Pending all illusions nee Dr. Sigmund Freud’s “Civilization and its discontents” A CAT ON A HOT TIN Roof”
In devastating avarice and greed, Tennessee Williams had Burl Ives fall off a wheel chair, the raging metaphor being a screaming death wish, somewhat like Prince’s sister having a confrontation with his five half siblings. Their screaming blandishments like their screaming tongues aflame, 3000 million dollars asunder, Prince in his tough love libretto, caught at fifty seven years, without a will, signifying the despair of his death wish.
II
The cream cheese bandit unlike Burl Ives hedged his bets on tacking on the octopus tentacles of avarice, hoisted by cocaine snuffing and a dose of heroine pain relief, saving one’s tormented grace into eternity.
“Who you leaving all your money to?” asked the bandit into his breakfast ritual, his grandmother in her own cantankerous shuffle between her two daughter’s abodes in Flatbush, her sojourn for the weekend. Her daughters putting up with their mother, notwithstanding the elder one was intro a natural for her bread and butter.
“Commitment.! A perpetuity into old age. A cantankerous thrust into Alzeimers ..a treadmill into oblivion,” ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
murmured over the telephone that weekend Grandma’s excursion took a sadistic cannabilistic inquisition from the Cream Cheese bandit, his own nature twisted and corrupted by dollar bills and its stultifying Scrooge like egocentricities self serving greed and avarice..
A showcase of a calculating vanity ….those PSAL leatherbelts…the fastest eighth grader in the 60 yard
dashtrip left umaborted , wrecking havoc, dominating all those who fell prey to his larceny of a lifetime. The George Washington role, the 8th grade senior play.
III
“If a villain they want me to play…..Iago then in vaim, Othello’s path…. Desdemona’s handkerchief dropped in the wake of the General crossing the walk. Your Iago bringing it to the Generals attention. stirring her husband’s jealousy. That it was dropped by his subaltern, his jealousy stirred up as in a storm. The jealousy mounting to avenge the owner of the dropped hanky.
“Murder she said,” the chief into his bathrobe drubbings. “I’ll get that son of a b..cuckolding me, ever since he caught me in my bathrobe., teasing Grandma in our fifth floor elevator apartment.
“Who you gonna leave all your money to, Grandma?”
IV
How could he envision all that bucket list of insinuating taunts and abuses. The tit for tat resentments
and insults. The insidious smiles and come ons, all the while the Name Detective by hiring Karol Cosalow as the cream cheese bandit’s tennis coach (“steady on the baseline, your eye on the ball…anticipate anticipate …..” never knowing the cream cheese bandit would become his own worst enemy….
V
Reneging on the slave bracelet and jeweled wrist band. Those symbols of endearment. But alas alack Hitler’s war intervened, the bandit living up to his Iago endearments, lost his grip, the war ending, he demanded the slave bracelet and wrist band be returned.. the Bard’s “Love labor lost” playing out.
“You’re as useless as teats on a boar’s ass,” said Iago’s overlord, he knowing of the cream cheese bandit’s distain for correction.…..
The Venice pier dances in California. The Santa Monica Hotel Friday nighters. The shadowing of drunks. …stealing their souls, that made Burl Ives look like a fraternity upper classmanon a frat house ritual. into nudie flicks.
VI
His weaknesses grew like a tumor. The libidinous images grewlike lava flowing five fold. Little did he know the very petty crimes he espoused as he vicariously incarnated those very debilitating character traits he denied…..the Spanish final caught cheating by his Tilden High School maestro Sam Levinson, his own Aunt Selma pleading for a reprieve in lieu of an F and repeating “Habla el Espanol”
. VII
In the meantime Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”, his Wily Loman self destructiveness came upoin the scene in its Frankenstein incarnation. Wily not unlike our own Uncle Phil out of Bensonhusrt, downloading a fortune in changed labels on canned groceries had to crry the weight of losing two sons…one flunked out of High School; the other caught up in his wretcheddespair of giving up on his own Wily Loman desperation and futility…
IX
Like Iago’s self deception. The overreaching moneyed drift.ing …Evelyn Keyes (John Huston’s “Treasure of Sierra Madre”wife) he was in finance when she asked him what he did for a living, the two idling around the swimming pool, the Filipino waiters carrying their trays in a tennis racquet backhand flow.
Yet in freaking out the Cream Cheese Bandit still made his silver screen rounds, whipping his Volkswagon from the freeway…..Hollywood Roosevelt bar and grill, opposite Bill Tilden’s private court for lessons, …Figueroao Ballroom, the Venice pier ballroom, Casino Gardens, Palladium, the bar and grills on LaCienega, where he could acknowledge the revelers and inebriates.
The Adler hotel in Memphis, Original Joe’s on Market Street in San Francisco , the mainstay being Treasure Island.
May 4, 2016 The City that never sleeps..
