R.A. Cramblitt's Blog
November 15, 2023
Keep grinding
Last year around this time, I wrote in my sporadic journal: "Woke this morning at 4:15 and couldn’t go back to sleep, thinking about the crime novel. Too many characters. Two stories in one. Too much technical information and back story. I don’t know if I can go on...Might be time to cash in the chips and learn to play pickleball with the rest of the old cranks."
Six months later: "The good thing is the book is done. All it needs is final proofing. I’m reading it in kindle and so far liking what I see. It moves along briskly and the scenario is intriguing."
Don't know if I'll write another book, but it's a reminder that when all seems lost, there's probably much that can be salvaged.
Six months later: "The good thing is the book is done. All it needs is final proofing. I’m reading it in kindle and so far liking what I see. It moves along briskly and the scenario is intriguing."
Don't know if I'll write another book, but it's a reminder that when all seems lost, there's probably much that can be salvaged.
August 13, 2023
Don't bore us, get to the chorus
Seems like every crime novel now has an overriding directive: Never stand in the way of the narrative. The train must barrel down the tracks at all times, rushing to its destination. Show, don't tell, is not just a guideline, it's an inexorable imperative. Yet, some of the great crime writers took detours, telling us how to tune the engine of a 1954 Ford or how to rope a steer, or the vagaries of dating in 1920s New York City. Sometimes those detours are vital to the fabric of the story, sometimes not. I invariably enjoy them, almost always welcome them, providing a bit of a breather outside the story maelstrom. The pace doesn't always have to be breakneck. Every element of the story doesn't have to act as fuel for the narrative. Sometimes a cigar is a cigar and we want to find out why the character savors that cigar, even if it's not going to explode somewhere down the line. There's room for languid parts of a book, and if done right they should be welcome, like an afternoon nap or a melodic middle eight within a balls-out rocker.
May 21, 2023
Bernard Jamal woke up
Bernard Jamal woke up in the trunk of a large car, his left temple throbbing and ass aching. He reached up and his hand rebounded off the felt roof of the trunk, a jolt of alarm reverberating through his 6’ 6” frame.
There was little that Bernard feared. Growing up in East Baltimore, he’d seen a man die on a sidewalk, his chest spurting blood from a shotgun wound the size of a baseball. He’d heard the sounds of gunfire reverberating nearly nightly in the black air; given a wide berth to skinny men in sagging jeans jumping out of their skins on crank; watched as fellow teenagers were braced against cop cars for the crime of walking through their own neighborhood late at night.
He’d been a thrill seeker as a kid and teenager, cruising the streets with his boys looking for things to climb. Rusty fire escapes leading to the top of an early 20th century apartment building, pedestrians looking like figurines in those train gardens that the city fire stations stage for the holidays. In the dead of night climbing the scaffolding surrounding one of the few remaining water towers in the city, sneakers crunching on the gravel-covered roof. Buzzed on MD 20/20 in the suburbs, the night air bristling against their cheeks, scaling a microwave tower and gazing at the city lights to the south, all the way to the diffused glow of M&T Stadium, where the Ravens were playing Monday Night Football.
Fearless he was, unless thrown into a dark, enclosed space like the one he was now lying in, sprawled diagonally, his head in the far right corner and feet bumping against the ledge at the front of the trunk...
***
"Like Printing Money" is available online through the usual suspects. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
There was little that Bernard feared. Growing up in East Baltimore, he’d seen a man die on a sidewalk, his chest spurting blood from a shotgun wound the size of a baseball. He’d heard the sounds of gunfire reverberating nearly nightly in the black air; given a wide berth to skinny men in sagging jeans jumping out of their skins on crank; watched as fellow teenagers were braced against cop cars for the crime of walking through their own neighborhood late at night.
He’d been a thrill seeker as a kid and teenager, cruising the streets with his boys looking for things to climb. Rusty fire escapes leading to the top of an early 20th century apartment building, pedestrians looking like figurines in those train gardens that the city fire stations stage for the holidays. In the dead of night climbing the scaffolding surrounding one of the few remaining water towers in the city, sneakers crunching on the gravel-covered roof. Buzzed on MD 20/20 in the suburbs, the night air bristling against their cheeks, scaling a microwave tower and gazing at the city lights to the south, all the way to the diffused glow of M&T Stadium, where the Ravens were playing Monday Night Football.
Fearless he was, unless thrown into a dark, enclosed space like the one he was now lying in, sprawled diagonally, his head in the far right corner and feet bumping against the ledge at the front of the trunk...
***
"Like Printing Money" is available online through the usual suspects. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
December 19, 2022
Sudden Light in the Summer of '69
In the summer of 1969, just before Woodstock, I joined a rock and roll band. I was a clean-cut, reed-thin boy from the Baltimore suburbs with little to rebel against. But I’m 14, I’ve taken guitar lessons for two years, and I can sing a bit.
We call ourselves Sudden Light and we have cards printed with our name in flowing yellow script that looks as if it was poured from a tube of acrylic paint.
The four of us have varying skill sets. Our lead singer, Bill Stephan, doesn’t sing too much and isn’t much of a leader either. His main asset is a fairly well-off mom who has a lot of money and in the absence of a father by way of divorce buys her son most of what he wants. In this case, it’s a Peavey amp the size of a refrigerator with inputs for two guitars and a couple of microphones. Bill also has maracas, a tambourine, and bongos that he mercifully never plays.
I play a combination of bass and rhythm on a standard six-string Kay guitar that my parents bought me for Christmas at EJ Korvette. I have a Montgomery Ward amp with one eight-inch speaker, but it’s too small to use on any real gigs, so I plug into Bill’s amp, as does Dave Sweeney, our lead guitarist and band leader. Later I buy a used, pro-sized Vox amp from money I make working during the summer for the Baltimore County Parks and Recreation.
Sweeney is a self-taught guitarist with some swiftness on the fretboard, but an often short-circuited sense of rhythm. He can play The Ventures and The Shadows stuff, however, and that saves us when people get tired of our standard fare, ranging from “One Two Three Red Light” from the 1910 Fruitgum Company, to Creedence’s “Bad Moon Rising”, to chaotic faux Steppenwolf. Basically, our repertoire is anything we can play or sing.
Our drummer is Tommy Ronkowski, a big slobbering dog of a drummer who bangs with unflagging energy, oblivious to the concept of time as it pertains to music. When called on this shortcoming, he shrugs and says, I just want to jam, man.
Our first performance is a skate party at Parkdale Elementary. Every weekend during the winter they open up the gym and the hallways of the school for roller skating. The gym has a stage and every other Saturday a live band plays for the pre-teen and early teen skaters. I give Sweeney a lot of credit, because somehow he gets one of the band slots, even though nobody on the selection committee has heard us play.
I put on a pair of striped bell-bottoms and a blue Henley. My guitar is blood red with a paisley guitar strap. Bill somehow finds a shirt with puffy sleeves to go with extra-wide bell bottoms, probably from a downtown Baltimore boutique/headshop called Purple People near where his mom works as an executive secretary, whatever that is. Dave has a tie-dye t-shirt, tight white jeans, and a terry-cloth headband dyed day-glo orange. Tommy dons the same clothes he wears to school every day: button-down oxford, khakis and Jack Purcells.
We play for 45 minutes during which girls twirl in arcs and figure eights on the tile floor below us and boys race through, occasionally tagging girls on the shoulder while winging by. No one except a smattering of parents, siblings and friends listen to us. My cousin Ricky is there, because he always shows up. He loves the group Them and whistles loudly when I finish singing “Gloria.”
It takes three songs before I can stop shaking. Ricky tells me afterwards that I need to work on my Mick attitude when I sing “Satisfaction”. His advice: Act like Aunt Mary won’t let you ride your bike on Harford Road. I take his advice the next time we practice and it works surprisingly well. I even curl my lip a bit and dance as spastically as I can while singing and playing the guitar strapped over my left shoulder.
On the weekend before July 4, Sudden Light gets a gig at a yacht club near Annapolis, Maryland. There are a lot of so-called yacht clubs around the waterways of Baltimore and surrounding Maryland towns. If you have a few sailboats, regardless of size, and a cabin cruiser or two docked at a pier with a clubhouse, it can be called a yacht club.
Bill’s mom, whose boss belongs to the club, gets us the gig. It starts at 7, giving parents freedom from their kids for a couple of hours as they start in earnest on their holiday drinking.
Having played the skate parties and a couple of street fairs, the Annapolis Yacht Club feels like a gig at the Copa. I try to be nonchalant, but I’m awestruck when I stroll into the clubhouse, which is modeled after a tiki bar. There are two huts with faux grass roofs serving cokes and Kool-Aid. Polynesian masks and beach scenes decorate the walls and a dugout canoe hangs from the ceiling. There’s the obligatory plastic marlin curled up as if it has just leapt from the ocean. A gnarled wooden post near the back door is studded with driftwood signs pointing out the direction and mileage to places like Fiji, Honolulu, Borneo and Barbados.
Risers set up three-feet off the ground serve as the stage. As we set up, a girl DJ spins 45s and we take veiled peaks at the audience. It’s not cool to stare, but I get glimpses of a growing crowd of girls and boys our age. The girls come in all forms, sizes and stages of development. They are dressed in the latest styles – bell bottoms, peasant blouses, leather thong sandals. Sophisticated, I think. The boys are in t-shirts, cutoffs or ragged jeans and sneakers. They look like they came from a tribe that hasn’t evolved at the same pace as the girls.
It’s dark in the clubhouse, allowing us to use our new secret weapon: a strobe light from Spencer’s Gifts that makes our movements jerk and streak in the flashing blasts of light. It’s a gimmick, but it works. We use it on “Magic Carpet Ride” during the instrumental break, which for us entails playing random notes at a loud volume to simulate psychedelia.
During the third song, a group of girls – Annapolis girls! – more worldly and hip than any from our small suburb of Parkville, Md., gathers and sways in front of the risers. They talk among themselves and start to focus their attention on either me, Bill or Dave. A girl about my age, solidly built and medium height with barely emerging breasts, locks in on me. Her short, deftly cut brown hair hangs close to her neck and her bangs are trimmed halfway down her forehead. Her green eyes shine brightly from her summer-tanned skin. A red flowered bandanna frames the top of her forehead. A green cashmere sweater, a near match for her eyes, is tied at her waist. She’s tucked an off-white broadcloth shirt into low-slung tan bell-bottoms that she secures with a wide, horseshoe-buckled leather belt. She smiles ever so slightly when I sing the Stones “She Smiled Sweetly”. I feel something lurch inside.
After 20 minutes we take a break and let the girl spinning 45s take over. As I step off the risers, the girl with the bandanna comes up to me and sticks out her hand.
“Hi, I’m Susie, Susie Green. Did you smile at me?”
I’ve never been able to talk to girls, immediately struck dumb when confronted with a request to dance or to otherwise engage at teen center gatherings. But somehow this is different. Somehow, none of the defensiveness engages. I’m flushed with good fortune.
“Yeah, I guess so. I like to smile when I’m doing that song. Besides, I thought I saw you smile.”
“I probably did. I liked that song. I liked all your other songs too. You guys are a good band.”
“Well, we’re working on it. This is a cool place. Does your Dad belong to the club?”
“Yes. He has a sailboat, but he doesn’t call it a yacht. Too pretentious, he says.”
“I can imagine,” I say, although I couldn’t.
“So, do you guys play around here a lot?”
“No, this is the first time. Maybe the only time. We’re from outside of Baltimore.”
“That’s a shame. Umm, it’s not a shame being from outside of Baltimore, but it’s a shame you’re not closer because I really like you guys.”
“We like you too.” Realizing how stupid that sounds I shift gears quickly. “How about if I buy you a coke? I get a free one for being in the band.”
“Wow, that would be really swell. Gentlemanly even.”
“I try,” I reply, as she retreats to her girlfriends, who are in a corner shifting their eyes toward us and giggling. As I stand in line for the cokes, I’m thankful she left, as I can’t imagine how I would keep up a conversation while in a line that’s at least five-minutes long. By the time I get the cokes, the break is almost up. Susie meets me halfway between the bar and her gathering of friends. As I hand her the bottle with a striped paper straw sticking out of it she hands me a little square of folded paper.
“I want you to have this, since at the end of the dance the parents usually gather at the back and whisk us out of here.”
“Don’t want you to slip out back with the boys in the band?”
“Hah! Naw. I guess it’s a parently gesture. They might be a bit tipsy, but they usually take good care of us. How about your folks?”
“Yes, I’m lucky. They didn’t come to this gig, but they’re interested in what I do.”
Dave comes up from behind and taps me on the shoulder.
“OK, James, we’re on again.”
“Be right with you, Dave-o.”
“Thanks for the coke, and do they say ‘break a leg’ in rock and roll?”
“My mom told me that before I left today, so, yeah, I guess they do.”
“I liked meeting you, James.”
“I liked meeting you, Susie, and Jim is fine.”
“Well, Jim it is. Now go knock us out.”
“We’ll try, Susie.”
And while not exactly knocking them out, we keep the girls in the front occupied, and even some of the guys standing against the wall coolly tap their toes and metronome their heads back and forth a bit.
As the clock nears 9 we tuck into the last song, “Proud Mary”. Looking toward the back of the clubhouse, I see the parents gathering, swaying back and forth and singing along to the chorus. We end on a crashing chord and thank the crowd. The parents gather up their kids and stream out, as Susie said they would. Susie’s father wraps his left arm around her and leads her toward the exit. Just before the door, she turns around, smiles, and waves like a beauty queen in the back of a convertible in a town parade. The lurch rises up again and I mouth “Susie” to her retreating back.
When I get home, I take the change, house key and guitar picks out of my pocket and dump them on the bed, shaking in anticipation of what might be inside the yellow-lined, tightly folded paper. I flatten it out and read:
To Jim, my Sudden Light. Keep shining! Yours, Susie.
Underneath is a phone number with an area code I’ve never seen before. The numbers look as exotic as the porcelain elephant my mother once bought me in Chinatown during a trip she and my dad took to San Francisco.
I know I’ll never talk to or see Susie Green again. Annapolis might as well be San Francisco to an unworldly 14-year-old from Parkville, Md.
###
We call ourselves Sudden Light and we have cards printed with our name in flowing yellow script that looks as if it was poured from a tube of acrylic paint.
The four of us have varying skill sets. Our lead singer, Bill Stephan, doesn’t sing too much and isn’t much of a leader either. His main asset is a fairly well-off mom who has a lot of money and in the absence of a father by way of divorce buys her son most of what he wants. In this case, it’s a Peavey amp the size of a refrigerator with inputs for two guitars and a couple of microphones. Bill also has maracas, a tambourine, and bongos that he mercifully never plays.
I play a combination of bass and rhythm on a standard six-string Kay guitar that my parents bought me for Christmas at EJ Korvette. I have a Montgomery Ward amp with one eight-inch speaker, but it’s too small to use on any real gigs, so I plug into Bill’s amp, as does Dave Sweeney, our lead guitarist and band leader. Later I buy a used, pro-sized Vox amp from money I make working during the summer for the Baltimore County Parks and Recreation.
Sweeney is a self-taught guitarist with some swiftness on the fretboard, but an often short-circuited sense of rhythm. He can play The Ventures and The Shadows stuff, however, and that saves us when people get tired of our standard fare, ranging from “One Two Three Red Light” from the 1910 Fruitgum Company, to Creedence’s “Bad Moon Rising”, to chaotic faux Steppenwolf. Basically, our repertoire is anything we can play or sing.
Our drummer is Tommy Ronkowski, a big slobbering dog of a drummer who bangs with unflagging energy, oblivious to the concept of time as it pertains to music. When called on this shortcoming, he shrugs and says, I just want to jam, man.
Our first performance is a skate party at Parkdale Elementary. Every weekend during the winter they open up the gym and the hallways of the school for roller skating. The gym has a stage and every other Saturday a live band plays for the pre-teen and early teen skaters. I give Sweeney a lot of credit, because somehow he gets one of the band slots, even though nobody on the selection committee has heard us play.
I put on a pair of striped bell-bottoms and a blue Henley. My guitar is blood red with a paisley guitar strap. Bill somehow finds a shirt with puffy sleeves to go with extra-wide bell bottoms, probably from a downtown Baltimore boutique/headshop called Purple People near where his mom works as an executive secretary, whatever that is. Dave has a tie-dye t-shirt, tight white jeans, and a terry-cloth headband dyed day-glo orange. Tommy dons the same clothes he wears to school every day: button-down oxford, khakis and Jack Purcells.
We play for 45 minutes during which girls twirl in arcs and figure eights on the tile floor below us and boys race through, occasionally tagging girls on the shoulder while winging by. No one except a smattering of parents, siblings and friends listen to us. My cousin Ricky is there, because he always shows up. He loves the group Them and whistles loudly when I finish singing “Gloria.”
It takes three songs before I can stop shaking. Ricky tells me afterwards that I need to work on my Mick attitude when I sing “Satisfaction”. His advice: Act like Aunt Mary won’t let you ride your bike on Harford Road. I take his advice the next time we practice and it works surprisingly well. I even curl my lip a bit and dance as spastically as I can while singing and playing the guitar strapped over my left shoulder.
On the weekend before July 4, Sudden Light gets a gig at a yacht club near Annapolis, Maryland. There are a lot of so-called yacht clubs around the waterways of Baltimore and surrounding Maryland towns. If you have a few sailboats, regardless of size, and a cabin cruiser or two docked at a pier with a clubhouse, it can be called a yacht club.
Bill’s mom, whose boss belongs to the club, gets us the gig. It starts at 7, giving parents freedom from their kids for a couple of hours as they start in earnest on their holiday drinking.
Having played the skate parties and a couple of street fairs, the Annapolis Yacht Club feels like a gig at the Copa. I try to be nonchalant, but I’m awestruck when I stroll into the clubhouse, which is modeled after a tiki bar. There are two huts with faux grass roofs serving cokes and Kool-Aid. Polynesian masks and beach scenes decorate the walls and a dugout canoe hangs from the ceiling. There’s the obligatory plastic marlin curled up as if it has just leapt from the ocean. A gnarled wooden post near the back door is studded with driftwood signs pointing out the direction and mileage to places like Fiji, Honolulu, Borneo and Barbados.
Risers set up three-feet off the ground serve as the stage. As we set up, a girl DJ spins 45s and we take veiled peaks at the audience. It’s not cool to stare, but I get glimpses of a growing crowd of girls and boys our age. The girls come in all forms, sizes and stages of development. They are dressed in the latest styles – bell bottoms, peasant blouses, leather thong sandals. Sophisticated, I think. The boys are in t-shirts, cutoffs or ragged jeans and sneakers. They look like they came from a tribe that hasn’t evolved at the same pace as the girls.
It’s dark in the clubhouse, allowing us to use our new secret weapon: a strobe light from Spencer’s Gifts that makes our movements jerk and streak in the flashing blasts of light. It’s a gimmick, but it works. We use it on “Magic Carpet Ride” during the instrumental break, which for us entails playing random notes at a loud volume to simulate psychedelia.
During the third song, a group of girls – Annapolis girls! – more worldly and hip than any from our small suburb of Parkville, Md., gathers and sways in front of the risers. They talk among themselves and start to focus their attention on either me, Bill or Dave. A girl about my age, solidly built and medium height with barely emerging breasts, locks in on me. Her short, deftly cut brown hair hangs close to her neck and her bangs are trimmed halfway down her forehead. Her green eyes shine brightly from her summer-tanned skin. A red flowered bandanna frames the top of her forehead. A green cashmere sweater, a near match for her eyes, is tied at her waist. She’s tucked an off-white broadcloth shirt into low-slung tan bell-bottoms that she secures with a wide, horseshoe-buckled leather belt. She smiles ever so slightly when I sing the Stones “She Smiled Sweetly”. I feel something lurch inside.
After 20 minutes we take a break and let the girl spinning 45s take over. As I step off the risers, the girl with the bandanna comes up to me and sticks out her hand.
“Hi, I’m Susie, Susie Green. Did you smile at me?”
I’ve never been able to talk to girls, immediately struck dumb when confronted with a request to dance or to otherwise engage at teen center gatherings. But somehow this is different. Somehow, none of the defensiveness engages. I’m flushed with good fortune.
“Yeah, I guess so. I like to smile when I’m doing that song. Besides, I thought I saw you smile.”
“I probably did. I liked that song. I liked all your other songs too. You guys are a good band.”
“Well, we’re working on it. This is a cool place. Does your Dad belong to the club?”
“Yes. He has a sailboat, but he doesn’t call it a yacht. Too pretentious, he says.”
“I can imagine,” I say, although I couldn’t.
“So, do you guys play around here a lot?”
“No, this is the first time. Maybe the only time. We’re from outside of Baltimore.”
“That’s a shame. Umm, it’s not a shame being from outside of Baltimore, but it’s a shame you’re not closer because I really like you guys.”
“We like you too.” Realizing how stupid that sounds I shift gears quickly. “How about if I buy you a coke? I get a free one for being in the band.”
“Wow, that would be really swell. Gentlemanly even.”
“I try,” I reply, as she retreats to her girlfriends, who are in a corner shifting their eyes toward us and giggling. As I stand in line for the cokes, I’m thankful she left, as I can’t imagine how I would keep up a conversation while in a line that’s at least five-minutes long. By the time I get the cokes, the break is almost up. Susie meets me halfway between the bar and her gathering of friends. As I hand her the bottle with a striped paper straw sticking out of it she hands me a little square of folded paper.
“I want you to have this, since at the end of the dance the parents usually gather at the back and whisk us out of here.”
“Don’t want you to slip out back with the boys in the band?”
“Hah! Naw. I guess it’s a parently gesture. They might be a bit tipsy, but they usually take good care of us. How about your folks?”
“Yes, I’m lucky. They didn’t come to this gig, but they’re interested in what I do.”
Dave comes up from behind and taps me on the shoulder.
“OK, James, we’re on again.”
“Be right with you, Dave-o.”
“Thanks for the coke, and do they say ‘break a leg’ in rock and roll?”
“My mom told me that before I left today, so, yeah, I guess they do.”
“I liked meeting you, James.”
“I liked meeting you, Susie, and Jim is fine.”
“Well, Jim it is. Now go knock us out.”
“We’ll try, Susie.”
And while not exactly knocking them out, we keep the girls in the front occupied, and even some of the guys standing against the wall coolly tap their toes and metronome their heads back and forth a bit.
As the clock nears 9 we tuck into the last song, “Proud Mary”. Looking toward the back of the clubhouse, I see the parents gathering, swaying back and forth and singing along to the chorus. We end on a crashing chord and thank the crowd. The parents gather up their kids and stream out, as Susie said they would. Susie’s father wraps his left arm around her and leads her toward the exit. Just before the door, she turns around, smiles, and waves like a beauty queen in the back of a convertible in a town parade. The lurch rises up again and I mouth “Susie” to her retreating back.
When I get home, I take the change, house key and guitar picks out of my pocket and dump them on the bed, shaking in anticipation of what might be inside the yellow-lined, tightly folded paper. I flatten it out and read:
To Jim, my Sudden Light. Keep shining! Yours, Susie.
Underneath is a phone number with an area code I’ve never seen before. The numbers look as exotic as the porcelain elephant my mother once bought me in Chinatown during a trip she and my dad took to San Francisco.
I know I’ll never talk to or see Susie Green again. Annapolis might as well be San Francisco to an unworldly 14-year-old from Parkville, Md.
###
