Let me tell you about my mom. Because really, to truly understand a person, you kinda need to know where they came from. My mom is where I came from: popped right out of her…well, probably not that easily. According to the popular recollection, my dad put me in her initially, so clearly as with all things mammalian, I am product of a group effort. It might not take a village, but a couple of families and distillery will deliver in a pinch.
Jan, as I am wont to call her when not using her maternal title, was a product of the Great Depression, the one in the 1930s that the bankers used to gin us for World War II. Youngest of 3 sisters, her dad died when she was 2, and for a time she grew up with a stepfather. A drinker unsurprisingly, as this culture is particularly good at producing those as well. Jan told of how Jim, her stepdrunk, would hide bottles around the house to make it seem that his drunkenness was in fact a glandular condition that only smelled of rye.
Jan and her sisters were all redheads – a gingery lot. I remember how the room seemed on fire when they would get together, their behivey hairdos arching toward the ceiling, threatening to ignite the insulation. Spots? You bet. They were a freckly collective, Jan to my recollection the spottiest of them all. They proved contagious, those spots, and I ended up with the little bastards all over me too while my brother, with the hairline, has none. My sister got a few.
I got my Dad’s gender and my Mom’s spots. Among many other attributes as well. Didn’t get the red hair thing, so I dodged that additional torture, but my parents’ head genetics combined to give me a noggin of the curliest Goddamned hair you’ve ever seen. Short, its ringlets jockey for position of cranial primacy; long, it is a diaphanous hydra lashing out in all directions simultaneously, independently. Quite the thing to see.
Then of course there’s the hairline issue. The last time I saw my Dad he lay in silent repose upon the mortician’s slab. Through my tears I noted that while his mind, then body, had wasted away into ineffectiveness, he had a perfect hairline. Thick, defined, still had a little color. My Mom’s hair is fairly thin in age. That’s the hair I got, the thin curly stuff.
Bill, my dad, liked his drink. And upon deciding that she was inextricably linked with him, Jan decided to become a drinker as well. And as many Americans (and non-Americans alike) they would enjoy the occasional libation. Every day. As it was legal, readily available without a prescription and promoted widely, she joined the majority of drinkers in the notion that it is safe, forgetting that war is legal, readily available and prescribed regularly and promoted widely but is in fact quite dangerous.
A notion I would come to by and by.
Fueled by similar logic and deep cravings for acceptance then relief, my folks smoked cigarettes as well. My dad changed brands on occasion based likely upon what the rugged, manly individual on the TV told him would best fulfill his vaporous machismo needs, but my mom was a loyalist, and to the best of my recall smoked Salem menthols in the green pack. By their 50s they both hung that fun up.
And good for them.
In his 50s my dad also stopped drinking, which was good for everyone else, but signified in him the death of his childlike/childish joys, which I suspect led to his deterioration. He gave up.
Jan, on the other hand, likes her drink to this day. While it might be suggested that combining a tumbler of vodka with a handful of pharmaceuticals could be dangerous, Jan abides now in her 80s. In this an argument could be posited that our addictions sustain us as we must work to sustain them. Gives us something to do, gives us something to look forward to. As I get old I understand this.
Mom was afflicted. The tensions of life with Bill; raising a spoiled little boy while contending with a self-indulgent adult boy; a couple of miscarriages; then a damaged boy and finally an even more spoiled girl led to her back ailments, many and excruciatingly unpleasant. Body affliction leads to pill addiction, and as the years progressed, so did Jan’s dependence on the things which palliated her symptoms, for in cure comes diminished sales receipts. And in the USA we invent afflictions to profit from the cure. Just like with our computers.
I can’t say how much of my crazy mom was my crazy mom and how much was the combination of pharmaceuticals with the psychological stressors attendant in her life. She came of age during the USA’s mass chemical testing on its citizens and was certainly impacted by it as were (and are) we all. Upon reflection I see a person in pain reacting to all kinds of new and untested substances more than the angry lady that used to chase me around the house yelling at me.
When I had reached teenage, Mom made an acquisition (or two) that certainly changed my life. She bought a piano. A big old upright. Then she bought a player piano. The upright was boomy and loud and out of tune, just like me, and we fell into immediate accord. I recall the joy of watching the player piano work its magic and marveling at all the amazing sounds such devices can manifest. Bill was really into music so my interest in piano held little appeal to him because he saw I would never make any money with it. Mom, I think, takes pleasure in the fact I can make music, and she actually liked some of my songs of old. Probably doesn’t mind some of my current ones either.
Some.
My dad was good with the English language and had a sense of humor. Mom has an infectious laugh. A useful combination as I learned young a good way to relieve distress was to get a laugh. Unsurprisingly, distress increased as the innocent guilt of childhood metamorphosed into the guilty innocence of teenage. I was called upon more often to find humor in the myriad unfortunate situations I got into, which made some of them better, but only served to exacerbate most.
I would suggest that this has led to my creative endeavor in life. As the solitary child for nearly 3 years, my primacy was usurped by first my brother then 11 months later, my sister. I went from all the attention (at least the good attention) to barely any at all. In Showoffitude I realized the means to recapturing the spotlight. Mom’s receptiveness to my goofiness evolved as my goofiness developed into useful capacities.
I know that the positive rewards I realized as a boy drive my creativity still, even though I’ve long since given up trying to impress my mom. Maybe with music a little, but for the most part, my family from top to bottom don’t much cotton to what I create, so I impose it upon them less and less. Which is fine. We each have tastes peculiar to us and mine are far too peculiar for most.
Mom is very feisty. She terrified all of us kids and Bill when we were young and has never been one to want in her expression of her perspective. If she felt we should know what she was displeased by, she was always very ready to let us know. Curiously, she was displeased by a lot. We were fairly rambunctious as children, growing into positively dangerous as we got older.
She got involved in politics fairly young, likely owing to Bill’s political awareness, and ran and served in local county politics when I was teenaged and getting into all kinds of mischief. I’m sure my behaviors didn’t advance her political aspirations. She takes pride in her civic activism and I suspect she enjoyed her foray into politics more than she would have had it become a career. Even from a spectator’s perspective it is corrupting.
In our non-religious house, politics became the subject of esteem. Jan is a life-long Republican and fiercely proud of it. Just like Bill. I was raised very conservative with strong libertarian leanings, as Bill was not a big fan of Drug Prohibition and repeatedly expressed that the Constitution made no provision for the legislation of morality. Jan is more Law & Order: it doesn’t matter if it is right or not, if it is the law, it must be enforced. I suspect her exception (as with everyone) is when it is applied to her and those close to her. She didn’t like my drug use, she hated it for a period, but I don’t think my time behind bars as a result of it made her very happy either.
Even though I was just an asshole kid, I was still her asshole kid.
And while I find many positions she holds to be in tension with my perspectives, I don’t see my mom as a liar. My dad either. Mistaken perhaps, an easy mantel to hoist, but I have no recollection of them lying to me or promoting the idea that mendacity paid dividends. They believed what they said and didn’t allow me to think lying was a good thing. The result is that I am a terrible liar and more truthful (or direct) than polite society prefers.
In this I learned to own my shit. Everyone is happy to jump in with reminders of their successes, but Mom inculcated in me the importance of accepting my failures as well and, perhaps more importantly, admitting them. Owning my actions is something I am pleased I was raised with; wish more had been raised with it.
I consider myself among the fortunate few who get to enjoy really good lives. I grew up in a good time, good conditions surrounded by good people for the most part. I’ve had an amazing amount of joy. Fun, lots of fun. If I could have been any person at any time in history I’d still be me now (or George Clooney) because most of the people in history are dead and I like being alive. A lot. And even in my usual privation I live better than most while even George Clooney can’t do what I can do. So, he’ll just have to settle for remaining himself.
Mom is a fighter and that above all other traits I prize because I got some of her whiner and the fighter helps me modify it into qualities less repellant. When I’m feeling sorry for myself, Bill will pipe up, “Don’t be a baby, you baby.” To which Jan will respond, “I’m not a baby. You’re a baby…” And I will usually grab for some intoxicant or another to push them back with the full understanding that no matter how old I get, how smart or how stupid, no matter what I do with the remainder of my life, they will always be in there guiding me, driving me.
I take a certain comfort in that.
(They insisted I include that…)
Thanks, Ma.
6/17/14
simmbiosis
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Thursday, March 23, 2017
Bastard
When I was young and had the occasion to run afoul of my mother (an occurrence more than just occasional), she would call me a bastard. Occasionally. When my dad would transgress, as he was indeed wont to do, she would call him that as well: a bastard. Now in my case that was a certainly less self-denigrating insult than calling me ‘son-of-a-bitch’ if only by degrees. When she would talk to Opal, Bill’s mom, she would refer to him as a son-of-a-bitch. In later years she claimed she didn’t realize what she was saying.
Clearly one could apply the same standard to calling one’s son a bastard: the insult self-applied in the inherent suggestion of one’s dodgy morality. It could be in no way my fault that I am or am not a bastard from a biological standpoint – I was too ill-formed to have any real influence on the matter. So it becomes an odd insult at best when directed at one’s offspring. Indeed that moniker applied, regardless of where, is a commentary on someone’s parents’ behaviors and is no way reflective of the child’s choice. If it was up to us, we’d all be George Clooney.
As I got old enough to consider simple mathematical equations I realized my parents’ anniversary was a mere 8 months from my birthday. While mature beyond my years, it was never indicated that I arrived any earlier than my allotted 9 months – conditions were cozy, I was well tended, why vacate before the lease is up? I say… But simple math confirms: my Mom was with me before she married my Dad.
I am of virgin birth.
Or my Mom wasn’t necessarily as chaste as she led many of us to believe. In fact, whenever I alluded to said sidereal discrepancy, she was quick to giggle and avoid the subject completely. As avoidance was how we dealt with many issues around our house, it wasn’t out of the ordinary. As she didn’t admit to having premarital hummana-hummana with my Dad nor did she deny the virgin birth possibility, I ran with the likely rather than the divine explanation, always holding out the grander hope…
You see, I am very different from my family. My family is crazy. Don’t get me wrong, I am crazy as well, being a part of the whole ‘family’ aspect of the observation. The difference is (as it usually is) is that I know I am crazy. I’m not homicidal or anything, don’t have special relationships with my stuffed bunny or whatever, but I understand by any rational measure – you know, what society presents as rational – I am crazy.
My family (what remains of them) accepts that I am crazy, but – here’s the scary part – they think they are sane. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that the only truly sane members of my crazy family are the ones, like me, who understand they are crazy. Of particular interest to no one in particular, there is no one in my family like me.
I suspect now that I might understand why.
This has been a hard year by any measure. Started out destitute, and after visiting a dear friend who was recovering from lung cancer, got terribly ill while repairing a piss-saturated deck at Bobby Kennedy’s kid’s house in the Palisades. For half a month’s rent. In March, my nephew died horribly in a single-car collision. In June, Gayle was felled by that cancer and in July my mother died. For 2 weeks, I traveled a thousand miles of the deepest grief I believe I have yet known.
Before my Mom died she called me and asked me to come and see her. At this point she had entered hospice and knew the end was near, so her request for me to come back was very sad but understandable. I was working on the ESPN machine so I told her I’d be up in early June. But the check got tied up, as checks will, and by the time we were able to head Northward I got the call: Gayle had passed. Pat, my oldest friend, was utterly devastated.
The trip became immensely harder.
Upon arrival, we found Jan doped out of her skull on huge amounts of morphine and an endless panoply of other chemical emollients, an oxygen tube wrapped around her face. Death seemed imminent, and all communications had that dream/nightmare quality as she shifted about in her drug haze talking to people who weren’t present and preparing for events long past. Moments of recognition were punctuated with moments of confused terror, delusion and paranoia.
I hearkened back to my Dad’s death in 2001. Alzheimer’s took him down slow and hard, leaving him lost and terrified, coveting death. Begging for it. Of course a humane society doesn’t allow people who have deteriorated so awfully that only death will end their suffering to die with dignity, so Bill soldiered through until catatonia stole his motor function and held out till I could send him off.
People I know have bad deaths. Sorry to those of you I know. Keeping that in mind, I recommend all those I know to have good lives just in case this horrid trend continues.
One moment of lucidity will stay with me the remainder of my days: my son Errol (who had been caring for her for some time before we arrived), Robin and I were with Jan when the haze cleared and she knew us all. She was pleased we were there, together, especially as her other two children who lived more locally couldn’t make the trip. Errol set up the CD player and put on The Moment, my first piano concerto, which astounded and pleased Jan greatly. She was amazed at what her boy had created, at what he could do.
I told her, “I made that but you made me so this music wouldn’t exist if not for you. You’ve made the world a more beautiful place.” The look of satisfaction on that one face in that single instant made all the work required to create it dissipate into delight. Art can do that. The moment shared.
Before Jan went down, and she went down very hard with much wailing and gnashing of teeth, she had an unexpected burst of lucidity. She had joined wonder-girl Robin and me for a compelling little chat that I had the occasion to record in which she offered the real reason for needing to see me: she needed to get something off her chest.
As her coherence was dodgy at best, at first I didn’t pick up on what she was saying. Some of the conversation was to me while big parts of it (the juicy stuff) had me as a neutral unnamed 3rd party to whom she confided about me. She made it clear to us that she didn’t want me to know about this. She’d kept it a secret my entire life, apparently only her mother knew:
Bill wasn’t my biological father.
That honor/disgrace belonged to someone in San Pedro named Tidwell. While dating Bill, she had messed around with Tidwell, found herself with child (zygoat) and seduced Bill with the notion that the little bundle of freedom-ending responsibility gestating in her womb was of his delight. She indicated that he never found out.
She had tricked my father into marrying her under the pretext that he had knocked her up, and he raised me under the belief that my curly, reddish hair and spots were the natural outcome of his natural manly outpouring. I have lived the entirety of my life under this perception. If he had any idea, he never let me know.
“The only charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception necessary for both parties…” – Oscar Wilde
I’ll admit I was fairly surprised by this revelation. 58 years seems a long time to keep secret what some might imagine as relatively significant information. Learning about your real father when there might actually be a possibility he’s still vital seems more likely to achieve any hope of a functional relationship. Expand the Christmas card list, that kind of thing. But she kept it, her private little embarrassment, all to herself.
Grown larger each passing thought, the secret becomes more difficult to tell the longer it hides.
Such secrets, it seems, become a burden and as with all burdens, the longer you carry them, the more back-breaking they become. All who knew Jan knew of her back afflictions. It would seem in trying to put something she couldn’t face behind her, the weight necessarily became more crippling each year until she could carry it no more. At the end, she gave it to me, with the tease of relevance, plummeted into the hospital, and within a few days, was dead.
Taking the short view, this could be seen as selfish and a little cold; keeping the true biological nature of a child’s parentage from them the entirety of their life, then achieving catharsis by dropping it on them at the last moment, callous.
The long view affords a more palatable palliative: when she called me a bastard, she was just being honest.
RIP Jan Simmons 5/20/31 – 7/7/14
7/31/14
Clearly one could apply the same standard to calling one’s son a bastard: the insult self-applied in the inherent suggestion of one’s dodgy morality. It could be in no way my fault that I am or am not a bastard from a biological standpoint – I was too ill-formed to have any real influence on the matter. So it becomes an odd insult at best when directed at one’s offspring. Indeed that moniker applied, regardless of where, is a commentary on someone’s parents’ behaviors and is no way reflective of the child’s choice. If it was up to us, we’d all be George Clooney.
As I got old enough to consider simple mathematical equations I realized my parents’ anniversary was a mere 8 months from my birthday. While mature beyond my years, it was never indicated that I arrived any earlier than my allotted 9 months – conditions were cozy, I was well tended, why vacate before the lease is up? I say… But simple math confirms: my Mom was with me before she married my Dad.
I am of virgin birth.
Or my Mom wasn’t necessarily as chaste as she led many of us to believe. In fact, whenever I alluded to said sidereal discrepancy, she was quick to giggle and avoid the subject completely. As avoidance was how we dealt with many issues around our house, it wasn’t out of the ordinary. As she didn’t admit to having premarital hummana-hummana with my Dad nor did she deny the virgin birth possibility, I ran with the likely rather than the divine explanation, always holding out the grander hope…
You see, I am very different from my family. My family is crazy. Don’t get me wrong, I am crazy as well, being a part of the whole ‘family’ aspect of the observation. The difference is (as it usually is) is that I know I am crazy. I’m not homicidal or anything, don’t have special relationships with my stuffed bunny or whatever, but I understand by any rational measure – you know, what society presents as rational – I am crazy.
My family (what remains of them) accepts that I am crazy, but – here’s the scary part – they think they are sane. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that the only truly sane members of my crazy family are the ones, like me, who understand they are crazy. Of particular interest to no one in particular, there is no one in my family like me.
I suspect now that I might understand why.
This has been a hard year by any measure. Started out destitute, and after visiting a dear friend who was recovering from lung cancer, got terribly ill while repairing a piss-saturated deck at Bobby Kennedy’s kid’s house in the Palisades. For half a month’s rent. In March, my nephew died horribly in a single-car collision. In June, Gayle was felled by that cancer and in July my mother died. For 2 weeks, I traveled a thousand miles of the deepest grief I believe I have yet known.
Before my Mom died she called me and asked me to come and see her. At this point she had entered hospice and knew the end was near, so her request for me to come back was very sad but understandable. I was working on the ESPN machine so I told her I’d be up in early June. But the check got tied up, as checks will, and by the time we were able to head Northward I got the call: Gayle had passed. Pat, my oldest friend, was utterly devastated.
The trip became immensely harder.
Upon arrival, we found Jan doped out of her skull on huge amounts of morphine and an endless panoply of other chemical emollients, an oxygen tube wrapped around her face. Death seemed imminent, and all communications had that dream/nightmare quality as she shifted about in her drug haze talking to people who weren’t present and preparing for events long past. Moments of recognition were punctuated with moments of confused terror, delusion and paranoia.
I hearkened back to my Dad’s death in 2001. Alzheimer’s took him down slow and hard, leaving him lost and terrified, coveting death. Begging for it. Of course a humane society doesn’t allow people who have deteriorated so awfully that only death will end their suffering to die with dignity, so Bill soldiered through until catatonia stole his motor function and held out till I could send him off.
People I know have bad deaths. Sorry to those of you I know. Keeping that in mind, I recommend all those I know to have good lives just in case this horrid trend continues.
One moment of lucidity will stay with me the remainder of my days: my son Errol (who had been caring for her for some time before we arrived), Robin and I were with Jan when the haze cleared and she knew us all. She was pleased we were there, together, especially as her other two children who lived more locally couldn’t make the trip. Errol set up the CD player and put on The Moment, my first piano concerto, which astounded and pleased Jan greatly. She was amazed at what her boy had created, at what he could do.
I told her, “I made that but you made me so this music wouldn’t exist if not for you. You’ve made the world a more beautiful place.” The look of satisfaction on that one face in that single instant made all the work required to create it dissipate into delight. Art can do that. The moment shared.
Before Jan went down, and she went down very hard with much wailing and gnashing of teeth, she had an unexpected burst of lucidity. She had joined wonder-girl Robin and me for a compelling little chat that I had the occasion to record in which she offered the real reason for needing to see me: she needed to get something off her chest.
As her coherence was dodgy at best, at first I didn’t pick up on what she was saying. Some of the conversation was to me while big parts of it (the juicy stuff) had me as a neutral unnamed 3rd party to whom she confided about me. She made it clear to us that she didn’t want me to know about this. She’d kept it a secret my entire life, apparently only her mother knew:
Bill wasn’t my biological father.
That honor/disgrace belonged to someone in San Pedro named Tidwell. While dating Bill, she had messed around with Tidwell, found herself with child (zygoat) and seduced Bill with the notion that the little bundle of freedom-ending responsibility gestating in her womb was of his delight. She indicated that he never found out.
She had tricked my father into marrying her under the pretext that he had knocked her up, and he raised me under the belief that my curly, reddish hair and spots were the natural outcome of his natural manly outpouring. I have lived the entirety of my life under this perception. If he had any idea, he never let me know.
“The only charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception necessary for both parties…” – Oscar Wilde
I’ll admit I was fairly surprised by this revelation. 58 years seems a long time to keep secret what some might imagine as relatively significant information. Learning about your real father when there might actually be a possibility he’s still vital seems more likely to achieve any hope of a functional relationship. Expand the Christmas card list, that kind of thing. But she kept it, her private little embarrassment, all to herself.
Grown larger each passing thought, the secret becomes more difficult to tell the longer it hides.
Such secrets, it seems, become a burden and as with all burdens, the longer you carry them, the more back-breaking they become. All who knew Jan knew of her back afflictions. It would seem in trying to put something she couldn’t face behind her, the weight necessarily became more crippling each year until she could carry it no more. At the end, she gave it to me, with the tease of relevance, plummeted into the hospital, and within a few days, was dead.
Taking the short view, this could be seen as selfish and a little cold; keeping the true biological nature of a child’s parentage from them the entirety of their life, then achieving catharsis by dropping it on them at the last moment, callous.
The long view affords a more palatable palliative: when she called me a bastard, she was just being honest.
RIP Jan Simmons 5/20/31 – 7/7/14
7/31/14
A Little Chat
When I entered the room, everything was already in place. I appreciate good prep and well understand the revealed costs of sloppy planning, having too many times spent precious hours compensating for amateurism and the preciousness of dilettantism. These jobs can be so messy when not properly attended, and posers and show-offs merely increase the difficulty of a hard circumstance.
I am an executioner. I receive pay and even the occasional plaudit for making people offensive to my employer non-existent. To that end, often at my discretion, usually at direct request, I see to it that those dispatched enjoy a journey of agony so remarkably intense that demise is a welcomed mercy at my hand. Often the pain inflicted is sufficient to send my subjects into the great beyond without further inducement on my part.
Which is fine. I find no particular joy in my work, it is but a job and one few are properly suited to. Through training and practice one develops skills, but the drive to such avocation must exist innate: executioners are born then made good through work. Those who take up the work owing to some psychopathology or sociopathology invariably leave the field, often the way many of their subjects do – by death’s official hand. I’ve dispatched more than a few.
Today was different – a little moonlighting. A favor to a friend if you will. Death was not the object, no. Something much deeper and more grievous – I would find this wretch’s spirit and rip it from him. I would eviscerate without ever touching a blade. I’m just that good.
I didn’t know him, didn’t know why, don’t care. Ever. Not my place. I am a technician, an engineer of pain, of death, but not a moral authority or judge. I seek no confession or repentance, I offer no atonement. Those fall out of the purview of my department. I’m the nuts and bolts guy, dealing in hard realities, not squishy abstracts. Salvation? Repentance? Take it to the man in the dress if you want someone to feel your pain. You come to me, you feel your own as well as any I can muster for you.
Usually I work in a fairly sterile official environment – blank walls, tile floor with a drain, good light but not too bright (I have my vision to consider), a rolling worktable for my tools, and a single metal chair or gurney for the subject. Intensity Rooms, as we call them, are ideally isolated with good sound-proofing and access to running water. Water is vital for cleaning up as well as making a mess out of someone, so a good room always has a nozzle.
As I wasn’t working in my usual institutional environment I was pleased at the steps taken to assure my maximum effectiveness. The room appeared as an add-on to a residential house: tile floor, glass walls, decent ceiling clearance.
It had been cleared of everything but a single chair, upon which the subject had the occasion to be lashed. The walls were enshrouded in black to control the light, visibility, and to deaden sound. As this was to transpire in a fairly populated suburban setting, I took the unusual step of turning on some music, giving it some volume. It was just me and him. As it should be.
The music was my own, something driving yet grating, like running the finest edge of a cheese grater across the inside of your skull, back and forth with increasing urgency. I wisely wore earplugs: often even with gags and other sonic muffling accoutrements the subject can manifest cries so shrill as to leave one with hearing loss if not adequately prepared. My ears still ring from an evisceration in Wrilling where the subject shook so violently as to dislodge my ear protection and render me permanently impaired.
Such are the hazards of such work. Beats plumbing…
He was naked but for a sack over his head. His hands were cuffed behind him and he was additionally secured to the chair (which was bolted to the floor) by his ankles. He wasn’t going anywhere. I had all day.
I stepped over to him after setting my toolkit on the table which had been set for me. As the music wailed I leaned in close to his head. “Can you hear me now?” I ground my boot heel on his left foot’s little toes, crushing them. He shuddered then slammed his bagged head right into my nose, breaking it, blood gushing. He had spirit. Even pained, I found that to be good. I was there to remove it, crush it, demolish it, shred it beyond any recognition – I needed to know where it was.
I stood, grabbing my bleeding nose with my left hand, elbowing his face with my right, knocking a few teeth out. They oozed out in a bloody drool under the sack which obscured him from me. He heard me.
I was furious, more at myself than him. I hadn’t even changed out of my street clothes, my shirt was saturated with blood – my blood. I got cocky, and the pro knows that getting cocky is a sure way to get yourself fucked up. And with no one more so than a person you are about to kill, a person who knows you are going to kill them. They don’t tend toward tolerance or ready compliance – most when pressed will fight to stay alive.
In those moments, I am the one they fight. Hence the precautions. I am the vanguard against run-amok disregard for rule of authority: after me comes chaos. With me comes chaos controlled. That is the role of the executioner: chaos controlled.
He got me right on the nose. Assuredly broken. It hurt an awful lot, my eyes welled with tears. I instinctively looked around: any cameras? The threat of embarrassment overcame the pain of injury, an amazing condition. Upon establishing our privacy, the throbbing became one with the pulsing musical beat swirling around us in our special time together, and I grabbed some cotton and stuffed it in my nose. My shirt was a mess. I was annoyed.
I took it off and considered it – if I didn’t give it a good cleaning right now, it was lost. I was at work: lost. I set it aside; I would make use of it soon enough. Long ago I determined to accept loss or personal failure with dispassion – my line of work is about loss and personal failure, to get trapped by sentiment is to perish. I stepped up and kneed him in the nuts. Even though the chair was bolted to the floor, the impact moved him back at least a foot – he literally compressed under my assault.
Then he expanded! I pulled back just as he erupted in puke and blood, cascading from under the sack, rolling down his chest and belly, pooling around his horribly mashed balls. I stepped back and brushed a little puke and what looked to be part of a tooth from my pant cuff. He trembled violently, sweat pouring from him along with more puke and blood. He definitely heard me.
“You know why you’re here.” A statement, not a question. They always know why they are there and to a person deny it till they can endure it no longer. Many cave rather quickly these days as the pussification of our culture has lowered our threshold of pain. Now it hurts too much to even go to work and everybody sits around whining about their pain online. It sickens me.
He was silent. I wasn’t sure if he was being cagey, thought he was being tough, or had swallowed his tongue, so I posited my suggestion more forcefully by bringing a two-foot length of 1.5-inch steel pipe down on his knee, busting the cap right out of his leg, sending it bouncing across the floor. Must have caught him with the edge. Oh well…
The third option averted, he bellowed, “Cocksucker!” I brought the pipe down hard on his shoulder, shattering his right collarbone. He heaved, flopping that direction, and I hit him upside the head with the pipe, just a tap, to keep him focused. He reeled. His chest and crotch were fairly covered with bloody puke and what looked to be chunks of flesh – he probably bit through his cheek. But still he didn’t cry or beg. Defiance. I like it.
I dropped the pipe end down on his right foot – it caught him on the middle toes, breaking three of them nicely, nearly severing the middle one. He jerked. “Still feel tough huh? I’ve got all day. This is just the intro, you can trust me on that. They’ll be finding pieces of you in coyote shit from here to Pomona.” I grabbed my desecrated shirt and stepped over to him. My kid gave me that shirt. Still, as I had executed him several years back the sentiment just wasn’t there.
I took the shirt and wound it into a fairly tight rope. Wrapping it around his neck, I twisted it tight and pulled him up hard. Holding the shirt in my left hand I began to pummel his face through the bag with my right, pounding, pounding.
Then, one good smack and the bag came off. I beheld the wretch. He had allowed his transitory other pursuits to distract him, he had neglected the one person who stood by him and made her sad. The wretch was I.
I woke with a start. I trembled and noticed I was soaked with sweat. Robin slept peacefully next to me. She had been reading more of her grim tales of monsters of days gone by. Once more, her sickness caught up with my madness and it infected my dreams. Sure, I had missed her birthday gift, I deserved the beating. But I was so sick of her psycho nightmares.
I smacked her on the back of the head and pretended to be asleep. She woke up all kerflubbled.
It’s good being a jerk….
I am an executioner. I receive pay and even the occasional plaudit for making people offensive to my employer non-existent. To that end, often at my discretion, usually at direct request, I see to it that those dispatched enjoy a journey of agony so remarkably intense that demise is a welcomed mercy at my hand. Often the pain inflicted is sufficient to send my subjects into the great beyond without further inducement on my part.
Which is fine. I find no particular joy in my work, it is but a job and one few are properly suited to. Through training and practice one develops skills, but the drive to such avocation must exist innate: executioners are born then made good through work. Those who take up the work owing to some psychopathology or sociopathology invariably leave the field, often the way many of their subjects do – by death’s official hand. I’ve dispatched more than a few.
Today was different – a little moonlighting. A favor to a friend if you will. Death was not the object, no. Something much deeper and more grievous – I would find this wretch’s spirit and rip it from him. I would eviscerate without ever touching a blade. I’m just that good.
I didn’t know him, didn’t know why, don’t care. Ever. Not my place. I am a technician, an engineer of pain, of death, but not a moral authority or judge. I seek no confession or repentance, I offer no atonement. Those fall out of the purview of my department. I’m the nuts and bolts guy, dealing in hard realities, not squishy abstracts. Salvation? Repentance? Take it to the man in the dress if you want someone to feel your pain. You come to me, you feel your own as well as any I can muster for you.
Usually I work in a fairly sterile official environment – blank walls, tile floor with a drain, good light but not too bright (I have my vision to consider), a rolling worktable for my tools, and a single metal chair or gurney for the subject. Intensity Rooms, as we call them, are ideally isolated with good sound-proofing and access to running water. Water is vital for cleaning up as well as making a mess out of someone, so a good room always has a nozzle.
As I wasn’t working in my usual institutional environment I was pleased at the steps taken to assure my maximum effectiveness. The room appeared as an add-on to a residential house: tile floor, glass walls, decent ceiling clearance.
It had been cleared of everything but a single chair, upon which the subject had the occasion to be lashed. The walls were enshrouded in black to control the light, visibility, and to deaden sound. As this was to transpire in a fairly populated suburban setting, I took the unusual step of turning on some music, giving it some volume. It was just me and him. As it should be.
The music was my own, something driving yet grating, like running the finest edge of a cheese grater across the inside of your skull, back and forth with increasing urgency. I wisely wore earplugs: often even with gags and other sonic muffling accoutrements the subject can manifest cries so shrill as to leave one with hearing loss if not adequately prepared. My ears still ring from an evisceration in Wrilling where the subject shook so violently as to dislodge my ear protection and render me permanently impaired.
Such are the hazards of such work. Beats plumbing…
He was naked but for a sack over his head. His hands were cuffed behind him and he was additionally secured to the chair (which was bolted to the floor) by his ankles. He wasn’t going anywhere. I had all day.
I stepped over to him after setting my toolkit on the table which had been set for me. As the music wailed I leaned in close to his head. “Can you hear me now?” I ground my boot heel on his left foot’s little toes, crushing them. He shuddered then slammed his bagged head right into my nose, breaking it, blood gushing. He had spirit. Even pained, I found that to be good. I was there to remove it, crush it, demolish it, shred it beyond any recognition – I needed to know where it was.
I stood, grabbing my bleeding nose with my left hand, elbowing his face with my right, knocking a few teeth out. They oozed out in a bloody drool under the sack which obscured him from me. He heard me.
I was furious, more at myself than him. I hadn’t even changed out of my street clothes, my shirt was saturated with blood – my blood. I got cocky, and the pro knows that getting cocky is a sure way to get yourself fucked up. And with no one more so than a person you are about to kill, a person who knows you are going to kill them. They don’t tend toward tolerance or ready compliance – most when pressed will fight to stay alive.
In those moments, I am the one they fight. Hence the precautions. I am the vanguard against run-amok disregard for rule of authority: after me comes chaos. With me comes chaos controlled. That is the role of the executioner: chaos controlled.
He got me right on the nose. Assuredly broken. It hurt an awful lot, my eyes welled with tears. I instinctively looked around: any cameras? The threat of embarrassment overcame the pain of injury, an amazing condition. Upon establishing our privacy, the throbbing became one with the pulsing musical beat swirling around us in our special time together, and I grabbed some cotton and stuffed it in my nose. My shirt was a mess. I was annoyed.
I took it off and considered it – if I didn’t give it a good cleaning right now, it was lost. I was at work: lost. I set it aside; I would make use of it soon enough. Long ago I determined to accept loss or personal failure with dispassion – my line of work is about loss and personal failure, to get trapped by sentiment is to perish. I stepped up and kneed him in the nuts. Even though the chair was bolted to the floor, the impact moved him back at least a foot – he literally compressed under my assault.
Then he expanded! I pulled back just as he erupted in puke and blood, cascading from under the sack, rolling down his chest and belly, pooling around his horribly mashed balls. I stepped back and brushed a little puke and what looked to be part of a tooth from my pant cuff. He trembled violently, sweat pouring from him along with more puke and blood. He definitely heard me.
“You know why you’re here.” A statement, not a question. They always know why they are there and to a person deny it till they can endure it no longer. Many cave rather quickly these days as the pussification of our culture has lowered our threshold of pain. Now it hurts too much to even go to work and everybody sits around whining about their pain online. It sickens me.
He was silent. I wasn’t sure if he was being cagey, thought he was being tough, or had swallowed his tongue, so I posited my suggestion more forcefully by bringing a two-foot length of 1.5-inch steel pipe down on his knee, busting the cap right out of his leg, sending it bouncing across the floor. Must have caught him with the edge. Oh well…
The third option averted, he bellowed, “Cocksucker!” I brought the pipe down hard on his shoulder, shattering his right collarbone. He heaved, flopping that direction, and I hit him upside the head with the pipe, just a tap, to keep him focused. He reeled. His chest and crotch were fairly covered with bloody puke and what looked to be chunks of flesh – he probably bit through his cheek. But still he didn’t cry or beg. Defiance. I like it.
I dropped the pipe end down on his right foot – it caught him on the middle toes, breaking three of them nicely, nearly severing the middle one. He jerked. “Still feel tough huh? I’ve got all day. This is just the intro, you can trust me on that. They’ll be finding pieces of you in coyote shit from here to Pomona.” I grabbed my desecrated shirt and stepped over to him. My kid gave me that shirt. Still, as I had executed him several years back the sentiment just wasn’t there.
I took the shirt and wound it into a fairly tight rope. Wrapping it around his neck, I twisted it tight and pulled him up hard. Holding the shirt in my left hand I began to pummel his face through the bag with my right, pounding, pounding.
Then, one good smack and the bag came off. I beheld the wretch. He had allowed his transitory other pursuits to distract him, he had neglected the one person who stood by him and made her sad. The wretch was I.
I woke with a start. I trembled and noticed I was soaked with sweat. Robin slept peacefully next to me. She had been reading more of her grim tales of monsters of days gone by. Once more, her sickness caught up with my madness and it infected my dreams. Sure, I had missed her birthday gift, I deserved the beating. But I was so sick of her psycho nightmares.
I smacked her on the back of the head and pretended to be asleep. She woke up all kerflubbled.
It’s good being a jerk….
Friday, September 26, 2014
My Favorite Hour (A 50s Memoir)
When I was young, quite young actually, I held a much coveted position as a staff writer for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows. It was there I met and worked with some of show business’s most notable comic minds: Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, Ernest Hemingway (who only worked the first season) and the always hysterical Topo Gigio.
Originally called His Show of Shows, 47 writers good and true were hired and sacked before they came up with Your Show of Shows. Their Show of His, Our Show of 90 Minutes, A Show of Hands (offered by sponsor Ponds), Skippy’s Peanutorium were all floated and sunk before Sid himself came up with his Your Show of Shows. It was rumored that Mel Brooks came up with the first Your but in Sid’s autobiography Your Book of Books (not to be confused with Mel Brook’s autobiography Your Book of Brooks) Caesar dispels that notion:
“Everybody wanted a piece of the title. Woody Allen ran around for months claiming exclusive rights to the ‘of’. The ‘of’. Who wanted a stupid ‘of’? Oy!”
It was an amazing time and a rare honor, almost raw, to work with such show business luminaries and Hemingway, who mostly contributed fishing sketches and brought the beer. In fact, it is a little known story that the beer was what ultimately led to Hemingway's leaving the team. Sid wasn’t big on fishing to begin with, so most of Ernie’s work ended in the crapper, which led to contention between them.
The break came when Ernie (he despised being called that) submitted receipts for the beer. I’ll never forget Sid’s response: “Forty thousand dollars for beer!? For that I could have bought some Germans and brewed my own!”
When he found out Ernie was the only one drinking it he went through the roof. When we got him back down he kvetched: “This is the funniest thing you’ve submitted since you worked here. And it breaks my heart. I could almost understand import, but Coors?”
And with that, he had Woody Allen fire him. Hemingway was a big man and didn’t begrudge Woody for this; we all knew Sid hating firing people. Especially large, rowdy, drunken people, who liked firearms and shows of masculine physicality. He hated firing those kinds of people.
So Woody took the hit for firing Hemingway. Right cross to the nose if I remember correctly. Sent him reeling over a waste can. While hysterically distressing at the time, after Woody got out of the hospital, all fences were mended, primarily by his legal team of Pinchuck, Moosebine & Berkowitz. With the costly litigation, Ernie was driven into early retirement to enjoy his declining years in peace, I imagine. Don’t know what ever became of him…
Originally Neil Simon worked as part of a writing duo with Art Garfunkel. After the Hemingway debacle, budgets were slashed and belts were tightened (this after the disastrous belt slashing and budget tightening first attempt) and Art was let go. Sid had Mel fire him: I remember Mel’s exact woids, “Dis is television, we sell soap. There’s no place for Art in TV.” As we all know that was later expanded to motion pictures, music, literature and the stage.
Of course, Art thought Mel was joking and continued showing up for work until he finally noticed the sign on his office no longer read Garfunkel & Simon, but simply Simon. Infuriated, he grabbed his letters and numbers, storming off, but in his haste he forgot his punctuation which gave Simon the edge in the writing game and it has served him well if popular accounts are to be believed. Garfunkel moved onto other pursuits and achieved phenomenal success in dry goods, where punctuation is only a luxury.
Of course Brooks and Reiner were virtually inseparable, beyond all the time they spent apart, one hilarity after another except, oddly enough, at work. At home, at Solly’s Deli on 54th (not to be confused with Sauli’s Belli on 45th), on the subway, in the elevator for Christ’s sake, these were two of the funniest guys I ever met. I actually lost weight trying to eat with them because I couldn’t get any food past my trachea. Hysterical.
But then they’d show up at work and couldn’t rub 2 chuckles together to save their lives. It was amazing. Initially dubbed Writer’s Block on the Clock, shortened to Clock Block out of convenience, some suspected it was an attempt to hold out for bigger paychecks, knowing that if Sid fired them, invariably he’d have to have one fire the other one which would just get messy and cost more than just tolerating their shenanigans. Hard to imagine these two comic powerhouses on a career defining show unable to come up with a joke, but there it was.
They actually made Hemingway look funny, putting a little hat on him and a big squeezy red nose. This of course after he had passed out drunk again after offering up his latest version of his fishing joke. He didn’t discover his get-up until he passed a mirror on 55th St South, whereby he punched a newsy and caught a hack to Trader Vic’s on 44th St W. Interestingly, he forgot to remove the offending apparel and ended up in an impromptu rendition of HMS Pinafore at Elaine’s.
To counter Clock Block, Sid had Alice Bluhearty, the network stenographer, follow Carl and Mel around and transcribe their conversations. Their first season contribution in fact came from 7 elevator rides, 3 breakfasts, 9 lunches, 12 dinners and a traffic jam on 9th St. One of their most memorable routines, that escapes me at the moment, came from them waiting for a prescription at Schwab’s on 97th.
A couple of wonderful guys, inoffensive to work with and brilliant to hang around with – sadly, owing to the remarkable trajectory of my career, I haven’t had opportunity to keep track of their work. I hope the industry has served them well.
And little Woody Allen; 2 first names and everything. Woody was the closest one to me age-wise, we were both the young upstarts and the subject of much ribbing, a little hipping and some spining from the other guys on the staff. After some particularly vicious shinning from Neil, Woody moved closer to my end of the conference table while castigating him, “Very mature, Neil. No, no really quality stuff. I’m beginning to understand why everybody thinks they took the wrong name off your door…”
I remember one particular crunch where we needed a punch-line for the Near-sighted Boxer sketch. Reiner kept suggesting the Boxer knocks himself out, while Brooks just kept repeating “Nibbles” (ultimately the line we went with). I’ll never forget at one point Woody looked up at me, as he did most people, and said, “Uh, could you pass me that pencil?” And I did. A defining moment in my writing career to be certain.
Woody was a chick magnet and he seemed to always have one or two stuck to his shirt or trousers. Often they would become the source of material for the show as we would peel them off and make them wait for Woody in the green room. Sid often said, “If comedy doesn’t woik out for you, you could become an adult haberdasher…”
In his autobiography Sid recounted, “When the show finally cancelled, Woody gave me a lovely double knit jacket with two blonds stuck to the sleeves. I only wear it on special occasions. Usually when the wife is out…”
At first I thought Sid had hired Topo so Woody would have someone to be bigger than, but the first week Topo made it clear he was settling for no sizism or rodent bias, or he would scurry. I came to feel he held something, some deep dark secret, some ineffable shame over Sid, and I wasn’t alone in this: Woody, Neil and Ernie all expressed similar sentiment. The way Sid let that cute little fuzz ball walk all over him made us sick to our stomachs, except for Woody, who got sick to his pancreas, leading to another hospital visit.
Once, while Woody was hospitalized for a pancreatic enema (Panema) Sid became incensed at my perfume joke, telling me in no uncertain terms, “It stinks!”, while the term Simon used was Fragrant. Eager to please Sid, I set about rewriting it, removing many of the “Nose” references. As I typed furiously, I felt a tap on my shoulder – it was a boy from Western Union with a telegram for me. It read:
To: Hammer
Writing Staff – Your Show of Shows
Re: C. – Topo asked me to inform you - You’re Sacked
That is all
Hemingway
Originally called His Show of Shows, 47 writers good and true were hired and sacked before they came up with Your Show of Shows. Their Show of His, Our Show of 90 Minutes, A Show of Hands (offered by sponsor Ponds), Skippy’s Peanutorium were all floated and sunk before Sid himself came up with his Your Show of Shows. It was rumored that Mel Brooks came up with the first Your but in Sid’s autobiography Your Book of Books (not to be confused with Mel Brook’s autobiography Your Book of Brooks) Caesar dispels that notion:
“Everybody wanted a piece of the title. Woody Allen ran around for months claiming exclusive rights to the ‘of’. The ‘of’. Who wanted a stupid ‘of’? Oy!”
It was an amazing time and a rare honor, almost raw, to work with such show business luminaries and Hemingway, who mostly contributed fishing sketches and brought the beer. In fact, it is a little known story that the beer was what ultimately led to Hemingway's leaving the team. Sid wasn’t big on fishing to begin with, so most of Ernie’s work ended in the crapper, which led to contention between them.
The break came when Ernie (he despised being called that) submitted receipts for the beer. I’ll never forget Sid’s response: “Forty thousand dollars for beer!? For that I could have bought some Germans and brewed my own!”
When he found out Ernie was the only one drinking it he went through the roof. When we got him back down he kvetched: “This is the funniest thing you’ve submitted since you worked here. And it breaks my heart. I could almost understand import, but Coors?”
And with that, he had Woody Allen fire him. Hemingway was a big man and didn’t begrudge Woody for this; we all knew Sid hating firing people. Especially large, rowdy, drunken people, who liked firearms and shows of masculine physicality. He hated firing those kinds of people.
So Woody took the hit for firing Hemingway. Right cross to the nose if I remember correctly. Sent him reeling over a waste can. While hysterically distressing at the time, after Woody got out of the hospital, all fences were mended, primarily by his legal team of Pinchuck, Moosebine & Berkowitz. With the costly litigation, Ernie was driven into early retirement to enjoy his declining years in peace, I imagine. Don’t know what ever became of him…
Originally Neil Simon worked as part of a writing duo with Art Garfunkel. After the Hemingway debacle, budgets were slashed and belts were tightened (this after the disastrous belt slashing and budget tightening first attempt) and Art was let go. Sid had Mel fire him: I remember Mel’s exact woids, “Dis is television, we sell soap. There’s no place for Art in TV.” As we all know that was later expanded to motion pictures, music, literature and the stage.
Of course, Art thought Mel was joking and continued showing up for work until he finally noticed the sign on his office no longer read Garfunkel & Simon, but simply Simon. Infuriated, he grabbed his letters and numbers, storming off, but in his haste he forgot his punctuation which gave Simon the edge in the writing game and it has served him well if popular accounts are to be believed. Garfunkel moved onto other pursuits and achieved phenomenal success in dry goods, where punctuation is only a luxury.
Of course Brooks and Reiner were virtually inseparable, beyond all the time they spent apart, one hilarity after another except, oddly enough, at work. At home, at Solly’s Deli on 54th (not to be confused with Sauli’s Belli on 45th), on the subway, in the elevator for Christ’s sake, these were two of the funniest guys I ever met. I actually lost weight trying to eat with them because I couldn’t get any food past my trachea. Hysterical.
But then they’d show up at work and couldn’t rub 2 chuckles together to save their lives. It was amazing. Initially dubbed Writer’s Block on the Clock, shortened to Clock Block out of convenience, some suspected it was an attempt to hold out for bigger paychecks, knowing that if Sid fired them, invariably he’d have to have one fire the other one which would just get messy and cost more than just tolerating their shenanigans. Hard to imagine these two comic powerhouses on a career defining show unable to come up with a joke, but there it was.
They actually made Hemingway look funny, putting a little hat on him and a big squeezy red nose. This of course after he had passed out drunk again after offering up his latest version of his fishing joke. He didn’t discover his get-up until he passed a mirror on 55th St South, whereby he punched a newsy and caught a hack to Trader Vic’s on 44th St W. Interestingly, he forgot to remove the offending apparel and ended up in an impromptu rendition of HMS Pinafore at Elaine’s.
To counter Clock Block, Sid had Alice Bluhearty, the network stenographer, follow Carl and Mel around and transcribe their conversations. Their first season contribution in fact came from 7 elevator rides, 3 breakfasts, 9 lunches, 12 dinners and a traffic jam on 9th St. One of their most memorable routines, that escapes me at the moment, came from them waiting for a prescription at Schwab’s on 97th.
A couple of wonderful guys, inoffensive to work with and brilliant to hang around with – sadly, owing to the remarkable trajectory of my career, I haven’t had opportunity to keep track of their work. I hope the industry has served them well.
And little Woody Allen; 2 first names and everything. Woody was the closest one to me age-wise, we were both the young upstarts and the subject of much ribbing, a little hipping and some spining from the other guys on the staff. After some particularly vicious shinning from Neil, Woody moved closer to my end of the conference table while castigating him, “Very mature, Neil. No, no really quality stuff. I’m beginning to understand why everybody thinks they took the wrong name off your door…”
I remember one particular crunch where we needed a punch-line for the Near-sighted Boxer sketch. Reiner kept suggesting the Boxer knocks himself out, while Brooks just kept repeating “Nibbles” (ultimately the line we went with). I’ll never forget at one point Woody looked up at me, as he did most people, and said, “Uh, could you pass me that pencil?” And I did. A defining moment in my writing career to be certain.
Woody was a chick magnet and he seemed to always have one or two stuck to his shirt or trousers. Often they would become the source of material for the show as we would peel them off and make them wait for Woody in the green room. Sid often said, “If comedy doesn’t woik out for you, you could become an adult haberdasher…”
In his autobiography Sid recounted, “When the show finally cancelled, Woody gave me a lovely double knit jacket with two blonds stuck to the sleeves. I only wear it on special occasions. Usually when the wife is out…”
At first I thought Sid had hired Topo so Woody would have someone to be bigger than, but the first week Topo made it clear he was settling for no sizism or rodent bias, or he would scurry. I came to feel he held something, some deep dark secret, some ineffable shame over Sid, and I wasn’t alone in this: Woody, Neil and Ernie all expressed similar sentiment. The way Sid let that cute little fuzz ball walk all over him made us sick to our stomachs, except for Woody, who got sick to his pancreas, leading to another hospital visit.
Once, while Woody was hospitalized for a pancreatic enema (Panema) Sid became incensed at my perfume joke, telling me in no uncertain terms, “It stinks!”, while the term Simon used was Fragrant. Eager to please Sid, I set about rewriting it, removing many of the “Nose” references. As I typed furiously, I felt a tap on my shoulder – it was a boy from Western Union with a telegram for me. It read:
To: Hammer
Writing Staff – Your Show of Shows
Re: C. – Topo asked me to inform you - You’re Sacked
That is all
Hemingway
Monday, September 22, 2014
Aloft
Deranged didactics dumbing down
Waylaid wearing world’s weight
Drawing deeply designers drown
Worried wonder why we wait
Rigid reason rejects renown
Insane insistence ids inflate
For fulsome fearsome faces frown
Constant cries commiserate
Seeking solace spirits soar
Heartened healthy heads held high
Majestic minds meander more
Worried we wait, wonder why
Entreat excitements eyes explore
Freed from fear from fetters fly
Elate ecstatic evermore
Satisfaction’s soaring sky
With wings we waft
Seek sojourn soft
Detritus doffed
Afloat aloft
Cumulous caressing cloud
Far from fervor friendlies float
United untamed unbowed
Reason’s wrecks remain remote
Even empathy endowed
Resolute resisting rote
Disappointment disavowed
An aerial antidote
With wings we waft
Seek sojourn soft
Detritus doffed
Alive aloft
©2014 simmbiosis 8/27/14
Waylaid wearing world’s weight
Drawing deeply designers drown
Worried wonder why we wait
Rigid reason rejects renown
Insane insistence ids inflate
For fulsome fearsome faces frown
Constant cries commiserate
Seeking solace spirits soar
Heartened healthy heads held high
Majestic minds meander more
Worried we wait, wonder why
Entreat excitements eyes explore
Freed from fear from fetters fly
Elate ecstatic evermore
Satisfaction’s soaring sky
With wings we waft
Seek sojourn soft
Detritus doffed
Afloat aloft
Cumulous caressing cloud
Far from fervor friendlies float
United untamed unbowed
Reason’s wrecks remain remote
Even empathy endowed
Resolute resisting rote
Disappointment disavowed
An aerial antidote
With wings we waft
Seek sojourn soft
Detritus doffed
Alive aloft
©2014 simmbiosis 8/27/14
Thursday, September 11, 2014
Nature Preserves/First Period
Nature Preserves
I sat at my desk, struggling to conclude my kid’s version of the Stephen King period piece, Carrie. My publisher, Garfunkel & Schuster, had been relentlessly dogging me owing to my rapidly approaching deadline coupled with the fact I hadn’t submitted a single page after 3 months while burning through my Advance, Movie Rights Advance, TV Spin-off Advance, and the pawning of the furniture in their reception area. It wasn’t going well.
I was distracted. For a guy that can compose piano concertos while writing alliterative lyrics, philosophical studies of the foundation of human linguistics, creating intense visual artwork and watching hardcore midget/donkey porn, that is no small admission. Most people are hard pressed to accomplish anything with midget/donkey porn on.
As a child of the media age, I thrive upon distraction; there’s always some noise happening somewhere near. Of course many bemoan such attention stealers; understandably, narrow focus in this broad range is difficult at best. But I can usually pull focus and force the issue (with midget/donkey porn this is essential), thus achieving amazing things under the strangest of conditions.
But I was stymied. I had spent 3 weeks trying to sanitize the scene where Carrie impales herself on a crucifix screaming “Fuck me Jesus, fuck me Jesus!” before Robin – muse and editrix – pointed out to me that that scene was from the movie The Exorcist and was thus not germane to the original assignment.
My agent, Morrie (Moose) Berkowitz, was near apoplexy, so I stopped taking his calls, prompting him to come by unannounced and wail out on my driveway for hours at a time until Ilsa next door complained. Moose – he hated that name – countered by playing recordings of her yapping, yowling curs back at her, prompting her back inside to fume.
Of course none of this helped so when I heard a knock at the door I was prepared, so I thought, for anything. I threw on a robe, Robin’s it turned out, so it acted as a tight-fitting mini-toga, and stormed to the door.
“I got it, Morrie, Garfunkel wants his lobby set back…I’m on the phone as we speak…”
I held my dead cell phone to my head and squinted to make it look like I was trying to hear over the distant, encroaching sirens. I looked askance; this wasn’t Morrie.
Indeed, upon my porch in the middle of Godridge, 3:00 in the afternoon, stood not my agent Morrie but a very distressed looking zebra. “I’ll call you back…” I said to the phone, then let it slip from my fingers to the runner on the foyer linoleum. The zebra watched as it hit the floor then looked back up at me, puzzled. I’m sure I must have been something to see there in my wild haired, red-eyed, mini-toga thing.
Now, I’m fairly open minded; I work hard to avoid too much bias in my perspective. But even at my best I found it hard to reconcile a zebra soliciting door to door. I thought, “Jehovah’s Witness?” then quickly dispelled that notion in favor of solar retrofitting. I noticed he didn’t have a clipboard. Our eyes met.
“Uh, can I help you?” It was instinctive I suppose; I have pretty much always spoken to animals as if they could not only understand human, but Americanized English human. He looked at me imploringly, but I suspect didn’t decipher the nuance in my query. The sirens neared, accompanied now by the sounds of thoroughly unhappy people, lots of shouters.
The zebra (Eddie his name apparently) looked over his shoulder at the sounds of the nearing people then looked back at me, hopefully. I looked past him at the still street and could hear the local Godridge chopper and about 30 different sirens all closing in, fast. It took me a beat, but I got it when Eddie looked down at his hooves then back up at me.
The Welcome Mat.
Damn, he had me. Originally purchased for hookers and drug dealers, it had fallen into recent disuse owing to dearth of funds resultant to its original application coupled with Advance profligacy. I looked at him, then pulled the door open as I stepped aside. He wiped his hooves on the mat then stepped in graciously. I showed him into the dining room then closed the door.
He stood there, kind of embarrassed, which made me a little uneasy as well – some situations are more difficult than others to muster small talk in. I almost asked if he’d like a seat, then realized I didn’t know if I’d want him to stay that long. I didn’t even know what he was being pursued for. Perhaps he had mal intent. I took a cautious position.
Eddie looked at me with what I would characterize as gratitude – but later turned out to be gas - and then looked around the place. Most of my minor work he gave a quick look at, he actually snorted at Crucifried but was clearly more enamored of Robin’s Meth Odd painting over the firepit/TV hole, viewing it from different angles, adjusting the light for better representation.
There came a frenzied knocking at the door. Eddie looked up concerned. I looked at him, “Relax. I’ll see who it is…”
“There’s an escaped zebra on the loose!” He was a pudgy little bald guy. His name patch declared him Pete.
“Well, that would be consistent with escape.” Pete eyed me suspiciously – what was I up to? I elaborated, “Being on the loose and all.” He wasn’t buying it, so I turned it back on him and the wild-eyed contingent swarming the street beyond his pudgy suspicions.
“How could you lose a zebra in Northridge*!?” Pete was on the defensive, right where I wanted him, “I didn’t lose it! They had it for the Farmer’s Market. On loan from the Zoo…”
Ah, the weekly Farmer’s Market at the Fascist Center. In the media pit, Eddie knocked over The Simpson’s Season 14 with a crash while nosing around the DVDs. Pete looked up concerned. I covered.
“The Fashion Center** is 2 miles away. How did it get all the way over here? Presuming it is…” Now Pete was annoyed. He scrunched up his pudgy face, then shoved his hand in his coveralls. “Crash. Down on Plummer. Just trying to warn people.” He scowled at me then turned back to the busyness on the street beyond, his voice trailing off, “Asshole.”
I closed the door and went back in. Eddie was watching The Great Escape. I brought out the Fiddle Faddle. Don’t think I’ll ever finish that adaptation…
*what infidels call Godridge
**what conservatives call the Fascist Center
First Period
A lonely little girl lived in a town not far away. Her mother was very sick and had no one but her daughter to help her. Like her lonely girl, she was very lonely as well. They only had each other.
They lived on a quiet street in a small house with two stories. As they had no TV, they would often amuse themselves telling and retelling those stories. The little girl had a special room all to herself, under the stairs, where she could think about the stories and other things her mother wanted her to.
Her mother had a bad sickness, it made her see things that weren’t there and think people who were pretty much average were instead very, very bad. This more than any other thing kept her from having friends; she was afraid of people and that made them afraid of her too.
The little girl was like her mother in that she was afraid of people. The kids in her town didn’t understand why she was afraid of them and as most kids most places, were too selfish to care enough to find out why. So they teased her. They called her names, threw things at her and did things to embarrass her, to make her feel even worse than she did.
It worked and she sunk into her mind where she could be accepted, where she could be liked. Unlike other girls and boys who had to use their bodies to move things, she was able to move things with her thinking. The problem came in that she had the most power to move things when she was angry.
It came to pass that when her feelings got hurt, other people’s bodies got hurt too. This did not help her get more friends. And as she had none, one would be more.
When little girls become big girls, their bodies change much like when babies become little girls: they get bigger in places; they get stronger and smarter and faster. When little girls become big girls they become able to make babies. Their bodies change to allow that to occur. The girls at her school knew about this. The little girl didn’t.
She found out at school. First period, in the gym, she found out in a most embarrassing way. The girls at school saw fit to embarrass her even more; they mocked, called her names, threw things at her. This made the little girl cry. She was very sad. When she understood that her issue was normal for girls her age, she was relieved, but very unhappy.
She asked her mother why she never told her about this, why she was allowed to go to school not knowing. But her mother was sick. She told her daughter that the issue of her concern was the result of her bad behavior, that she was a bad girl with bad thoughts. She made the little girl go to her special place to think on her distress. This made the little girl very unhappy.
Things began to move about.
One of the girls at her school felt bad about making fun of the little girl. She had her boyfriend ask her to the prom, a big deal in any girl’s life. The little girl didn’t believe him; she thought she was being tricked. But her classmate’s boyfriend did not give up and finally the little girl agreed to go with him.
One of the girls who made fun of the little girl could not go to the prom for that very reason. She and her boyfriend came up with a way to really embarrass the little girl. She blamed the little girl for her not being able to go to the prom. She did not see her part in her problems. They would come to haunt her.
The little girl, in a dress she made, enjoyed the prom. She and her classmate’s boyfriend were even crowned king and queen of the prom. Then the mean girl and her meaner boyfriend played their trick on the little girl.
So she killed them all.
The End
I sat at my desk, struggling to conclude my kid’s version of the Stephen King period piece, Carrie. My publisher, Garfunkel & Schuster, had been relentlessly dogging me owing to my rapidly approaching deadline coupled with the fact I hadn’t submitted a single page after 3 months while burning through my Advance, Movie Rights Advance, TV Spin-off Advance, and the pawning of the furniture in their reception area. It wasn’t going well.
I was distracted. For a guy that can compose piano concertos while writing alliterative lyrics, philosophical studies of the foundation of human linguistics, creating intense visual artwork and watching hardcore midget/donkey porn, that is no small admission. Most people are hard pressed to accomplish anything with midget/donkey porn on.
As a child of the media age, I thrive upon distraction; there’s always some noise happening somewhere near. Of course many bemoan such attention stealers; understandably, narrow focus in this broad range is difficult at best. But I can usually pull focus and force the issue (with midget/donkey porn this is essential), thus achieving amazing things under the strangest of conditions.
But I was stymied. I had spent 3 weeks trying to sanitize the scene where Carrie impales herself on a crucifix screaming “Fuck me Jesus, fuck me Jesus!” before Robin – muse and editrix – pointed out to me that that scene was from the movie The Exorcist and was thus not germane to the original assignment.
My agent, Morrie (Moose) Berkowitz, was near apoplexy, so I stopped taking his calls, prompting him to come by unannounced and wail out on my driveway for hours at a time until Ilsa next door complained. Moose – he hated that name – countered by playing recordings of her yapping, yowling curs back at her, prompting her back inside to fume.
Of course none of this helped so when I heard a knock at the door I was prepared, so I thought, for anything. I threw on a robe, Robin’s it turned out, so it acted as a tight-fitting mini-toga, and stormed to the door.
“I got it, Morrie, Garfunkel wants his lobby set back…I’m on the phone as we speak…”
I held my dead cell phone to my head and squinted to make it look like I was trying to hear over the distant, encroaching sirens. I looked askance; this wasn’t Morrie.
Indeed, upon my porch in the middle of Godridge, 3:00 in the afternoon, stood not my agent Morrie but a very distressed looking zebra. “I’ll call you back…” I said to the phone, then let it slip from my fingers to the runner on the foyer linoleum. The zebra watched as it hit the floor then looked back up at me, puzzled. I’m sure I must have been something to see there in my wild haired, red-eyed, mini-toga thing.
Now, I’m fairly open minded; I work hard to avoid too much bias in my perspective. But even at my best I found it hard to reconcile a zebra soliciting door to door. I thought, “Jehovah’s Witness?” then quickly dispelled that notion in favor of solar retrofitting. I noticed he didn’t have a clipboard. Our eyes met.
“Uh, can I help you?” It was instinctive I suppose; I have pretty much always spoken to animals as if they could not only understand human, but Americanized English human. He looked at me imploringly, but I suspect didn’t decipher the nuance in my query. The sirens neared, accompanied now by the sounds of thoroughly unhappy people, lots of shouters.
The zebra (Eddie his name apparently) looked over his shoulder at the sounds of the nearing people then looked back at me, hopefully. I looked past him at the still street and could hear the local Godridge chopper and about 30 different sirens all closing in, fast. It took me a beat, but I got it when Eddie looked down at his hooves then back up at me.
The Welcome Mat.
Damn, he had me. Originally purchased for hookers and drug dealers, it had fallen into recent disuse owing to dearth of funds resultant to its original application coupled with Advance profligacy. I looked at him, then pulled the door open as I stepped aside. He wiped his hooves on the mat then stepped in graciously. I showed him into the dining room then closed the door.
He stood there, kind of embarrassed, which made me a little uneasy as well – some situations are more difficult than others to muster small talk in. I almost asked if he’d like a seat, then realized I didn’t know if I’d want him to stay that long. I didn’t even know what he was being pursued for. Perhaps he had mal intent. I took a cautious position.
Eddie looked at me with what I would characterize as gratitude – but later turned out to be gas - and then looked around the place. Most of my minor work he gave a quick look at, he actually snorted at Crucifried but was clearly more enamored of Robin’s Meth Odd painting over the firepit/TV hole, viewing it from different angles, adjusting the light for better representation.
There came a frenzied knocking at the door. Eddie looked up concerned. I looked at him, “Relax. I’ll see who it is…”
“There’s an escaped zebra on the loose!” He was a pudgy little bald guy. His name patch declared him Pete.
“Well, that would be consistent with escape.” Pete eyed me suspiciously – what was I up to? I elaborated, “Being on the loose and all.” He wasn’t buying it, so I turned it back on him and the wild-eyed contingent swarming the street beyond his pudgy suspicions.
“How could you lose a zebra in Northridge*!?” Pete was on the defensive, right where I wanted him, “I didn’t lose it! They had it for the Farmer’s Market. On loan from the Zoo…”
Ah, the weekly Farmer’s Market at the Fascist Center. In the media pit, Eddie knocked over The Simpson’s Season 14 with a crash while nosing around the DVDs. Pete looked up concerned. I covered.
“The Fashion Center** is 2 miles away. How did it get all the way over here? Presuming it is…” Now Pete was annoyed. He scrunched up his pudgy face, then shoved his hand in his coveralls. “Crash. Down on Plummer. Just trying to warn people.” He scowled at me then turned back to the busyness on the street beyond, his voice trailing off, “Asshole.”
I closed the door and went back in. Eddie was watching The Great Escape. I brought out the Fiddle Faddle. Don’t think I’ll ever finish that adaptation…
*what infidels call Godridge
**what conservatives call the Fascist Center
First Period
A lonely little girl lived in a town not far away. Her mother was very sick and had no one but her daughter to help her. Like her lonely girl, she was very lonely as well. They only had each other.
They lived on a quiet street in a small house with two stories. As they had no TV, they would often amuse themselves telling and retelling those stories. The little girl had a special room all to herself, under the stairs, where she could think about the stories and other things her mother wanted her to.
Her mother had a bad sickness, it made her see things that weren’t there and think people who were pretty much average were instead very, very bad. This more than any other thing kept her from having friends; she was afraid of people and that made them afraid of her too.
The little girl was like her mother in that she was afraid of people. The kids in her town didn’t understand why she was afraid of them and as most kids most places, were too selfish to care enough to find out why. So they teased her. They called her names, threw things at her and did things to embarrass her, to make her feel even worse than she did.
It worked and she sunk into her mind where she could be accepted, where she could be liked. Unlike other girls and boys who had to use their bodies to move things, she was able to move things with her thinking. The problem came in that she had the most power to move things when she was angry.
It came to pass that when her feelings got hurt, other people’s bodies got hurt too. This did not help her get more friends. And as she had none, one would be more.
When little girls become big girls, their bodies change much like when babies become little girls: they get bigger in places; they get stronger and smarter and faster. When little girls become big girls they become able to make babies. Their bodies change to allow that to occur. The girls at her school knew about this. The little girl didn’t.
She found out at school. First period, in the gym, she found out in a most embarrassing way. The girls at school saw fit to embarrass her even more; they mocked, called her names, threw things at her. This made the little girl cry. She was very sad. When she understood that her issue was normal for girls her age, she was relieved, but very unhappy.
She asked her mother why she never told her about this, why she was allowed to go to school not knowing. But her mother was sick. She told her daughter that the issue of her concern was the result of her bad behavior, that she was a bad girl with bad thoughts. She made the little girl go to her special place to think on her distress. This made the little girl very unhappy.
Things began to move about.
One of the girls at her school felt bad about making fun of the little girl. She had her boyfriend ask her to the prom, a big deal in any girl’s life. The little girl didn’t believe him; she thought she was being tricked. But her classmate’s boyfriend did not give up and finally the little girl agreed to go with him.
One of the girls who made fun of the little girl could not go to the prom for that very reason. She and her boyfriend came up with a way to really embarrass the little girl. She blamed the little girl for her not being able to go to the prom. She did not see her part in her problems. They would come to haunt her.
The little girl, in a dress she made, enjoyed the prom. She and her classmate’s boyfriend were even crowned king and queen of the prom. Then the mean girl and her meaner boyfriend played their trick on the little girl.
So she killed them all.
The End
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
Funny Man
The laughter has abated
Alas the presses cried
Tragedy has won again
A funny man has died
They said his sadness took him
They called it suicide
It seems the best life offers
Leaves us dissatisfied
Each day seems more difficult
In all this to abide
Where all the sadness welling
In our hearts is multiplied
So often we have seen it
Where humor has belied
The smile on the face
Masks the misery inside
Thank you for your laughter
My sorrow for your pain
The world has lost a funny man
Who brightened the mundane
Alas your great sadness
Wipes the smile from my face
Even though your joy made
The world a better place
The battle with addiction
The enemy within
So hard to best the killer
That lives beneath your skin
Life within the spotlight
Hero or heroin
The high price of celebrity
The winners seldom win
Thank you for your laughter
My sorrow for your pain
The world has lost a funny man
Who brightened the mundane
Alas your great sadness
Wipes the smile from my face
Even though your joy made
The world a better place
For Robin Williams with great sorrow
© 2014 simmbiosis 8/12/14
Alas the presses cried
Tragedy has won again
A funny man has died
They said his sadness took him
They called it suicide
It seems the best life offers
Leaves us dissatisfied
Each day seems more difficult
In all this to abide
Where all the sadness welling
In our hearts is multiplied
So often we have seen it
Where humor has belied
The smile on the face
Masks the misery inside
Thank you for your laughter
My sorrow for your pain
The world has lost a funny man
Who brightened the mundane
Alas your great sadness
Wipes the smile from my face
Even though your joy made
The world a better place
The battle with addiction
The enemy within
So hard to best the killer
That lives beneath your skin
Life within the spotlight
Hero or heroin
The high price of celebrity
The winners seldom win
Thank you for your laughter
My sorrow for your pain
The world has lost a funny man
Who brightened the mundane
Alas your great sadness
Wipes the smile from my face
Even though your joy made
The world a better place
For Robin Williams with great sorrow
© 2014 simmbiosis 8/12/14
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