Dan Leo's Blog, page 16

"Listen to the Young People"

“Riding around in our Pierce-Arrow Model 33 convertibles and our Willys Whippets, our Hispano-Suiza Torpedoes and Durant Speedsters and our sturdy Stutz Bearcats, in our raccoon coats with a flask of bathtub gin in one pocket and a slim Morocco-bound volume of The Waste Land in the other, roaring off into the still-virgin New Jersey countryside to arrive roaring drunk at halftime at the Princeton-Harvard game! Why, I’ve still got my old Bearcat in the basement garage of the hotel here, although I haven’t driven it in nigh on twenty years, ever since my motorist’s license got irrevocably revoked after a certain regrettable accident, but nobody got killed from it, I’m happy to say. You ever want to take a spin in the old heap, you just let me know, Harrington. The garage man keeps her all tuned up and Turtle-waxed and spit-shined, and every month or so he’ll take her out for a tour around town, just to make sure the motor’s purring good and steady. Heck, maybe I’ll even come out for a spin with you, if’n you don’t mind taking an old codger along. Tell the truth, I don’t think I’ve been more than four blocks from this hotel since the war. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve stepped outside the hotel at all since last September I think it was. I took a little stroll one evening. Just to make sure the world was still out there. And it was.”

“So you live here in the hotel?” said Addison.

“Yes, sir,” said Farmer Brown, “a permanent resident you might say. And what more could a confirmed bachelor of a certain age ask for, I ask you? Yes, this old hotel is my kingdom as it were. Oh, and what do we have here? The lovely Miss De LaSalle!”

Being a gentleman of the old school, Mr. Brown hefted his bulk off his bar stool.

“Hiya, Farmer,” said Shirley. “How’s it hanging, big fella?”

“Splendidly, Miss Shirley, splendidly! Won’t you take my seat? Got it all warmed up for you!”

“Don’t mind if I do, Farmer,” said Shirley, and she slipped her lissome self onto the vacated stool and laid her silvery spangled purse on the bar top.

“Shirley,” said the Farmer, “have you met my two young friends? This is Harrison. Harrison, the lovely Shirley De LaSalle, chanteuse extraordinaire.”

“Well, it’s Addison, actually,” said Addison.

“Isn’t that what I said?” said Farmer Brown.

“Well, no, I think you said Harrison, but, you know, it doesn’t really matter, because Addison is just a sort of nickname I’ve acquired, because supposedly I behave like the George Sanders character ‘Addison DeWitt’ in the movie All About Eve –”

“So what do I call you?” said Shirley. “Addison, or Harrison, or George Sanders?”

“Ha ha,” said Addison, “well, I suppose you may as well call me Addison, since –”

“What’s in a name, anyhow?” said the Farmer. “Am I right? Are we not all mere insignificant specks floating in the great vastness of the universe?”

“Um,” said Addison.

“Your usual, Miss De LaSalle?” said Raoul the barman.

“Yeah, thanks, Raoul. I need a little rocket fuel to get me through my next set.”

“That will be on my tab,” said Farmer Brown, “thank you, Raoul, and another round for myself and my two young friends as well. Hey, Gifford, why not break down and have a little Cream of Kentucky with your ginger ale this time?”

“Mr. Brown,” said Milford, “for the tenth time, my name is Milford, not Gifford, or Mumford, or Rutherford, it’s Milford, okay?”

“Are you sure you didn’t tell me it was Renfield?”

“Jesus Christ!” said Milford.

Raoul was still standing there, so the Farmer said, “Go ahead and make that round happen, please, Raoul, and, remember –” he elaborately blinked one eye behind his thick round glasses –”a nod’s every bit as good as a wink to a blind mule, as we used to say back in Kansas.”

“Oh, my God,” said Milford. He felt his whole world crashing around his head. All he wanted was to talk to Shirley De LaSalle, and here was this idiot dominating the conversation. Why, dear God, why was life so hard?

“How you doing?” Shirley said to him.

She spoke to him!

“I, um, uh,” said Milford. “I’m, uh, I’m, uh –”

“You seem a little nervous,” said Shirley. 



“Oh, no, not at all!” said Milford.

“He’s not nervous,” said Farmer Brown. “He’s sensitive is all. A poet. And a darned good one, too! Have you met Rimford, Shirley?”

“Yeah, we had a brief chat before my last set,” said Shirley. “You enjoying the show, Rimford?”

“Um, yes, very much so,” said Milford. “Very much!”

“Cool,” said Shirley. “I aim to please.”

“Oh,” said Milford, “I assure you, Miss De LaSalle, I was very pleased with your singing!”

“Hey, I try,” said Shirley, taking a pack of Lucky Strikes out of her purse.

Addison, Farmer Brown, and even Milford all simultaneously tried to offer Shirley a light for her cigarette, but the Farmer won out, with his monogrammed silver-plated Ronson.

“Thanks, Farmer,” said Shirley.

“My pleasure, dear Shirley,” said the Farmer.

Poor Milford was left there holding the match he had already torn from his paper matchbook. He actually had a nice Ronson lighter of his own that his mother had bought him for his last birthday, but he felt paper matches fitted his image more correctly as a poet and bohemian. But really, what did it matter? Paper matches, a nice lighter, it just didn’t matter in the end, and he dropped the unstruck match into his ashtray.

“So what kind of poems do you write, anyway, Rimford?” said Shirley, after exhaling that first great delicious lungful of Lucky Strike smoke.

“Who, me?” said Milford.

“Yeah, like what’s your poetic bag, daddy-o?”

The Farmer had been standing between Shirley and Milford, but now he stepped behind her and leaned toward Addison.

“Y’know, Hatcheson,” he said, in his version of a stage whisper, a low holler for anyone else, “I do believe Miss Shirley is actually showing some mild interest in young Melville.”

“So it might seem,” said Addison.

“There’s no telling with women, my boy,” said the Farmer. ”No telling at all! Let’s just hope young Sheffield doesn’t blow it, because, well, just between you and me and the four walls here, the lad doesn’t exactly bring a case of Dom Perignon to the party, you know what I mean?”

“Yes, I suppose so,” said Addison. “He is a bit socially awkward –”

“Ah, but here’s the drinks! Thank you, noble Raoul!” said the Farmer, as Raoul laid down a Cream of Kentucky and ginger ale for Addison, another for Farmer Brown, a champagne cocktail for Shirley, and a Cream of Kentucky and ginger ale for Milford, whose lips had not touched alcohol in six months and twenty-three days.

“Let us drink, my friends,” said Mr. Brown, raising his glass, “to this merry convocation of the old and decrepit and of the young and vital, because as I always say, and I wish more of my generation would say it as well: ‘Listen to the young people!’ Yes, listen to the young people, because maybe, just maybe, mind you, they’ve got something to say!”

No one was listening to Farmer Brown, but they all raised their glasses and drank.

{Please go here to read the “adult comix” version in A Flophouse Is Not a Home, profusely illustrated by the illustrious rhoda penmarq…}

“A Handsome Woman”

“Another thing Tommy Eliot told me, ‘Farmer,’ he said to me – ‘cause he called me Farmer, just like I asked him to, just like I called him Tommy, just two straight shootin’ midwestern lads in the big city – ‘Farmer,’ he says, ‘the plain and honest truth is that the vast majority of humanity are dullards, and the one thousandth of one percent of humanity who are not dullards are as annoying as all hell.’ I thought that rather a harsh assessment myself.”

“That’s because you are a dullard yourself,” said Milford.

“Yes, it’s true,” said Farmer Brown, apparently unfazed. “But, you see, Milberg, I have accepted my humble lot in life, and, in truth, I love humanity.” He turned to Addison. “What think you, Rafelson?”

“I’m sorry, what?” said Addison.

“Would you agree with T.S. Eliot (or Tommy as I called him) that the preponderance of humanity are dullards, and that the remaining percentage who are not dullards are annoying?”

“An intriguing question,” said Addison, “and, speaking as one who has been accused, alternately, of being boring and annoying my entire life, yes, I would be inclined to agree with Mr. Eliot. However –”

And here Addison paused, as he so rarely did while discoursing.

“Yes?” prompted Farmer Brown.

“However,” said Addison, “the exception to this rule is a beautiful woman with whom one is in love.”

“Ah, a very good point, sir,” said Farmer Brown. “And, yes, I know it may be hard to believe to look at me now, but even I was once in love!”

“Only once?” said Addison.

“Yes,” said the Farmer, “only the once, but how intensely that once! The object of my amour was a certain Miss Charlton, whom I met in this very bar some quarter of a century ago. She was young and beautiful – and rich, which didn’t hurt, I’ll tell you. Alas, I never told her of my infatuation.”

“Too bad,” said Addison.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Farmer Brown. “You see, by never pursuing my infatuation, even had I been successful, I never had to face the inevitable deterioration of my adoration, and of its object. There she is, by the way, sitting at that table over there right now.”

The Farmer pointed with his soft pudgy finger, and Addison looked and saw, halfway across the room, a thin, drawn, bejeweled and quite drunk-looking old woman sitting with a fattish and also quite drunk-looking old man at a table with a bottle of champagne in a silvery ice bucket. Even through the thick and barely stirring clouds of tobacco smoke in this place Addison could see that the faces of both creatures were so thickly powdered and painted that they looked like life-sized Punch and Judy puppets, and barely more animated.

“That’s her?” said Addison.

“Yes, it is she,” said Farmer Brown.

Addison was almost about to mutter “Good God” but he caught himself.

“A not entirely unhandsome woman still at the age of fifty, isn’t she?” said Farmer Brown.

“Yes,” said Addison, looking away from the wasted crone and her bloated companion. “A handsome woman indeed.”

Milford had been listening to none of this. He was thinking only of Shirley De LaSalle, the young and beautiful chanteuse Shirley De LaSalle. Who now emerged from a door off to the left of the stage, and who was now walking toward the bar, toward Milford, and, oh, would she talk to him? 




{Kindly go here to read the “adult comix” version in A Flophouse Is Not a Home, illustrated by the illustrious rhoda penmarq…}

“The Heckler”

It was that feeling you got onstage when it was all just flowing, from you to the punters down there and back to you again, and you weren’t really thinking about the next gag or the one before it or all the other gags on all the other nights over all the years that were just like one long night that never ended.

“Hey, McGee,” said Mickey Pumpernickel.

“Yeah, Mickey?” said Waldo McGee.

They were in that flow, in that groove, and Waldo had no idea what this crazy little dummy was going to say, and Waldo didn’t care.

“I got another question for ya, McGee.”

“Shoot, my friend.”

“You ever wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and just stare up at the ceiling and feel like you’re just floating in outer space?”

“Yeah, I done that, Mickey,” said Waldo, “plenty of times. Almost every damn night in fact.”

“Hey, watch the language,” yelled up some fat guy at a table down front. “Ladies present.”

“I don’t see no ladies at your table, pal,” said Mickey.

The fat guy had a fat woman at his table, and she laughed.

“Hey, wait just a goddam minute,” said the fat guy.

“You watch your goddam language, fatso,” said Mickey. “Because there might not be a lady at your table, but there must be a couple of ladies in this joint somewheres.”

The fat broad laughed at this one too, but the fat guy stood up.

“Why you little wooden punk,” he said.

“Yeah, I might be made out of wood,” said Mickey, “but at least I ain’t a big fat ignorant slob like some people I can mention.”

“Okay, pal, that’s it,” said the fat man, but the fat woman grabbed his arm.

“Henry, sit the hell down,” she said.

“I’m not gonna have that little dummy insult me.”

“He’s a wooden dummy. What are you gonna do, beat up a dummy?”

“Yeah, pick on someone your own size, fats,” said Mickey.

“Maybe I’ll just beat up the ventriloquist then,” said the fat man.

“Hey, buddy,” said Waldo, “don’t take it out on me. I didn’t say nothing.”

“But you’re the goddam ventriloquist,” said the fat man. “You’re the one’s doing all the talking.”

“Hey,” said Mickey, “leave McGee out of it. This is between you and me, chubby.”

“All right, then,” said the fat man. “How about I come up and wring your wooden little neck?”

“Henry,” said the fat lady, “you’re embarrassing me and yourself, now sit the goddam hell back down.”

“I’m gonna kill that little dummy.”

“How you gonna kill a wooden dummy?”

Suddenly Mr. Bernstein was standing there.

“Sir,” he said, “I’m going to ask you to sit down and please be quiet.”

“But that dummy was insulting me.”

“Sir, he’s a wooden dummy. He’s not insulting anyone.”

“He called me a fat slob.”

“A fat ignorant slob,” said the fat lady, and she laughed.

“Yeah, he called me a fat ignorant slob,” said the fat man.

“Sit the hell down, buddy,” said a guy at the next table. “We’re trying to enjoy the goddam show.”

“Fuck you, pal,” said the fat man.

And just like that a drunken scuffle ensued, like a thousand drunken scuffles Waldo and Mickey had seen over the years in a thousand joints, all of them different but all of them alike, with guys swinging and missing and falling down and knocking chairs over and innocent bystanders trying to get out of the way, but the staff of the Hotel St Crispian was well-trained, and before you knew it Raoul the bartender and Rex the waiter were frog-marching the fat guy out of the Prince Hal Room, and the fat woman followed them. She was still laughing.


Mr. Bernstein looked up at Waldo and Mickey and made a circular motion with his finger.

“So, where were we, Mickey?” said Waldo into the mike.

“Yeah,” said Mickey, “before we was so rudely interrupted. Oh, I remember, we were talking about waking up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night…”

For some reason this got a big laugh from the crowd. 

Mickey looked out at them all, looking up at him through the tobacco smoke.

“And I’m sure this crowd knows what we’re talking about,” he said.

And the punters laughed again, even louder.

{Please go here to read the “adult comix” version in A Flophouse Is Not a Home, profusely illustrated by the illustrious rhoda penmarq…}

“Nothing in This Whole Wide World”

Waldo McGee stood with his wooden dummy Mickey Pumpernickel under his arm outside the “green room” (which doubled as a storage room), and he smoked one last Old Gold while he waited for Shirley and Tony and the band to finish their set.

“Listen, Mickey,” said Waldo, “There’s something I been wanting to say to you.”

“Spill,” said Mickey, or rather he communicated telepathically, on account of people looked at Waldo and Mickey funny when they had private conversations out loud.

“It’s this, pal,” said Waldo. “When I croak, I want you to find a new partner.”

“What do you mean, when you croak?” said Mickey.

Even though they weren’t talking out loud, Waldo’s lips moved ever so slightly when Mickey spoke telepathically, just like they did onstage in their act.

“I mean I ain’t gonna live forever,” said Waldo.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” said Mickey. “What’s with this morbid shit when we’re like two minutes away from going on?”

“Look, I’m sorry, Mickey, but it’s been like welling up in me. It’s like I got gas from eating beans on toast and I just gotta let it out, ya know?”

“I know I’m trying to get in the right frame of mind to entertain these punters out there who are paying good money to have a good time, and I don’t need you to be bringing me down, daddy-o! Now zip it.”

“How many years we been together, Mickey? Thirty?”

“Thirty-two.”

“Thirty-two years, and I ain’t getting no younger. You, you don’t age, but me, every day I get older, every day I feel more like shit, every day I get closer to that hole in the ground –”

“Oh, Jesus Christ, Waldo, tell it to the marines, will ya?”

“All’s I’m saying is I don’t want you sitting on a shelf somewheres. I want you to find a new partner, some good younger guy, to like keep the act going.”

“Don’t you worry about me, buddy. Worry about yourself. Maybe cut back on the booze and the smokes a little, you ever think about that?”

“Sure I think about it.”

“Maybe take a little exercise now and then.”

“I exercise.”

“You exercise your right arm lifting a glass to your mug.”

“That ain’t nice, Mickey.”

“I am only speaking the truth, Waldo. You try taking care of yourself you got a good twenty years left.”

“No way I got twenty years.”

“Fifteen then. Ten. Just watch the booze. And the smokes. Take a walk now and then.”

“I walk.”

“Yeah, you walk from the bar to the jakes to strangle the worm, and then back to the bar again.”

“That still counts as exercise.”

“Yeah, right, it is to laugh.”

“Just promise me.”

“What?”

“That you will find a new partner when I croak.”

“Awright, awright, if it will shut you up, yes, I will find a new partner when you croak, all right?”

“Some fresh young kid.”

“Sure.”

“You can teach him everything.”

“Okay.”

“Everything we learned these thirty-two years.”



“Okay, sure.”

“Working all them dives. All them nights. All our jokes and bits.”

“Okay, Waldo.”

“But, look, you gotta tell him to work out his own material, too.”

“Sure.”

“That is very important. That he finds his own, like, voice.”

“Okay, Waldo.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise, Waldo.”


Shirley was singing another one of her and Tony’s original numbers. The audience didn’t seem to mind, drunk and getting drunker as they always were, and Shirley and Tony and the boys would slip into one of the old warhorses every now and then just to keep the marks on their toes – “Starlight” or “Body and Soul” or “You Go to My Head” – but right now they were laying down one of their new compositions…

When I walk down this lonely street
every fella that I meet
says, "Hey, baby, trick or treat?"
but they don’t seem so reet to me
in fact they seem pretty beat to me,
so, "Scram, Sam," I says,
"and tell your story walkin’
because this jive that you’re talkin’
don’t mean nothing to me…"

She nodded over to Waldo and Mickey through the smoke. That meant she was getting ready to wind the number up.

Waldo took one last drag on the Old Gold, then stubbed it out in the sand in the standing ashtray there.

“You ready, Mickey?” he said.

“Ready as I’ll ever be, partner.”

“All right then,” said Waldo.

“Let’s kill ‘em,” said Mickey.

“Don’t mean nothing in this whole wide world to me,” sang Shirley. 

Tony tinkled out a final arpeggio and Zeke the drummer tickled the snare with the brushes. Some of the people clapped, and a couple of the drunker ones hooted approvingly.

“Thank you, ladies and gents,” said Shirley into the mike, “thank you very much. Tony and the boys and I are gonna take a little break to wet our whistles, but we’ll be back for two more sets! And now let’s hear it for Waldo McGee and Mickey Pumpernickel!”

Waldo grabbed the wooden chair at the side of the stage and carried it and Mickey up the two steps.


“Knock ‘em dead, Waldo,” said Shirley.

“Sure, doll,” said Waldo, and he set the chair down with Mickey on it while he lowered the mike stand. Then he picked Mickey up again and sat himself down in the chair, with Mickey on his lap. He looked out at the crowd.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” said Waldo into the mike, “and I use those terms of address in their loosest possible sense.”

This got a ripple of laughter, just like it usually did. It was one of Mickey’s lines, something he came up with at a Kiwanis gig in Sheboygan before the war, and for some reason it never grew old.

“My name is Waldo McGee,” said Waldo, “and this little guy here is my friend Mickey Pumpernickel.”

“And he uses the term friend in its loosest possible sense,” said Mickey, and this got an even bigger laugh…

I got this, thought Mickey. Even if McGee don’t got it, I got it, and as long as he don’t keel over dead in the middle of a joke I’m gonna keep on getting it. 



“Hey, McGee –” said Mickey.

“Yeah, Mickey,” said Waldo.

“I got a question for ya.”

“Shoot, Mickey.”

“My question is, if I’m the wooden dummy how come you’re the one puts away bourbon like you got two wooden legs?”


The punters laughed at the gag, just like they always did when they were drunk enough…


{Please go here to read the "adult comix" version in A Flophouse Is Not a Home, profusely illustrated by the illustrious rhoda penmarq...}

“Tell Me, Murchison”

“So, tell me, Murchison,” said Farmer Brown to Addison, “what novels have you written? I should love to read one.”

“Well, in point of fact, Mr. Brown –”

“’Farmer’, my boy, please, call me ‘Farmer’. That’s what all my buddies call me, and I truly hope that we can be buddies.”

“Okay, ‘Farmer’ – well, as I was starting to say, I have not published any novels as yet, because you see I am still in the process of composing my first novel –”

“And a wonderful novel it’s going to be, I’ll wager!”

“Well, I hope so –”

“Is it perhaps an autobiographical novel about your wartime service in the parachute factory?”

“Oh, God no. I don’t think I could bear to relive those two-and-a-half long years of grinding tedium, let alone inflict them on the reading public!”

“A tale of a young writer in the big city then, struggling to complete his first novel, the subject of which is a youthful would-be author in the Big Apple, striving to compose his début novel, which is an epic of a young fellow, new to Gotham, and his bohemian adventures as he writes a sort of Bildungsroman about a young lad writing his first novel?”

“Well, no, actually it is a prose epic set in the American Old West of the 1870s.”

“Ah! Now we’re talking! A good western yarn, like Zane Grey or Owen Wister!”

“I was thinking more in terms of a psychological epic on the order of Proust or Joyce, but in the setting of the American frontier days.”

“Splendid! Now that’s something you don’t read every day, is it?”

“Well, I hope not.”

“But tell me, Murphyson, just between you and me, and I’m not asking you to give up any trade secrets, but – all that other stuff aside – Proust, Joyce, the Golden West – tell me, what is your book really about?”

“What’s it about?”

“Yes. I mean, don’t a book have to be about something? I mean on a deeper level, you get my drift? What’s its deeper meaning?”

“Gee, Farmer, that’s a tough one.”

“Take your time.”

“Okay, let me think about it for a second –”

“You do that, my friend,” said Farmer Brown, and he turned to Milford on his right. “How you doing there, Mimford?”

“What?” said Milford.

“How are you doing? I mean really?”

“I’m doing fine, Mr. Brown. I was listening to the music.”

“Ain’t she something, that Shirley De LaSalle?”

“Yes, she’s quite –”

“She’s a tomato all right,” said Farmer Brown.

Shirley was singing these words:

I’m just a lonely gal
in a lonely town.
All I want is a pal
who won’t mess me around…

“A real peach,” said Farmer Brown, and then he turned back to Addison. “So, what’s your book about, Mulligan?”

“Okay, I think what it’s really about –” said Addison, “I mean, at bottom, what it really deals with – is man’s search for some shred of purpose, some meaning, some ghost of meaning in this dream we call life, in this, this –”

“Do you know what Tommy Eliot once told me?”

“Tommy Eliot?” said Milford.

“Oh, sorry,” said Farmer Brown, “T.S. Eliot. But that one time I met him he told me to call him Tommy. This was after a few highballs you understand.”

“You met T.S. Eliot?” said Addison.

“Oh, yes,” said Farmer Brown. “You see he was in town for a publishing convention which the hotel was hosting, and he and I quaffed a few at this very bar. Really nice fellow, once he had a few under his belt.”

“What was it he told you?” said Addison.



“I had asked him what was The Waste Land all about. That poem was all the rage at the time, and I had attempted to read it. Attempted, because, well, just between you and me and the four walls here, I’m more of a Vachel Lindsay kind of guy. Or Eddie Guest – now there’s a fella who can write a poem! Anyhoo, so I asked ol’ T.S., flat out, just what that darned Waste Land poem meant. ‘C’mom, Tommy boy,’ I says to him, ‘cause by this time I was calling him ‘Tommy Boy’, heh heh, ‘tell me, Tommy boy, from one midwestern lad to another, straight from the hip, what in tarnation was that dang-blasted poem all about?’ And you know what he said?”

“No,” said Addison.

“’Farmer,’ he said, ‘one midwestern boy to another? It don’t mean shit.’ That’s what he said. ‘Don’t mean shit, Farmer.’ That’s what he told me.”

“Wow,” said Addison. “Okay.”

“’Don’t mean shit,’” said Farmer Brown. “That’s exactly what he said. But.”

“But?” said Addison.

“I ain’t saying that your book don’t mean shit,” said Farmer Brown.

“No?”

“Nope. Ain’t saying that at all. Your book might mean a lot.”

“Well, I hope so –”

“A heck of a lot,” said Farmer Brown.

Addison was rarely at a loss for words, but at this moment he found nothing within his vast mind worth saying.

Shirley De LaSalle was singing again, coming in after a piano improvisation from Tony Winston:

Yes, I’m just a lonely girl
always wearing a frown
lost in a lonely world
stuck in an unkind town…

Milford was vaguely aware of Farmer Brown and Addison talking nonsense behind his back, but he only had eyes and ears for Shirley De LaSalle. Would she allow him to talk to her on her next break? Would he think of something clever or possibly even endearing to say to her? Would her eyes glaze over in boredom? He knew only one thing: he would write a poem about her, maybe many poems. What else did he have to write poems about? How many poems could anyone write about the meaninglessness of life?



And then Shirley seemed to be looking directly at him, through the clouds of cigarette smoke, as she sang…

I’m just a lonely dame
in a city that knows no shame.
Is there somewhere a lonely guy
who would care for such as I?


{Plese go here to read the “adult comix” version in A Flophouse Is Not a Home, profusely illustrated by the illustrious rhoda penmarq…}

“A Limitless Source of Wonder”

“Raoul,” said Farmer Brown to the bartender, “if you please, sir, another Cream of Kentucky with a small bottle of White Rock ginger ale for my new friend Madison here, and, what the heck, same again for me. Oh, do you prefer ice in your highball, Madison? I prefer not, but that’s just me.”

”I assure you it’s a matter of complete indifference to me,” said Addison, “as long as the Cream of Kentucky is not stinted on.”

“Spoken like a stout fellow of my own bold stripe,” said Farmer Brown, and, turning to Milford on his right, “and what do you say, Montfort, how about just a soupçon of Cream of Kentucky to liven up that White Rock of yours?”

“No,” said Milford, “thank you, but, again – as I believe I have mentioned no more than half a dozen times in our brief acquaintance – I am an alcoholic, and as much as I would like to quaff an entire fifth of Cream of Kentucky in very short order, I choose not to.”

“But another bottle of gingy ale is okay, right?”

“Okay, fine,” said Milford, “thank you, I’ll take another ginger ale, even though I’m about to burst with the stuff.”

“So that’s also a fresh bottle of White Rock for young Malfort here,” said Farmer Brown to Raoul, “and all on my tab of course.”

“Right away,” said Raoul the bartender and he went away.

“By the way,” said Addison, inclining his head to look past Farmer Brown and address Milford, “I wonder if you could spare one of those Woodbines?”

“I probably could,” said Milford, “but for your information there’s a tobacco-and-candy stand out in the lobby of this hotel, and I know for a fact that they carry Woodbines, as well as many other brands of cigarettes, both foreign and domestic.”

“Oh, but I’m so comfortable on this bar stool,” said Addison.

“Here, have one of mine,” said Farmer Brown, clicking open his silver monogrammed cigarette case and shoving it toward Addison. “I hope you don’t mind Old Golds?”

“Love Old Golds,” said Addison; indeed he loved any cigarette, especially a free one.

Up on the little stage Shirley De LaSalle had launched into a new song:

Why do I always choose a man who
doesn’t have a job?
Why do I always pick a chap
who’d rather steal and rob,
who likes to gamble
and run around
with every two-bit
Jane in this old town?

Why do I always pick a fella
bound to make me blue
Why do I always settle on
a ham-and-egger just like you?

Oh, I got no choices left to choose –
I got them ham-and-egger blues!

Addison was happy. He had a free drink on the bar in front of him, and in his hand a free Pall Mall, which had been enthusiastically lighted by Farmer Brown with his silver monogrammed lighter that matched his cigarette case. Or was it platinum? Regardless, the oaf had the air of someone with money, and Addison thought that someday, after his novel was published and became a bestseller, this is the sort of bar he would frequent. Nothing against Bob’s Bowery Bar, you really couldn’t fault a place where you could purchase a glass of the hearty basement-brewed house bock for a dime, but he could get used to a less shall we say demotic place like this Prince Hal Room. Oh, sure, he was sitting next to a madman, with a po-faced young bad poet on the other side of the madman, but the madman was buying, Addison was in love, and all was as well as could be expected in this most imperfect of all worlds.

“So, Madison,” said Farmer Brown, “have you read young Mordant’s poems?”

He tapped the sheaf of typescript lying there on the bar.

“Oh, yes,” said Addison. “Really, uh, marvelous.”

“We were just talking about this one poem here, what’s it called –” he lowered his head and his thick eyeglasses closer to the top sheet on the pile – “’Those Who Are Dead’ –”

“Oh, yes, wonderful poem,” said Addison, despite not having read it.

“Did you realize it was about the Rosicrucians?”

“What?”

“I mean, not the Rosicrucians, I think it was the Knights of Columbus – isn’t that right, Morton?”

“My name is Milford,” said Milford, “and, no, as I told you, the poem has nothing to do with the Rosicrucians, or the Knights of Columbus, it’s about AA!”

“Right, you told me that,” said Farmer Brown, “AA, for anti-aircraft.” He turned to Addison. “My mistake, it’s about these meetings Milton goes to with his fellow veterans of the anti-aircraft battalions. He must have been so terribly young –  probably lied about his age to get in the service. I tried to enlist but they said I was too old. Did you serve, sir?”

“Alas,” said Addison, “I was declared 4-F – flat feet and knock knees – and so I did my war service in a parachute factory in Fayetteville, North Carolina.”

“And I’ll bet you made a darn good parachute, too, sir!”

“Oh, I did my best,” said Addison, not mentioning that his best was not much, and that he had been relegated to janitorial duties after his first couple of weeks, so clumsy he was with his hands, and so absent-minded when it came to even the simplest assembly-line work.

“Nothing but respect for our brave boys who fought,” said Farmer Brown. “Like young Merton here, brave lad.”

“Mr. Brown,” said Milford, “I was not even sixteen when the war ended. I was not in the military. I was in prep school.”

“Then how could you have been in the anti-aircraft batteries? Did they have one in your school?”

“Oh, Christ,” said Milford. “oh, Jesus Christ and all the saints in Heaven, please help me.”

“What is it, Mervyn?” said Farmer Brown.

“Nothing, nothing at all,” said Milford.

Farmer Brown turned to Addison, and leant his large red face closer to Addison’s thin pallid face.

“You know what I think it is?” Farmer Brown whispered.

“What’s that?” said Addison.

“Shell shock. That’s what they call it. Or battle fatigue. These lads who went through the real barney while guys like you and me were safe at home, making whoopee with them Rosie the Riveters and Allotment Annies. The horrors these young fellers saw. And it comes back to them at odd moments. Just rises up from the depths, so to speak, like a bad plate of oysters. And poor Mimson can’t even drink to drown his terrible memories, on account of he thinks he’s an alcoholic. Ain’t that sad?”

“Yes, very sad,” said Addison.

Milford had turned to look at and listen to Shirley De LaSalle up there at the microphone. Damn it, he would stay here at this bar just until she went on break again, and then once more he would attempt to talk to her. He felt that he was falling in love, even though he had only spoken a few stumbling and awkward words with her. Could it be that she might care for him?

Shirley was singing another song now, a slow song rich with sadness:

I got them melancholy blues
from my head down to my shoes,
them mean old melancholy blues,
I think I’ll drown myself in booze…

“And you, Madison,” said Farmer Brown to Addison, “if I am not wrong, and I don’t think I am, are you also a poet?”

“Novelist, actually,” said Addison.

“Novelist!” said Farmer Brown. “I knew it! I only suggested poet as a gambit, as I didn’t want to seem one of those annoying people who are always pigeon-holing other people, but I just knew you were a novelist!”

“Was it my slightly threadbare brown serge suit?”

“It was that, yes, but even more so, those penetrating eyes, the hawklike eyes of a novelist – or perhaps a short-story writer? But nonetheless the keen eyes of a skilled observer of humanity and of the world.”

Farmer Brown’s eyeglasses were so thick, the eyes behind them hideously but dully magnified and looking like the eyes of a cartoon character in the Sunday funnies, that Addison wondered what if anything they did see, but all he said was, “Thank you, Mr. Brown. Yes, the world and its inhabitants are a limitless source of wonder to me.”


Tony went into his piano break, and Shirley gazed through the smoke at all the punters on the dance floor and at the tables, and there at the near end of the bar was that weird younger guy in the peacoat who had bought her a drink and tried to chat her up, stammering and sweating, and he was gazing longingly up at her now.

Yeah, another conquest.

What was his story? Dressed like a longshoreman, but he sure didn’t talk like one. Maybe he was one of these eccentric rich guys. Who knows, maybe he was her ticket out of this joint and six nights a week, four sets a night. A girl could dream, right?

{Kindly go here to read the “adult comix” version in A Flophouse Is Not a Home, profusely illustrated by the illustrious rhoda penmarq…}

“Those Who Are Dead”

 “Now this poem here,” said Farmer Brown, tapping the sheet of expensive typing paper, “the one titled ‘Those Who Are Dead’. This one I think is especially – what’s the word? Moving.”

“Moving?” said Milford. “Really?”

“Yes. Moving. That’s the word.”

Farmer Brown raised the sheet closer to his thick eyeglasses and read aloud, repeating the poem’s title:

Those Who Are Dead



Those who are dead
but who have not sense enough
to fall over,
those who stumble into church basements
with their cigarettes and their bloodshot eyes,
sipping stale coffee from Dixie cups
awaiting their turn to stand up and whine
about their wasted lives –
why, oh why must I listen to them,
night after night,
screaming silently with boredom
while I await my own turn
to stand up and bore them –
is this what I have to look forward to,
for the rest of my dreary existence –
the church basements,
the cigarettes,
the Dixie cups of bad, stale coffee?

“Yes,” said Farmer Brown. “Really quite moving.”

“Well, thank you, Mr. Brown.”

“Please, call me Farmer. All my friends call me ‘the Farmer’.”

“Okay – ‘Farmer’.”

“And may I call you – what was it again? Marion?”


“I would really prefer it if you just call me Milford.”

“Milford it is then. Now, ‘Milford’, I was struck by this image of the ‘church basement’. And if it is not too inquisitive of me to ask, what did you mean by that? Was it a reference to certain subterranean sodalities of organized Christian religion – those dark secret brotherhoods kept hidden away in the nether regions of Catholicism, say, the ones that are not bruited about in popular films like Going My Way or The Bells of St. Mary’s?”

“No, it’s just a reference to the church basements where AA meetings are often held.”

“You mean Triple-A?” said Farmer Brown. “The motoring club?”

“No,” said Milford. “Just two As. AA.”

“AA – anti-aircraft?”

“No, Alcoholics Anonymous.”

“Ah! I see – and now the poem takes on an even deeper meaning. So it’s a veiled commentary on secretive societies like Alcoholics Anonymous?”

“Well, I wouldn’t call it ‘veiled’ –”

“And perhaps by extension to other sub rosa organizations like the Rosicrucians or the Illuminati? Y’know, back in Indiana my father wanted me to join the Knights of Pythias, but you know what? I guess I’m just not a joiner. I’ve always been a lone wolf so to speak. Forging my own solitary path through the uncharted wilderness of life. Do you have any other poems which deal perhaps with the Kabbalah?”

“Um, no, I’m not Jewish –”

“Neither am I. But I am fascinated by these mysterious cults and cabals and confraternities. For instance the Shriners always stay here in the hotel when they have their annual galas – now those are some crazy guys, I’ll tell you!”

“The Shriners?”

“Yes. Not bad fellows once you get a drink or two in them.”

“Well, as I’ve told you, Mr. Brown, I don’t drink.”

“Not even occasionally?”

“No.”

“Not even as a shall we say social lubricant?”

“No. As I thought I made clear, I am an alcoholic.”

“But you’re so very young!”
 

“You can be young and still be an alcoholic.”

“Yes, I see your point. But tell me, to be an alcoholic, is it not necessary to imbibe shall we say over much of spiritous liquids?”

“Yes, I think that is a reasonable definition.”

“But – and I ask this in all simplicity – this would not include fermented beverages like beer or wine, is that not correct?”

“No, it is not correct. You can be an alcoholic even if you only drink beer or wine.”

“Even just beer?”

“Yes, even just beer.”

“But, surely, a glass of wine with a meal, or sitting at a café in the afternoon, and even a nice port by the fireside on a wintry wet night such as this one –”

“No, no, and no,” said Milford. “Have you never heard the term ‘wino’?”

“Ha ha, yes, of course, a delightful example of the American vernacular –”

“Well, do you think those winos sitting on the curbs on the Bowery with their bottles of Taylor port are not alcoholics?”

“Oh,” said Farmer Brown. “Point taken again! Yes, I suppose those unfortunates would fall under that general rubric, wouldn’t they?”

“They certainly would. I see them all the time at the meetings I go to.”

“And what meetings are these? The Knights of Columbus perhaps?”

“No, the AA meetings!”

“The anti-aircraft meetings? So you were in the war? You must have been awfully young. Was it very frightening shooting those machine guns up at the bombers?”

Milford sighed.

Onstage Shirley De LaSalle was singing again. He should just stop talking to this moron and listen to her, as she sang a song he had never heard before:

He’s my ding dong daddy
They say he’s not no good
He’s my big dong daddy
And he do me like he should…

“Oh, hello, Milford. Fancy meeting you here of all places.”

Milford turned. Who was it but that guy Addison.

“Oh, hi, Addison. How are you?”

“Oh, I’m very well, thank you very much. I wonder if I might join you?”

“Hi, there, fella,” said Farmer Brown. “Here, take my bar stool, I got it all warmed up for you.”

“Oh, no, I wouldn’t dream of taking your seat, sir,” said Addison.

“Heck, partner, I’ve been sitting all day! Now, please, take the seat.”

“Only if you insist.”

“Don’t mind standing for a spell. Tell the truth, after a few hours on a bar stool my rear end tends to get a bit tender, you know what I mean?”

“Yes, I think I do,” said Addison.

Farmer Brown heaved himself off the stool, and Addison sat himself on it. The old worn leather of the seat was indeed quite warm.

“Don’t mind standing at all,” said Farmer Brown, squeezing in between Addison and Milford, his shoulders abutting theirs, his beaming face turning from one of the younger men to the other. “So you’re a friend of Mumford’s too, sir?”

“Uh, yes,” said Addison.

“So also I,” said Farmer Brown. “We’ve only just met, but I already feel that I’ve known the lad all my life. Isn’t that right, Rumford?”

“Um, yes,” said Milford.

“Now some older fellows like me disdain the company of the younger generation,” said Farmer Brown. “But not me. You know what my motto is, sir?”

“I can’t say I do,” said Addison. “But I would like to know.”

“Listen to the young people,” said Farmer Brown. “That’s my motto. Listen to the young people. Because maybe, just maybe, they might have something to say! Brown is my name. What’s your name, if I may be so bold?”

“Well, everyone calls me Addison.”

“Put ‘er there, Addison,” said the Farmer, extending his slightly pudgy soft hand, which Addison took in his thin soft hand.

“Very pleased to meet you, Mr. Brown.”

“Call me Farmer. That’s what they call me on account of my name is Brown. Farmer Brown my friends call me, and if you’re friends with Wilfred you’re friends with me.”

“All right then,” said Addison. “I’ll call you Farmer.”

“And I’ll call you Madison if I may.”

“Uh, well –”

“Let me buy you a beverage, Madison.”

Well, thought Addison, if this guy is buying he can call me anything he wants to…

“Thanks, ‘Farmer’,” he said.

“What are you drinking, Madison?”

“Whatever you’re drinking, Farmer.”

“Cream of Kentucky and ginger ale then,” said the Farmer.

Milford sighed again, and looked toward the stage. “He’s my boogie woogie papa,” sang Shirley De LaSalle, “and he knows how to treat me right.”

He’s my zoot suit cutie
Keeps me up all through the night…

 

{To be continued next week, et ad infinitum. Please go here to read the “adult comix” version in A Flophouse Is Not a Home, profusely illustrated by the illustrious rhoda penmarq…}

“Two Bucks and Change”

 

It was true that Bubbles had given him a couple of Baltimore handshakes (at three dollars per), and that once before she had allowed him to kiss her (for one dollar), on the cheek, with her looking away if not perhaps quite askance, but this was the first time she had allowed him to kiss her on her ruby red lips – and she did not even ask him to pay for it!

“Okay,” she said after half a minute, pushing her hands against his chest, “down, tiger.”

“Oh, just one more, please, Bubbles,” said Addison.

“No, Atcheson,” she said. “I said one kiss and I meant it.”

“How about if I gave you a dollar? I still have two dollars and change. You can have it all. Just one more brief kiss. I promise I’ll be quick.”

“Save your money, Atcheson. What are you gonna eat tomorrow if you give me your last two bucks and change?”

“I shall go hungry. Gladly! And anyway, who knows, I might get an envelope from home. My Aunt Agatha is quite overdue to send me something.”

“You and your aunts.”

“Yes, they are quite literally life-savers.”

“Where would you be without these women in your family sending you money?”

“I suppose I should have to find a job.”

“What sort of job?”

“Oh, I don’t know. A lowly clerk in some sort of office perhaps. A modern day Bartleby. ‘I would prefer not to.’”

“I’ll bet you’d prefer not to.”

“The idea of wasting my life working at a job has always been abhorrent to me.”

“Well, we’re on the same page there, buster.”

“One kiss.”

“Ixnay. Like I told you, I need my beauty sleep. I can’t be standing out here in the cold and damp all night making whoopee with you.”

“May I call you tomorrow?”

“You can do whatever the hell you want to do, Atcheson.”

“Perhaps we can meet for a drink.”

“With your two bucks and change?”

“You forget, my Aunt Agatha –”

“Look, don’t push it, buddy. I’m gonna tell you a secret.”

“I love secrets.”

“The secret is everybody gets boring if you’re around them too much.”

“I could never get bored with you.”

“You haven’t been around me that much. Give it time.”

“I should love to give it time.”

“You want to know another secret?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I’m me every single second of every day, and it’s not as glamorous as you might think. Good night, Atcheson.”

She already had her key out. She opened the door.

“Good night, Bubbles.”

She glanced at him but said nothing and went inside, closing the door behind her.

Addison sighed, then went down the steps, turned right, and began to walk along the glistening wet sidewalk between the ridges and piles of soot-encrusted snow. The cold drizzly rain had finally stopped, and he kept his old umbrella furled. He didn’t want to go home. It was still early – early for Addison, who rarely went to bed before four in the morning. He wanted to walk, and to think about Bubbles, and that kiss, that glorious kiss.

Bleecker Street. And there was the San Remo, where he and Bubbles had dined and drunk wine, and she had picked up the bill – surely her paying the tab meant that she really liked him! Well, just wait until he got his novel published, then he would treat her. In the meantime, there was Aunt Agatha, and Aunt Enid, and Great Aunt Edna, and his mother, and his two grandmothers, and their envelopes…

Oh, would that an envelope would arrive tomorrow! If he got a twenty he could take Bubbles somewhere really swell – 21, or the Stork Club, or the Copacabana! Not that he had ever been to any of those places, but he would bet Bubbles would like them.

He walked and walked, through the cold and the damp, but he did not feel the cold nor the damp, not with this fire within. He continued to walk along Bleecker, passing bars and bistros and bohemians and bums, and finally he saw a sign that said Seventh Avenue and realized he had been walking in quite the opposite direction from where he lived just off the Bowery – but what did it matter? What did anything matter? He turned left on Seventh, for no good reason, for no bad reason, for no reason at all.

A few more blocks and then he saw that automat where he had eaten lunch with that pathetic young fellow Milford earlier that day – God, it seemed ages ago! Should he go in there and have some pie and coffee? No, fie on that, a drink was more like it, damn it! Across the alley from the automat was that old hotel, the Hotel St Crispian. Addison had been there once, months ago, when he had gone with the rest of the Bob’s Bowery Bar gang to see that broken-down ventriloquist Waldo McGee and his dummy Mickey Pumpernickel on their opening night at the hotel’s cocktail lounge, the Prince Hal Room. It had been quite amusing as far as that sort of thing went, and, really, Addison had to admit he was easily amused. As long as he had a drink and a cigarette, preferably both paid for by someone else, who was he to complain, especially now that he was in love?  

Idly Addison went over to the entrance and next to it was a sign, with Dutch-angled photographs, which read:


The Prince Hal Room

Entertainment Tonight!

Featuring the “swinging” sounds of

Tony Winston & his Winstonians

with the stunning chanteuse Shirley De LaSalle

(fresh from her nation-wide tour in Fifty Million Frenchmen)

Also, the Betty Baxter Dancers!

(as featured on the Schaefer Beer Variety Hour)

No cover charge. One-drink minimum.


And there at the very bottom of the sign was


With your compères Waldo McGee and Mickey Pumpernickel!


So the old boy and his dummy were still working here…

Addison decided to go in. He still had his two bucks and change, and it wasn’t as if he had anything better to do.

An enormous old doorman opened the door.

“Good evening, sir. Welcome to the Hotel St Crispian.”

“Good evening to you, my good man. I’m just here for a drink in the Prince Hal Room.”

“Of course, sir. Right across the lobby there.”

“Thank you,” said Addison.

“You are quite welcome, sir.”

Addison headed across the lobby, with its potted plants and rubber trees and comfy-looking divans and armchairs, with old people sitting in them reading newspapers.




Two dollars and change. Enough for two or three cocktails and a modest tip, and as for breakfast tomorrow, well, that was tomorrow, and this – this was now…

{To be continued next week. Please go here to read the “adult comix” version in A Flophouse Is Not a Home, profusely illustrated by the illustrious rhoda penmarq…}

“Farmer Brown”

“Excuse me, young fellow, but may I ask you a question?”

It was a middle-aged guy, pleasant-looking and plump, with a smiling flushed face and thick eyeglasses.

“What?” said Milford.

“Now when you say ’What?’, is that in the sense of ‘What is your question?’, or, rather, simply, in the sense of ‘What did you say?’”

“’What?’ in the sense of ‘What did you say,’” said Milford.

“I said, and say again, begging your indulgence, ‘May I ask you a question?’”

“Yeah, sure,” said Milford.

“Are you a seafaring gent?”

“A what?”

“A sailor. Perhaps a merchant seaman? Or a bargeman? Or a tugboat man?”

“No, I am none of those.”

“I see,” said the man. “I ask because of the peacoat you are wearing, and, also, to an extent, because of the thick ribbed woolen sweater you wear beneath it.”

“I am not a sailor.”

“Very interesting. And, if it is not too intrusive of me to ask, may I inquire of your occupation?”

“Yes, you may.”

“And that is?”

“I am a poet.”

“I knew it! By the sensitive cut of your jib – if I may speak in nautical terms – I just knew you were a scribe of some sort, perhaps an autobiographical novelist or a literary essayist, but most likely a poet, a modern troubadour!”

“If you knew I was a poet, then why did you ask if I was a sailor?”

“Only because if by chance you were a sailor, then you might have been offended if I assumed you were a poet.”

“Oh, okay. But since I am a poet, I shouldn’t be offended if you were to assume I was a sailor?”

“Precisely. If anything, in my experience, poets are flattered to be taken for anything but a poet. I once met T.S. Eliot, and he told me that he was always pleased when people took him for a bank manager or an accountant. May I buy you a libation, sir?”

“I don’t drink. This is ginger ale I’m drinking.”

“Excuse me, do you mean to say that you do not partake of alcoholic beverages?”

“That is correct. I am an alcoholic, and if I have even a taste of alcohol, then next thing I know I’m waking up in an alleyway.”

“A pity. And so young!”

“Yes. It’s a struggle. But life is a struggle. And then we die.”

“How true! But – and again, please stop me if I am being overly inquisitive – why are you sitting at a bar?”

“You know, sir, I have been asking myself that very question ever since I came in here an hour ago. Why? Why am I here?”

“On this planet? In this life?”

“Well, that, too, but more particularly, why am I in this bar? And the most obvious answer is that I was sitting all alone in that automat across the alley from this hotel, and that ventriloquist and his dummy up there came in, and they suggested I come over and see the show.”

“Waldo McGee and Mickey Pumpernickel?”

“Yeah. The dummy said I was missing out on life sitting in the automat by myself and smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee.”

“The dummy said this?”

“Yeah, the dummy did all the talking. Although I guess it was really the ventriloquist guy talking.”

“Yes, I suppose it must have been. And are you glad you came over?”

“In a sense, yes. Because the dummy introduced me to the singer.”

“Shirley De LaSalle?”

“Yeah, he introduced me. And, even though I don’t drink, I bought her a champagne cocktail, and she said thanks. But then she had to go back onstage and sing.”

Shirley was at that moment singing, and her song went:

“Dark are the alleys I stumble down.
Steep are the stairs I tumble down.
What is that sound that’s comin’ round?
Is it the siren of that train hellbound?”

“She’s quite the little songstress, isn’t she?” said the man.

“Yes,” said Milford. “I’m reluctant to say it, because I’m so used to not wanting to be wherever I am, but I have to say I’m almost glad I came in here now.”

“Ah, to be young!” said the man.


“Being young is wasted on me,” said Milford.

“You might feel differently when you are no longer young, my friend.”

“Oh, I’m sure that if I live long enough to be no longer young, that I shall be suffused with regret for wasting my youth.”

“It is not too late!”

“Do you think so?”

“Look at me,” said the man. “Three decades ago, at the dawn of the so-called Roaring Twenties, I came to this great city from my hometown in Indiana, bright-eyed I was and full of dreams.”

“And did you fulfill your dreams?”

The man paused.

“In a sense, yes.”

“In what sense?”

“In the sense that my whole life has passed like a dream, a dream full of dreams, which were themselves composed of dreams, dreams within dreams within the great dream of life.”

For an awful moment Milford saw himself in the man. Would he, Milford, still be sitting at this bar, thirty years hence, boring some other young fellow in a peacoat?

Shirley sang, and the words of her song went:

“Down dark alleys I creep.
Into dark windows I peek.
Words like night winds I speak.
And the universe makes not a peep…”

“Brown is the name,” said the man, and he was extending a hand.

Milford gave the man his own hand, and their two soft and uncallused hands, one young, one older, embraced briefly.

“Call me Farmer,” said the man. “That’s what all my friends call me: ‘Farmer Brown’. Phineas is my actual Christian name, although I like to joke that it was most un-Christian of my parents to give it to me. Ha ha. ‘Farmer Brown’ they call me, on account of I’m originally from Indiana. Not that I’ve ever been on a farm. May I know your name?”

“Call me Milford.”

“Milford? An unusual name.”

“It’s my surname actually.”

“I see. So you prefer not to be called by your, uh, given name?”

“Yes, I prefer it.”

“May I ask what that name is?”

Milford sighed. This was another reason why he shouldn’t go to bars.

“My allegedly Christian name is Marion.”

“Marion?”

“Yes.”

“And I thought Phineas was bad. So your friends call you Milford?”

“Yes,” said Milford, not getting into the question of whether he even had any friends.

“We all have our little crosses to bear,” said Farmer Brown.

“Why do I even bother to live,” sang Shirley De LaSalle, on the little stage, “when I ain’t got nothing left to give?”

“Why do I get up in the morning?
Why do I go to bed at night?
I’ve got no man to love me,
to kiss and hold me tight.”

Milford gazed at the bottles of liquor ranged sparkling on the shelves of the bar. He wondered if he would be stuck with this Farmer Brown character all night.

“Y’know, Milford,” said the Farmer Brown guy, “I should really like to read some of your poetry.”

“What?”

“I said I’d love to read your poetry, I mean if you wouldn’t mind.”

This was the first time, the absolute first time that anyone had ever asked to read Milford’s poetry. Would it be the last?

Milford told Farmer Brown that, yes, he would show him some of his poems, and in fact he just happened to have a sheaf of them rolled up inside his peacoat.

{Please go here to read the “adult comix” version in A Flophouse Is Not a Home, profusely illustrated by the illustrious rhoda penmarq…}

"An American Epic"

“And so you see, Bubbles,” said Addison, “what I am attempting to do in my novel is to do something akin to what Tolstoy did in War and Peace, but to create an essentially American epic, which, yes, might fall within the delineaments of what we call ‘a western’ qua ‘western’, but which will also encompass all the themes of all great literature, from the time of Homer down to our own sadly decadent day –”

“Hey, Atcheson,” said Bubbles, “I hate to interrupt you, but can I just say one thing?”

“Of course, Bubbles, say not only one thing, but a dozen, a thousand things –”

“That one thing I want to say is I don’t care.”

“You don’t care. In what sense, dear Bubbles?”

“In the sense that I don’t care about your ideas for your novel. I mean, if you want to ramble on, knock yourself out, but just don’t expect me to pay attention.”

“Oh. So I was boring you.”

“You would have been boring me if I was paying attention, but luckily for me I wasn’t.”

“Ha ha.”

“No offense.”

“Oh, no offense taken. May I tell you a little secret, Bubbles?”

“Fire away. I love secrets.”

“My little secret is that my entire life people have been telling me I’m boring.”

“But it hasn’t stopped you yet, has it?”

“No, I seem to be quite irrepressible that way. But what ever shall we talk about?”

“Nothing’s always good for me.”

“You mean you like to talk about nothing?”

“I mean I like not talking about anything.”

“Just sitting here, saying nothing?”

“It’s not so bad. It beats hearing about Homer and Tolstoy and your western.”
 

“A prose epic in the guise of a western –”

“Yeah, not talking about anything is better than hearing about your whatever in the guise of a western.”

“So I should just write it and not talk about it.”

“It doesn’t matter to me if you write it or not, just don’t talk about it to me and expect me to listen.”

Addison paused for a moment, his senses full with Chianti and baked ziti and cheesecake, with the jukebox jazz music and the warmth of human bodies, the rich odors of cigarette smoke, the chatter and laughter of the voices of men and women, and above all the calm beauty of Bubbles. At last he spoke again, as he was innately incapable of not speaking for more than a minute at a time.

“May I say it again, Bubbles?”

“What’s that?”

“That you are a true existential heroine?”

“Yeah, you can say that again. I don’t know what it means, but I like being called some kind of heroine.”

“You truly are.”

“Hey, let’s get the check.”

“Oh, I am boring you.”

“Just a little maybe, but mostly I’m getting a little sleepy, and like I told you, I don’t get my good ten hours beauty sleep I’m just a wreck the whole next day.”

“Speaking of the check, I’m afraid I only have two dollars and some small change left.”

“I told you dinner was on me.”

“Thank you very much, Bubbles.”

“You’re welcome. Y’know, Addison, even though you’re kind of a boring guy, I like you for some reason.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. I’m not sure why. I mean, you look like Dan Duryea on a bad day, you never have any money and you never buy your own cigarettes, but, I don’t know, I kind of like you.”

“Bubbles, you don’t know what it means to me to hear you say that.”

“Don’t get carried away, pal. I didn’t say I was in love with you.”

“No, of course not! I mean, why would you?”

“Exactly. Why would I? Now flag that waiter down.”


Outside the San Remo the sleety rain had all but stopped, and the neon sign of the bar cast its blood-orange glow over the wet pavement and the piles of dirty snow.

“May I at least walk you to your door?” said Addison.

“You’d better,” said Bubbles. “All the creeps in this town?”

A half block down Bleecker and they were at the steps of her building.

“Good night, Atcheson.”

“Good night, Bubbles. But.”

“But what?”

“I hate to overstep my bounds.”

“Go ahead and overstep.”

“I wonder if I might kiss you.”

She looked at him.

“Only if you wanted to,” added Addison.

She continued to look at him.



“I could give you that two dollars I still have,” said Addison.

“Your last two bucks?”

“Well, I still have some loose change also.”

“So you’d still have enough for some coffee and a roll or two for breakfast.”

“Oh, yes, the diner I always go to, Ma’s Diner, it’s quite reasonable, and Ma bakes the most excellent breakfast rolls and cinnamon buns –”

“Keep your two bucks, Addison.”

“Oh.”

“Keep your two bucks, and get yourself a nice nutritious breakfast tomorrow.”

“Well, if you insist.”

“I insist,” said Bubbles. “And, yeah, you can kiss me.”

“I can?”

“That’s what I said, wasn’t it?”

“And I don’t have to pay?”

“Shut up and pucker up before I change my mind,” said Bubbles.

It was never easy for Addison to shut up, but now he did, and then he puckered up.

{Kindly go here to read the “adult comix” version in A Flophouse Is Not a Home, profusely illustrated by the illustrious rhoda penmarq…}