field hit --”

“Yeah. So who’s Joan’s lawyer?”

“Beats me. She said she was gonna get one, but I haven’t heard from her since she took off for Europe with this idiot.”

“Do you know when she’s coming back?”

“No idea.”

“She hasn’t even been in touch with Deirdre?”

“She sent her a postcard last week. But it didn’t say when she was coming back.”

“O-kay,” said Dave.

Buddy looked out the window. They were on the thirty-third floor and you could see the Pacific Ocean from up here. Which was depressing somehow. Not so much the ocean itself but seeing it from up here was depressing. But then maybe it was just the
ocean --

“Ground control to Major Bud.”

“Oh -- I guess there’s no way I’ll get to keep Deirdre, right?”

“I doubt it. Not if Joan wants her.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

Buddy looked at the ocean for a bit more. In some ways Dave was a weird guy for a lawyer. For instance he knew how to keep quiet sometimes, and he did this now. But then of course Buddy was paying him for his time. But what sort of a maniac chose to become a divorce lawyer anyway? It was like deciding to be a proctologist. Or a mortician. Or a hit man?

“What’re you thinking about?” said Dave, finally.

“Oh, nothing,” lied Buddy.

“Okay. So, soon as Joan gets back, give me a call and we’ll see if we can get this thing rolling.”

“Right,” said Buddy. “Oh, by the way, my son Philip is probably going to call you. He split from his wife, too.”

“When it rains it pours,” said Dave.

“Yeah. You picked a good field, Dave.”

“Don’t I know it.”

But a funny thing happened as Buddy rode the shiny metal elevator down thirty-three stories through this ugly building. He finally realized that he was glad that Joan had fucked off. He didn’t know why it had taken him so long to come to this. Maybe he hadn’t become glad until recently or until just now, maybe deep down he had been glad about it all along but was just too stupid and humiliated to realize it, but now he did. Joan gone: not a bad thing. Joan gone: good thing.

But unfortunately this one good thing was going to mean a whole fuckload of bad things: the divorce and the lawyers, and the endless fistfuls of money down the toilet and the thousands of hours of wasted tortured time dragged screaming out of his life and all the unknown but pre-ordained hosts of demons just lying in wait to leap out and sink their fangs into his flesh in the months and years ahead as a result of Joan’s fucking off with this moron, and -- really fucking depressing -- the Deirdre thing. Joan would take her, even though or because Deirdre and Buddy got along about a thousand times better than Deirdre and Joan did, and even though -- oh, fuck it --

He didn’t want to think about it.

****

The day had been shot to hell, it was too late to get anything done at the office, so Buddy went home. He swam back and forth in his pool (which even Buddy noticed was clean now, and he did realize that Liz had apparently done something to make it be clean) until he was good and tired, then he drank a lot of bottled water. Health régime out of the way, he put on a t-shirt, went into the kitchen and emptied a bottle of beer into a big glass. The kitchen phone rang. He picked it up and said hello, but whoever was on the other end didn’t say anything.

“Fuck you,” said Buddy, and he pressed the button.

The phone immediately rang again. He thought about letting the voice mail take it, but he couldn’t resist. He pressed the talk button.

“Hey, fuck you, pal, and your bitch mother.”

“What?”

It was Deirdre.

“Oh, sorry, babe. I just got this weird phone call. Somebody called and didn’t say anything.”

“Oh; did you star-69?”

“I didn’t have time to, ‘cause you called.”

“Oh, well, too late now.”

“Yeah. Fuck it. What’s up?”

“Can Trish stay over tonight?”

“Trish?”

“Yeah, Trish.”

“Oh --”

“Don’t worry, we’re not gonna have sex.”

“All right, all right --”

“So it’s cool.”

“Sure, if it’s cool with her parents.”

“It’s just her mom, her parents are divorced, and her mom wants her out of the house because she has a date.”

“Her mom has a date?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Who do you think called you?”

“No idea.”

“It was probably Mom.”

“You think so?”

“She’s weird enough. She probably wanted to talk to me but not to you.”

“Calling from France?”

“Maybe. Or maybe she’s back.”

“She wouldn’t come back and not call.”

“Duh. That’s what I’m saying. Maybe she’s back and she did call, but she didn’t want to talk to you. Or she just wanted to yank your crank.”

“My what?”

“Look, don’t worry about it, Uncle Bud. Don’t try to read Mom’s mind, ‘cause she doesn’t have a mind.”

“Right. Good point.”

“Okay, look, dude, I have another call so I’ll see you in a little while.”

Buddy took the phone and his beer out back and sat down in his chair. He thought for a bit, and then he called the office and got Marlene to give him the Ancient Mariner’s home phone number. He dialed it, and after what seemed like seven or eight rings he was about to disconnect when an answering machine came on, and this was what it said:

“Hello, this is Stephen. I am not at home at this particular point in time, but, after the beep, please leave a brief message, including your full name, your telephone number and area code, and the time and date at which you are calling.”

And Buddy was all set to leave a brief message as soon as the thing beeped, but the Mariner wasn’t through yet. After a pause his voice continued:

“And my message to you is: Work like you don’t need the money. Love like you’ve never been hurt. And [a chuckle] -- dance like nobody’s watching. [chuckling] Ciao.”

Buddy pressed the button.

The man was wrong. And just when you thought you knew how wrong he was he came up with a whole fucking new way to be wrong.

Buddy pressed the talk button and hit the redial. He sipped his beer and listened to the whole thing again and he made a mental note to get everyone at the office to call up and listen to it and leave fake messages.

When the beep finally beeped again Buddy said, “Hi, Stephen, Buddy Best here. Listen, if you’re back and if Joan is there --”

“Hello?”

A girl had picked up on the other end.

“Hi,” said Buddy. “This is --”

“I know, I was listening. I was screening the calls. My dad doesn’t like me to answer the phone.”

“Oh --” that sort of humid voice -- “this is, uh -- Ophelia?”

“Close. Cordelia.”

“Ah, right. King Lear,” said Buddy. “The good daughter.”

“That’s me,” she said.

(What fine mess will Buddy get himself into now? Get an inkling in our next exciting chapter. Please feel free to consult the right hand column of this page for an often up-to-date listing of links to all other available episodes of Uncle Buddy’s House™, recently snubbed by the Nobel Prize committee as “completely lacking in moral uplift”.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 168: him again

2009-10-11T05:21:00.012-04:00

Let us rejoin our hero Arnold Schnabel and his inebriated personal savior “Josh” in the King Edward Room of Cape May’s Chalfonte Hotel, on a night in August of 1963, just as Arnold has realized that the fellow deep in conversation with his friend Dick Ridpath down at the other end of the bar is no other than a brakeman poet by the name of Arnold Schnabel...

(Please click here to go to the previous episode of this Gold View Award™-winning memoir; new recruits or obsessed veterans who just can’t get enough may go here for the first chapter.)

“Oh, Christ,” I said.

“Arnold, please,” said Josh, in a slightly quietened voice, “call me Josh.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“You look upset. Is it because I ordered you an Old Fashioned?”

“No,” I said. “I mean, it’s true I don’t want an Old Fashioned --”

“Would you prefer just a glass of beer?”

“No, Josh, thank you. Look, do me a favor,” I was whispering, probably in a very suspicious manner, anyway I could see Beroosha and Manbootha or whatever their names were tilted toward us, smiling stiffly, their ears quivering as they tried to hear what Josh and I were saying, “do me a favor and just turn sort of naturally the other way and lean forward a bit and tell me who you see talking to my friend Dick down there at the other end of the bar. But don’t turn suddenly.”

“You told me you didn’t know the guy.”

“I said that because he was turned away. But just now I saw his face.”

“Wait, it’s not that bastard Lucifer again, is it? Did he follow us here?”

“No, Josh, it’s not Lucifer. Just look, but do it unobtrusively. Say something or other to these ladies.”

“Well, okay.”

Josh turned the other way, saying as he did, in a hearty fashion, “Well, where’re those libations?”

“Libations,” said Berooga. “You are so cute.”

“Too cute,” said Muranna.

“Here you are, sir,” said the bartender, arriving with a tray with the drinks.

“Well, thank you, Jerry,” said Josh. “What do I owe you?”

“On the house, sir,” said the bartender, deftly dropping a coaster in front of each of the four of us.

“Well, thank you very much, Jerry,” said Josh.

“My pleasure, Josh,” said the man, laying the drinks down and then backing away, bowing slightly.

Josh raised his drink to the ladies, they raised theirs. Not wanting to draw attention, I raised mine as well.

“Thank you very much, Josh,” said Beroomoo

“You’re a sweety-pie,” said Mulanna.

“Cheers,” said Josh.

The ladies both held out their glasses to be clinked, and Josh duly clinked them with his. Then I had to go through the awkwardness of reaching out my own glass for clinking.

Then came the drinking part. I hadn’t wanted to drink at all, but now I felt that just a little alcohol might help, so I took a sip. Anyway, the bartender had forgotten my large seltzer, so I had nothing else to drink.

Josh turned smiling to me, and leaning forward, he said, in a very quiet voice, holding the smile, “Arnold, that’s you down there, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“What the heck is going on?”

“I’ve gone back in time again,” I said. “Inadvertently.”

“And brought me with you.”

“Yes. Sorry.”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” he said.

“I do. I have to get back to my own time. This is too weird. Even for me. What if I turn and see myself here?”

“You mean the other you.”

“Yes.”

“If he should see you here.”

“Right,” I said.

“Well, I’m sure he’ll be able to handle it. I mean you’re doing okay, considering.”

“No, I’m not. I’m ready to run out of here screaming.”

“Well, don’t do that.”

“I’ll try not to. But I have to do something.”

“What are you two talking about?” said Bezooma.

“Yeah, let us in on it,” said Muloona.

Josh turned back to the ladies.

“Please forgive us,” he said. “My friend Arnold has a little problem.”

“What sort of problem?” said Bethimba.

“Yeah, tell us,” said Marimba. “We know all about problems.”

“Well,” said Josh, “the problem is, he --”

Quickly and firmly I cut in.

“It’s my lady friend,” I said.

“What?” said Josh.

I poked my finger into his side.

“Aw, woman trouble,” said the B-woman.

“Women are trouble,” said the M-woman

Then they both burst into peals of laughter.

I saw myself turn and glance down toward our end of the bar, so I drew my head back, out of my line of vision.

“Josh,” I said, into his ear. “We have to get out of here.”

“But we just got our drinks.”

“Josh --”

“And you wanted something to eat.”

“I’ll grab something at home.”

He dropped to a more exaggerated whisper that was still just as loud as before, only more whispery.

“Wouldn’t it be rude just to leave these ladies after buying them drinks?”

“But, Josh, if I see myself then the entire, uh, fabric of the universe might fall apart.”

“You mean if your other self down there sees you.”

“Yes.”

“Well, you’re seeing yourself and the universe seems okay.”

“So far.”

“Just relax. Maybe you’ll leave soon.”

“You mean the other me.”

“Yeah.”

I peeked down the bar again and just avoided myself idly glancing this way again. I noticed I was smoking one of my Pall Malls, and I was deeply envious.

I got up, keeping slightly bent over.

“Arnold --” said Josh.

“Hey, where ya goin’?” said Beroosha.

“Yeah,” added Mullasha.

“Uh, men’s room,” I mumbled, God knows why (or not), and I hobbled off, doing my hunchback imitation, but instead of heading back to the entrance I went the other way, into the short hall where the doors to the lavatories are. I don’t know why I did this, blame it on my confusion, or the reefer, or, perhaps since I had said I was going to the men’s room, blame it on the power of suggestion or on my wish never to tell a lie. At any rate I found myself going into the men’s room.

As it happened I had to urinate anyway. In fact I only now realized that I was ready to burst.

Fortunately no one else was in the small facility. I unzipped and relieved myself, it took a full two minutes at least, two minutes in which all was pleasure and nothing else seemed to matter, and then the two minutes were up, and reality, or my version of reality, descended upon me again. I re-zipped and went to the sink.

There was I in the mirror, with the same baleful face I had just seen back there in the bar.

I washed my hands, and splashed cold water on my face, on one of my faces.

After drying my face and hands on the towel from the roller thing I turned and took a look at the window. It wasn’t too high up, and it was open, with no screen. I didn’t like to abandon Josh, but after all he did have the two ladies to keep him company. I went over and took a deep breath to prepare myself before hoisting myself up onto the sill.

“Do you need a boost there, Mr. Schnabel?”

Of course I nearly leapt out of my skin.

I turned around.

It was that tall dark man from the Pilot House, the one Josh had pointed out to me, the one in the ash-colored suit. Very dark shiny hair, a black moustache. Smiling, smoking a fat strong-smelling cigarette.

It was Lucifer.

(Continued here, and until the men in the white jackets come. Kindly refer to the right hand column of this page for a dauntingly long list of links to all currently available episodes of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train To Heaven©. Be sure to watch out for the première of Ken Burns’s new 12-part documentary, Arnold Schnabel: American Master; music by Flatt and Scruggs; narrated by ”Wilford Brimley”; featuring interviews with David McCullough, George Will, Harold Bloom, Gore Vidal, Joyce Carol Oates, Dick Cavett, Alistair Cooke, Steve Allen, Kitty Carlisle, Sir Kenneth Clark, Bennett Cerf, and Tallulah Bankhead.)

“Uncle Buddy’s House”, Chapter 18: to Roscoe’s

2009-10-08T18:25:00.014-04:00

Big changes in Buddy’s house on Ivar Avenue, Hollywood, USA: his wife Joan has left him for a ham actor; his son Philip has moved back home following the dissolution of his own youthful marriage and the loss of his job; his stepdaughter Deirdre has been caught making out with another girl in the cloakroom at her school; and Buddy has had to fly to Milwaukee to bring home his troubled daughter Liz. Meanwhile Buddy’s colleague Debbie has revealed a romantic interest...

(Go here to see our preceding episode or here to go to the first chapter of this “scintillating and sin-soaked sockeroo showbiz sexposé” -- J.J. Hunsecker, in Parade Magazine.)

Here was the scoop. The doctor didn’t think it absolutely necessary that Liz go into rehab again, unless she herself really wanted to go in. He did think she should continue with AA or NA. He said she looked undernourished, and he recommended she eat and exercise and keep busy.

The doctor’s office was on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, and as they came out of the building Buddy said, “Okay, baby, you heard the Doc. Let’s eat. Your choice.”

She had gotten her cigarettes out while she was still in the elevator, and now she lit one up. She exhaled slowly, then looked at Buddy.

“Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles?”

“Let’s go.”

On the way over she said, “Wait, why was Philip around the house today?”

"Oh. I didn’t tell you. He left what’s-her-name.”

“Cynthia? He left the cunt?”

“Yep.”

“For good?”

"Yeah, apparently. He moved back in about a week ago.”

“That’s great. I hated her.”

“Yeah, I wasn’t too crazy about her either --”

“Is that why you made out with her at the wedding?”

“All right, look, that whole incident got blown out of proportion, okay? I was drunk, she was drunk --”

“Dad --”

“What?”

“I don’t give a shit,” said Liz. “Although Joan --”

“Yeah, I know --”

“Wait --”

“What?”

“Where is Joan, by the way?”

“Oh, Christ, I never told you about that, either.”

“Told me about what?”

“We broke up. She left me. For some other jerk.”

“Dad, when did this happen?”

“It was like, oh, fuck, two weeks ago?”

“Christ, Dad, why didn’t you tell me?”

“Well, I was -- I don’t know --”

“You don’t know?”

“Well, baby, yesterday, and the night before -- you were --”

“Oh, right. Blotto. Followed by oblivious. Including pathetic.”

“Yeah. And this morning, and on the way to the doctor’s -- I don’t know -- it was -- you were --”

“Wrapped up in my own problems.”

“Yeah,” said Buddy. “But I mean, that’s okay --”

They were quiet for a bit. Of course Buddy could have telephoned Liz in Milwaukee, kept her apprised of what was going on in his life, in her brother’s life, maybe find out what was going on in her life. But he hadn’t called. And Liz hadn’t called him. Second-rate father. Addict daughter. They were a team.

“So,” said Liz, “I suppose Joan took Deirdre with her?”

“No, Deirdre’s still home. She was already at school by the time you got up today.”

“Wow. What a bad mother Joan is, not even taking fucking Deirdre.”

“Oh, I’m sure she will. See, a few days after she left me, she ups and goes off on a vacation, to France, with her boyfriend --”

“To France? Really? What a cunt.”

“-- but, if I know Joan, when she gets back --”

“She’ll take Deirdre just because Deirdre likes you better than she likes Joan. In fact, Deirdre doesn’t like Joan at all. But she loves you --”

“Well --”

“So, how do you feel?”

“Me? Um, I feel all right. I guess --”

“I mean about Joan leaving, Dad.”

“Yeah, I figured that,” said Buddy.

He stopped for a red light. Liz stared out into the distance, smoking. She had laid a lot of make-up on before going to the doctor’s, but it didn’t hide that bruise on her jaw.

“Hey, Liz.”

“Yeah?”

“Um, are you okay about, uh, are you all right about, um --”

“What?”

“This, uh -- what is it, Keith or Craig?”

“Craig.”

“Right. I mean -- look -- I told him I didn’t want him to try to call you or anything, to try to --”

“Good,” she said.

“Okay. I mean --”

“Dad --”

“Yeah.”

“Light’s changed.”

“Oh, right.”

She ate her chicken and waffles like a stevedore, and then after some hemming and hawing she ordered a piece of pineapple upside-down cake, or rather Buddy made the decision and ordered it for her, along with two coffees.

“Dad,” she said.

“Yeah, babe.”

“Look, I’m sorry I fucked up.”

“Okay, great, let’s move on, nobody’s perfect. So what do you want to do? You want to go back to Milwaukee?”

“Oh, Dad, what would be the point? I was so far behind at school. I mean, forget it. I don’t know what I was thinking about anyway. Film school? At UWM? When I could’ve just worked for you and learned all that shit.”

“You still can if you want to.”

“Well, maybe I will. But I have an idea. Funny how clear you can think when you sleep for about a million hours.”

“Yeah. So?”

“Dad, do you know the house is a complete mess?”

“Uh, yeah, yeah, I know, and I’m gonna get a cleaning lady, I’m gonna get on that -- thank you, miss.” The waitress had just put down their coffee. “I’ve been very preoccupied, Liz. Busy...”

“Dad, here’s my proposition. Let me keep house for you.”

Bud watched as Liz put a quarter pound of sugar into her coffee.

“Keep house,” said Buddy.

“I cook, I clean, I buy what we need, I’ll do it all.”

There was still some space left in her cup for cream, and she filled the space up.

“Well, okay -- but don’t you want to, or shouldn’t you --”

“In return, I get free room and board.”

She stirred her magic potion and finally lifted it to her lips.

“Well, okay, but, Christ, Liz, don’t you, you know --”

“I want to write, Dad. This will give me the freedom to write, and staying at home maybe I’ll keep out of trouble and not get mixed up with loser guys and start using drugs and drinking again.”

“Well -- okay. What are you going to write? Screenplays?”

The waitress was there again and she laid the pineapple upside-down cake in front of Liz.

“Thank you. No, no offense, Dad, but most screenplays are pretty damn shallow. I want to write a book.”

She dug into the cake.

“What, like a novel?”

“No, I’m going to write a memoir, about growing up in Hollywood, you know, you and Mom breaking up, my body-image problems, my sexuality problems, the diet-pill addiction, rehab, Milwaukee. That loser Craig. Oh, and Joan, the evil stepmom. And you.”

“Oh, great.”

“Well, what do you say?”

“Whatever you want to do, baby. What the hell, I’ll even toss in a little per diem.”

“I don’t need a per diem, Dad.”

“Well, we’ll see.”

“So you think it’s a good idea?”

“Yeah, sure, just don’t make me look like a complete asshole in your book.”

“I’ll try.”

Bud took a beat here.

“I mean I know I have been an asshole. I mean, in the past. I know I wasn’t like the most -- Ozzy Nelson of fathers --”

“Who is this Ozzy Nelson? I’ve heard that name.”

“He had a show, back in the fifties. A sitcom. He sat around the house wearing a cardigan.”

“Yeah, that wasn’t you,” she said, eating her cake. “Nope.”

And the thing is, she probably didn’t even know the half of it. Or did she?

“That definitely wasn’t you,” she said.

“I guess I’ll have to be on my good behavior from now on,” said Buddy.

“Yeah, I’ll be taking notes. Oh, shit, I ate all the cake and I didn’t offer you a bite.”

“That’s okay, sweety, I really didn’t want any.”

“You’re sure?”

“Sure. So, uh, I guess you’ll be going to AA?”

“Oh, yeah, Dad. I’m gonna go every day if I have to.”

She polished off her coffee and she looked satisfied.

“I just have one tiny suggestion,” said Buddy.

“I know, don’t get involved with anyone from the meetings.”

“I mean, I know it’s hard to meet people --”

“Dad, they’re not all losers like Craig.”

“I’m sure they’re not --”

“But they’re all drunks and drug addicts, right?”

“Uh, well --”

“Look, Dad, don’t worry your head about it, because you know something? I don’t even want to meet a guy. I don’t want to meet anyone.”

“Good.”

“Sex is too weird for me now. And relationships are boring.” She’s my daughter all right -- “I’m just gonna like buy a vibrator...”

“All right, cool it --”

“Sorry. Should we get more coffee?”

“Why not, let’s go crazy.”

Buddy raised his coffee cup for the waitress to see it.

“You crack me up, Dad.”

“I crack myself up.”

“That’s why I prefer you to Mom. She’s so fucking serious.”

“You should call her, by the way.”

“I will,” said Liz. "If that fucking head-monk will put her on the phone. He’s such an asshole.”

“He’s an idiot,” said Buddy.

“Yeah. Mom’s an idiot too, isn’t she? But I’ll call her.”

The waitress came over with the coffee pot.

“So, Dad,” said Liz, “what is up with you and Debbie Greenberg?”

Buddy dropped Liz off at the house and then headed back to the office. Marlene was there. Looking good.

“Hey, Buddy. How’s Liz?”

“She’s -- well -- she’s got a good attitude. She’s --”

“Well, like I said, if you need any help, Buddy --”

“Thanks.”

“I’ve been through all this with my brother.”

“Thanks, Marlene.”

“I wanted to pick you up at the airport yesterday, but
Debbie --”

“Yeah, I know --”

He also knew that Marlene and Debbie had a close but volatile friendship, and he knew he wasn’t going to get involved in any shit between those two if he could help it.

“They all in there?”

“Harvey and Debbie are. Heather’s in the editing room with Iggy and Maxine.”

“Right.”

She was looking him all over and right through him, all her feminine radar and sonar on full blast, and he hightailed it into Harvey’s office, noticing along the way that Marlene’s skirt was short and that she had great legs.

The meeting with the Sony people had gone well. They would look at a cut in a week or two; if they liked what they saw they were open to the idea of domestic theatrical distribution and of taking the film to festivals; also, there was a good chance Lenny might get more money for his music budget. The cable people still had to be dealt with, but if Sony dug Iggy’s next cut there should be no problem on that front. Fine, fine, fine...

Buddy was heading out through the outer office and saying a quick “See ya later” to Marlene when Debbie came clacking out after him on her high heels.

“Hey, Best.”

“Yeah, Deb.”

“So tell me about Liz.” In the office Buddy had simply told them that Liz was fine. “And don’t just tell me she’s fine again.”

Marlene was looking at them over her computer screen.

“Well, she seems fine,” said Buddy.

“So is she going back to rehab?”

“No. But she is gonna stay home for a while.”

“And do what?”

“She’s, uh, she’s gonna keep house for me.”

“Keep house?”

“Yeah.”

“That is so -- 19th Century.”

“Hey, it’s her idea.”

“I dunno.”

“Well, she’s not gonna just keep house. She wants to write.”

“A screenplay?”

“No, I think like a memoir.”

“What’s she got to write a memoir about? She’s what, twenty-three, twenty-four --”

“Well, you know, they start ‘em young nowadays.”

Marlene was typing at her keyboard but she was hanging on every word.

“I’ll walk you out to your car,” said Debbie.

Outside:

“Boy, sister was all ears,” said Debbie.

“Hey, Marlene’s cool,” said Buddy.

“I know she is. She runs this company. Or rather she and I run it. So,” she said.

“Yeah?” said Buddy. She looked into his eyes. “Yeah,” he said.

She touched his face and came closer, in the bright sunlight. She smelled good. People walked by them on the sidewalk, cars drove by on Hollywood Boulevard.

“Hey, Deb --”

“What?”

“Deb, look, I just don’t know if I can --”

“Get it up?”

“Well, that too.”

“You’re afraid.”

“Yeah, that too.”

“What else?”

She was looking him right in the eyes. She’d been to all sorts of empowerment seminars, years of therapy; she believed in dealing directly with people, and she was good at it.

“Deb, look, what do you want from a man?”

“Besides a hard dick?”

“Yeah, besides that.”

“You mean do I want to get married?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Yeah, I would like that, if I could find someone who --”

“Which is what every woman says.”

“You sexist asshole.”

“Deb, I don’t want to get married again. I don’t want to live with a woman again.”

“You just got separated, Buddy, slow the fuck down.”

“But, if we -- went out, that’s where it would be leading, I mean possibly -- “

“What a coward.”

“I just don’t want that, Deb. And, anyway, we work together. It could get -- weird.”

“It always gets weird.”

“I know,” said Buddy. “But it’s just --”

“Buddy. It’s okay. You can stop now.”

“Well --”

“You don’t know what you’re missing, though.”

“Oh, I can imagine.”

“You think so?”

“I’ll probably be imagining it tonight when I’m whacking myself off to sleep.”

She touched his face again.

“You’re sweet.”

“Yeah,” said Buddy. “So, okay --”

“Where were you running off to anyway, sexy man?”

“Nowhere, really. I was just running.”

“Ruthie has her piano lesson today. What about a drink at my place? If we leave now we should have an undisturbed hour or so.”

“Don’t you have work to do?”

“You’re my boss. You tell me.”

“Well --”

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck. Fuck.

Buddy suddenly realized he was sweating, from head to toe. And it wasn’t all that hot out, either.

“Buddy.”

“Yeah?”

“I was kidding.”

“Oh.”

“You can breathe now.”

She put her hands on his arms and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

“Talk to ya later.”

“Yeah, later, Deb.”

She turned around and headed back into the building.

When Buddy got home Liz was lying on the couch, on the phone, and he could tell just by looking at her and by her tone of voice that she was talking to her mother. And, as was usual for them, they seemed to be in the middle of some low-level but endless argument. He left them to it.

(Continued here, despite a flurry of completely ungrounded lawsuits. Kindly go to the right hand column of this page to find what on most days is an up-to-date listing of links to all other published chapters of Uncle Buddy’s House™. A Republic Serial, produced by Larry Winchester.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 167: double

2009-10-05T16:03:00.011-04:00

Towards what one may only hope is the tail-end of perhaps the longest day in recorded literature (“Makes Joyce’s Ulysses look like a walk around the block” -- Harold Bloom), our memoirist Arnold Schnabel was last seen with his friend Josh in the lobby of the lovely Chalfonte Hotel, in the quaint seaside resort of Cape May NJ...

(Please go here to revisit the preceding chapter of this Gold View Award™-winning 26-volume epic, or go here for the beginning, which starts in the middle.)

So we went through the lobby, down the little side hall, and opened the door into the King Edward Room. The place was pretty full still, but oddly not noisy for a bar, thanks to its old-school absence of a jukebox, TV or radio. It felt odd to think that I had been here for the first time just the night before last, with Dick Ridpath. It seemed like another lifetime, but then all at once it seemed like this lifetime, because there at the far left of the bar sat Dick himself, talking what looked to be intently with some other guy. The other guy was turned toward Dick and away from Josh and me, so I couldn’t get a good look at him, except to see he was wearing the same kind of polo shirt that my mother always buys for me at Sears; he struck me as somewhat oafish-looking somehow, perhaps even cretinous, although I should have been hard-pressed to tell exactly how he looked this way.

“You know those guys?” said Josh.

“The one fellow I do,” I said. “The one facing more toward us. He’s a friend of mine, Dick Ridpath.”

“Another friend! Mr. Popularity here.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m a regular --” I couldn’t think of anyone who had a lot of friends. “Oscar Levant?”

“That’s you all right, Arnold, a regular Oscar Levant. You want to go say hi?”

“Well, he seems awfully deep in conversation with that other fellow.”

“You don’t know him?”

“No,” I said, slowly I suppose.

“What,” said Josh.

“I don’t know,” I said. “He looks -- weird.”

“All I can see is the back of his head. How is he weird?”

“I don’t know, just something about him. But I’m sure it’s just me.”

“I want that beer. You want to go say hi, or what?”

“No, I don’t want to interrupt.”

“Okay, great, look, there’s a couple of stools down there,” he said, indicating the opposite end of the bar from where Dick and his companion sat.

Two ladies were sitting on the stools near the empty seats, and as we got near them Josh said, smiling in that way he has, “Are these seats occupied, ladies?”

“Oh, no, go right ahead,” said one lady.

“Sit away!” said the other one.

“Great,” said Josh. He took the stool closest to the two women, (and I of course sat down in the other one, preferring to sit, rather than stand there, like an idiot). “Can I buy you two ladies a drink?” Josh asked.

“Sure,” said the first one, who was sitting closest to Josh.

“Absolutely,” said the other one.

“Great, what are you drinking?”

“Old,” said the one.

“Fashioneds,” said the other.

“Great,” said Josh, tapping his cigarette into the same ashtray the first woman was using.

As usual with Josh the bartender was right there the moment he sat down, if not several seconds before.

“What’s your pleasure, my lord?”

“Oh, none of that ‘my lord’ stuff,” said Josh. “I’m a human being just like you now.”

“Of course, sir.”

“Call me Josh.”

“Okay. Josh.”

“And your name is -- wait -- don’t tell me. Let me riffle through the old mental card file a second. George?”

“Well --”

“No, not George. Harry, right?”

“Close, sir.”

“Josh.”

“Close, Josh.”

“What is it?”

“Jerry, sir, I mean, Josh.”

“Jerry? Oh, well, okay -- anyway, Jerry, would you make us four -- what are they?” He turned to the two ladies, who were hanging on his every word. “Fashions?”

“Fashioned,” said the first woman.

“Old Fashioned,” said the other.

“Old Fashioned,” said Josh, turning back to the bartender. “Four of them, please.”

This time I didn’t even bother to protest. I knew what little good it would do me. But fortunately there didn’t seem to be a team of heavyweight wrestlers around who would hold my arms back and force the drink down my throat.

“A glass of seltzer water for me, too, please,” I said, “A large one.”

“Four Old Fashioneds,” said the bartender, “coming right up.”

“And a seltzer,” I said.

“Right. One seltzer back,” said the bartender, and he went away.

“So, ladies,” said Josh, “allow me introduce myself and my friend. This is Arnold.”

“Hi, Arnold,” said the first woman. She was blond.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hiya,” said the other woman, who was also a blonde. “I’m Muhhanna.”

I know Muhanna couldn’t be her name, but that’s what it sounded like.

“And I’m Berootha,” said the first one, and, again, I know it wasn’t really Berootha, but that’s what will have to do for the time being, and quite possibly for ever. “And you are?” she said to Josh.

I just knew he was going to forget again and say his real name, so I burst in, “This is Josh,” trying to sound not psychopathic but only perhaps slightly socially inept.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Josh to the ladies. I noticed he didn’t say their names, so maybe he hadn’t quite caught them either. He did rise politely from his seat and shake their hands though, one at a time.

The women were forty I guess, somewhere around there in that first blush of middle age. They seemed to enjoy Josh’s attentions, despite his dirtied and rumpled clothes, his long hair and stubbly beard. Despite his obvious drunkenness too, I might add.

And despite his friend with the scraped knees and arm and hand.

Josh sat back down again and suddenly turned to me.

“Oh, you wanted food, Arnold. What would you like?”

I was looking down the length of the bar, to where Dick and his friend were still deep in conversation. His friend’s face was now in profile, and now he seemed really and strangely familiar.

“Arnold,” said Josh. “What would you like to eat, buddy?”

I couldn’t answer, because I had just realized that the fellow Dick was talking to so intently down there at the other end of the bar was none other than myself.

(Continued here, and way beyond all reasonable expectations. Kindly look to the right hand column of this page to find an interminable list of links to all other available episodes of Arnold Schnabel’s Gold View Award-winning Railroad Train To Heaven©. A reminder: the deadline’s approaching, so be sure to send in those cards and letters on Arnold’s behalf to the Nobel Prize Committee today!)

“Uncle Buddy’s House”, Chapter 17: pool

2009-10-01T18:35:00.015-04:00

Our roguish hero Buddy is now safely back home in the familial manse in Hollywood, having rescued his daughter Liz from an abusive boyfriend…

(Go here to review our previous chapter, or here to go to the beginning of this “rollicking good read” -- J.J. Hunsecker, in “The Ladies Home Journal”.)

When he came back in Deirdre was sitting in the living room with her laptop on her lap.

“Doing homework?”

“Writing e-mails.”

Okay.

“Did you have dinner?”

“I had a veggie burrito after field hockey.”

“Great. Uh, everything okay at school?”

“I’ve been meaning to ask you. What the hell did you say to Mother Mathilde?”

“I -- uh -- I probably -- sometimes my mouth works a lot quicker than my brain does.” Putting it mildly. “How is she acting toward you?”

“As if I’m not there.”

“You cool with that?”

“Sure. I have nothing to say to that fascist old dyke. Is Liz moving back in?”

“I -- uh -- yeah, I guess so, for, uh -- I don’t know. I guess so. Yeah --"

“So she’s addicted again.”

“Well, supposedly she’s just been drinking this time.”

“Oh,” said Deirdre.

“Yeah,” said Buddy.

“Hm.”

“What?”

“Just ‘hm’.”

“Oh. Okay.”

She started tapping at her keyboard.

“Debbie Greenberg likes you by the way,” she said, not looking up.

“You think so?”

“I know so. Do you like her?”

She stopped typing and looked up at Buddy.

“Sure I like her.”

“But do you like her that way?”

“Um --”

“Don’t fuck her over, Uncle Buddy.”

“What? What do you mean --”

“You know exactly what I mean. Debbie’s a nice lady. Not one of your actress or P.A. bimbos.”

“All right, look --”

“It was different with my mom. With her I don’t blame you. Not too much, anyway.”

Buddy paused.

Deirdre looked at him.

“Okay,” said Buddy. “Uh, look, I’m gonna swim. I need some exercise.”

“Fine,” said Deirdre, and she lowered her gaze to her laptop screen.

****

Buddy decided to swim as many laps as he could, and as he swam, occasionally spitting out bits of organic matter, one of the things he thought about was how he was thinking about Debbie Greenberg instead of about Liz and her problems. And not only about Debbie, but about what Deirdre had said about Debbie and him, and about him, and then he thought about the woman in the Nomad last night, and about Marlene, and about Marlene’s body, and then he thought some more about Debbie, and her body -- okay, Marlene, what was her story? Divorced, with a kid. Debbie, too, divorced with kid, a little girl -- Rachel? no, Ruth, Ruthie, whatever, it was chaos. People hooking up, propagating, breaking up, propagating again…

And Joan -- all right, why the fuck had he given a fuck when that bitch walked out? Joan had driven him nuts. She had bored him to tears. Okay, he had been madly in love or whatever the fuck it was with her at one time, enough of what it was to break up his first marriage. And then of course he had gotten less and less madly in what it was with her. But on the other hand he’d fallen more and more in whatever with Deirdre and she wasn’t even his own kid, it was weird, but he had to admit it, he loved Deirdre more than he loved either Philip or Liz, not that he didn’t love Philip or Liz, but, oh fuck it...but -- what if Joan came back? This was possible. And the thing is, with all her idiocies, he was used to Joan. He could live with Joan. He had lived with Joan quite contentedly really, for twelve years. He had always looked forward to coming home to Joan, to Joan and Deirdre. And Joan was funny, funny ha ha, not always intentionally funny, true, but a constant source of amusement nonetheless, nearly constant, and a great cook too. Oh, sure, he wasn’t sexually attracted to her anymore and hadn’t been for years, but who cared about that? Sex wasn’t everything. You could say he loved Joan. Yes. Definitely. In his fashion. You could say...and anyway at least with Joan he would have Deirdre around.

So, what if...no, forget it...fuckin’...

After forty-six laps in the dark murky pool his thinking hadn’t got any more profound, and he realized that he felt like he was going to have a heart attack if he didn’t stop swimming right now, so he hauled himself out of the pool and collapsed on his back on the tiles, gasping what fiery painful final breaths might reasonably be supposed to feel like and staring up at the spinning stars, wondering if this was what it was for him to die. Well, it happened to everybody, and you were a damn fool if you thought you would get it all figured out before you croaked...

Philip stood over him, a cigarette in his hand.

“Christ, Dad, are you okay?”

A chest-heaving moment or two, then Buddy said, or croaked:

“Yeah.”

“You’re not like having a heart attack, right?”

“No. Such. Luck. Just. Did. Fifty laps.”

Okay so he exaggerated the number.

“What’re you, fuckin’ nuts?”

“I know. It won’t. Happen again.”

“So -- you brought Liz back, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool. Well, anyway, I wanted to tell you I finished making those cuts in the script. You wanta read it? I mean when you’re able to get up?”

“Yeah.”

Buddy reached out his hand to his son.

“Help me the fuck up. I need a beer.”

****

“Philip, this is really good.”

"No, really?”

“Really. The cuts are good, and -- you’ve made some other changes, I see.”

“Yeah, you don’t mind?”

“No, not at all. Tell you what, I’m gonna make some notes on this script, and I want you to give it another go. Try to incorporate my notes, but if you have any other bright ideas, feel free.”

“I did actually, but I was afraid to, you know -- like that one part right around -- where, here, page what, twenty-seven...”

“Yeah, that’s the act break.”

“Act break.”

“Yeah. Don’t worry about it now, but all these scripts have a three-act formula.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I’ll tell you all about it some other time, but look, don’t tell me your ideas now, just write them in and then we’ll talk it over.”

“So I did good.”

“You did really good.”

“So I still get like a hundred a day?”

“If you do the work, yeah.”

“Right on,” said Philip. “Hey, by the way, what’s this about you and this Debbie woman?”

(Continued here, and at least until a plot develops. Please look to the right hand column of this page for an up-to-date listing of links to all other available chapters of Uncle Buddy’s House™, soon to be a major motion picture starring W.C. Fields as Buddy, Linda Darnell as Deirdre, and “Buster” Crabbe as Philip; a Charles Bogle Production.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 166: mysteries

2009-09-29T03:10:00.010-04:00

The lobby of the Chalfonte Hotel, circa 1963

Let us rejoin our intrepid memoirist Arnold Schnabel and his inebriated and deific friend “Josh”, as they ascend the wooden steps to the stately Chalfonte Hotel, in the only slightly shopworn resort of Cape May, NJ, late on a Saturday night in August in that faraway land called 1963...

(Please click here to go to the previous chapter of this Gold View Award™-winning multi-volume masterpiece. Newcomers, or those old-timers who wish to re-live the good times, may go here for the very first chapter.)

We walked across the porch, or Josh walked, I limped, Josh pulled open the screen door and we entered the lobby.

No one was about, no one at the desk, but we could hear some faint voices down to the left of the hall, from the King Edward Room, although we couldn’t see into it from here.

In the light of the lobby I got a good look at Josh as he turned and headed toward the lounge.

“Hey, Josh, wait up a minute.”

“What’s up? Come on, we’ll miss last call.”

“Josh, wait, look at us.”

There was a full-length pier-glass on the front wall. I gently pulled Josh over to it, and I stood there next to him.

There was he, with tar-black stains on the knees of his khakis and the elbows of his wrinkled Oxford shirt. And there also was I, both bare knees scraped, and with a trail of dirty-looking blood painted down one of my shins and into my sockless Keds. I watched myself as I raised the underside of my right arm so Josh could see the long bloody scrape there, and then I held out my left hand with its own scrape and purple bruise.

“Okay,” said Josh, looking at us, and smiling. “I know I look bad, but you look terrible, Arnold.”

“I know,” I said, and I turned to face the real him and not his image. “We can’t walk in there looking like this, Josh. They’ll throw us out.”

“Well, you they would throw out, definitely. I suppose those scrapes hurt, don’t they?”

“Uh, yes, a little.”

“Well, twice in one night with you, then. Here we go.”

He made to crouch in front of me, but I grabbed him by the arm and pulled him up.

“Josh, not in here.”

“Oh, right, I guess it would look a little suspicious to anyone just strolling in. Well, okay then, let’s just find a more private spot.” He looked around, taking out his cigarettes. “Oh, I know, the dining room, the so-called, what, Magnolia Room -- come on.”

A mere dozen or so quick strides and limps, and we were in the dining room; the electric lights were all turned off, but the white tablecloths glowed and the upturned glasses and the silverware sparkled and gleamed in the pale light spilling in through the tall windows from the street lamps outside on Sewell Street.

Josh pulled a chair out from the nearest table, turned it around and sat down. He popped a cigarette up from the pack in his hand, and, after he’d lit it, he said, “All right, let’s try this again. Stand in front of me.”

I did so.

“Let’s do the knees first,” he said.

Putting his cigarette in his mouth he laid his hands with outstretched fingers lightly on my knees.

After ten or fifteen seconds he pulled his hands back, took the cigarette out of his mouth and said, “That’s funny, the scrapes should be disappearing.”

I bent forward and looked down in the dimness. The scrapes were still there all right.

“Does it still hurt?” he asked.

“Well --”

“Be frank now.”

“Yeah, it still hurts,” I said.

“Hmmm. Okay. Let’s give it another shot.”

First he reached around behind him and grabbed an ashtray, brought it to the edge of the table and put his cigarette in it. Turning forward, he took a breath, then rubbed the palms of his hands together rapidly for half a minute or so. Then, quickly, he put his hands out again and laid them my knees, but much more firmly this time.

“Ouch,” I said.

“Sorry,” he said. “Just bear with me here. Do you feel anything?”

“Yes,” I said. “Pain.”

“Nothing like an energy wave -- you know -- the life force, that sort of thing?”

“Well, maybe a little. But mostly just pain.”

“Okay. Hold still just a little longer.”

I waited. I really wanted a cigarette now. And God only knew what would happen if someone walked by the dining room and took a look inside. But then I thought, Wait, Josh is the son of God. Which means he more or less is God, since God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost -- or Spirit rather -- were one God indivisible, or at least so I had been taught, although I won’t pretend to say that I had ever even begun to understand the ins and outs of this odd doctrine. So, what I should do, I should just do what the priests always told us to do, and leave myself in his -- or His -- hands. But I doubt if the priests ever meant that phrase so literally.

Finally Josh pulled his hands away.

“Hmmm,” he said. “This is really bizarre. Scrapes still there. Does it still hurt?”

“Well, it’s a little better,” I said.

And it might have been a very little better. But not very much better.

He reached over to the table, got a napkin, and wiped his hands, which had got my blood and dirt on them.

“Well, there you go,” he said. He took his cigarette out of the ashtray. “Not only am I not omniscient, but I’m obviously not so very all powerful, either.”

He took a drag of his cigarette.

“You’re tired,” I said.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Probably bringing Mr. Arbuthnot back from the dead took a lot out of you.”

“You know, Arnold, you’re probably right. That on top of all the bourbon I drank.”

“And the reefer, too, maybe,” I ventured.

“No, I don’t think it’s the reefer,” he said. “If anything the reefer should help when it comes to miracles.”

“Well, anyway, it’s okay,” I said. “These scrapes will heal. They’re nothing serious. God knows I’ve fallen in the street loads of times before, and I’m still here to talk about it.”

“Yeah, true. Oh well --”

He heaved himself up from the chair, looked around. There was a small white vase in the center of the table with a stem of pink-hued gladiolus in it; Josh picked up the vase, spilled some water out of it onto the napkin he had just wiped his hands with, then he handed me the napkin.

“Here you go, Arnold, just get the blood off with this. I gather you’d be more comfortable doing it yourself.”

“That’s true,” I said. “Thank you.”

I gingerly wiped off my knees, my calf, my arm, my hand.

“Great, looks worlds better,” said Josh.

Now I didn’t know what to do with the napkin.

“Okay, let’s get that drink now,” he said. “And a sandwich for you. Or pie.”

We went back out into the lobby. I was still carrying the blood-stained napkin, and Josh noticed this.

“Here, give me that.”

I gave it to him, he took it between his thumb and index finger, looked around again, then went over to the reception desk. I was afraid he was going to stick it in a drawer or something, but he found a waste-paper basket behind it and dropped it into that.

“It’ll be one of life’s little mysteries for the desk clerk tomorrow,” he said. “Okay, let’s go.”

(Continued here, because we must. Kindly look to the right hand column of this page to find what quite often is an up-to-date listing of links to all other faithfully transcribed chapters of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train To Heaven©, soon to be a major motion picture starring Jeremy Irons as Arnold and Brad Pitt as “Josh”; a J. Arthur Rank Production, written and directed by Larry Winchester.)

“Uncle Buddy’s House”, Chapter 16: home

2009-09-26T16:44:00.014-04:00

Let us rejoin our raffish hero Buddy Best, as he brings his troubled daughter Liz back from rainy and cold Milwaukee to sunny Los Angeles...

(Click here to go our previous chapter, or here to go to the beginning of our Hollywood soap opera. Based on an untrue story.)

When they got into LAX Debbie Greenberg was waiting for them.

“Debbie, baby, what are you doing here?”

“What’s it look like I’m doing, I’m picking you guys up.”

“Oh, thanks, but -- “

Debbie turned to Liz.

“How are you, sweety?”

“I’m -- tired.”

Liz had slept about twelve hours the night before, and she’d slept in the cab to the airport. She’d fallen asleep again in the Milwaukee airport and she’d slept through the flight. Buddy had hardly talked to her at all. Last night she’d been drunk and incoherent, and today she had been hungover and untalkative or asleep.

“Are you guys hungry?”

Yeah, Buddy was hungry; he’d only had peanuts on the plane (and not a single goddam drink, even during his customary over-the-Rockies panic attack), but he waited for Liz, and anyway the question was really directed at Liz.

“I -- yeah, I am, Debbie.”

“Good, what do you want to eat, sweetheart?”

“I want -- a Pink’s hotdog?”

“No, you’ve got to have something nutritious, Liz. Look at you, you’re a twig.”

“No I’m not --”

“Look, don’t start. Now what do you want to eat?”

“Can I have -- a hot pastrami?”

“Sure you can, baby. All right, let’s blow this dump.”

Despite the fucked-up circumstances Buddy felt full of the joy of being safely alive back on the ground and, yes, back in L.A. Despite all its ugliness and tackiness this town was his home...

And in the car Liz fell promptly asleep again, curled up in the back seat.

“What do you think, Deb, should we just take her home?”

“Nah, let’s get some food in her.”

They were driving in Debbie’s vintage 1960-something Chevy convertible, Debbie cruising along through the rush-hour traffic like a gangster’s moll with a kerchief on her head and her sunglasses on and a cigarette in her hand.

“Y’know, Deb, you really didn’t have to --”

“Oh, shut up, Buddy. Marlene wanted to come but I had work for her to do at the office.”

“Oh, that was nice of her --”

“She’s hot for you.”

“Aren’t all women?”

“Hey, you’re a free man now, Best. Watch the babes come crawling out of the woodwork.”

“Yeah, I’ll have to stop at the drug store and pick up some chick repellant.”

But then maybe Debbie had a point there. Like what about that woman in the bar last night, who had given him her lawyer-card, which admittedly he had thrown away, but still -- and what about Marlene? She was fine looking --

“You’re thinking about Marlene, aren’t you, Best?”

“No, no, not at all, uh, just thinking about where we should go to, uh, eat --”

“Yeah, sure.”

“No, really --”

“Okay, how about Canter’s?”

“Canter’s is cool,” said Buddy.

They talked business for a bit, and now Buddy was looking at Debbie. Okay, how old was Debbie? Late thirties? Forty? He sure wasn’t going to ask. But she did have a bod, another one of these workout queens -- and what was up with this skirt action? Her skirt was really short. And tight. As her foot worked the brake and the accelerator you could see the muscles moving in her thigh and calf. And she was wearing this sleeveless top that showed off her shoulders and her arms. And her breasts. Okay, were they real? Not that Buddy gave too much of a damn if they were or not.

****

While Debbie got Liz into bed in her old room -- she’d fallen asleep again on the way back from Canter’s -- Buddy sat in the kitchen with a bourbon on the rocks and made some phone calls. Philip and Deirdre were both out. Buddy finished his calls and sat there at the kitchen table. Debbie came in.

“She had a little crying jag, but she’s asleep now,” she said.

“Cool.” There was a wet blotch on Debbie’s top, over her right breast; it must have been from Liz’s tears. “You want a drink, Deb?”

“Yeah, I could use one now, thanks.”

Debbie wanted wine, so Buddy opened up a bottle of Montrachet for her and they took their drinks out back. They sat in the deck chairs with the sun going down behind them on the other side of the house, and they stared at the pool, which had now assumed a marbled greenish-brown color under its coating of leaves and twigs and dead bugs. It gave off a slightly swampy odor, mingled with the smell of the eucalyptus and of the overripe garden.

"So Buddy," said Debbie, "are you trying to grow something in this pool, like a science project? And what’s with the garden over there? You gonna shoot a miniature Tarzan movie?”

“That’s an idea.”

"And are you aware that your lovely old home looks like a frat house on a Sunday morning? Don't you have a cleaning woman?"

“Joan wouldn’t have one. It was this weird midwestern thing with her --”

Say what you want about Joan, and you could say a lot, but she was a clean-freak, an orderly-freak, a lawncare-and-gardening freak. She’d come home from a full day of shooting action scenes and then clean the oven or vacuum the fucking curtains --

“Joan is gone, Buddy. Your place is a pigsty. So hire a fucking cleaning woman. Hire a pool service and a part-time gardener.”

“Sounds expensive.”

“More expensive than Joan?”

“You got a point there.”

“I can help you with this stuff if you want me to.”

“No, I’ll get on it.”

“Did you talk to your doctor?”

“Yeah. He said just to let her sleep, and we have an appointment with him tomorrow at one.”

“You’re supposed to meet with the Sony people tomorrow at one.”

“Oh. Right.”

“I can take her if you want.”

“To the doctor’s?”

“Sure, why not?”

“Well -- no reason I guess.”

“I’m your business manager, Mr. Best.”

“Yeah. But this isn’t exactly business.”

“If it affects you it affects the business, so it is business. So what’s up with Liz? She started on the pills again, right?”

“I don’t know. I think she was just drinking this time.”

“Drinking? I thought her thing was diet pills.”

“Yeah, it was. But this guy she was with, she met him at AA, he was more of an alcy, so, from what little I could drag out of her, I gather he started drinking again, and she started drinking too, so --”

“Why did she go to AA if her problem was pills?”

“She doesn’t like NA. She says it’s always crack heads and heroin addicts and she can’t relate. She likes the alcoholics better.”

“Maybe too much.”

“Yeah, right.”

They sat and looked at the dirty water in the pool.

“So, what’s up with you, Deb? You still going out with, uh, what’s his name -- Jerry? No -- Harry?”

“Close. Larry. And no. Not for, what, a year now?”

“Oh. You going out with anybody else?”

“Are you asking me for a date?”

Buddy didn’t say anything. But a lot was going unsaid all of a sudden.

She reached over and touched his thigh.

Debbie would probably be great in bed. But then there was the problem of what would happen out of bed. And more immediately there was the problem that what he most wanted to do right now was to rent a trashy DVD, smoke half a joint and drink beer and watch the DVD, and then go the fuck to bed, alone, and sleep. Or maybe he should take a swim first, in the dirty water...

Deirdre’s voice rang out from inside the house, saying Hello she was home.

“Oh well,” said Buddy.

“Darn kids,” said Debbie. “Let’s go in, I haven’t seen Deirdre in ages.”

“You go ahead, I’m going to sit here a minute.”

He wanted to wait till his erection went away.

****

As he stood with Debbie out by her car he said, “Look, I’d better take Liz to the doctor myself tomorrow.”

“Okay, but --”

“No, look, you go to the meeting with Harvey and Iggy. Cover for me. This is more important.”

“You’re a good egg, Best.”

“Yeah, well --”

“Gimme a kiss.” And she lifted her face up.

Buddy gave her a little kiss and she wanted more.

“That wasn’t much of a kiss, asshole.”

“I’ve got a lot on my mind, Debbie.”

“Right. I’m being a fucking cunt.” She smiled. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

“Right,” said Buddy.

(Do we see romance in Buddy’s future? Should he perhaps keep it in his pants for just a little while? Continued here. Please turn to the right hand column of this page for a conceivably up-to-date listing of links to all other available chapters of Uncle Buddy’s House™, soon to be a major motion picture starring Humphrey Bogart as Buddy and Ava Gardner as Debbie. A Larry Winchester Production.)

The Legend of "Gooney" McFarland

2009-09-25T16:17:00.007-04:00

That's Gooney on the right, posing for his legion of fans at his disastrous wedding reception at the VFW

(By overwhelming popular demand we present this very special re-broadcast of a cautionary tale first seen here in June of 2007. )

Every neighborhood has one: the neighborhood nut-case; Olney back in the day distinguished itself by boasting dozens of neighborhood nut-cases at any given time. Every block had its nut-case, sometimes every house on the block had its nut-case, and indeed often there were heroic semidetached- and row-homes harboring more than one nutcase, or even a whole roistering clan of nut-cases. Lots of nut-cases in Olney. But in this land of the insane no one was less sane, and no one more feared, reviled, ridiculed, and defamed than one Martin de Pours McFarland, better known simply as “Gooney”.

Gooney McFarland (born in 1950 in one of those ugly "new" houses on Wentz Street, right by the Heintz factory) always seemed to get there first. He first got arrested at the age of eight, for breaking a window of Zapf’s music store and trying to steal one of their brand-new electric semi-hollowbody Gibson guitars. The young Gooney was a major Elvis fan at the time and he wanted his own guitar, so that he could learn how to play it and become a rock and roll sex king. Good thing for Gooney, his father, Frank X. McFarland, was a policeman. And Mr. McFarland’s job continued to be a good thing in the subsequent career of the young scalawag (although Gooney's career proved to be far from a good thing for that of the elder Mr. McFarland). It was solely because of the exploits of this young and then not-so-young madman that Officer McFarland was never promoted above the rank of patrolman, this proud ex-marine, this hardworking Joe who put himself through LaSalle College on the GI Bill while working fulltime as a cop, this staunch Catholic who fathered nine children (all of them good kids, except for the middle one, you-know-who).

First of the gang to be arrested, Gooney racked up many other firsts. In 1963 he became the first kid on the block to try pills. He had noticed the slick-suited boys from the “Harrowgate Mob” hanging around the corners of the Heintz factory compound. These guys were cool, with their skinny ties from Krass Brothers and their pennyloafers from Thom McAn, and Gooney wanted to be like them. The Harrowgate hoods soon had the young Gooney running back and forth across the street to double-shifting Heintz workers parked in their junkers, handing over little bags of pills in exchange for hard cash, which he would run back and deliver to the Harrowgate boys in one of their souped-up Thunderbirds. The Harrowgates were always wired to the gills, and of course Gooney, who would have jumped off the Betsy Ross Bridge if the Harrowgates were jumping too, tried a sample of the product, loved it, and became at the tender age of twelve the neighborhood's youngest drug addict, with a special love for the uppers called “Pink Footballs”. Alas, perhaps it was the drug that made Gooney so bold as to begin stealing from his heroes, shorting them on both pills and cash. But if Gooney was always a bold thief, he was never really a good thief. He couldn’t do anything quietly, the concept of discretion was alien and hateful to him, and he could not stand not to boast to one and all of any new crime he had committed. So it took the Harrowgate Mob about two whole days to realize that this little brat was ripping them off. They beat him up and then tossed him down that trash-filled gorge in the woods across Front Street from Cardinal Dougherty High School. But what did Gooney care, after he finally awoke in Einstein Hospital the next day? This would be just another one of the many stories he could bore people with his whole life.

First to get busted and take pills, first to get the last piece of shit beaten absolutely out of his wiry little form, Gooney was the first to try pot as well; the first in the neighborhood to sell pot; the first to get busted for selling pot; and the first to get sent down to Juvie, despite all the best efforts of the beleaguered Officer McFarland. Down at the Detention Center at 100 W. Coulter Street, Gooney became the first kid ever to attempt escape from the roof, trying to rappel down on a clothesline that turned out to reach only to within 50 feet of the ground.

After six more months in the hospital the now permanently-limping Gooney was released and sent back to the familial mini-manse on Wentz Street. Officer McFarland, a long-time usher at St. Helena’s Church (in which capacity he was a colleague of Olney's poet laureate Arnold Schnabel), amazingly was able to talk the priests at Cardinal Dougherty High into admitting Gooney as a freshman in the fall of 1966. He was put into the lowest academic section (section 20, “the Vegetables” as the “Brains” in sections 1-3 cruelly dubbed them), but even the easygoing courses in this nether-region (Basic Shop, Basic Phys Ed, Basic Numbers and an English course based on the “Dr. Seuss” books) proved beyond the limits of his attention. He drew all Fs that first semester, but this didn’t bother Gooney because he had scored in those months another first: first kid in the neighborhood to try LSD.

The incredibly patient Principal Father Dean allowed Gooney one more semester to try and buckle down and straighten out. Gooney got four Fs again. Who gets Fs in Phys Ed, anyway? Who flunks a course where the most rigorous reading assignment is “The Cat in the Hat”? A daily tripping Gooney McFarland, that’s who.

Next year it was off to the brutal grey corridors of the dreaded Olney High for our young hero. Little afraid of the striding African American teen gangs the Clang Gang and the Moroccans, Gooney blithely befriended the black kids, even affecting their mannerisms, dialect and mode of dress. He soon became the Clang Gang’s liaison-drugrunner to the school’s white kids. The Clang Gang had apparently not heard of Gooney’s treachery a few years before with the white Harrowgate Mob. But they soon experienced a similar treachery, and one day Gooney was sent sailing, flailing his arms and screaming bloody murder, out of a third floor window of Olney High.

Eight months in the hospital and young Gooney was back on the street, or at least back in his parents’ house, where he spent several months watching TV and getting his strength back.

The year was 1968, and every young man in his right mind was doing everything he possibly could to avoid the draft and Vietnam. Gooney of course on his 18th birthday took the subway downtown and volunteered for the marines at their recruiting office at Broad and Cherry. His services were refused by the USMC, on grounds both physical, educational, and most of all, psychological. Gooney marched right over to the army office and was soon frog-marched right out again and ordered never to darken their doors again. The army was desperate for manpower in that awful year but not quite that desperate. The distraught Gooney went wandering down to the low bars by the docks. In one of these reeking hellholes he met some off-duty sailors from the naval base; words were exchanged, he was taken outside and soundly thrashed, then tossed down into a forty-foot deep urban renewal excavation. So it was off to the hospital again for the patriotic young Gooney, who only wanted to serve, or at any rate who only wanted to, as he put it, “kick ass for my country”, but who instead got his own ass kicked by his country’s servicemen.

So it went for Gooney. When he had sufficiently recovered his old man got him a job as a slag shoveler at the neighboring Heintz plant. Gooney lasted almost a month. Next up was a good job as a janitor at the Tastykake factory, and Gooney managed to last three months there. During his tenure at Tastykake a young assembly line-worker named Barbara “Babbles” Boylan for some mysterious reason or reasons took a shine to the manic, hobbling, broken-nosed Gooney McFarland. She became "in the family way", there was a very hurried wedding at St. Helena’s, followed by a drunken riot at the reception at the VFW on Chew Street; and Gooney, instead of heading off to the planned honeymoon in Wildwood, spent the next six weeks in the hospital, followed by six months' convalescence at Holmesburg Prison on four counts of aggravated assault and battery.

Released, Gooney moved into the Rosemar Street rowhome of his pregnant young wife. Mr. Boylan got Gooney a job as an apprentice roofer. On his fifth day at work, while eating a hoagie and drinking a pint can of Ortlieb's and dangling his feet off the edge of the roof of a 75-foot high warehouse in Kensington, Gooney somehow managed to fall off.

After recovering once more, Gooney flat out refused ever to work again. He applied for a disability pension, and his father and his father-in-law (thinking only of his new baby boy and his poor wife Babbles) pulled some strings with the local Democratic party bigwigs, and Gooney was awarded a modest disability allotment.

Gooney now spent his days in the bars, any bars that would have him, but primarily the Green Parrot, the Huddle, Pat’s Tavern, and occasionally even Smith’s way over on Broad Street, never visiting the same bar two days in a row lest he wear out his always tenuous welcome.

One day he walked out of the Green Parrot, took all his clothes off (it was December, and snowing) and went across 5th Street to Fisher Park, where he proceeded to roll down Dead Man’s Hill, over and over again.

It required six patrolmen to get Gooney into a paddy wagon, and his next permanent address was the Philadelphia State Hospital at Byberry, in the Great Northeast section of Philadelphia, an institution popularly known simply as “Byberry”, or “the looney bin.”

Here at Byberry he achieved perhaps the most difficult of his many “firsts”. He became the first and only inmate in Byberry’s long and inglorious history to escape from the “Violently Insane” ward.

Somehow Gooney removed not only the wire mesh but the steel bars from his fourth floor window. No one knows how. There were no tools found and the mesh and bars seemed somehow simply to have been ripped with main force from the granite window frame. This time there was no rope however, merely two sheets knotted together and seventy-five feet of empty space below the end of them.

Gooney was found the next morning on the front stoop of his parents’ semi-detached on Wentz Street, clad only in his bloodied and soiled hospital pajamas and slippers, with both his legs broken and his skull fractured.

When he awoke from his coma a week later his first words were, “Am I dead yet?”

Incredibly, no. Perhaps it was Mr. Elwood Smith, the venerable proprietor of Smith’s Restaurant at Broad and Olney, who summed up Gooney McFarland best: “Some guys you got to beat into the grave with a stick.”

(Kindly turn to the right hand side of this page for listings of links to other "Tales From the O-Zone". You might also enjoy our serialization of Railroad Train to Heaven, the complete and unexpurgated memoirs of Arnold Schnabel, Olney's beloved "Rhyming Brakeman".)

And now, performing Gooney McFarland's favorite song, The Honeycombs, featuring the fabulously coiffed Honey Lantree on the drums: