“If you’re so smart mister, why ain’t we rich,” said the feminine side of the family owned Nixon burger, a drive in, mimicking the Hula Hut without the scantily clad car hops, waiting for their break....Whittier California circa 1952. Momma flipping the pattiets to the ceiling, playing out her role as wife mother confessor and fry cook in pursuit of business.
But what the hell is the business you ask, neighbor
II
The ding a ling off the wall phone
“A big order in La Habra...who should we say.... The tennis pro off that Glen Aire country club south of Ventura in Sherman Oaks ....Joel Arden..a sumptuous feast for three. His lady and son Lefty.”
A nickel an d dime bandit. His own shop, giving lessons, re stringing racquets.....Remember Herby Titler’s Church&Utica....in the 30's..Harry Diamond, Nathan Goldstein. Tubby Raskin those 6 clay courts.....re stringing racquets.
Remember pigs have guts, neighbor.
III
“Where is that testy son of ours?....cultivating the paparazzi for his run for Helen Gahagan Douglas’s Congressional seat.....get him back on his game...
“Tricky Dick where are thou kiddo? An order from a fat cat Olancha Drive.....he’s a tipper in La Habra.”....”
“But can he tickle the 88 keys?” asked the Nixon burgerTricky in hisfootbasll helmet and shoulder pads.... a Chopin polonaise spinoff... his self serving heroics.
Scoring the winning T.D. whupping the sororities being the best in his fantasy, never
succumbing to the Burger. But rising above it.
“Awesome”
IV
“Nixon burger sir,”he said offering the platter to Joe, the Fullerton Orange County panorama beneath the one bedroom cliff estate..a one acre with space for a tennis court.. swimming pool..
Nixon knew the lay of the land as he tried to make a score outside trhe gridiron in his search for mantra...Hillcrest Brentwood country clubs... the Riveria 18 holes... Beverly Hills tennis club...
“You’re the pro at Glen Aire...wow....a major W in that wow,”he said ,,,”Los ?Angeles tennis club and Perry Jones.....Jack Kramer Ted Schroeder Ted Olewine
Denying any “passport” to Pancho Gonzales from East Los Angeles....the barrio...
Garfield High School.... the other side of the tracks, neighbor.
V
“Keep the change,”said the tennis pro, ratcheting back those depression laden memories in Brooklyn at Herbie Titler tennis shop....
Wasn’t his expansiveness a mirror of Tricky Dick’s burger aggressions. The two seekers into the their destinies, shaking hands, their palms moist with sweat beads as they recognized each other in their cynical eye scathing configurations......
VI
Sitting on the bench, Richard Nixon waited for his chance. A varsity lettrer ‘W’ ut the coach savoring moment when could remove the splinters from sitting so long.....
What more could a junior high scrub from Yorba Linda prove?
Didn’t the vice principal introduce him to his girl friend and wife in futuro Pat...
All he needed was a break...
“Dear Duke watching you riding shotgun on “Stagecoach”, Pat and I savvy you as our hero..Your friend, Dick
VII
Three years at Duke law school, a stint as a Naval Officer in Aleutian waters playing poker......he got out of his mothballs....into luck and hope at the Nixonburger, “Slim”
(Howard Hughes)bankrolling Ma and Pa with $250,000 big ones......
Little did the protagonist of “Nixon in China” know he would beat Helen Gahagan Douglas ..Melvyn Douglas ‘s frau, co star with Greta Garbo “Ninotocha” Ernest Lubitsch with crafted added dialogue by Billy Wilder, the German emigre. allying with Jack Lemmon
Walter Matthau and Fred MacMurray.
VIII
The character assassination of Helen Gahagan Douglas....
Go after Helen Gahagan as a Commie but she is a well entrenched living North of Franklin in Hollywood...she has star quality but she can be whupped Tricky.....
.A liberal fer sure neighbor but her actor husband Melvin D. is a pinko, favors the American people....you can spear her like Professor Titus quoted in ‘Politics’....
Halderman and Erlichman sitting in his seating chart.not knowing you Tricky would chose them to guard the oval office from the true believers, neighbor. .....
“Welcome to the neighborhood of skulldollery Repeating the big lie until the public believes it. A hypnosis., a trance Tricky...y’gotta have balls...politics isn’t for faint hearted idealists..”.
Like Harry Truman said “if you can’t stand the heat... stay out of my kitchen.....why my son son had his eyes on the oval office...he could have made a good iving with the Nixonburger....Him and Pat and the girls Tricia and Julie could have settled in Yorba Linda where his library is....buthe had to get the splinters out of his butt first..
Good marriages for the girls......They deserve the best..
You betta believe it, neighbor..
IX
Pumped up.... he drove the coupe up to the Arden acre estate and trhir two bedroom at the edge of the hill, the panoramic view over the Fullerton Whittier Yorba Linda Pico reality scene: orange groves and chicken ranches..the rooster wake up call at dawn..
Tricky had come a long way since the boys vice principal at the middle school introduced him to his Pat, his life’s partner in his drive to capture the Iago like fuel to the promised land...the Congressional seat
Into theSenate.... kissing up with Ike’s coattails...
The “Senator from Formoso’s” suicide of Californiaa’s senior Senator..Bill Knowland..and the JFK assassination..........
A whirl for a kiddo who got splinters sitting on the Whittier College pigskin bench, waiting for the call, he had come a long way.....hearing the choo choo of the Southern Pacific locomotive..
The Glen Aire tennis pro Joe Arden and his missus and son were but links toward the good life the Brentwood Beverly Hills Beverly Wood Pacific Palisades Malibu reality scenes in comparison with the drive in Nixon burger black top.
Yorba Linda Whittier origins
X
However the first leg of the Nixon odyssey was to capture the Helen gahagan Douglas Congressional seat.....the underpinnings of that aggressive myth that the Nixon burger legal eagle could brush the lady with a paint of red.
“Wasn’t she a front for Commies....a pinko of an actor husband. How could she represent these hard working nose to the grindstone..... humans believing in the American dDeam.
The Nixon burger thinking, the IBM Wastson wonder of wonders wyhupping the incumbent....the Nixon burger mother taking the apron off,
Those burgers marketing a Westside target, the management extended into a
seductive quest.
XI
Meanwhile Chairman Mao and his alter ego Chou en Lai escaped the wrath of Chaing Kai shek and his madame, fleeing to the caves in the central provinces..
Chairman Mao when he wasn’t scribbling in his book ...rehearsed his foxtrot later to bve reprised in “Nixon in China”, his madame playing out her ballet lkie scene..her dancers in their spiked heels, carrying rifles......but we’re getting ahead of ourselves, aren’t we neighbor?
Tricky hungered for recognition, an appropriation from those chicken farm orange grove Nixon burger Orange County plains.
The North Rossmore LA Tennis club environs of the upper crust...wasn’t that the “snakes” for the hoit poloi...The Hearsts Miriam what’s Heart’s mistress. He wanted to make a star out of her lack of charisma..
Miriam Davies, thats who.
Who wouldn’t long for that reality scene? To rub elbows with the powerful? Isn’t that what’s
What the “soaps” are all about..”All my children”
Ask ‘The Great Gatsby” Fitzgerald, Hemingway they all want that clawing achievment....
North Rossmore Pancho Gonzales couldn’t make the grade. Even as great as he was....controlled power quoteh the tennis pro Joe Arden who practiced hittingf with the great Pancho at the courts behind the Coliseum
Ghettos and barrios why not . Porque whjy should the Caucasians rub elbows with the
these pegged pants and chains, these Chicanos must mind their place. Stay in Garfield High School, that’s their barrio..Wilson Lincoln....the El Sereno reality scene .
Their peyote......their lot in life...... the Jews settling in Boyle Heights off Whittier Boulevard and Brooklyn Avenue....the ghetto is their reoots, their place......but don’t get me wrong like the Jews, their dinero at Nixon burger we’ll buy into it...
I’m no antisemite...and neither are Halderman from Redlands or “honest man” Erlichman from
Santa Monica..One of my best friends is a Rabbi, neighbor.
“We haven’t worked out the bugs for kosher burgers yet....bwith techniology Mom and Pops my brother we’ll have kosher for our Boyle Heighs and Lake Elsinore market....you gotta believe it,
neighbor.” said the self aggrandized status seeker.
”Handsome? With his five o’clock shadow?” asked a car hop.,off the record.
XII
Taking a cue the East Los Angeles turf...Belvedere Gardens where Margo and Tony Quinn and sultry Martha Soto grew up, the latter a voluptuous USC conveertible original” blowing her persona...the same reality scene for Tony Quinn and Margo rider Tricky’s coefficient of expansion was up and away...”the skies the limit” “ as he navigated the skoals of Washington D.C. with his five oclock shadow, neighbor
XIII
But as time is running late, the final two issus...our man’s best friend caper with the Checkers flush fund. Running on Ike’s coattails, he was upset that his veep captured monies in the name
of “Checkers”....
Taking to the black and white screens of ‘52' we put on our five oclock shadow, explaining it away to the moral majority, our Amerifcan public...the moral majority..
Assuaged Ike felt there was hardly a dent in his legacy...and wse continued in our passion for the high office...the yardage we missed out getting splinters sitting on the bench at those Whittier College pigskin fracas.
XIV
Running late so shifting gears neighbor we’ll go to the caper with Alger Hiss. A career diplomat and a structured apparatus was furthered by Dean Acheson and his diplomatic superiors.
Thirty lashes with a wet noodle, we found a ready willing and able co conspirator in Whitaker Chambers, a Time magazine editor racking the coals with a Remington typewriter in Hew Jersey..
Cryptic typewritten messages..the “pumpkin papers” by “experts”, we were able with the complicity of discreet allies in the media to take mister Hiss to the cleaners
Wasn’t it my committee that did the dirty work....bigger than the Emile Zola Drefus case on Devil’s Island in retrospect.
“Everything is relative, isn’t it neighbor.” A marketing pro, I’m prone to hyperbole “quoteth he.
A red baiter , (“When did you stop beating your wife?”) to some fierce collaboration with mister Hiss the darling persona of the liberal establishment. An Ivy lague star that e brought down by
“our pumpkin papers. “ and W.C’s broken Remington.
The tackle we never made on the field. sitting on the bench
getting splinters......waiting waiting for my number to be called..
Chairman Mao into his fox trot,. His Madame into her ballet troupe...spiked heels, h9olding rifles......and Choi en Lai wailing “Aging isn’t for sissies.... growing older, neighbor..”
Deja vu all over again, neighbor. 22 minutes of oval office Watergate tapes.
.”Give me a downbeat, Tricky”
1/27/11..birthday boys’ 255th..Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
One foot with the romantics....
One foot with the romantics.... the other foot into the futuro..notwithstanding
Bob Crosby and his bobcats...trading on brother Bing’s crooning but
making it on his own, neighbor.
II
Stan Kenton into the Hollywood Hills Horace Heidt in the Valley Charley
Parker&Dizzy Gillespie @Billy Berg’s in Hollywood.
Elmer Bernstein based in Ojai..David Raksin (“Laura”, (Subject is film music, Kusc)
waiting on Charlie Chaplin “Modern Times” at the Glendale train depot.
Rachmaninoff in Beverly Hills, Stravinsky on North Wetherly Drive Schoenberg(
in Brentwood, Erich Wolfgang Korngold at Warners.
Not a big souled composer like Shostakovich.... but into chamber music. The lyrical
measures grooving iuto a fourth movement that takes the string players breathe away.
.”His name? “
Alexander von Zemlinsky ..Remember the name, neighbor....
45 minutes of the sublime:transporting the players into the ultimate nirvana...
Violins viola cello string quartet into a twinkling star lit galaxy.
III
But then the Viennese born contemporary of Alma Mahler, the 12 tone atonal
giant Arnold Schoenberg... his disciples Alban Berg Anton von Webern..
Gustav Mahler himself, neighbor.
The dissonance of “Wozzeck” and “Lulu” operas by acolyte Alban Berg, the Viennese ears hadn’t been attuned to since Beethovan broke the ice, shattering any Haydn Mozart classical
harmonies.
The subterfuges and hanky panky aroused a suicide Schnoenberg’s
frau, and a pianist, who when discovered by the 12 tone pioneer committed
hari kari...
But our Alexander von Zemlinsky stayed clear of such George Kaufman Mary Astor alliances, keeping his nose clean, avoiding any extramarital sandbagging.
His “aging isn’t for sissies” into the Big Apple and Larchmont.(sounds a lot like Mozart’s
DaPonte, Mozart’s librettist ( “Cosi Fan Tutte” “Don Giovanni” “Marriage of Figaro”)
teaching Romantic Languages at Columbia, owning a grocery store..
”A nickel a pickle, neighbor”.
In the long run the architecture with its counterpoint And modular key changes
comes before the femme fatale, doesn’t it neighbor even in those Freudian like
inner circles..
If Ludwig didn’t succumb to self pity or sensuality,, why should our Alexander von Zemlinsky.....
How else could his legacy be characterized as “sublime” by a string player:...
.the Escher quartet’s chamber music.. ....
IV
On hearing his “Mermaid” from Hans Christian Anderson’s own imaginary
data base(Danny Kaye&Sam Goldwyn) and information highway’s (Grimm
brothers... Aesop fairy tales) any sensibility would recognize the “sublime”
playing out.
“Wouldn’t they neighbor?”
The Big Apple, January 20,2011.........”Nixon in China” in futuro...
Bob Crosby and his bobcats...trading on brother Bing’s crooning but
making it on his own, neighbor.
II
Stan Kenton into the Hollywood Hills Horace Heidt in the Valley Charley
Parker&Dizzy Gillespie @Billy Berg’s in Hollywood.
Elmer Bernstein based in Ojai..David Raksin (“Laura”, (Subject is film music, Kusc)
waiting on Charlie Chaplin “Modern Times” at the Glendale train depot.
Rachmaninoff in Beverly Hills, Stravinsky on North Wetherly Drive Schoenberg(
in Brentwood, Erich Wolfgang Korngold at Warners.
Not a big souled composer like Shostakovich.... but into chamber music. The lyrical
measures grooving iuto a fourth movement that takes the string players breathe away.
.”His name? “
Alexander von Zemlinsky ..Remember the name, neighbor....
45 minutes of the sublime:transporting the players into the ultimate nirvana...
Violins viola cello string quartet into a twinkling star lit galaxy.
III
But then the Viennese born contemporary of Alma Mahler, the 12 tone atonal
giant Arnold Schoenberg... his disciples Alban Berg Anton von Webern..
Gustav Mahler himself, neighbor.
The dissonance of “Wozzeck” and “Lulu” operas by acolyte Alban Berg, the Viennese ears hadn’t been attuned to since Beethovan broke the ice, shattering any Haydn Mozart classical
harmonies.
The subterfuges and hanky panky aroused a suicide Schnoenberg’s
frau, and a pianist, who when discovered by the 12 tone pioneer committed
hari kari...
But our Alexander von Zemlinsky stayed clear of such George Kaufman Mary Astor alliances, keeping his nose clean, avoiding any extramarital sandbagging.
His “aging isn’t for sissies” into the Big Apple and Larchmont.(sounds a lot like Mozart’s
DaPonte, Mozart’s librettist ( “Cosi Fan Tutte” “Don Giovanni” “Marriage of Figaro”)
teaching Romantic Languages at Columbia, owning a grocery store..
”A nickel a pickle, neighbor”.
In the long run the architecture with its counterpoint And modular key changes
comes before the femme fatale, doesn’t it neighbor even in those Freudian like
inner circles..
If Ludwig didn’t succumb to self pity or sensuality,, why should our Alexander von Zemlinsky.....
How else could his legacy be characterized as “sublime” by a string player:...
.the Escher quartet’s chamber music.. ....
IV
On hearing his “Mermaid” from Hans Christian Anderson’s own imaginary
data base(Danny Kaye&Sam Goldwyn) and information highway’s (Grimm
brothers... Aesop fairy tales) any sensibility would recognize the “sublime”
playing out.
“Wouldn’t they neighbor?”
The Big Apple, January 20,2011.........”Nixon in China” in futuro...
Hobnobbing with Douglas Fairbanks&Charlie Chaplin in Hollywood
Hobnobbing with Douglas Fairbanks&Charlie Chaplin in Hollywood, Maurice Ravel was still able to compose his “ Bolero” “ Y’ know what I’m trying to say.”
II
Name dropping however has its built in limitations once the yard bird runs the
lights at Hollywood and Vine......the sidewalk of stars and the cemented hands
and feet at Sid Grauman’s Chinese theater down the block Liberace and brother George at the Hollywood Roosevelt”s cinegrill two streets up. Catty corner the bus stop at Hollywood and Highland, across from the centerfor the Oscars and those yard birds who become their pretensions: rolling the dice........
III
Meanwhile in the reality of the shootout at a Safeway market across the border in
Tucson, Arizona, the imagined expectations of our Democracy playing... a 9
year old precocious girl Christina-Taylor Green, her yearnings laid to rest, the 9//11 flag covering her casket, the priest reliving her dream.......
She had come to the marketplace to realize her imagined longings of being and
becoming a Gabby like Congress lady.
But the mall tragedy...the community college dropout with no love life...gone
ballistic....left not an eye dry..
The Tucson community resounding in its response to the maddening frenzy
gone ..... a wasted murderer , his gig deteriorating as so many other loners
before him.
Seeking attention at the cost of priceless life....a judge, the Congress lady, then nine year old Angel, a retiree off his motor home, several others caught in the rampage
Not a gun control law to be reckoned with,. A lawlessness frought with massacres
and peril to the sanctity of humanity . . Arizona’s “Petrified forest” John Ford’s monument valley....Duke Wayne’s riding shotgun.
A massacre playing out as the murderer reloads...The Congress lady off his crazed
trigger finger..a bullet to her left side of the brain.... opens both eyes, wiggles
her feet...., the Angels watching .......
A magnum opus of a miracle playing out.,
“Y’ know what I’m trying to say”
January 14, 2011.
II
Name dropping however has its built in limitations once the yard bird runs the
lights at Hollywood and Vine......the sidewalk of stars and the cemented hands
and feet at Sid Grauman’s Chinese theater down the block Liberace and brother George at the Hollywood Roosevelt”s cinegrill two streets up. Catty corner the bus stop at Hollywood and Highland, across from the centerfor the Oscars and those yard birds who become their pretensions: rolling the dice........
III
Meanwhile in the reality of the shootout at a Safeway market across the border in
Tucson, Arizona, the imagined expectations of our Democracy playing... a 9
year old precocious girl Christina-Taylor Green, her yearnings laid to rest, the 9//11 flag covering her casket, the priest reliving her dream.......
She had come to the marketplace to realize her imagined longings of being and
becoming a Gabby like Congress lady.
But the mall tragedy...the community college dropout with no love life...gone
ballistic....left not an eye dry..
The Tucson community resounding in its response to the maddening frenzy
gone ..... a wasted murderer , his gig deteriorating as so many other loners
before him.
Seeking attention at the cost of priceless life....a judge, the Congress lady, then nine year old Angel, a retiree off his motor home, several others caught in the rampage
Not a gun control law to be reckoned with,. A lawlessness frought with massacres
and peril to the sanctity of humanity . . Arizona’s “Petrified forest” John Ford’s monument valley....Duke Wayne’s riding shotgun.
A massacre playing out as the murderer reloads...The Congress lady off his crazed
trigger finger..a bullet to her left side of the brain.... opens both eyes, wiggles
her feet...., the Angels watching .......
A magnum opus of a miracle playing out.,
“Y’ know what I’m trying to say”
January 14, 2011.
Fu Manchu the Green Hornet&Kato the Lone Ranger&Tonto
Fu Manchu the Green Hornet&Kato the Lone Ranger&Tonto..Lamont
Cranston“the Shadow knows”&Margo.. Sergeant Preston of the Yukon.
Batman&Robin Clark Kent&Lois on high alert..the clock winding down....
II
The former Western Union telegram urchin...delivering the World War 2 wires from the War department to the next of kin....Gold star mothers and fathers....widows...brothers and sisters....
in and around the reality scene of the Avenue H subway in Flatbush.....
He saw first hand the culmination of a loved one’s loss. bearing the sorrow. No experience from the cradle to the grave could ever replicate that doom.
Oh sure you could revel in Mickey Rooney’s “The Human Comedy” by Saroyan...his role
bearing the Western Union telegrams .simulating reality.
But this was like being a witness to the lethal missing in action. A loss of a loved one that would leaves a scar on the survivor’s unconscious for all time..
How does any scorecard measure that loss?
III
The ambush on a Arizona House of Representative and our law of the land
exemplifies“some humans grow up at 21 but are not buried till they’re seventy.”
IV
How far can one push the envelope?
V
Daryl Zanuck coming off his war time experience visualized the bigotry,,,
“Oxbow Incident” Henry Fonda as the catharsis. Those unquiet quiet minds
morphing nto a lynch mob
“String him up at the highest tree”......
Civil discourse trashed.. rhetoric and passions riu amok.“Pass the smelling salts,
Sheriff. Time’s a wasting on these wasted folk.”
Where’s Henry Fonda when we need him?
Revisiting the “Gipper’s looney tunes” January 9,2011
Cranston“the Shadow knows”&Margo.. Sergeant Preston of the Yukon.
Batman&Robin Clark Kent&Lois on high alert..the clock winding down....
II
The former Western Union telegram urchin...delivering the World War 2 wires from the War department to the next of kin....Gold star mothers and fathers....widows...brothers and sisters....
in and around the reality scene of the Avenue H subway in Flatbush.....
He saw first hand the culmination of a loved one’s loss. bearing the sorrow. No experience from the cradle to the grave could ever replicate that doom.
Oh sure you could revel in Mickey Rooney’s “The Human Comedy” by Saroyan...his role
bearing the Western Union telegrams .simulating reality.
But this was like being a witness to the lethal missing in action. A loss of a loved one that would leaves a scar on the survivor’s unconscious for all time..
How does any scorecard measure that loss?
III
The ambush on a Arizona House of Representative and our law of the land
exemplifies“some humans grow up at 21 but are not buried till they’re seventy.”
IV
How far can one push the envelope?
V
Daryl Zanuck coming off his war time experience visualized the bigotry,,,
“Oxbow Incident” Henry Fonda as the catharsis. Those unquiet quiet minds
morphing nto a lynch mob
“String him up at the highest tree”......
Civil discourse trashed.. rhetoric and passions riu amok.“Pass the smelling salts,
Sheriff. Time’s a wasting on these wasted folk.”
Where’s Henry Fonda when we need him?
Revisiting the “Gipper’s looney tunes” January 9,2011
I don’t know what the hell yuu’re talking about buddy
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about buddy, but at least you’re
not boring”
Admiral Gravestone in his cups unable to read the tea leaves..coming off a blitz in the inner city schools, a trench coat groomed transferee discovering Gravestone’s hip pocket..among the crushing body to body straphangers, on the surface line Franklin Avenue shuttle reeling toward the Eastern Parkway station in its Southbound four station route...
II
The Admiral grabbing the pickpocket’s wrist, the caper unlike Hitch’s “Lady
vanishes”...the shuttle choo chooing... Botanic Garden and Prospect Park six decades of BMT
data based ridership the four stops honed without any derelictions, the 2010 winding
down into those raging hours of disenfranchisement...unable to discern reality’s
cosmetics ..a pop culture and egg nog landscape for what it really is about..
III
“Lemme go sir .I promise on my mother’s honor, I’ll never do it again.”
The Admiral held the miscreant’s wrist........this con never stole a ream of
computer paper ”Oh no sir, I never cheated on big tests either.”...
Why shouldn’t he pay the price for his encroaching intent? Every wino finds
their own level, don’t they? monsieur ?”
How else will he reform?. He needed the cat of nine tails spanking...
The folly of having leniency ride the rails.
.
Kubrick’s “Clockwork orange” the tedious reality scene of growing up amidst
the public housing environs of Lancaster Gate Hyde Park Paddington Victoria
Station the Old Vic.......
Gads not a ideal nor a lofty engagement of humanity Despair dominating
the mother and father Madonna scenario of the ancients.
How else can these stagnant booties be rehabilitated into what their purpose on earth once
was, their cosmos reopening, welcoming them back into the womb.
Being and becoming, people peoples.......
IV
“Eh what Kathy?”....Kathy Black, the new Chancellor, coming off her newspaper on line
media heroics....... her motto being “inch by inch it’s a cinch, by the yard it’s very hard”
sending her own two kids to boarding schools in the Nutmeg(Conn.)
The whole nine yards, monsieur.
V
The Franklin Avenue shuttle chug chugging along.... Admiral and his victim ..ipso facto prisoner But a victim in his mind set
Sidney Potier and Tony Curtis as the handcuffed “The defiant ones”
Madeleine Carroll in cuffs to Robert Donat “The 39 Steps” as they prowled the Scottish Moors for the killer of mister Atom, the counter espionage agent with total recall...
murdered on the West End London stage...........
But here Admiral Gravestone coming off a high in the inner city schools had captured a naive hood who thought the “easy rider” a raison d’etre of Peter Sellers ’“Pink Pantherr.”
The identities of the Admiral and his thug, playing out their needs on the Franklin
Avenue shuttle time table “in perpetua” for over six decades.
VI
Sure it wasn’t the “Education of Hyman Kaplan’ playing out...an immigrant student would never play out his inner need of assimilating the nefarious mores of a digital on
line I pod denizen crazed gone extraterrestrial .
Living in his own galaxy...is that too far from a two decade NFL quarterback .. C.Fauvre
playing out his hangups..
Like the pickpocket... he was into his fantasy...
Staying too long on the stage...”.Past yer prime ,big fellow.”
“Isn’t that the question dear Brutus?”
VII
The shuttle ripping along its track.., Admiral Gravestone and his assailant, their
hands unto each other.... the Botanic Garden platform cop sizing them up...his
lips snarling, his eyes capturing mortals clinging to each other ,waiting for their stop,
seated passengers departure..
“Gimme gimme another chance, sir,”said the thief.”It’s only a petty crime...I’m a good kid,”
said the crook out of class, caught in the act...hands down felony
“I should turn you in,” said the Admiral.”thinking of Lillian Roth’s “I’ll cry
tomorrow”: the heartache in growing up among the haves and have nots in the
age of entitlement. a callous indifference to finding yourself, Chief... .
VIII
He thought of his older brother trying to beat the system in San Diego. A naval officer on two weeks reserve duty, he met up with George Brent, an actor out at Warners, who was a Naval pilot. The second banana telling him the movie industry was but a fantasy.“The money was good” but his reality was Phantom jets.
The older brother into his fantasy ,homeward bound...a mistress liberating his appetite from the
constancy of boredom’s rut... back to the routine of civies , he pulled off the
San Diego freeway.....
“If it wasn’t for the basketball coach at Tilden, I would have made the varsity,”
he said, into an obscenity. “He wanted to put me on the junior varsity. There’s no place
on the varsity . You’re a heaver, out for yourself.”..
“A star in yoir imagination but not on mine. We need team players..that’s the nature of
the game. The bottom line,”said the coach 4 decades earlier ,the high school student never
forgetting the hurt, his voice rising..
Sam Levinson his “Habla el Espanol” failing him, when he caught him cheating.....but a Richmond Hill High aunt persuaded Sam to pass him with. a “D”. .
”I hate the bastard.” never having read “I’ll cry tomorrow”
IX
On the Franklin Avenue shuttle the crushing humans oblivious to each other... the Admiral felt the sweaty hands of the pickpocket...to be or not to be, the shuttle swirling around the sixty year old route in the city that never sleeps.
Let you out on the streets again, picking pockets at bus stops...corner of 13th Avenue and 49 the corner of Pershing middle school, the surveillance cameras koed because of
the blizzard,
“ No I can’t buy into that option, stud,” said Admiral Gravestone, living up to his name.
“So I won’t become a spaced out astronaut or computer enginner,”said the street smarts. Like Jean de Valjean, caught with his pants down for stealing a loaf of bread, the Frederic March Victor Hugo caper.... treading the Parisian sewers, Charles Laughton into his
booted labyrinth..
X
As the shuttle pulled into its Prospect Park station, the Admiral let his good nature dominate the fierce cutthroat scene...sado masochism, drug dealers, porno you name it.....
The Admiral sweated out the wasted lives of so many.” Turn your life around, kid,”said the inner
school maestro .pretending he was Spencer Tracy as Father Flanagan reading the riot ract
to Mickey Rooney in Dore Schary’s “Boys Town”
XI
“Was it all a dream?” the Admiral asked . ”Do I look any worse for riding
the Franklin Avenue staggering shuttle.?”
His bride to be shrugged her shoulders.”I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about buddy
but at least you’re not boring.
“Pick up the tab for the grub. You’re no longer Hugh Heffner in his prime
You’re into the pursuit of yourself”.
The Big Apple during the blizzard of December 2 6-27, 2010 the 6th worst storm in the
the City’s history... “Bloomy” taking the heat.......December 31,2010.
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