| MODERN WISDOM NUMBER 277 AUGUST 2021 Copyright 2021 Francis DiMenno dimenno@gmail.com http://www.dimenno.wordpress.com 1. THE COOL-OFF: AN ACID NOIR NOVEL CHAPTER TWELVE ALPHABET STREET I remember the day well. It was the first week of September, 1963. A bad Friday, for me, if not the country. Cloudy, with a chance of rain. Only with a conscious effort of my blasted will could I stop thinking about the Big Man. Instead I took to dwelling upon all my heady new thoughts for a now tired world. I suddenly developed a raging thirst; my saliva was turning into little cotton balls as the drug I had been given against my will took me further under its spell. My thirst only exacerbated my delirium and it suddenly seemed, as I walked down the pulsing ancient sunshining street, as though all the area businessmen and even the antique storefront signs themselves were growing antagonistic; they all were bristling, and with a wildcat hostility aimed directly toward me. Little me. Who was I? What was I? An animal? I looked around me and took in the street scenes. I was dressed in my usual plain brown suit and brown fedora with a white shirt, somewhat wrinkled, and a black tie with a small and hopefully imperceptible stain. I appeared respectable enough. I was nothing out of the ordinary. That’s the way I liked it. But my thoughts–my thoughts were a wild tangled kaleidoscope jungle filled with ravening beasts showing shining eyes. Soon they all coalesced and became the people I saw as I uneasily meandered the streets of Noxtown and its central business district in search of liquid sustenance. There, foremost, among the canyonesque building fronts, stood the celebrated but anxious and jittery Mistah J. from Jack’s Joke and Smoke Shop, where he sold corny gadgets like poo-poo cushions and joy buzzers. He also had a line of fake excrement and exploding cigars and sometimes he swapped them out, in my delusion, with real shit, or a stick of dynamite. That would have been good for a raw chuckle, watching some fat mama squirm at the sight of a sick infant’s little brown turd, or some fat sweating cigarface eagerly lighting up his smoke, and then–kaboom! Kablooey! And an upwardly spiralling mushroom cloud where his head was supposed to be. Adjacently there stridently stood behind a steam table arrogant Mr. A from the Automat, known locally as the Choke ‘Em Down Lunchroom, where, it was promised, via a sign in the window, that sandwiches were “sliced before your eyes”. I contemplated this threatening information and got away from him and there in a genuine hurry. I saw next the saxophone-shaped C of Clubland. On concert nights Mr. Clubland cruelly stood before the black door of his establishment and never let anyone in unless they greased his palm with ten or twenty dollars, which, to me, was nearly half a day’s wages. The cheapest drink they had there was a glass of water, and that cost $1.25. No. In a nearby tenement I knew of there was kinky Mr. K. of Kip’s Flophouse, a drooling old fool who bored holes in all the walls of all the rooms so he could watch the worn-out hoboes fight and make whoopie, and prance around in the altogether. I know. I saw the holes myself. Outside of Kip’s twenty-cent flophouse, a forlorn gurning black man dressed in worn blue jeans and a ragged gray sweatshirt, and wearing a faded blue cap, shouted “MAPER! Get your paper!” But he had no paper. There was no paper. The sun hid its orange face and dipped behind a grumbling and resentful gray cloud. Rounding the corner and traveling deeper still into the commercial district, I saw distracted and wild-eyed Mr. Donderbeck in his blood-stained yellowed white butcher’s smock; he was stationed in front of his meat store and in his hairy left hand was was holding and sharpening a hatchet blade, upon a whetstone which he grasped in his other meaty paw. I made a hasty getaway. Next door, the weirdly raccoon-eyed and hollow-cheeked Miss W. tottered on two unaccustomed high heels, like a little girl playing dress-up, in front of a place called the Wedded Bliss Bridal Shop, which never seemed to have any customers. In the grudging light she was ghastly, garbed in a weird raggedy white dress fashioned from disintegrating tulle and lace. Nearby, a sinuous, insinuating black man dressed all in purple named Mr. Smitty stood in front of Smitty’s Birdland, a wooden shack which boasted an enormous garish sign featuring a chicken wearing a chef’s hat and apron (itself bearing a picture of a fried chicken leg) standing waist deep in a sizzling skillet filled with oil which rested on a fiery red-hot stove. Over the picture were emblazoned the words MR SMITTYS “FAMOUS” FREID CHICKNS HEAH. Mr. Smitty was occupying himself with inviting shapely Negro women passing by to step indoors: “Come on in, chickadees, and put a little of my bird between your lips!” Just across the street from Birdland, the fat and lascivious Mr. Luetgert, a meatball-shaped cross-eyed Germanic bluto with a thick black muttonchop mustache stood in front of his Gourmet Food store and also urged all the women in their summer dresses to “Komm, kommen Sie herein. Kommen Sie alles!” Standing on the street corner, orotund Reverend O. stood statuesque before the portal of his storefront church, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and exhorted all “sinners,” as well as those who were blameless, to stop in for a free meal–though they would have to listen first to some of his interminable sermonizing, as I well knew from patronizing his place myself on the rare occasions when when I was on my uppers. Reverend O bounded over to me and came so close to my face that he flecked me with his spittle and I could see that he hadn’t shaved that day, or on the one before, “Sinner,” he shrieked, “have you been washed in the Blood of the Lamb?” I backed away from him and barked “No thanks, Sky Pilot. I’ll take vanilla.” “You’re going straight to HELL, you scoffer!” “Why, this is already hell,” I snapped back. “No ifs ands or buts. So you can keep your crummy grub.” And I moved on. Sharing a corner of the same storefront I saw seated behind a coffee table in a throne-like oaken chair the brassy and vexatious Mr. Verdigris, a tall slender, nearly cadaverous man dressed in shady black who was well known as a ruthless and brutal real estate agent. He made his fat profits by brokering and selling leases for slum apartments to people who couldn’t afford anything better. Why was he rubbing his slender hands like a fly? I didn’t know; I didn’t want to know, and so…I turned away. Oddly, just around the corner from the church, from the basement of a large commercial building, the excitable Mr. E. leered from the front window of the Eye of Horus Occult Book shoppe, scheming, as I imagined, to capture hapless souls for Satan. He ogled the little ladies in their summertime skirts as they innocently swanked and glided by, the poor dears little knowing what tragic rituals no doubt took place in those musty back rooms of his–rituals which filled his coffers of him and his indubitably diabolical cronies with ill-gotten hard cash. Across the street, the mad, quaking, consumptive Mr. M. staggered red-eyed outdoors into the intermittent red-orange sunlight, emerging bedraggled from the foul depths of his Majestic Pest Control storefront office to holler about how the gummint is killing his bidness and how hard it was to get good bug men who wudn’t hopeless drunks and about Miz Rachel Carson who was a no-good communiss. Young, yearning, cock-eyed, and perpetually lovelorn Mr. Y who worked the day shift at the YWCA in the same building as the book shop stood near the bottom of the heavy stone steps which led up to its formidable doors, making sure no man other than he could sneak into that establishment and ogle all the weary careworn midinettes. He was also known to have a keen eye for what was or might be in the womens’ parcels and he snarled half a warning and half a greeting at me: “Arnold, you got no business here, have you?” No, I said, and walked away before he could tell me to be gone. Ordinarily I would pulverized the weedy little twerp, but at that time I was in no condition to lick anyone. Some of those sad and wistful spinsters who whiled away their unhappy retired schoolmarm lives looking out from the grimy windows of the Y must surely have patronized, for the sake of their brothers and uncles and perpetual bashful suitors, the establishment of the baleful Mr. B., sole proprietor of the Big Boy’s and Fat Man’s Clothing Store, just across the street hard by the railroad tracks near the Depot. The store’s flyblown signage displayed a husky misshapen boy who resembled a sleepy resentful dwarf, accompanied by (presumably) his father, a freakishly rotund gentleman wearing a black derby hat and jauntily wielding an oaken cane whose knob was a roaring golden lion’s head. (How was it that I had strode by the place a hundred times on my way to the train station and had never noticed that unsettling sign before?) I finally decided that I badly needed to locate some liquid refreshment. I found it in an unlikely place. There was a Bar & Grill just off the railroad tracks. In it, the ideological Mr. I. was standing half-sitting on a stool, and working the bar back behind the swinging doors of his smoky bar called the IWW Club, which had rusted iron bars affixed on the front of its yellowed and opaquely bubbled windows. The sign was badly worn, raised white letters on a blood-red field; however, in places the red paint had chipped and underneath it was exposed down to the original bare brown wood. This was a low joint where hoboes, for two cents, freely drank All-sorts; liquor, which was, as its name implies, the dregs of everybody else’s leavings. There were framed pictures of Marx and Lenin on the walls, and also an elaborately framed photo of a boxing scene, a once-famous picture of Joe Louis, Champion of the World, lunging at brawny Max Schmeling, who stood fixed in his corner like an anxious hapless Teutonic oak. I ordered a small glass of five cent beer and got to talking with the barkeep, a woebegone, beetle-browed but muscular man with wild white hair and thick horn-rimmed spectacles, who was largely ghost white from his ill-lit indoor occupation. I said to him, “Wasn’t you a boxer onct? Kid Mitt? I heard of you. Didn’t you fight Gus Lesvenich in the Garden? He said, “I fought three rounds with Gus, only it was at an exhibition. In ’47, was it? A good man, Gus. He retired about fifteen years ago. So did I. Boxing was always just a sideline for me. I’m a worker, or I was, until I got too stove up and my eyes started to go. I was up against it for a spell. Toted a sandwich board for a while. Then me and a comrade who hit the number put a down payment on this here Club. That was fourteen years ago. But all the same, I’m no pork-chopper like some of the bums in this place. I’m no sponger. I’m not in it just for the pie card. And I sure as hell ain’t no labor skate. I may be red, but I’m not yellow.” “Good to know,” I grunted. “Better a live flea than a dead dog.” “Amen…comrade” he said, and tipped me a wink. I finished the pale yellow beer and left the poor old duffer a ten-cent tip. As if I hadn’t already had enough socializing in this purgatory of broken souls, who should I spy with my little eye but gregarious Mr. G. He was the outside talker hoping with the come-on to lure tourists and assorted riff-raff into the decidedly down-at-the-heels Gaiety Burlesk. “Come one come all.” he chanted. “Look no further. The gorgeous girls are all right here, direct from the the Folies Bergère in Gay Paree, located at 32 Rue Richer in the 9th Arrondissement!” The French words floated from his mouth and were pronounced with practiced guile. “These gals are all as hot as a firecracker on the fourth of Ju-ly, and they sway with a giggle and a wiggle when they walk!” He made a vague figure-eight gesture suggestive of a woman’s breasts and hips. “Listen, Mister Man: If you like beautiful showgirls–and lemme ask ya–who doesn’t? then feast your eyes on these gals! Fifty, count ’em–fifty tres chic girlies! Featuring for the first time as a special added attraction, all the way from Hollywood in California the bee-yoo-ti-ful Miss Gypsy Lee Jones!” But I knew that the glory days of the Burly-Q were long gone, and that inside the faded theatre there were only a few rather tired-looking former hoofers and faded hookers who posed on rickety chairs and wearily, to the brassy accompaniment of a scratchy phonograph record, stripped off in slow succession a pair of long black gloves, a pair of cheap nylon garters (which they always threw into the crowd of forlorn old retirees), a gown with a front zipper, and a back-fastening bra. Their pasties had sad tassels which they swung forlornly. The show-stopper was when one of the more energetic and talented dames swung her left tassel clockwise and her right tassel counter-clockwise. A beer cost five dollars and a bottle of champagne fetched forty. It was too rich for my blood, so I sidled away. “Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?” said Mr. Gaiety. “Got things to do? Places to see? People to be?” “I’m not in the mood,” I muttered. I don’t know why. It’s not as though I had to explain myself to the man. “Well, remember: a pretty girl is like a melo-dee that haunts you night and day! ” He broke into a song: “They go together…like summer weather….” I stopped for a moment and stared at him. He said, “Listen, Mister Man–just make sure you stop by and see them sometime! Don’t be backward! Take a gander! You can’t stop a stepper, and our gals are guaranteed to put some pep back into your step!” I forced a sickly grin and moved on. The sun slid out from behind some fluffy white clouds tinged along the edges with a barest trace of gray. Just then, in front of the next shop, I practically collided with puckish Mr. P., the stylishly dressed proprietor of the Pursuit of Happiness Haberdashery. “Say, brother,” he said, “You look like you could do with a new set of glad rags.” “I’m not your brother,” I said. “Aww, now, say! There’s no need to get sore, tough guy–step right into my parlor, as the spider said to the fly.” I couldn’t help but smile at this, and, because I wasn’t carrying much money, I obliged him by following him into his fabulous store, which smelled of furniture polish…and…what was that smell…meatloaf? “Pittsburgh Fats does all his shopping here,” said Mr. Pursuit of Happiness. “And nobody ever calls him a piker, or a Gloomy Gus. Drinks on the house! That’s HIS battle cry. There ain’t no flies on him!” “Not even one or two?” I asked. Remember that I wasn’t quite in my right mind. Mr. Pursuit paused for a moment. Then he acted as though that were the funniest thing he ever heard. “Gaw haw haw! The guys down at the Elite Pool Hall ought to get a load of you.” “They’re mostly colored fellas,” I said to him. “Sure, sure…but they’re human! They appreciate a good laugh too. I don’t hate nobody.” A short pause, and then he added, “So long as they buy….That’s a joke, brother. No offense.” The man’s humor was infectious. I was slowly beginning to warm up to Mr. Pursuit. “So what you got for me,” I said. He smirked for the briefest instant, as if to say “Gotcha,” and showed me a hat. “This, brother, is no ordinary run of the mill chapeau. Would I peddle inferior goods? Nix! I had Durwood Kirby in my store one time! That’s right–Durwood Kirby! Nice guy. Bought some argyle socks and a handkerchief. Anyhoo, this, brother, is a Crushable Dress Hat, only ten dollars and fifty cents, tax included, marked down from twelve-fifty because I like to see my customers dress sharp. This particular hat is a big seller, as it is made for the man on the go. You can’t crush it. You can even fold it in your pocket, slick as a whistle, and it’ll still come out looking brand clean like the day you bought it. It’s got a lightweight fur felt body in center dent style and is factory pre-blocked. Look at that roan leather sweatband! This is a quality article. See the edge on that brim? That’s hand-felted! We got this number in dark brown and two shades of gray. I’m telling you, brother, at THIS special price, you ought to buy two.” “Well….” “Well, if that’s too rich for your blood, then here’s a topper that’s popular with the pool hall crowd. It’s a water-resistant snap-brim with the same roan leather sweatband as the higher priced model, and with a genuine silk lining! You got a lucky face,” he snorted, “so I’ll sell it to you for eight dollars even, plus three per cent tax. It comes in gray, black, and dark olive. How many do you want me to put you down for?” I said I wasn’t in the market for a hat just now, though when I was I would certainly keep him in mind. At this he continued to grin but otherwise looked so crestfallen that, just to make him feel better, I bought three pairs of his cheapest black dress socks for seventy-five cents. I could imagine what he was thinking as he rang up the sale: “I gotta get out of this racket. I dance like a prancing circus pony just to make a crummy ten-cent loss-leader profit.” But Mr. Pursuit didn’t let on to what he was probably thinking but grinned as he opened the door to let me out. “Thank yooou,” he crooned. “Doooo come again!” And he snorted. I decided to get a drink of water at the pizza joint next door. It was growing hot outside, and the place had no air conditioning, so the glass door with a reinforced steel bar in the middle of it was propped wide open. Inside, perpetually baffled, heavyset Mr. Hi-Fi, owner of the Hi-Fi Tweeter Pizzaria, with a facsimile of his great hulking face serving as the shop’s outside logo, was seated directly under an overhead fan at a table off to the side of the murky den which served as the dining room. Up at the wooden service counter in front of the kitchen, a pimply young man in a clean white smock grumblingly drew me a cup of ice water at my urgent request and belligerently asked if I was intending to buy anything. “I’ll take a slice” I said, and he said, “What kind?” The question baffled me for a moment. (Like I mentioned, I was not entirely in my right mind.) I looked around and saw the faces of the owner’s Italian Hall of Fame gallery hung in framed portraits against the wall, all of which seemed to be leering at me. One autographed photo in particular, which was of the famous lounge singer Tiny Sinestro, disturbed me mightily. His glib face resembled a grinning ferret. He wore, I noticed, the same sort of cheap felt hat with a wide black and white striped sweatband that was worn by the likes of pawnbrokers and carnival pitchmen and low-budget used car salesmen. His sharkskin suit made me vaguely uneasy, nauseous even, and the red carnation in his boutonniere resembled a fresh bullet wound. I couldn’t continue to look at the portrait, but even though I turned away I still could not escape those feral eyes, leering at me. The young man behind the counter, who looked like he must be the owner’s son, repeated his question. “What kinda pizza you want? I ain’t got all day, chief.” “Sausage.” “We ain’t got that.” “Anchovy.” “Nope.” “Pepperoni?” “All out.” “What DO you have?” “Cheese.” “Is that all?” “Extra cheese,” he said, with a practiced sneer. I said “Cheese” and the kid said, “Ya sure ya don’t want extra cheese? Trust me. It’s fresh outta the oven.” I said, ‘Sure.” I turned away and heard a mumbling growl from the direction of the owner. “How are ya?” he asked. I had to think about that for a long moment. As in “How ‘am’ I? How is it that I even am? What’s the use of thinking about it? What’s the use of anything? We are all in a blind race with death waiting at the finish line. So why are we running so hard? Maybe–” “Seventeen cents,” the kid said. “Seventeen?” “Two cents extra for the extra cheese.” As I counted out three nickels and two pennies, I had a sudden insight. They were all cheese pizzas. There was no such thing as extra cheese. The kid was running a scam. You just can’t trust those Italians. Shake hands with a Dago and count your fingers. And the slice itself looked very unappetizing. It was nearly parched; the crust was hard and the cheese was completely dried out. I had a distinct feeling that they saved their more appetizing slices for their regular customers. Some mook who had just stumbled in from off the street wouldn’t dare complain. Would he? I thought of raising a stink, but it’s probably a good thing I didn’t, because just then a young Negro man hollered from across the street, “Hey Pizza Man! Pizza Man! Yo pizza look like yo FACE!” The owner’s son, Mr. Hi-Fi Junior, suddenly jumped nimbly over the counter wielding a sawed-off baseball bat, bolted through the propped-open door and out into the street and furiously ran after the kid. “Get him!” hollered the owner, bolting upright from his table. “GET him!” This was too much high drama for me. I wrapped the slice of dried pizza in a napkin, lest the owner Mr. Hi-Fi Senior somehow take offense, and carried it outdoors. The sun was fully out and I proceeded to Number’s Drug Store, where I ordered a cherry phosphate and stared for long minutes at the various colorful displays for Vim, Tide, and Ajax. Oxydol, Rinso, and All. “All,” I thought, inanely. “That’s the answer! We are all…All! All…in all! I started giggling hysterically. Mr. Number, from behind the pharmacy counter, gave me an appraising look. He had my number for sure, because he said, “Son…are you on something?” I looked in the mirror behind the soda fountain counter. My pupils were dilated to the size of a coal-black full moon. “Why do you ask?” I said, hedging. “Because you’re cradling that disgusting slice of greasy pizza like it was your newborn baby boy,” he screeched, and started to come out from behind his counter. “Now Mister, I run a clean drugstore here and we don’t want no hopheads around, ner anybody on the dope, so you crawl your filth out of here or I’ll call the POlice!” (I thought of mentioning my connections, but thought better of it, as the Big Man wouldn’t want me to drag his name in the mud with the upright Mr. Number.) I fled next door and ran up a long flight of stairs to the second floor Beauty Parlor of eccentric Mrs. Xaroshie. I said to her, as I burst through the door, “Excuse me, ma’am, I’m very sorry, but can I use your phone?” Not that I needed to–it was just something to say while I hid out. She was a horribly wizened Gypsy woman dressed in black lace who took one look at my pale white frightened face and said “Go away with you!” “Don’t talk to me like that, Sister–I’m a tough guy,” I mewed. “I’m not your sister!” she croaked. “Now–you go!” She gesticulated with her long bony figures as though she were summoning up a horde of demons and she laughed, kaa kaa kaa, with a hoarse wild crackling that sounded like the creaking of a collapsing ceiling. And so I debarked. I made my way to Brand Plaza, a relatively modern shopping center just off the main street. I walked around for a while inside the spacious, almost cavernous, hangar-like but still somehow dingy Fun N Games Amusement Arcade, where the ten cent pinball machines (three plays for a quarter) clanged and pinged. An unforgettable sound it was, accompanied by the sporadic and almost illicit THWACK of a hard-earned free game. I tried to throw away the slice of pizza I was still carrying. Just then the bald, fat, middle-aged and fractious Mr. Fun N Games, disgusted no doubt from riding herd all day over a gang of disrespectful juvenile delinquents with duck’s ass hairdos, said “Hey! Slob! Don’t chuck your garbage in here!” I ignored him and tossed the slice in a trash barrel. He strode over, gingerly plucked it out with the napkin, and then he actually threw it at me. He missed me, though. The slice fell to the grimy floor with a disgusting plop. I ran away to the front door and burst, gasping and almost heaving, out onto the sunlit street. The dreadful red sun was beaming down with extra harshness and storefronts beneath their awnings seemed to glister with malevolence. I ventured along, still trembling, as though I had drunk too much bad java, to what looked to be a nice and quiet shop next door. A weather-beaten, querulous, spavined old man stood behind the counter of Quality City, a dingy run-down hole in the wall with a black crack which snaked across the yellowed formerly white ceiling. It looked like it only sold trash and cheap plastic bric-a-brac which nobody in their right mind would ever want; unwanted rubbish from a better-forgotten childhood, as though the man had cleaned out his attic in a fit of nostalgia and opened a store for the sole purpose of putting his rubbish on proud display. Dust-coated trinkets and archaic gew-gaws stood on worn clumsy wooden shelves indifferently constructed. A cheap pocket watch with a missing dial face. A small reed basket filled with used matchbooks. Several religious books. Disintegrating satin ribbons in a cracked and yellow cellophane package. An empty bottle of Peruna. Some boxes of old Christmas cards. Six half-empty bottles of Technique Color-Tone hair conditioner in six different hues. A forlorn collar belonging to a dog long dead. There was also a small blond-haired plastic baby doll with missing eyebrows; a pair of badly scuffed tennis sneakers, size eight; fifteen (I counted them) tarnished silver teapot-shaped tea infusers; a dingy, dented, sweat-stained banjo with no strings; two old D batteries rotting in their own acid; a tattered teddy bear with its nose torn off, and to top it all off, a ghastly oil painting labelled “Brotherhood Week” featuring the floating green oversized heads of slobbering toddlers and fat drooling babies. I started heaving with an almost unsuppressable laughter. Then I saw it: A poorly traced drawing of a misshapen Mickey Mouse leading a melted blob which was supposed to represent Pluto Pup. “Why,” I thought, “would a MOUSE want to own a DOG? To chase cats? Why would a six foot mouse still be afraid of cats, anyhow?” I started to laugh, this time out loud, but the scowling Mr. Quality wagged a bony finger and cut me off. “Say, son, are y’ plannin’ t’ BUY anything?” he whined. I said, “Why, I wouldn’t buy any of this junk if you paid me!” And I quickly left the place before Mr. Q. could limp at me from behind his counter and threaten me with his cane. I next stopped next door at the banner-beribboned Uncle Elby’s General Store, advertising a Grand Reopening Sale which had been going on for several years, at least. The same banners hung there, it seemed to me, some twenty years ago. The place smelled like fresh tobacco with a touch of musty dankness. Uncle Elby himself was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he no longer existed, or never did. Instead, there was an insolent clerk standing at the center of the sawdust-strewn display floor. It looked as though nobody had been in the place in weeks–I broke a spider web when I entered through the solid oak door. One good look, and I could see why. The place hadn’t changed much in the past twenty years. Flour bin. Cracker barrel. Pickle jars. On the wall were posted the same ads from the 1940s I remembered from my boyhood telling us to “Slap the Jap Off the Map” and advising us that “Loose Lips Sink Ships” and warning us that “She May Look Clean But…”. “How’s about an egg, Pops?” said the unkempt clerk. I said “Where do you get off calling me Pops? Look at yourself in a mirror. You’re nearly as old as I am, and you’re still working in a dump like this?” And then…there on the counter near the old style cash register was a most harrowing sight–the same jar of pickled eggs I remember being fascinated by when I was a small boy. They may well have been the same eggs. To eat such an egg would be taking one’s life in one’s hands. The very thought caused me to nearly reel as I hastily exited the market. I decided I needed a drink, a real drink, a man’s drink, a drink that would scrape the cobwebs from my overstimulated and overwrought brain. So I went down a little side alley behind the Brand Plaza and dropped into The Red Carpet Lounge. It was usually the haunt of criminals, slumming playboys, and befoozled, chain smoking Party Girls, but at this time in the late afternoon it was nearly empty. I strode up to the bar behind which the rakish Mr. Red Carpet himself was, well, lounging, looking supremely bored. I gazed at the bottles of whiskey, rye and bourbon on the top shelf. There were the usual old friends–Old Crow, Four Roses, Old Grand-Dad, Old Overholt, Jim Beam….I ordered a thirty-five-cent shot of Jack Daniels, straight with no chaser, and tried not to gag as the rotgut in the glass landed like a lump in my stomach and exploded like a renegade torpedo. I shakily tipped the barkeep a dime and headed back outdoors. I felt as though I were walking on air, or on a puffy cloud as I wandered in a zig-zag path and ended up down at the foot of a hill at the site of the St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which stood like an enormous rotten tooth amid the skyscrapers on the fringes of the business district. The heavy metallic doors were locked. I banged on them with my fist, and from a small shuttered window high up along the stony edifice the timid voice of an elderly priest inquired “Who’s there?” “A seeker.” “Don’t you read the papers? We’re closed.” “You better come down here and let me in, or….” “Or what?” “Or nothing,” I said. “I want to confess!” I shouted. “Confess what? Did you murder somebody?” “Not yet,” I said. “It’s Friday,” he said. “Confession’s on Saturday.” And he closed his shutters. All these spectacles were surely leading me–me? Who was me? Who…is me? Leading me someplace somewhere for some reason, but I knew not why. I’d had enough. It was time to go home. But first I thought I’d stop and see the zany Mr. Stephano Izzard, Izzy for short, who held court every afternoon at at Zomack’s Five Cent Cigar Store. He was always good for a chuckle. But Izzy wasn’t in any mood to laugh today. In fact, he was crying. “Did you see in the paper? Four little girls died today,” he said. “This morning. In a Church. Blown up in an explosion.” He handed me the paper but I couldn’t read it because my eyes were also filling with tears. “Four little girls,” he said. “Never hurt nobody.” “Doesn’t matter if you never hurt nobody,” I said. “You still got to suffer.” He looked at me as though I were a wild man. He said, “Well, that’s a lousy thing to say.””But it’s the truth,” I said. “And you know it’s the truth. You know it’s the truth.” 2. WORST BEERS According to one Miz Valentine, Laser Beer “Tasted like hobo piss.” Haw! One of my friends’ nicknames for Corona was “Mescan Bladder Juice.” Back in my drinkin’ days, me and my buddy Mark Bigoness were roaming the streets of Manhattan drinking Ballantine out of 40-oz bottles and some homeless guy said, “Hey–that’s my brand!” One night I was wandering around New Orleans, also circa 1987, and struck up an unlikely friendship with an old homeless black fella who had three upper teeth and two lower teeth and who insisted on calling me “Doc.” Every time I tried to shake him, he would say, in a tremulous voice, “Don’t leave me, Doc, don’t leave me!” I bought some Coy beer and he turned up his nose at it. “Want some?” I said. “I don’t think so,” was his diplomatic and mildly shuddering reply. Get caught drinking Hop-n-Gator and you’re an idiot: http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/hop-n-gator/58536/ I saw it for sale at a package store in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh circa 1978. More on the wonderful world of Pittsburgh beers: “Wanker Light. In bottles. Amazingly enough, this product’s selling point is the labels, which feature an array of young women.” http://www.tinsel.org/beer/pittsburgh.html The three-worst hop-based beverages I ever had were: Elephant India Pale Ale ca. January 1978. From Denmark. Got it at Harvard House O’ Liquors up on Mass Ave near Porter and it had turned skunky in the bottle. Haffenreffer Malt Liquor ca. 1978. A distinguished Boston musician calls it “The Green Death” and opines that “the only good thing about it was the puzzles on the cap.” (As I recall, Private Stock had a peppery taste and a noxious formaldehyde finish that made your mouth feel like it had been invaded by toxic fire ants. But it did the job. Indeed, one of the happiest days of my life was when me and my innamorata sat on the steps on an off-campus house blasting Phil Spector’s Greatest Hits out the window (to the predictable consternation of fellow students who were trying to study) and drinking that godawful slop.) Canadian Ace, ca. 1981. It came (correct me if I’m mistaken) in 100-oz. bottles. It tasted like the flop-sweat of a tubercular roustabout. I later learned it was the brew peddled by Al Capone during prohibition. 3. INVERTED CLICHES, OR “EVERYBODY ELSE ALWAYS RUINS IT FOR A FEW ASSHOLES” Since our fine Hollywood solons and wise men have rung all the possible changes on every conceivable genre, it’s high time that they started making movies which are not only deliberately stupid, but ones which deliberately make no sense. And what better way to do that than to take half-forgotten cliches, reverse them, and in the process put a post-modern spin into the dialogue? The critics will hate it but the audience will be baffled. Then we can all go back to watching TV, reading tabloids and eating bon-bons. NAVAL “Give me but three ships, your highness– and we’ll be blown out of the water!” FRENCH REVOLUTION “The peasants are storming the palace gates! It looks like your goose is cooked, Kingie ol’ buddy! PIRATES “Bring me the head of Captain Morgan–and then I’ll probably kill YOU too!” SHOW BIZ “Baby, you’re going out there as an understudy–but when the show is over, you’ll be…fired!” WAR “If we stay here we’re going to be trapped like rats!” [Slap]…HEY, what did you have to go and do THAT for? ESPIONAGE “Tell these plans to no one–except maybe your wives and sweethearts.” BOXING “Baby, this is my last fight, I promise–because Kid Crusher is going to beat me to a pulp!” MYSTERY “Now that you’re here, Charles, I’m more afraid than ever!” POLITICS “Not a word of this must leak out to the newspapers–but it’s OK to tell the National Enquirer because nobody believes them anyway!” MONSTER “Lock the door behind me, Susan, and don’t open it for anybody–except maybe the pizza delivery boy.” SLASHER “They all laughed at me–even you! I don’t LIKE to be laughed at! But, come to think of it, I am kind of a ridiculous little man.” COP “Play ball with me and you’ll be back to poundin’ a beat in no time!” DETECTIVE “Look, Trench, it’s a simple case of suicide–and we’ve already warned you off the case–but if you think it’s murder then the police would like to hear your theory!” MOBSTER “The boys tell me you’ve been shootin’ off your mouth all over town. But then again, everybody knows the boys are a bunch of lyin’ bums.” PRISON “The parole board turned me down again, but I’m not going with you on the prison break–because it would be wrong.” WESTERN “One man travelin’ light COULD make it back to the fort–but why bother when we’re doomed anyway?” TERRORIST “Back–all of you! Take one more step and the girl might die. Then again, maybe not.” CONSPIRACY “Oh hell–the files are on an IBM and all I know how to use is a Mac!” HORROR “Do what you want to the girl, Scarwell–just let me get the hell out of here!” 4. TOP TEN NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS 1. Get that laughin’ Jesus tattoo I’ve been a-hankerin’ after. 2. Big H is for losers. From now on, I plan to offer methadone spit-backs and poppy-seed tea to my jonesing associates. 3. For my tricked-out 1979 Chevy Malibu low-rider (with the double tail pipes), I’m a-gonna get me that bumper sticker that reads, “El Policeman is my friend.” 4. Cut back on the ol’ hallucinogenic mushroooooooooms! 5. Every time I’m tempted to hit the crack pipe, eat a bag of potato chips instead. 6. Try to find a substitute for cheap gin that also tastes good– because I’m tired of hearing barrelhouse vags coming up to me and saying, “Ish a good rubbing alcohol–ish not a great rubbing alcohol.” 7. Purchase a hypoallergenic mite-free pillow to use for when I curl up in the back seat of the Chevy Malibu instead of shelling out $23.25 for a bed in a doss house. 8. Trade in my lead-shot-weighted leather gloves for a genuine beavertail sap. 9. Fool my wino friends by filling short-dog bottles with Cabernet Sauvignon. 10. Lay sticky traps for that darn YHWH who’s been prowling around the hobo jungle. 5. MORE INVERTED CLICHES, OR “ALL BUSINESS IS JUST LIKE SHOW BUSINESS” Perhaps the single most wonderful thing about advertising is that it is the secular religion of our day. It offers up its own iconic patron saints, symbolic of product attributes. These ad figures define things by what they are not–by advertising them as having those very same attributes. For instance, a deeply humane clown and a chortling, miniaturized, animatronic dough golem stand as symbols of enormous multinational corporations which are laws unto themselves and dedicated to starving farmers and poisoning consumers with lard. (And those are their good qualities!) Hollywood works fist-in-glove with ad agencies, the processed food industry, and other kingmakers, and since it has exhausted long ago every still-viable cliche, perhaps in the near future we can look forward to being sold inverted cliches, such as are to be found in the following dialogues: ARMY “Surrender? Sure!” RUSSIAN REVOLUTION “I have determined to give the kulaks their own state.” BUSINESS MOGUL “I am going to subsidize the purchase of modern machinery for the farmers–why should THEY assume all the risk?” MUSIC BIZ “Sorry–if you can’t sing or play an instrument, we can’t use you.” DIPLOMACY “Under most circumstances we cannot afford to back down and lose face…but seeing as how the fate of the world hangs in the balance–we STILL won’t do it!” SCI-FI “The aliens are indistinguishable from human beings–period. So why fight them?” WRESTLING “Baby, this is my last fight, I promise–because I just found out that this game is rigged!” ROMANCE (FEMALE) “I’ve been a fool–such an utter fool! I THOUGHT I could live without you–but I stayed with you for twenty years anyway!” ROMANCE (MALE) “What have I ever done to deserve a wife like you? Must be payback for that bank job I pulled in Cincy back in ‘98!” MYSTERY “So you’re saying the dead man stabbed himself twenty times, then shot himself in the head and still had time to write a suicide note with his own blood?? Hmm…sounds plausible to me.” MUSICAL “Hear that, darling? It’s “Zyklon B Zombie”–that’s OUR song!” BASIC TRAINING “Here are the volunteers, sir–Trump, Rockefeller, Clinton, Gates and Hoffman!” DOGS “Maw, the boy thinks the world of that mutt–better kill it.” SWORDPLAY “Retrieve your sword, Snobwell. You haven’t got a chance anyway, because I’m a-gonna blow your head off!” SERIAL KILLER “They all laughed at me–even you! So now I’m going to switch from murder to stand-up comedy!” WESTERN “Why wait for the law to string up these hoss thieves? We got plenty of spare hosses, so let’s give a few of them away and let the owlhoots go!” MONSTER “Man was not meant to tamper with forces beyond his control–except, or course, under the aegis of the government or a multinational corporation!” MOBSTER “I’ve been taking elocution lessons, Boss–and I’m planning to go to graduate school!” PRISON “Prison break? Count me out–I’m busy working on my Memoirs.” COWBOYS AND INJUNS “Hurry back to the fort…and tell them we’re giving back the land we stole from the Native Americans and other indigenous aboriginal tribesmen!” |
MODERN WISDOM NUMBER 277 AUGUST 2021
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