You Snooze, You Lose

I dread sleep; always have.  This was never evoked by If I die before I wake…a child’s anxious prayer.  It was more If I sleep I might as well be dead.  As a child I was wholesomely afraid of the dark for a reasonable time, but once I invented my imaginary friends to watch over me while I slept I felt protected, eventually, growing beyond the need of their company and surveillance.  (See Paper Man with Jeff Daniels and Ryan Reynolds.)   I did not seek, or believe, assurances from any of the common variety of deities.  I grew up in the last notch of the Bible Belt never having a religious notion.  My mother would, on rare occasions, say she believed in God, but He did not require her to sit in a pew.  My father admired Catholicism, but like the law (he graduated with honors from law school) he liked the study, but not the practice.  Was my warrior friend any less real than, say, Jesus?  Not to me.  That isn’t the point.  To me, my back was covered.

I feared I would miss stuff while I slept.  I did, too.  One of the great dramas in our family history occurred on an early summer morning.  We lived at the top of a perpendicular intersection formed by two dirt roads in a sparse farm community.  A drunken driver coming up the mast of the T failed to make the turn, either left or right, or didn’t realize it was a dead end.  Luckily, it wasn’t for him, though he managed to smash himself into a rock wall bordering our yard.  The sound of the crash woke everyone in our house, mom, dad, my older brother, but not me.  Sherriff cars and ambulance, sirens wailing, the groaning winch truck, came and went over the next several hours while I slept in my back bedroom.  When I got up nothing was left from the scene of the wreck except the scar in the ditch and the displaced stones of our wall.  Why did no one come and get me up?  During the hullabaloo my family decided to let me sleep since I seemed to need it.  Today, I live in New Mexico, where drunks crack up their cars routinely.  (And, tragically, lives of the faultless.)  In the late 50’s, in rural Kansas I only knew of two such calamities, my father being the other one a few years later.  I decided sleep was time forfeited, experience squandered.  I know this view is flawed.

I’ve always wanted to stay up late, and until my mid-50’s I was able to do so.  I was cursed earlier in life being a night owl and a morning person.  As a kid, I was forced to go to bed at an ungodly early hour.  We had a second living room we called the “TV” room on the same floor as my bedroom.  My parents would be enjoying Sid Caesar or Jack Parr, but I could only hear hubbub followed by laughter.  After my bed time, if my folks left to go to the bathroom or kitchen for a minute, I would sneak out of bed, dive behind the closed drapes of the window behind the couch and stand in the sill like a Beefeater, still and mum, one eye at the slit in the curtains.  It is amazing, with all the allergies I suffered, I never sneezed, was never caught.  One of the few things I’ve ever gotten away with.  I’d have to stay put until they turned off the TV and went to bed.  I’d watch the tiny white electric dot in the center of the black and white screen slowly fade, as if the set was resisting being extinguished.

I welcome sleep when I’m tired, feel refreshed if I actually get some, which is rare for me.  I wish I slept as much as I eat or drink, or, at least, as satisfactorily.   As soon as I’ve reached the bare minimum to sustain life, I snap awake, three, four a.m.  I can’t explain why.  It may be, deep down, it’s to escape from sojourns I am subconsciously afraid to face.  Though my recollection of dreams is usually vague to nil, I’m able to intuit they’re often as comic as they are renting nightmares.  Dreams are very important and useful to us, either creatively or as some kind of psychic spill way.  Like my mother and her view of God, if true, you don’t have to be present to win.  I don’t lose any sleep over it.

Anon, James

Exit, Stage Left

No, I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous---

Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old…I grow old…

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Excerpt - The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

T. S. Eliot

So much I like about this poem, though Eliot was an anti-Semite. Born in Missouri of all places.  Anyway, fairly astonishing poet.  It begins:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table…

…among my favorite lines in literature.  Etherized…rather puts you in a time.  The passage above has manifold meaning for me.  Actually, I did play Hamlet at the Folger in D.C., so, it was meant to be.  The girl who played Ophelia was gorgeous, but paid no attention to me whatsoever.  She was fucking Kevin Kline.  We all three were working at the Arena Stage but in different shows.  He was an uber-hot rising actor, and an awfully good one.  I’ve always maintained talent is a sexy force.  I was an attendant lord.

I am an instigator more than a finisher, saying things to get a reaction, or needle; have started a scene or two in my day.  Agitation is a kind of swelling, as a way to deal with feeling helpless or inadequate. Then, I slink away to another part of the party.  Not too comfortable advising, anymore.  Here I have learned, emphatically, to keep my mouth shut.  I get asked once in awhile, and, if asked, I will put in my oar.  As a differential, I made a living outside of the theater as a dependable middle-manager.  Once, in college, I helped my fraternity brother get chosen to take a trip to a conference.  We were in Kansas, and I think the thing was in Miami.  After he was selected to go, I thought: hey, wait a minute…why didn’t I try to get myself sent to Miami!  Regardless, I felt a secret, politic power behind the scenes, like Iago, or some Chancellor.

I believe I am fairly cautious now.  I used to bull-nose my way in and out of a lot of trouble, explode my existence to bits. I’d quit, burn bridges; have an affair to wreck a relationship; drink before an audition, the usual, self-destructive crapola.

At times, indeed, almost a schmuck---

Now?  No.  I may sense the tendency coming on to muck things up, like an alcoholic may crave a drink, but, firmly recovered, would never dream of taking one.  I am not meticulous in all things, but I am in my work, compulsive, out of a sense of incompetence.  If there is a mess on my desk?  Who cares.

Though, I certainly am not full of high sentences - I take my toast and tea from observation and instinct – I do presume to put up a blahg.  I am, on occasion, ridiculous, obtuse, just ask my teenage daughter or her mother.  In truth, I do play to it, aggressively, like “I, Claudius”, as a survival technique.  It’s almost a neurotic response from me, like a veteran who has to sit with his back against a wall.  My war was with a distant, depressive father.  I could deflect wrath, or make a ripple in the still surface of his dark, cold lake of moods.  In school, to win friends, I would clown, even restrain a bit of brilliance which may have put off people I wanted to win over.  Later, this penchant morphed into a stage career.  The Fool, commonly, in Shakespeare, the cleverest of fellows, gets his own.  Make ‘em laugh.

The other day, I caught myself with my jeans rolled …not for style, but because they kept slipping down, and without shoes on, I was stepping on the cuffs…so I rolled them up.  It is one thing to come to terms with the inevitability of to be or not to be, or its foreplay, aging.  I get that.  What snaps my braces is knowing how to drop the role.

Would it have been worth while

If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

And turning toward the window, should say:

  “That is not it at all,

  That is not what I meant, at all.”

Anon, James

Hail on Wheels

Everybody has their war stories, go-to cocktail palaver, one-up material to out in conversation to pull focus, spark a flagging dialogue, test the waters with a new acquaintance, or, if necessary, shut down some gasbag.  I have some good ammo: an extreme rural upbringing, a one-room school with outhouses, no less (not exactly Butcher Holler, but still), professional actor (though this can cause people to glass over when it turns out to mean Shakespeare or Moliere in Pittsburgh and Cleveland), lived in NYC (from Mars), wine consultant (ditto), bartended in NYC (ehh, used to have more cachet before everyone became a bartender), owned a café in Portland (loser), lifeguard at a pool in a mafia club (that’s a story I need to be careful about), drove a taxi in New York…people are all ears!

As most of my odd jobs (some very odd, indeed), I got turned on to them by an acting pal.  Dawber, a bright, well read, astonishing actor, one of my best friends for years, drove for a garage in mid-town and encouraged me to get a hack license.  Work as much as you like or part-time.  I did.  You go to the TLC, Taxi and Limousine Commission, take an exam.  Pay a bunch of fees.  Our garage was on West 55^th.  (The exterior of the one you see in Taxi was in Greenwich Village, and our main competitor in Manhattan.)  There were two shifts: 4 A.M. or 4 P.M.  You showed up a few minutes before the beginning of a shift, handed your hack license to a dispatcher, he assigned you a yellow cab, gave back your license to display on the dash, and a hard stock trip card, on which you entered the details of every fare: where and when you picked them up and dropped them off.  These days, I think it is computerized.  Drivers had to gas up before turning a car back in, so you were ready to roll.  They wanted you out on the streets.  Part-timers got the crappy, beat up buckets that rattled and shimmied, with an indentation in the driver’s seat as deep as a winter pothole; wonderful for your lower back.  They were mechanically sound, because the company needed them to run.  In those days there was no air-conditioning in the low end of the industry.  New drivers got 56% of the fare, plus tips.  With seniority the percentage got higher, as did the quality of the car.  I never saw that.  I had a cigar box, the chosen chalice of cash, and a few pens.  That was pretty much it.  You could wear whatever.  I would stop at the outdoor public swimming pool in the Village on 7^th Avenue on sweltering summer days, and for 25 cents take a quick dip in my cutoffs, cooled off, and dripped dried in the cab.  In the winter, I might go by another actor chums place.  He was a recluse, so he never got work.  I think he sold weed as he always had a joint going, which is why I stopped.  That and the hot, strong coffee he constantly brewed.

I don’t recall how long I stuck at it, maybe six months?  Enough to sour me on the profession and respect the people who do it, though it can be hard as a passenger when some ass takes you through midtown at rush hour instead of going a bit East or West to avoid traffic or chooses a longer route to the airports.  Anyway, as a rider, you are the boss, and when you get in tell them how you wish to go.  It’s like getting onto a horse.  They’ll know if there’s a fool on their back and will take advantage.  One thing I got out of the job was learning New York, the boroughs, boulevards, and parkways, the bridges, short cuts, theaters, taverns, hospitals, and other things, too.

I about died stopping for a fare in front of Lincoln Center, figuratively, I mean.  As it happened, I was hailed by my new agent, my first important agent.  There was nothing to be ashamed of, clearly, I was not the only out of work actor driving a hack in NYC.  I wanted her to see me as an up and coming, not a down and out.  She didn’t get into the cab, but put a girl friend, or client, in the back seat, closed the door, and leaned to my open front passenger window.  “Be sure you get her home safely, Driver!” she ordered.  I kept my face turned away and hoped she didn’t read my name or see my picture on the license, which, she would have done if she were sincerely concerned.  (Punk’d!)   After receiving her stern instructions, I decided not to rape her friend in Riverside Park.  That incident bothered me on so many levels.

In the dark of the morning I picked up a couple coming out of a club in lower Manhattan.  They gave me an address in Brooklyn.  Pretty fresh on the job, I was a little nervous to leave Manhattan, though I knew Brooklyn a bit, having operated a gas station there.  (Talk about your odd jobs.)  About half way over the Brooklyn Bridge, my eyes began to sting and I was overwhelmed with a strong and pungent odor.  I began to panic they were trying to drug me into a stupor with some kind of emanation, and I’d slowly succumb, but not before safely pulling over, where they’d take my cigar box.  I got them home with no incident.  A few days later I smelled the same scent in the Village and learned it was patchouli oil.  I was embarrassed at my paranoia.  I felt like the batty aunt in the James Thurber story who would always put her jewelry outside her bedroom door at night, accompanied by a note: “This is all I have.  Take it and please don’t chloroform me.”

One spring evening, I was racing up 3^rd Avenue, on a slip stream of greening lights, and a young blond woman’s arm went up on the left side of the avenue.  I easily threaded through the bit of traffic at that hour and pulled up sharp, put my head out of the window, and kissed the fare on the mouth.  Her friends looked startled until they realized, out of the 15,000 cabs in NYC, the woman, coincidently, happened to have hailed her husband.  Her sister was standing there.  I should have been kissing her.

In midtown during a midday shift, I picked up a hippy executive, long hair in a business suit with an attaché in hand, and drove him a few dozen blocks to an address on Broadway.  He got out as if to get to his billfold, but turned and ran, his limp hair a little flapping cape, and disappeared into the crowd flowing in and from an office building.   Obviously, he had practiced this maneuver.  I wanted to give chase and strangle, but I knew by the time I turned off the car, rolled up the windows, and locked up (because you don’t leave anything unlocked in NY) he would be on the 9^th floor, or around the corner.  Nice guy.  Rip off a kid driver for four bucks.  I didn’t profile, for the most, even after the black whore stiffed me when I took her from 9^th Avenue in Manhattan to the South Bronx, a thirty minute drive.  At least, the bitch covered most of the fare with the fistful of money she shoved at me, unlike dirty hairy.  Angry, scared, and impotent in the Bronx, out the time and tip, I slammed my hand into the roof of my car.  A screw holding on the taxi top light punctured the skin.  The next morning, when my wife saw it, I told her I’d been shot.  She started to cry.  I apologized, and told her the truth, but she was shaken.  Pathetically, I was trying to make her feel guilty for the situation of, what, my life?

On a night ride to Kennedy my directive was to get to the airport as fast as I could.  I had picked up the well dressed young man in front of the St Regis Hotel.  I was still new at it but you learn the routes to the airports pretty quickly, and at 10 o’clock the traffic was minimal.  New York does sleep.  Maybe it had more to do with the bone numbing vibrations of my jalopy than Knieveling, but when I pulled up to the Pan Am terminal, he paid the fare and handed me the biggest tip I’d ever seen.   “Thanks for the ride,” he said.  “I’ve never gotten here so fast!”

New York, whether it’s the greatest city, I can’t say, but it is an amazing collection of humanity, and if you live there long enough, you’ll witness as much as you care to see.  More, if you look in the rearview.

Anon, James

I'll Be a Monkey's Debunkle

The proverbial theorem of putting an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters (it’s an old postulation), ad infinitum, where they would reproduce all the great works of literature - never intrigued me.  Phui, who can wait around?   Always wondered why not suppose they would create some of their own?  No doubt they could best me.  I feel like a monkey (no offense to my wonderful nieces and nephews) when I look at all the stuff on the word processor’s…whatever you call it...tool bar options.  If I sat for a long time and played on my computer, I’d figure a bit of it out.  Our teenage daughter has over the years.  I don’t have a lot of time to goof around on this thing.  I’d be in big trouble if I screwed something up because Darling uses the home computer for work.  She is somewhat of a professional processor, in that she prepares official-type documents.  As it happens, things do go funny once in a while with a PC, and if, coincidently, I happen to be on it at the time, I am immediately suspect and all hell breaks loose.  Spell check, bullets, fonts, B, I, and U, symbols, etc., I can handle, but don’t ask me to do a table, or columns, or even margins/tabs.  I’ve intended to take a course at the community college but, if I need fancy things, I call Kid or Darling into the office.  They act incredulous that I don’t know how to do - whatever it is, are annoyed (I have interrupted what they were doing), call me lame, and, impatiently, boot me from the desk chair long enough to do the action.  Shades of my dad, I guess.  People would ask him why he didn’t wear a watch.  “I can always ask some son-of-a-bitch,” he would say.  (No offense to my wonderful family.)  There are all these buttons on the keyboard.  What is Pause Break?  What does F Lock do for you?  It’s a great tool, our PC.  Indubitably, would be of even greater use if I knew a few more manipulations.   Help?

When I was growing up, our family had a Royal typewriter with a rugose, matte-black finish.  For years it sat on our family’s large wooden desk, then, was moved to my older brother’s room in high school.  The name was on the front, like Steinway on a piano.  The imperious letters grew taller in the middle, the right leg of the “R” underscoring the rest.  The crown piece had an opening that looked like a parted curtain.  Beneath, thin steel arms with letters lay in curved formation, saluting with a snap as you struck a key, tangling in midair if you went carelessly fast.  Round keys with white letters on black back ground, a clear piece of plastic shielding each, held in place by a chrome pinky ring, the return arm and other shiny pieces, begging to be touched with purpose.  It was rarely used.  After my brother went off to college, and my father died, we sold the farm to an attorney who wanted to get back to the land, as we had some fifteen years earlier.  Long enough for a man to become ill, healthy, and die, a woman to weary, or boys to grow up.  The typewriter, along with the tractors, pickups, tools, and my father’s clothes, were dispersed among neighbors.

I’d like to have a Royal, even if just to admire.  I could use it for a poem once in a while, or a thank you note.  Crinkling onion skin, bluish, oily carbon papers, spools of black/red ribbon, even White Out for a modern touch, sitting near.  I realize now why writers of yore had separate studios out back, or down the street.  It isn’t that they needed quiet.  If they were banging on the keys of a typewriter, slamming the carriage return, tearing out paper from the roller platen, who else could think?  It would wake up Darling in the morning.

Kid is exactly the age I was when my father died.  Seventeen.  She held the hand of her other grandfather as he slowly died.  Put a cat down.  Moved twice.  Slipped between barbed wires of a fence her grandmother helped build to scatter her ashes in a pasture.  She has gripped her life with two hands and hoisted it like a sail.

Anon, James

Blast From the Past

Our house is on a flat piece of earth on a mountain plateau and the sky is the view from where we sit.  The southern tail of the Rockies tapers off into the plains, and two other modest ranges embrace the area, offering no end of beauty.  At first, I thought our property itself, flat, scrubby, prickly, essentially, treeless, was dull.  But, taking my eyes up from my feet, over the peaks to the horizon, I realized half my visual world is sky.  When I tell people I grew up in Kansas, you hear one of two things: a crack about Dorothy and Toto, or a remark as to how flat it was when they drove through.  Everyone drives through, no one stays.  Even my Dad, who choose to return there with his family from San Francisco in the 1950’s, dissed Kansas.  The original settlers, he liked say, either didn’t have the gumption it took to continue west, or were too lazy to go back, so they plopped down in Kansas.  As a kid, I looked at the sky a lot.  Clouds, especially.  Dad had been a pilot starting with the barnstorming days of aviation.  I like to imagine the name comes from getting your ass into a barn when a storm is coming.  He had to pay attention to clouds.  When I was very young, he taught me some things about predicting weather from them.  Cirrus, wispy things, aren’t serious but can point to things to come, nimbostratus, gray and flat, means it’s probably raining already, cumulus cotton balls are OK, but if they puff up taller like the Michelin man, a storm is likely.  Stuff like that.

Growing up I became, Jimmy, Boy Barometer, reading the high and low emotional pressures building in our father, watching cirrus moods moil into cumulonimbus, his big, round face, cheeks puffed like Dizzy Gillespie, angry and fiercely blowing.  Our mother, a stalk of bamboo, was the only bulwark as tempests broke.  My older brother and I had bedrooms at the top of the stairs.  At night, I would sneak out of bed, crawl like a scout to the doorway and listen to my mother and father fight below.  She hushed, seeking some purchase of reason, restraining her own anger; his basso voice cracked in wounded flailing, as if her words came at him like panicked bats.  The morning rose on bruised and cautious silences.  Slowly, the worn fabric of our daily existence mended, but I kept my eyes on the firmament.

An aviator can sight on stars, and has an advantage over a sailor, being above clouds.  On summer evenings, home from watching a softball game, or after dinner when dad went out to be sure the coals in the hibachi were extinguished, he’d point out constellations and tell me their names.  I enjoyed these private lessons, but I didn’t seem to retain what he was explaining or see what he saw in the night sky.  After a few attempts, he stopped trying.

One of those summers, I joined a Little League team, and dad would give me batting practice using a tennis ball, our barn as a back stop so I didn’t have to chase the ones I fanned, which I mostly did.  He could be patient.  Again, I didn’t seem to pick it up.  One night, at a game, as I sat on the bench next to Cecil, our pitcher, I asked if I could try on his glasses.  It was a shock.  I could see the numbers, sharply, on player’s uniforms in the field.  I could see small branches on the trees that before had appeared as fuzzy clusters.  Not just birds were clear, but the wires they sat on.  I could see things that didn’t exist to me before.  That night I told my mother.  The next day she took me to have my eyes checked and I got some Buddy Holly glasses.

If I had been a different person, I might have been able to say to my dad, “Now that my sight has been corrected, I would very much like to go back outside to resume our study of the stars.”  Honestly, it didn’t occur to me; I really didn’t have an affinity, or a reason, to differentiate between Scorpius and Ursa Minor.  At an age when adolescents are pulling away from their fathers, I got closer.  I don’t mean we spent a lot of time together.  By my senior year of high school I was, typically, active in school plays (which suited me better than team sports), working part-time evenings and weekends at a clothing store, and I had a girlfriend.  Dad, for the first time in my life, had taken on a job.  He worked as a probation officer.  Before WWII he had been a district attorney and was good at reading character.  He liked being able to guide these men as they came out of jail, often giving them money for work shoes or a shirt.  By then, my brother was off at college and life settled around us pleasantly.  I would come home from work about the time my dad was turning in, sit on the side of his bed and chat for a few minutes about the day.  These talks were the salvation of my relationship with my father.  When he died a few months later, it is what I grieved for, what I would miss for the couple of more decades he might have lived.

What had damaged him is not clear.  I may seek information one day, if Menninger or the State Hospital in Topeka still have such records, as all who could bear witness are dead.  It doesn’t matter.  Mercifully, what was done can be undone, if not erased.  I was visiting my mother some twenty years after my father’s death.  Very seldom would she vary from the family cant about my father’s life and “illness”, but this night, over martinis, she made a frightening confession about the years when I climbed out of my bed to eavesdrop.  This woman, who went to Berkeley, the CEO of a family business, later a government official, was at such a loss, with no idea what she could do to salvage our lives, considered taking one of the shotguns from the rack on our living room wall, killing my brother and me, and then herself.  I have no doubt this was fleeting fantasy born of her desperation.  She wouldn’t have done it.  (I wonder, though, how far down the imaginary path she went.  Would she have shot us as we slept?  We had separate rooms.  The one remaining would have woken up at the sound of the blast, sat up, waiting?)  After this admission, I was stunned to the point of quiet acceptance, of validation.  I couldn’t bring myself to ask her - why not kill him?

Anon, James

Bewtiched, Bothered, Bewildered

How is it I can be so eloquent in my head, say, making a toast, or giving an acceptance speech for an award for which I will never be nominated and, all the while, knowing if I were to ever get up in front of an assembly I’d stammer, wander, and blabber.  [“Stammer, Wander, and Blabber.  How may I direct your call?”]  I make these speeches in the middle of the night, in bed, waiting to fall back to sleep.  I am conscious, not dreaming, extemporaneously speaking the speech in my mind’s voice.  I marvel at them.   These are kind of speeches people would remember forever, and replay in clips, like ones that Meryl Streep or George Clooney come up with at the Oscars, or Barack Obama makes without the teleprompter.  What happens to those speeches when I get out of bed?  Where do they go?  How can I resurrect these random, impromptu monologues and show the world, at least, the people I know at a dinner party, how eloquent I am?  Why can’t I do out loud what I do in my head?  I have had my chances and blew them every time.

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

I am not a collector of things, but I do gather post cards, paper, stationery, notes, not bunches and not regularly, only as I happen upon them.  If a friend is off to some far place I will ask, if they think of it, to snag some hotel letterhead from the desk in their room.  I have sheets of paper with Arabic (I think) lettering, some with elephants, a coat of arms, or fleur-de-lis.  When I travel, I am on the lookout in a pharmacy, a whatnot shop, or stationery store, even supermarkets, where they may sell school supplies and notebooks, like ones from Japan with anime covers and vertical lines.  Before I began using a PC, I would write in longhand on sundry found pads.  I was partial to graph paper, or paper the color of Necco Wafers, easy on the eyes; careful not to buy so much that I would become bored.  Since I don’t use a camera, I rely on post cards to document trips.  Back home, I get a pinch of nostalgia as go through and select one to send as a thank you or a birthday greeting.  They all wait in an old wooden tool box found at a flea market.  I save up my best papers for years and years until the perfect occasion comes along.  Sending a letter on a piece of paper earmarked for someone you love is like cooking for them with a recipe you don’t break out every day.

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

I met this young woman during the hay days of Soho.  Restaurants and galleries and shops were attracting hordes.  Bridge and Tunnel crowds had yet to figure out where it was, though the Holland Tunnel dumped them off on Canal.  I will call her Inga.  She was from Copenhagen, yah, about 5’11” and looked like Ingrid Bergman stretched on a rack.  (Now, there’s an image.)  Yah, she was a model making mad money as a hostess where I was bartending and we hit it off.  Not as lovers.  We liked one another.  I think she found it a relief I didn’t hit on her, and I had heard enough about her vexing love life.  We saw each other for lunch, movies, museums, the way friends do in New York.  Inga had wit and brilliance and sensitivity that made her pleasurable company.   And, since we weren’t fucking, it was relaxing to be with her.  I got to look at her a lot.  Everybody looked at her.  This is where she was a bit cuckoo.  I could see it in her eyes when we were at a crowded bar, looking to see who was looking, as if she needed someone to lock on her.  It was the call of the wild.  She never introduced me to any of her lovers.  I escorted her to a clinic and waited while she had her second abortion, then brought her to my apartment to recover.  A few weeks later, Inga offered me money if I would marry her for citizenship, do the ruse of photos of “our” wedding and life together, show Immigration her underwear in my bureau.  Instead of money, I thought about asking for sex once a month.  (Every week would be too hard to schedule, especially, if I found a lover.)  It was an unvoiced impulse.  I felt used and wanted to use her.  She may have agreed, but then she’d hate me.  I’d hate me, too, for such an ugly hold.  I told her no.

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