The Noon Goons

From the Topeka Daily Capitol, February 2, 2003

Marjorie C. Selby, former Shawnee County auditor and financial administrator, will celebrate her 90th birthday as guest of honor at a reception from 2 to 4 p.m. Feb. 11 in the penthouse at Brewster Place, 1205 S.W. 29th, in Topeka.

Mrs. Selby became a part-time cost accountant for the Shawnee County Road and Bridge Department in 1959. She later became the first secretary for the County Purchasing Department and assistant county auditor. She was appointed Shawnee County auditor and financial administrator in 1966. She retired from Shawnee County in 1983 after 24 years of service.

Marjorie Collat Selby was born Feb. 11, 1913, in San Antonio.  She married James F. Selby, an airline pilot and attorney, in California. They moved to a farm at Richland, southeast of Topeka, in 1952. Mr. Selby, a Shawnee County probation officer, died in 1966.

Their children and spouses are Robert and Martha, Naperville, Ill.; James and Leslie, Portland, Ore.; and Sharon and Wayne, Hackensack, Minn. Mrs. Selby has seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.  The Topeka Civic Theater's Marge Selby Warehouse Workhouse Award is named in Mrs. Selby's honor. A lane of the parking lot north of the Shawnee County Courthouse also is named after her. She is a charter member of a group of Shawnee County employees who have met each week for lunch for more than 40 years.

Mrs. Selby requests no gifts, but cards would be welcomed.

Me:

This was a swell afternoon, unseasonably warm in northeastern Kansas for February.  Gauzy clouds filtered the brilliance of sun coming through all those windows giving the “penthouse” party room in her assisted living facility a cheery, shawdowless light.  Platters of cold-cuts and cheeses and fruit had been picked up from what passed for a deli in Topeka.  And, there was a big rectangle cake.  Our mother, dressed in one of her pretty, color coordinated outfits, stayed seated most of the time in a winged arm chair and, with characteristic charm and her beautiful smile, greeted guests, maybe forty or fifty, as they got off the elevator.  All sorts of people.  The three of us grown offspring, my brother’s wife, my partner and our daughter, nine at the time, had all journeyed to Topeka to unite and celebrate the day and appear as hosts.  Friends from mother’s various endeavors paid their respects, not in a maudlin way, but jocular and heartfelt.  County colleagues, neighbors from our days on the farm, teachers from her children’s schools (one lived in her same facility), civic leaders and politicians, her community theater chums, mingled easily.  My high school girlfriend brought her mother who still lived alone in the family farmhouse.  One elderly gal strode up and stuck out her hand to shake, gripped me like a sailor, and said, “Hi! I’m Alice Jones! I’m ninety-six years old and I am a friend of your mothers!”  She was shouting, not because she was deaf, just full of beans.  Mother led, essentially, a healthy existence (though she smoked until she was seventy-two.)  Now, she was on the fragile side.  Nothing seemed fragile about Alice.

I noted, too, who wasn’t there.  Our father, of course, but he had died nearly forty years earlier.  The absence of one of our mother’s closest friends, Maxine, was glaring.  She had died recently of cancer.  A couple of decades younger, Maxine had been a single mom when they met, I don’t know when.  Marge became a kind of guardian angel, making sure she and her daughter were included in holiday events, pool parties, things like that.  Mother always remembered Maxine’s daughter’s birthday who had a funny nickname, like “Pooky”.  For many years, Maxine worked at a mental health facility for children.  It could be pretty harrowing.  Several times she would come over wearing a scarf wrapped around her head because a child had yanked out a fist full of hair.  Later, she would wear them, again, when she was going through her chemo.

Maxine met Virgil, an older widower, and stockbroker, and they married.  Now, they became a social threesome, as if Maxine was a kind of daughter, and Virgil, the good-hearted, blow-hard son-in-law.  My brother and sister and I lived thousands of miles from Topeka, all of us with our own lives.  Mother was just fine with that, turning down offers to move near one of us, preferring to stay put.  Of course, she always loved getting letters (I was the best at that) and visits (my brother) and phone calls (my sister.)

As Marge got older, Maxine and Virgil became her guardian angels, coming over to relax together around her apartment pool, taking her to events, even traveling together, sometimes to visit me where I was acting in a regional theater.  When one of us would come to Topeka to visit our mother, Virgil and Maxine would take us out to eat, often at their country club.  Once I brought my girlfriend, Patty, from New York, and while we were in the buffet line, Virgil grabbed her ass.  Patty told me about it later.  She was not amused.  After Maxine died, Virgil did his duty and escorted Marge to shows at the Topeka Civic Theater.  (Maxine had played the mother in “Gypsy” in one of their productions before she became too ill, fulfilling a lifelong goal.)  Mother, in her sense of duty to Maxine, allowed Virgil to carry on in this role, but, eventually, he married again, divorced soon after, and their obligation faded.

The newspaper quoted above got the award wrong.  It was the “Marge Selby Workhorse” award, not workhouse, which sounds Dickensian.  And, the name of the lunch group was left out:  “The Noon Goons,” a core of gals, 8 to 10, who, indeed, met every Wednesday.  They even had a special Goon lapel pin, some bobble one had found and distributed.  They each took turns choosing a Topeka restaurant.  It was a great way to break up a ho-hum week, or a stressful one, smack dab in the middle like that.  When we kids came to visit, if it happened to fall on a Wednesday, we would be invited as an “honorary Goon” for the day.  I loved going out with the goons, who were as witty as any Algonquin Round Table gathering.  They would drive the poor servers nuts, always asked for separate checks.  After 40 years most places were used to it and appreciated the business.  Once, I noticed how little they were tipping for their $6 or $7 lunches and multiple refills, and chided mother afterwards.  From then on, being the worthy women they were, they would pony up.

Let’s talk about that for a minute.  The women.  All, near the same age with a few younger gals of the same ilk who had been brought into the fold, were career civil servants or bureaucrats and, shamefully, underpaid.  Our mother, as noted in the announcement, rose into an executive position in the county government, in charge of all finances and budgets.  She knew damn well a man at her level, in her position, would have been paid a hell of a lot more.  It chapped her ass.  They were among the first of their generation to be out of the house, joining the workforce as two-income families.  Yes, some had no ambition to do more than what they did.  Marion, one of the younger ones, went back to college while she worked fulltime, got a masters degree in something, and a better job, eventually.  Mostly, it was a march to the pension, small as it may be.  These were frugal, content, and silent women.  Except on Wednesdays.  Anyway, some of these gals, some of the survivors, also came to Marge’s party.

Again, not to be maudlin, but just to let you know, this was to be our mother’s last birthday.  She died that November in a hospice facility.  “It was a good day and a good time,” my sister wrote in a recent email about that party.  “Mom was very ‘royal’, quite gracious and on top of things, and enjoyed every minute of it.  I know all of us enjoyed it and enjoyed her enjoying it.”

Anon, James

A Guy Walks Into a Bar

I miss going into bars.  I am not recovering.  They’re just not my habitat any longer.  Perhaps, it’s clear time I don’t have.  Or, stamina.  To touch a line from Will Rogers, I never entered a bar I didn’t like.  There were a few that didn’t like me, where no one wanted to know my name.  I was too dressed up, not dressed well enough, or I represented the kind of scrutiny patrons were there to escape.  You can tell pretty quickly if you’re simply being left to finish your drink, or they’d rather you didn’t.  I popped into an Irish pub in Santa Monica and imprudently asked for a “black and tan”.  In a cliché take, everyone stopped.  The bartender with a brogue said, “You mean a half and half.”  I was not clued into the cultural reference of the British constabulary sent into Ireland in the 20’s nicknamed the Black and Tans. This is rare, however, as most establishments are truly public houses, be they a seedy, side street bucket of blood or a legendary literary haunt.  You can step inside.

                                                                

                                                         Three Bars

The snow fell a couple of days before Christmas but had worn out leaving everything dank.  The dark sky, the puddles, the streets of the working class neighborhood, all the same shiny charcoal, reflected the holiday colors of stop lights at intersections.  A nondescript bar, its door recessed into the building’s corner, seemed to be a good spot to thaw.  Inside it was just as grey as it was out.  A single string of blinking lights looped over some bottles, a couple of commercial neon’s, and a few dim hanging bulbs provided the sole illumination.  A man, his forearms around his drink like parentheses, sat at the bar.  A pallid, thick couple, heads close, occupied a table.  I put my ass on a stool and looked around for the bartender who was just coming through a door of an idle kitchen or a storeroom.  He was tall, gaunt, with slick-backed hair the color of cigarette smoke.  He poured my Jack on the rocks and leaned near the register to gaze out the windows at the silent street.  Ella sang of mistletoe, Bing of white, and Elvis of blue. I suckled my drink and waved for another.  I was getting warm.  Other than the murmur of the couple, no one spoke.  The bartender took up my cash, hit the keys of the register like an organist, and the bells rang.

Who mourns a middle-aged bartender who asphyxiated on his own vomit?  I do, I guess.  I mourn because every time I remember Fanelli’s Cafe at the corner of Prince and Mercer, a place more like my living room than a bar, the image of his last gasps has to be cleared away.   He used to be “on the stick” there – Larry - jovial, efficient, pleasant and gruff, as much of a fixture as the carved and spindled cherry wood bar with its splotchy beveled mirror.  The barroom, among the few NYC bars you can imagine with spittoons on the floor, fills with artists, families, women in black, and guys who shanghaied enough change cleaning windshields on Houston Street to score a drink. Bentwood chairs wobble and squeak on the old wood floor, cracks of laughter ricochet off the tin ceiling, the crumbling brick walls, and the unchecked downtown light expresses the time of day through the hoop high glass windows.

I’m trying to think of a smaller bar than Harry’s in Venice. Maybe the Blue Bar off the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel.  Find the narrow double doors down an alley passage, step into a wood paneled room, windows onto the Grand Canal, a bar with six stools, a handful of tables covered in butter yellow linen.  It feels like a salon on a small yacht.  Off season, midday, if we weren’t the only two in there, I can’t recall.  Intending to have a Bellini, invented there, I saw a bowl of lemons sitting on the zinc near a hand cranked juicer.  Olive oil, vinegar, fruit in Italy has colors that bring me to tears.  The barman squeezes juice of two lemons, adds it to bulbous glass pitcher with a flip of sugar, a pour of whiskey, some chunks of ice, swirls it in his hand like a brandy snifter, strains it into a straight sided glass.

Anon, James

How High the Trees

Football and me.  Macramé and me.  Home repair and me.  Placing these activities with my own personal pronoun reminds me of a simple Christmas present long ago.  My mother, in my stocking, had given me a pair of small rectangular magnets, each with a plastic Scotty dog, one white, one black, glued on the top, no taller than a postage stamp.  I played with these for hours.  (I was a very little kid, OK?)  I couldn’t get enough of watching the magnets repel each other, as if the dogs were pushing, kicking one another away.  Those exertions I mention above, when placed in the magnetic field of “me,” should make the words spring apart right on the very page.

Football ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~   me

Home repair~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~   me

                                                                                        

It hasn’t always been that way with football.  I loved watching the games with my family on our black and white TV.  I collected football playing cards.  Y. A. Tittle.  Elroy “Crazy Legs” Hirsch.  Paul Hornung.  Rosy Brown.  My older brother and I developed (well, it was really more him than me) a one-on-one game of football we could play in our oblong yard, by using the newly planted trees, not much taller than we were, as pass receivers.  You could make a forward pass to one of these trees, and as long as we agreed the ball hit squarely in the “strike” zone, it counted as a reception.  We played dozens and dozens of times.  When we first started playing football together, I was walking around with my shoulders hunched up, as if stuck at the top of a shrug.  My brother asked what I was doing.  I said I wanted to look like the football players on TV.  He cracked up and then explained they were wearing shoulder pads, not holding their shoulders up in the air.

One of my mother’s close friends from Berkeley came to visit us at our farm in Kansas.  She accompanied us outside to watch us throw the football around.  My brother had chased one of my bad passes down the driveway and I was standing there talking to Beverly, who I thought was very pretty.  My brother, figuring I was paying attention, launched a long ball to me.  Maybe he was showing off a bit.  But, I wasn’t paying attention.  He called out my name, I turned toward him, and because his aim was dead on accurate, the ball slapped me in the face.  I started to cry and Beverly held me and gave my brother hell for not being careful.  Double satisfaction.

My brother went off to college when I was still in grade school and I didn’t have anyone to toss around the ball.  So, I would kick it, punt it, and got pretty good.  I would go in the alfalfa field kick it one way, run after it, and kick it back the opposite direction.  This one kick lofted up and over the tops of these gigundo trees that lined our property.  I could never kick it that high or that far again, so I gave up.  I watch punters now and wish I’d have stuck to it.  When I was a freshman in high school I went out for the football team.  I was 5 feet, 4 inches tall and weighed one hundred and five pounds.  I think my coach was afraid to put me in.  The one time he did, I dislocated my knee cap. The cap was sticking out from my knee, off to the side, like a drawer pulled out from a bureau.  As my team mates were carrying me off the field to the locker room, it popped back into place.  That felt good.  The asshole coach wanted me to jog around the field a few times.  To “shake it off.”  I protested, I can’t even stand on it let alone jog.  But, he made me do it anyway.  I hobbled off, more like hopping.  The only time I got to suit up is when one of our starting players fucked up, and was late for the team picture.  The coach was so mad.  He looked around and saw me and said, “You’re suiting up for Mike.”  I got to put on the game uniform and sit in the front row for the team photo.  Number 26.  Mike’s number.  That weekend I got to go with the team to a game in Kansas City, about an hour from our school, suit up, and stand on the side line.  The weather was rainy and cold.  We were losing something like 65 to 6 and the coach, after our touchdown, put me in on the kick off.  I ran down the field along the sideline.  When the whistle blew he called me back out.  My one play in my high school football career.  Maybe he wasn’t such an asshole.  Dean, our star quarterback and a really nice guy, got his collar bone broken during that game.  They had to cut his jersey off and tape him up.  It looked a lot more painful than my knee cap.

After the game and a hot shower, we got into our jackets and ties and onto the bus.  We were taken to a restaurant for dinner.  We could eat anything we wanted; as much as we could pack away.  That was great, as I didn’t go to restaurants that often.  I fell asleep on the way home.

Some years later, living in New York, I had come back to visit my mother in Topeka.  I called up my friend, Dan, and we went out for a beer.  He had been a half back on the team.  He was also in all the musicals because he had a wonderful tenor voice.  He told me Mike, number 26, had died of AIDS.  He and his twin, Steve, grew up in a hard life on a dairy farm.  They boasted about putting a crate behind cows in the barn.  I was sorry about Mike’s death.  He was always laughing, and he never got mad about my wearing his uniform for the picture and the game.  Not long after that visit, I got a call from Dan’s wife, Donna, a former cheerleader and Dan’s girlfriend in high school.  In college, she and I had been in a folk trio together with another friend.  Dan had been getting ready for work that morning.  He had a business maintaining apartment buildings.  He collapsed and died of an aneurism.  He was 43.

I have no idea what happened to those playing cards.  I wonder how high the trees have grown in the yard and if some kid is trying to punt a football over top.

Anon, James.

Taking to Bed

I made my bed and I lie in it.  (This could have a double meaning when sharing a bed with someone.  In this instance I refer to being supine.)  When I first moved west after spending 20 years in New York City, I felt as if I was free to explore my aptitudes, whimsies more like.  I’d been doing pretty much the same two or three things. As it happened, every 20 years I pick up and move and change my life.  It isn’t an agenda.  It just works out that way.  I don’t say to myself, “This makes 20 years and counting, so get out the map and the suit cases.”  Some kind of migratory itch happens to me.  I grew up in Kansas and when I was 20, I moved to New York City, where the etcetera of my 20’s and 30’s transpired.  When these migrations occur, there’s usually a surprise in store.  You will walk into a bakery, strike up a conversation, and viola!  I caution: if you think it will rectify what is wrong with your life, it won’t.  It may seem that way for the first year or two, because you’re busy setting up an abode, getting a job (which seems daunting these days) and exploring a new domain.  You may alter your day to day pattern and environment, but to really change what’s gone wrong is a different battle.  If you have problems they will follow you like a shadow.  There can be junkets within these double decade campaigns, where I shoot off in another direction.  When I was an actor in New York, it would be necessary to live elsewhere sometimes.  I might actually move to another city for a spate.  There’s always a correlation, though it may not be obvious.  The score is not only about time, but an entity of existence.  A lesser cycle happens in seven year periods: I get fit.  I’m due to get fit, and relocate.  Neither seems likely at this sitting, but who knows?  The shadow? 

Departing NYC, I yoyo around the country.  It felt good to ramble a bit.  I land in Santa Fe after false starts in San Francisco and Denver, and settle into a new routine.  I meet my Darling, etc.  I am not sure how the idea of making a bed came to me.  It was never an ambition of mine, the way some people make boats, or snow shoes, or take up painting. Occasionally, I visualize things.  I don’t mean supernatural occurrences.  I call it that when I see something in my imagination, complete and finished, like a cartoon character may see a new car in a bubble above her head.  I saw a bed frame and it was made from steel.  Now, I am not really handy with tools, and certainly don’t weld.  I grew up near a small country town where the last working blacksmith in the state had a shop.  It was in a small barn-like structure on a side street in Overbrook, Kansas.  If you looked straight at it from the sidewalk the building could have been a set in a Western movie complete with a forge and an anvil just inside the barn door sized entrance.  I always loved fire and sometimes wish I had the brains to apprentice with the old guy.  But, I was a kid and I doubt if my parents would have let me.  (I almost set our house on fire once when I was playing with matches.)  When my parents would go into town to do their errands, they’d drop me off and I’d wander around town on my own.  Sometimes, I’d stand at the doorway of the blacksmith shop and, no doubt, pester the old fart.  If he told me anything I don’t recall.  I have met two blacksmiths in my life and neither of them was exactly talkative, until you got them going on smithing.  I’d stand as near to the forge as he’d allow feeling the heat, see the embers, and watch him bang things.  His clothes and face were sooty like a chimney sweep.

The other blacksmith I found in the yellow pages.  He was out by the race track on the southern end of Santa Fe and his name was Leonard.  His set up was bigger than the fellow in Kansas, more of a ware house with racks of various kinds of pipes and bars along the walls.  But, the forge was there in the middle, and the anvil; as was the soot on his overalls.  He was in his 60’s.  I went up to him and said I wanted him to make a bed.  A what, he said?  I could tell he was thinking, oh, brother.  I took a sketch from my pocket, a diagram in decent perspective with the measurements drawn like a blueprint.  I had worked part time in college in a drafting office.  I had the lines drawn very professionally.

|----------54.5”----------|

 All the specifications and details were there for the head and foot “boards” and the frame holding them together.  Leonard took the drawing and half looked.  What color do you want this, he asked.  No color, I said, just the color of the steel.  He paused a second, like his brain revved. Well, it may rust a bit, he said.  I don’t care, I said.  ‘Course, out here it’s so dry, it won’t discolor too much.  What’s this here, he said, pointing to four small disks I had drawn.  The basic shape of the foot and head board was an elongated “H” and I explained those disks would sit on the top of the posts to cap them off.

He began to study my sketch.  The four main vertical posts were to be steel pipe.  He said, What about using square piping for these?   He took me over to the racks along the wall and showed me a sample of tubing about an inch-and-a-half square.   I could make cuts at the top of the bar, he said, close that up and cope it.

As I tried to visualize that, he slowly traced where the cuts would be with his finger tip.  Rather than a flat end with a disk on top, he would soften the steel in the forge, crafting posts into the crown of an obelisk, like the top of the Washington monument.  I’d make a smooth seal, he said, it would look nice.

It surely did.

We’ve had that bed nearly 20 years.  As Kid prepares to go off to college, to go off period, I picture that bed in her apartment someday, on the top floor of a small building in a large city.  In the meantime, I’ve begun to visualize.

Anon, James

Rational Enquirer

I met some wonderful new people at a New Year’s Day party.  Peeling away coincidences in conversation with a young woman (“Oh, really?  I lived in Topeka, too.”), only to discover I had been a groomsman some forty years earlier at her uncle’s wedding, in another state, before she was born.  There was more, but the details aren’t the issue.  The degrees of separation John Guare so brilliantly espoused in his play (the title of which became more renown than the writing itself), is not the point; it’s the connections.  When I go to a party, I tend to want find a corner, talk to my Darling, and avoid making the effort to speak to people I don’t know.  (Never doubting she is the most interesting person there.)  But, I force myself to go chat, even when I am clearly being given the cold shoulder after I’ve sidled up to a knot in the kitchen. (Bubble over guests head: “Crap. Who is that asshole? Is he really going to stand there with that stupid smile on his face nibbling the pate until I have to acknowledge him?”)  Yes, yes I am.  I may start out with something mundane, dip my toe in ribald, or highbrow, but I will spend enough time to find out if there is a genuine person in the circle.  After a few minutes, if you realize it is folly go back for another hunk of pate and target a different click.   Allow folks to talk about themselves, which is what everyone wants to do, until they feel so very good they’ll get around to asking you something, so you can talk about yourself, too.  Anyway, if the party is being given by someone you enjoy, the guests are probably cool.  Aren’t you?

I’m not suggesting we start chatting up everyone we stand next to in a queue, but in a social situation, get over yourself, your reluctances, make an effort to talk, or even better - listen.  Hard to do, listening.  Hard to stop preparing the next brilliant thing we intend to say as soon as the jackass opposite shuts up. The word “I” can be dead weight in a dialogue; an effective ear plug, so if sentences mostly begin with “I” someone isn’t listening, but launching. Improvisational conversation can be a kind of a jazz dialogue of several terrific conversations, feeding and building from what is offered around, but it can fall flat if not connected to what’s been played.  There is risk in stepping into the stream unless you’re in earnest, pay attention, and do it for the right reasons: to make music, rather than to blow your horn.  Listen with your eyes.  Are you seeing a polished performance by the person you are engaged with, have they given this “speech” too many times?  What are they doing while you’re speaking?  Are they looking around the room, is the light behind their eyes dimming, or do they focus in concentration? 

I worked with a famous acting coach and director, Robert (Bobby) Lewis, who no one knows now but theater historians and actors he taught, like Linda Hunt, Jeff Goldblum, Montgomery Clift, Maureen Stapleton, and the late Ron Silver.  He was a member of the Group Theater and one of the founders of the Actor’s Studio for starters, and therefore, a major influence on American theatre and its acceptance of Stanlislavski’s “Method” technique, now tossed around as a joke (like psychology) by the uninformed.  Here is the connection: this renowned method teacher, who you’d think would tell us to dig deeper into personal experiences, told us, repeatedly, to get out of “your own lousy psyche.”  In other words, imagine the life of this character, this person you are trying to play.  (My favorite line he used was, “If crying were acting my Aunt Minnie would be Duse.”)  

Even if you fail to make a connection, you’ll come out better for the leap.  Be patient, watch people like a birder and hear their call.  There lies benefit, be they wise or foolish.

Anon, James.

"Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding..."

I was playing one of the Three Wise Men the night I broke my nose.  It was the evening of the Christmas pageant and potluck supper at our one-room elementary schoolhouse.  The place was thronged.  Every student in the school had a part, all seventeen or so of us.  I was the myrrh guy.  Not a bad part for first grade.  The costume my mother created was built on the foundation of my robe, a heavy felt material in seasonably appropriate hues of dark reds, forest greens, flecked with white.  It was in a zig-zaggy pattern of an American Indian blanket.  This bothered me, because I knew the story took place in a desert land, overseas and their clothes wouldn’t have looked like my bathrobe.  But, then I figured, well, the wise guys were foreigners and Indians were foreigners so it was OK.  Neither was I entirely pleased with her choice of my backless bedroom slippers for footwear, though I understood they were more credible than my Buster Brown’s.  Throughout my career as an actor, theatrical makeup had always helped me get into character.  (It would the following summer at our town’s talent show when I impersonated Elvis Presley on the improvised stage of a flat bed truck; the sideburns mother drew on my cheeks with her eyebrow pencil put me over.  I won an honorable mention.)  For the distinguished gentleman traveling afar, the same eyebrow pencil shaded a full, Babylonian beard, which hurt like hell when she rubbed it off.

The pièce de résistance was the turban.  Mother - until marrying a handsome pilot, one time lawyer, would be rancher and moving to rural Kansas – had been in charge of her family’s department store on the West Coast.  She packed some fancy clothes in her trousseau.  Evening turbans had been in style at some point in her salad days because, using one of her diaphanous silk scarves with peacock colors, she easily fashioned an authentic headdress.  I felt like the Sheik of Araby.

All went off without a hitch and through the magic of quick change I reappeared after the show from the boy’s cloakroom in my nice trousers, white shirt and clip-on tie.  (Beneath my robe the whole time, leaving me flushed.)  After the play, the holiday feast was coming to life in the basement.  It held a full kitchen and an open area where we ate our lunches from sacks and pails during cold or rainy days and did sloppy projects.  Tin foil was being pulled and folded for leftovers, pots stirred, and meats sliced.  This was farmland food, and every mother wanted to contribute her best dishes.  It was the one shindig of the year, outside of our town’s fair (where I lip-sank to “I Wanna Be Your Teddy Bear), that everyone set aside their petty feuds, forgot their big problems and gathered in community spirit.  Long tables were choked with ham, roasts, a turkey, fried chicken, casseroles of all kinds, mounds of potatoes and yucky yams, overcooked green beans larded with bacon, and Jell-O things.  More than we all could eat, more than we had seen at one time, more than many could afford to share.  Best of all, and where the Midwest farm wife had no equal, were the desserts.  Latticed and two-crusted fruit pies, creams, custards, chiffons, hatbox-sized frosted cakes, Angel and Devil, German Chocolate, ginger, orange, and lemons, shinny drizzled Bundt’s, stood like a squad, visible beyond the pass-through kitchen counter, along with platters of cookies, cupcakes, and brownies.

I had to take a shit.  (Or, in our family euphemism, “have a session.”)  I had been so excited I’d held it in all that day.  I dashed out the door of the schoolhouse, leapt down the eight front steps, around the flag pole, and sprinted toward the outhouses.  We’ve all seen port-a-potties.  An outhouse is a permanent, generally, larger version.  At Howard School, they were well constructed and maintained, not the kind you see pictured in jokey postcards of a falling down, weather beaten shack with a quarter moon cutout in the door, and captions like, “The new addition to the family manse!”  Ours were crispy white clapboard two-seaters, with L shaped entrances; you’d loop around two corners to enter the open doorway of the commode.  There were separate toilets for the boys and the girls, set forty yards behind the schoolhouse, for obvious reasons.  The repositories, nice as they may be, sat over an open cesspool, and in hot weather, with the wind in the right direction, you wanted some distance from the student population.

Running, I realized it was dark, black dark.  There was a single bulb on a tall telephone pole to illuminate the front of the building, but the toilets were away from that, behind the school.  The windows, only along one wall, shed no light onto the large open field I had to cross.  I became disoriented, at full tilt.  I couldn’t see anything at all, but I knew I must be close.  I hit hard and fell back onto the grass.  To my left I saw the shape of the outhouse.  I had run between the boy’s and the girl’s, just past, tripped over a low stone wall, my face going into the barbed wire fence that separated the school yard from the neighboring property.

I still had to crap.  I didn’t take the time to go into the toilet.   I just took down my pants, crapped on the grass, pulled them up and ran back to the school.  It was easy to see my way because there were lights in that direction.  Most of the parents were still upstairs.  I pushed into the middle of the pack, like a Dickensian pick pocket.  Everyone I moved by stopped talking and stared down at me, creating a wake of quiet.  I thought it best to start crying in case I was in trouble.  By luck or homing instinct I ended up near my mother.  She took my face in her hands.  I looked down at my shirt, the front covered with blood.  I hadn’t remembered to zip up and my shirt tail was sticking out of my fly.  The school had no running water, but there was a hand pump over a sink in the kitchen, and that’s where she took me, down to the basement, to clean me up as best she could and tuck me back together.  I gave my folks a blubbery account of what happened, but dad wasn’t even mad, so we stayed for the meal.  The next day mother took me to our local clinic in a nearby town.  I cut my lip on the barbed wire and had to have a tetanus shot.  The wooden fence post broke my nose.  Doctor Ruble stuffed long, pencil thin strands of cotton up both nostrils and taped it over.  I couldn’t breathe out of my nose.

The morning I was to go and have the cotton removed, I sneezed, and the strips shot from my nose like those gag boxes where a spring loaded snake flies out.  This thing went clear across my room.  It had been in my nose for six weeks.  Mother had to pick it up.  She had one of those “last straw” looks on her face.  I have a funny nostril now, more like a slit as a friend once said, and a scar at the corner of my mouth.

I presume I was the first Elvis impersonator.

Anon, James

Will the Real Ding-Dong Daddy, Please Stand Up

U.  S.  NAVAL  AIR  BASE

SAIPAN,  M.  I.

                                                                                                 JANUARY 31,  1945

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA***********

                GREETED BY APPLAUSE AND WHISTLES OF NEARLY ONE HUNDRED WOMEN AND NUMBER OF MEN,  STREETCAR CONDUCTOR FRANCIS VAN WIE RETURNED TO SAN FRANCISCO FROM LOS ANGELES UNDER POLICE GUARD SUNDAY NIGHT TO FACE BIGAMY CHARGES FOR MARRYING EIGHT AND POSSIBBLY ELEVEN WIVES WITHOUT BENEFIT OF DIVORCE….VAN WIE CAME BACK TO QUOTE FACE THE MUSIC UNQUOTE, BUT ALREADY SYMPATHETIC CITIZENS WERE ORGANIZING “DING-DONG DADDY DEFENSE FUND” SPONSORED BY LOUIS LURI, MILLIONAIRE PALO ALTO REAL ESTATE OPERATOR WHO HAS RETAINED ONE OF THE CITY’S TOP-FLIGHT CRIMINAL LAWYERS FOR THE ARMOROUS STREETCAR CONDUCTOR AND FORMER LION TAMER………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

                                                                   ************

I found the above among my mother’s effects after she died in 2003.  The folded paper had yellowed but was in good condition.  By the looks of the font, it had come off a kind of teletype machine, printed front and back, containing several domestic stories and news of the war.  The excerpt of Mr. Van Wie, an overweight man “on the wrong side of 50”, as one report put it, is recreated here as close to how it actually appears on the document I found, including the ironic wartime typo, “ARMOROUS”.  As far as I know, my mother was not victimized by the “Ding Dong Daddy”, though she was living in the Bay area at the time of the scandal.  (Van Wie would flirt with ladies on his streetcar, and if vulnerable, propose marriage.)  This was not an approach my mother would brook.  My father, a pilot during WWII, seeing the dispatch while deployed in the South Pacific, mailed it back to my mother, to share a laugh.  According to one article (see site listed below), it was a highly publicized scuttlebutt, picked up widely by the national press as a relief story from the war.  Mother decided it was a memento.  It came to light he’d married some fifteen women.

My father was something of a ding dong daddy himself.  From Missouri, he was stationed in San Francisco during the war.  When he met my mother he was married.  His wife, back in the Midwest, was taking care of their daughter, who would later be my half-sister.  I had not been born.  My mother, recently divorced, was from a prominent Piedmont family who owned several major businesses in the Bay area.  A beautiful, still young society divorcée with a three year old son (one day to be my older brother), meets this 6’5” pilot in a uniform.

When I was just old enough to read and to be left to myself, I was snooping in a box.  I came across a newspaper clipping containing a photo of my father with a woman on his arm.  The caption read, “Mr. and Mrs. James and Virginia Selby…”  I thought it odd as the woman was not my mother.  And, anyway, her name was Marjorie.  Maybe the reporter had the details wrong and the woman was a cousin, or an acquaintance he was escorting.  Further into the article, it mentioned their home as being in St. Joseph, Missouri.  In my family history, we had lived in Oakland where I was born, a brief time in Colorado, then Long Boat Key before settling in Kansas by the time I was four.  Never in Missouri.  This was curious in the way of our family silverware having an “M” monogrammed on the handle.  “M” for Marjorie, I had always thought.  Somehow, an inner voice, one complicit with my mother, told me to fold up the clipping, return it to the box, push the box back into the bottom of the linen closet.  I was a good boy; I didn’t think of it again.

Not, that is, until I was in high school.  My father died suddenly while on the job.  A few weeks later there was a routine hearing for compensation.  My mother was to be questioned under oath to establish certain legal relationships.  I was required to be present in the courtroom.  During her testimony, an attorney asked my mother about the parentage of me, my brother and sister.  She took a moment, fumbled with a handkerchief as I had seen many an actress do on Perry Mason, and proceeded to answer the questions put to her.  Both my mother and father had previous marriages bearing, respectively, my brother and sister.  I was the only child from their union.  When the hearing was concluded she came to me, in tears, and said she was sorry I had had to learn of this in such a way.  She’d always meant to tell me.  I held her and told her it was all right, I had kind of figured it out on my own.  That was in 1966.  I was a good boy and we never spoke of it again, with one exception.

Twenty years later I traveled to Kansas from New York City where I was living, to see my mother.  She was 70.  One afternoon, I made the two of us a Bloody Mary.  We were having a nice visit.  I made a couple of more Bloody Marys.  I had been divorced myself by this time, so maybe the subject of my parents courtship didn’t seem so risqué to her any longer.  While stationed in California, she told me, my father lived in a carriage house behind one of the mansions in the hills above Oakland, not far from the house my mother built with her ex-husband.  They met at a party and began an affair.  Because of her family’s position, she felt they had to be discreet.  Even if it isn’t necessary, the secretiveness of a tryst can be provocative.  After dark, she would drive to my father’s house and park her car out of sight in his garage.  The next morning she would put on a scarf, dark glasses, and leave very early.  Eventually, my father divorced and married my mother.  His daughter came to live with them.  I was born a few years later.

Not an original story, particularly, during the uncertainty of war, but it was one my mother couldn’t share with me.  Maybe she felt there was too much fragility in our family as it was.  Or, perhaps, it was something for her alone, like a love letter kept in a locked box.  When I was visiting my mother’s sister in Palo Alto over a college Christmas break, I told her how I’d found out about mother’s first marriage.  She was flabbergasted my mother hadn’t explained.  It was an ordinary divorce, she said; no stigma involved.  My mother’s first husband, Bert Meyer (hence the “M” on the silverware), was a nice enough guy but never “right” for her.  He was a plain and simple man and Marjorie needed - something more.  What bothered me about the whole saga was everyone in our family knew.  My brother, whom I tormented as younger brothers will do, must have wanted to yell it in my face.  An otherwise model brother, he got his frustrations out in other ways, becoming quite the practical joker.  My sister eloped when she was 16, going AWOL with a kid from the Keys.  Our father was so maddened, he stopped talking to her.  Though my mother corresponded with her stepdaughter - in secret, it would be fourteen years before we all would reunite and meet her three children.  Even then, my nieces and nephews were cautioned never to mention their Grandma Virginia in front of Uncle James.  They were of elementary school age.

My mother was an amazing, brilliant, loyal, resilient lady, a remarkably giving mother.  I was a good son.  I was, also, an inveterate liar until I was forty.

What did Francis Van Wie, the Ding-Dong Daddy and lion tamer endure do you suppose?  Francis?  My sister's first husband, the kid from the keys, the father of their five children, was named Francis.  He became a traveling salesman, if you know what I mean, and I think that you do...

Anon, James

To read an account of the real Ding-Dong Daddy:

http://www.streetcar.org/blog/2005/10/ding-dong-daddy-the-real-story.html