“I knew something was wrong when they took away our water bottles”
“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.
Revisited, Boro Park Rehab April 29- August 2 2010 ninth fl oor....a reunion of Midwood Abraham Lincoln Jefferson New Utrecht High Schools Pershing Jr.High six decades later.
August 7,2011
