Bleak Heart

Except for shaving, I try not to look into mirrors, now.  I lived a fairly narcissistic life, without a lot of justification, mind you.  Growing up lonely on a large farm in an empty area, I required my own attention.  I wandered all over hell talking to imaginary friends; they didn’t brush me off like my older brother, or get angry, like my father.  When I could, I sought the refuge of a ravine, or the bank of a pond, and got accustomed to quiet thoughts.  Dad and I shared some very, very long summer days until I was old enough to drive.  I certainly made friends over the years, but I’ve come to realize, for a long while, I was psychologically isolated.  During my young-man years in New York, where I worked as an actor, a career choice which meshed with my narcissism, I spent very little time alone.  I utterly gave myself over to professional and physical connections, or both, rather than personal.  Understand, in those twenty years, I certainly felt love and those former lovers have remained lifelong relationships, miraculously, like sound artifacts pulled from the ashes.  I am grateful for them.

I found comfort within this bleak grip.  My screw remained loose through therapies and kindnesses, and became a predilection – to reserve the kinds of feelings and spoken thoughts which lead to closeness.  This reservation is an important distinction.  It wasn’t that I didn’t feel or have genuinely tender thoughts.  I wouldn’t, or couldn’t, pronounce them.  Unless, I needed something.

This led me to disappoint.  I occupied disciplines, alternatively, healthy or destructive (exercise or drugs; relationships or betrayals).  I could be a passionate friend, colleague, lover, pen pal, mate.  I was told once by a woman who had had some knocks, “Well, at least, you aren’t a flake.”  That was the best that could be said.  Eventually, I would run down, like a cell phone battery.  I re-charged in some form of solitude.  If lucky, an acting job would take me out of town.  Then, alone, I would have too much of my own company.  A definition of crazy tedium.

As with smoking, I got weary of bronchitis.  On free days, I began to take myself away to a house I found in the woods with no phone or television, no distractions, and I nearly healed.  I could leave the woods, the self-imposed quiet.  Eventually, I left New York, which I loved, because new habits required fresh scenery.  At first, it was a bad reaction from withdrawing from all I knew.  After months of living in a few cities, a true vagabond, I breathed easy.

The spell was remedied when I met Darling and we made a decision to have a child.  Kid was born.  It isn’t so sappy.  I was a kind of Strangelove who managed to keep my hand off my throat.  In our fluky, mad-for, bull ride of a nurtured romance, we’ve hung on.  Sometimes I daydream about the house in the woods, or crave, with phantom appetite, an unctuous proclivity.  Inescapable love is revealed when you embrace the bona fide humanity and beauty, the vulnerability or strength in someone, even yourself, stop rummaging in your own lousy psyche, and move past the reflection.

Anon, James

Get the Picture?

Somewhere off Sunset Boulevard in the Beverly foot Hills, I had my first meeting with my new theatrical agent at Flick, an offshoot of a successful modeling agency in New York called Click.  I was under contract with their New York office, and since I had just completed a small part in a large movie, the agents thought I could parlay this nugget into a TV pilot if I were in Los Angeles.  As it happened, an actor I knew had an apartment in Santa Monica with an empty bedroom to rent.  I decided to go out for a few months, on “spec.”  The L.A. office was in a single story, white cabana-like building set back in a pretty courtyard.  The receptionist was on the phone, chewing gum and flipping through the pages of a thick Day Timer.  (This pre-dated iPhones by 20 years.)  She wore a white jump suit (see?) with matching boots, one of which was propped on an open desk drawer.  I was halted by her upraised index finger, totemically stacked with silver rings.  It then pointed to a fan-backed rattan chair.  I took it to mean that I was to sit.  Clipped short, her black hair was gelled into a series of spikes that vibrated as her head made little jerky movements when she spoke or gestured.  She wore fire engine red lip stick and heavy eyeliner.  The overall affect was that of a rooster, or a Liza Minnelli impersonator.  Replacing the phone on its cradle she said, in exhale, “Can I help you?”

“I have an appointment with Maggie.”  Before I could give my name, a beautiful boy, maybe sixteen, burst into the office and walked past the receptionist’s desk and headed to a small kitchen.  “What’s up, Maggie?” he said to her.

“How did it go?!”  She swiveled her chair to follow him.

“They loved me,” he said, flatly, cleared his long mink-colored hair from his eyes, and opened the door of a refrigerator.

“Well, yuh!” she said.  The boy took out a carton of orange juice and drank from it.  My throat was suddenly dry.  Maggie, my agent-to-be, got up to chat with the lad.  Two desks at the back of the office were occupied by young women whose press-on nails filleted the air as they spoke into their phones.  I picked up a worn copy of People magazine.   Meg Ryan was on the cover.

Maggie came back to her desk, smiling.  I moved to the chair opposite.  During our conversation, the smile dropped and there was a dawning annoyance from her that, not only had I interrupted what might have been a few extra minutes with her beautiful boy, but that the branch of her New York office had obligated her to a thirty-something actor with “B” teeth she neither knew, nor was interested in representing.  It was as if some hated relative of hers had incurred another rehab sentence, and it fell to her to take care of his aging, paraplegic, diuretic dog left behind.  There would be no submissions, no entrées into casting offices, no pilot season.  It would come and go without me.  I would not read for a movie, not through my agency, at any rate.  My baffled call to the New York Flick office yielded no help.  As far as I could surmise, sending me out to the coast was more of an impotent whim, a dart thrown blindly at the board by a newly formed, disorganized agency, rather than a considered plan to foster my talent and career.  What’s more, New York seemed to hold no sway, whatsoever, with their colleagues in Los Angeles.  I had made the choice to come.  Gene Lasko, a producer of the film, had advised, “Sure, go out and get some mileage out of this before the film comes out and they see how bad you are.”  “I’m joking,” he added.

That night I went to my first Hollywood party.  There I was in a glass house in the hills above L.A., wishing I was stoned, sipping white wine, talking to a fine actor I had known in New York.  He had just gotten the role of the sheriff in Halloween Four or Seven.  He was elated and gushing.  I wanted to scream.  Not because of envy.  I could swallow back those feelings.  I was glad for him; it was a great job and he could earn enough to live for several months.  The real horror show was this Renfield’s sycophantic gratitude, his drooling, slavish, thankfulness.  It should have been the other way around.  This actor was doing Hollywood a favor by offering his talent to the project.  Instead, he was taking it in the neck.  I felt hopeless.  I wouldn’t get a bite.

A few days later, I went to a brunch at a seaside restaurant above Santa Monica with some ex-pat actors I knew, casually, from New York.  There was some shop talk but mostly we reminisced about our favorite restaurants and hangouts in New York.  All of us were in California on a fishing expedition and seemed a little sea sick.  I knew I’d see these men and women, paler and feeling more at ease, back in New York in the fall, unless, one of them landed a part on a series.  They might attain the ultimate status and become “bi-coastal,” with the rent controlled apartment in New York and a bungalow in the Valley.  These were accomplished, working actors sitting around the table sipping their Mimosa’s.  I liked them, almost loved them, and am gladdened when I see them in a guest slot now and then.

When I wasn’t watching the sunset from the beach in Santa Monica, sipping orange juice out of its plastic container that I spiked with rum (about the only entertainment I could afford), I found solace in the kitchen of our apartment.  I needed something to keep me occupied besides mailing out pictures and resumes or going on a long drive in a borrowed, yellow Karmann Ghia convertible to the occasional benign interview with a casting director.  My roommates were, generally, gone during the day, leaving me the place to myself.  They were all too happy to be my guinea pigs, coming home in the evening to soups, breads, pies, and casseroles, all manner of things comforting.  I learned, playing in that kitchen, my first lessons in cooking.  (# 5: Don’t put spinach stems in a garbage disposal.)  Though very satisfying, I missed acting.

Anon, James

Melon Folly

As a young man, I suffered when my inner life was in variance with my surface existence.  In point of fact, from when I was young until I was not so young.  About 18 years.  When not tormented (it cycled in and out) with this shit, I was having a pretty good time.  I fell in love with a beautiful actress named Erika in the latter half of the 70’s, and to all appearances we were very compatible, created a stimulating environment, and lived with élan.  On free days we’d often strike out on simple adventures of window shopping, museums and concerts, restaurants, cook in our door-manned apartment, drive in the country, or explore New York City.  We’d dress-up and go into fancy places, like Harry Winston’s to browse, test drive a Mercedes (which she purchased and used on those country drives), or make an appointment to see a penthouse apartment advertised for sale we had no intention of buying.  After one such day of make believe, we sat down at the counter of Rumplemeyer’s, a café in the St. Moritz Hotel on Central Park South, which served delicious confections.  Looking over the menu of Viennese delights I noticed a man one stool down to the left of me enjoying a large, gleaming, succulent slice honey dew melon.  He was one the handsomest men I had ever seen.  In his early thirties, dark and Mediterranean, solid stature, he was absorbed in easy conversation with a woman at his side and offered genuine warmth as he listened and commented and, gracefully as a surgeon, filleted the melon away from its rind.  It wasn’t envy I felt as I observed him, so much as inspiration: could such peace and unselfconsciousness in a human being be possible, manifest in the eating of fruit?  I wanted to forgo my inner-conflicts and be able to enjoy melon and Erika’s company.  I put down the menu, forgot about chocolate, the famous Napoleons, their ice creams and éclairs, and ordered the honeydew.  Life was altered by my witness.

While I waited for my honeydew, I surreptitiously observed how my neighbor ate his melon.  Not with a spoon as I had always eaten them before, but with a knife and fork.  First, he removed the fruit whole from the rind in one long, under cut.  Next, he made an incision, lengthwise all along the middle, then bisected the two narrow halves into smaller, bite-sized sections.  It waited in place upon the rind looking untouched, just as the butcher’s at William’s Poultry on Broadway at 86^th pre-sliced their roasted turkey’s, reassembling them to look whole.  I wanted my life to feel whole, from all its separate little pieces.  My melon arrived on its pristine white plate.  I picked up my silvery knife and fork and addressed it with enthusiastic dash.  The last thing I wanted was to appear unsure.  I began by cutting.

I put down my utensils and sat back with folded arms to admire my first maneuver.  The newly freed wedge began to move, so imperceptibly I thought it was an illusion.  I had sliced it at such an angle that gravity, aided by the natural lubrication from its juice, sent it on a determined slide from its rind.  I was hypnotized.  Even if I could have reacted in time and lanced it with my fork or made any attempt to arrest its progress, there would be a catastrophe.  The plate would rear up and clatter back on the marble surface, perhaps breaking, the melon would fly off and slap onto the polished floor, or worse, crash amid the stacks of crystal glassware behind the counter.  In the agonizing slow motion in which our minds see such moments, my fruit-boat launched off the plate and accelerated on a voyage across the counter top, lagged like a curling stone, and kissed the gentleman’s elbow.

I retrieved my melon with fork and bare hand, apologizing for the damp spot on the sleeve of his crisp, French blue shirt.  Awkwardly, I put it back on the plate, as if landing a fish, careful to avoid the rind, lest the wedge take flight again.  This was a challenge.  There was little room left on the plate, and I had to keep it pinned while I used the knife to render it into lifeless, mangled pieces.  Erika and I were unable to restrain our hysterics.  The gentleman and his friend paid and left.  We finished quickly and did the same.

Anon, James

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