Ralph Bland's Blog

November News

A new novella, JIMMY MILLS, is published in the October issue of Scarlet Leaf Review.

Every girl has a bad boy in her past. Meet Jimmy Mills.


http://www.scarletleafreview.com

November News

My twelfth novel, LAMB WHITE DAYS, is due for release on November 14 by Powder River Publishing.

A novella, JIMMY MILLS, is due for publication on November 1 by Scarlet Leaf Review magazine.

A second novella, FORESTWOOD, will be published in installments in December by The Piker Press.

author reading

Here's the link to the Eastside Storytellin' podcast from The Post on July 16, 2019.
https://soundcloud.com/…/east-side-st...…

soundcloud.com

East Side Storytellin' 157 - Ralph Bland & Jess Nolan - 01
East Side Storytellin' 157 was a live event hosted by Chuck Beard of East…

author reading

Hi friends!

Here's a personal invitation extended for you to come hear me read from my work at the next Eastside Story Artist presentation on July 16, 2019, at The Post. I'll be reading from a short story and a novella, and would love to have some friendly faces in the audience for support.


Come join the fun as we celebrate the 157th round of East Side Storytellin', y'all! This show, we are honored to feature the likes of the talented Ralph Bland & Jess Nolan!

Stars Rain Sun Moon

My novel Stars Rain Sun Moon was just nominated for the 2019 Readers Choice Awards contest by TCK Publishing!

Please vote for it at https://www.tckpublishing.com/2019-re... Category 16

Stars Rain Sun Moon

(There is no way to get away from it. I can sit here in Trudy Lee’s forever listening to the music I grew up on, I can arise from this stool and walk out on the pier as far as it will take me—hell, I can even take a big long dive like Johnny Weissmuller used to do as Jungle Jim and crash through the darkened waves and never come back up for air—but I am not going to be able to get away from everything that has once and is and will always be a part of me forever. Sooner or later it’s all going to catch up with me, find where I’m hiding, wriggle its finger and tell me to come out from where I’m sequestered. We have to talk, it will tell me. It’s about time we sat down and dealt with a few things.)

--from Stars Rain Sun Moon
By Ralph Bland

Ages Past

Ages Past, a new short story by Ralph Bland, is this week's cover story in The Piker Press. www.pikerpress.com.

New Cover Story in this week's Piker Press-- AGES PAST: a man relives defining moments in his life via stream of consciousness visitations while trading in his car. www.pikerpress.com September 17- September 23. Visit the Archive section for additional stories and blogs.

British Sports Cars

British Sport Cars
Recollections from the Occasionally-Ghastly Past

Anybody who knows me is aware that I have always been a sucker for the pretty face of a British sports car. Like beautiful women, I have consistently in the past invested my all and everything into these automobiles with their smiling grills and pretty features and allowed myself to be seduced into believing how life will always be rosy and glorious when looked at and experienced from behind the wheel of a two-seater convertible. This kind of attitude has cost me money galore down through the years, caused me to suffer pain and angst while standing along the side of the road with the hood of the car raised waiting for assistance and wondering if a tow truck would arrive before unfriendly criminals and hoodlums and ax-murderers descended upon me and took my billfold and stripped my car, left me in a ditch bleeding and gnarled, caused me heartache and grief, and shortened my lifespan with stress and worry.
Yes, the sports cars have always been like women. They torture and tease and tend to bring one to the point of tears, cause one to at times to stand on the high cliffs of the psyche looking down into the abyss and wonder whether now might be the proper time to take the quick easy whoopsie-doo off the edge and put an end to all the suffering and nonsense brought on by a hunk of overseas metal. But also, like women, the cars also bring uncontrollable joy, make one smile for the briefest moments and forget the fiery hell one has previously been roasting within not so long ago.
This week marks another anniversary with Zelda, my 1971 MGB. This current milestone has made me think back to a few checkered occasions with my long litany of British sports cars that span almost five decades now. Here are a few of them, several good examples of how I am and always have been a damn fool for love.

Sally
My first foray into British sports car ownership came in the mid-70s when I bought something called a Sunbeam Tiger off a (appropriately) Sunbeam bread salesman. The Tiger was red with spoked wheels and almost ten years old at the time. The only times I had seen a Sunbeam before was in “Get Smart’ on television and watching Elizabeth Taylor wrap one around a tree in “Butterfield 8”. I named the Sunbeam Sally because she had a nice smile and there was that touch of alliteration there, and for a few years Sally and I commenced to roar around town and out into the country on wild rides most nights into the wee hours, and when I say “roar” I really mean it, since Sally was equipped with an engine the size of a small jet-liner and liked to with the slightest press of the accelerator take flight down the road with thunderous soundbites accompanying her. Being nuts as I was at the time, taking my life in my hands each time behind the wheel had some sort of weird fatalistic appeal to me. I can remember driving Sally to Pensacola for a week of hedonist behavior and watching the speedometer pass the 140 mph marker, laughing in the wind and the shimmying of the frame like a prized lunatic and trying to contort my body to see if I could possibly steer the car with my toes. It was not pretty. This is probably the abiding reason God chose to have Sally explode in the Kroger parking lot one day, to blow a gasket and crack a block and undergo all sorts of dire mechanical problems it would take a millionaire to fix. My co-workers at the time were so in sympathy with my loss that they went to a cemetery and stole flowers and wreaths from fresh graves, cloaked a Rest in Peace banner over Sally’s body and took an 8 by 10 picture of it. That picture still sits on my desk looking at me while I work. It is like the picture of the dead wife in the novel Rebecca, a reminder of love gone terribly wrong. The truth is Sally was taken from me by a benevolent Maker to save me from destruction, but there will always be that part of me, abject eegit that I am, that can’t stop loving her.

Elizabeth
Elizabeth was a 1979 MGB, British racing green, that I bought brand new from a high-end dealer in downtown Nashville. Elizabeth was great for a few months until a lady ran into the back of us at a four way stop, crushing the trunk and damaging the fuel cutoff control that, no matter how many times it was repaired, never worked completely right ever again. It was one of those wonderful MG things, which I came to know quite well, that couldn’t be fixed because it couldn’t be found or understood. I had to learn to live with what became a reoccurring mysterious malady.
Elizabeth would run fine for periods of time, then come to a complete halt and stoppage with no warning whatsoever.
She stranded me everywhere, in rush hour traffic, in distant parking lots, in Timbuctoo, many times in that well-known city in out of the way Egypt. I learned to hike. I learned to stand in front of Elizabeth and make threats. I learned to always take a book along with me so I’d have something to do until she decided to start up again, which she would, for no reason at all other than she wanted to.
Once I made a big play for a lady and took her to dinner and a movie on a summer night. When we came out of the movie we got in to take a nice drive beneath the moon, making it about fifty yards before Elizabeth sighed and gasped and said see you later. It was eleven at night and my date I’d tried so hard to impress had to help me push Elizabeth up a small rise to get into a vacant parking lot, then I had to leave this woman alone with Elizabeth while I trekked to a distant phone booth to call one of my grinning friends to come and pick us up.
End of romance. This woman was not in the least adventurous and had no sense of humor about being stranded in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.
Elizabeth’s time was up when a tree fell on her on a calm summer morning while she was parked in my driveway, the sun shining down on her, no wind whatsoever, just a limb falling for no reason to crush her convertible top into particles resembling Chicklets. I knew right then I was beaten. I traded her in for a pickup truck that afternoon.

Martha
I waited almost ten years before I got back into the British sports car romance addiction thing again. I saw a shiny 1973 red roadster sitting in somebody’s front yard with a For Sale sign in the window. I drove by the house and gaped at the car for about a week until finally stopping and going up to the house and ringing the bell. The guy was nobody’s fool. He took my first offer.
Martha was okay for a while but was not to be trusted. It was not just her, but I had been burned before by her ilk, so I made certain to always have a second car available—a real car, loyal, faithful, trustworthy. I wasn’t going to fall prey to any British shenanigans again.
On a snowy night I got off work late and started up Martha to go home. My foot immediately went to the floorboard and I knew the clutch was gone. There had been no warning. It was as if Martha had waited until I worked way past closing and everyone had gone home and the snow was falling like runaway dandruff and ice had enveloped the earth. I had no choice but to walk home and leave her sitting there exposed to the elements.
The next day I learned that in order to replace the clutch the engine had to be pulled. Gosh, I thought, never heard of that one before. What a surprise. Then I learned how much replacing a clutch would cost me. Thank god I had no children, no college tuitions to pay, wasn’t divorced and didn’t have to pay out alimony. I finally managed to work overtime and make enough money to get Martha fixed and repaired, and after about two months in the shop I got her back and drove her to work. I parked on the rise above the store, put the gearshift in first and pulled up the hand brake. After I’d taken about ten steps I heard a clicking sound and turned around to see Martha rolling away, picking up speed as she headed through the lot toward the hilly driveway that spilled out into a suburban street. I tried to catch her. I was too slow.
She didn’t make it all the way down to the hill, but just decided to veer off a bit to her left and clip a couple of cars before running into a bascart return corral. Luckily, I had insurance, but I said some things out in that lot that day to Martha that couldn’t ever be taken back.
I’d grown smarter over the years too. I put her up for sale. I took the first offer.

Emily
I went more than twenty years before I considered owning a sports car again. I retired in 2012, and one of the first things I did was behave like an imbecile and check Craigslist to view the inventory. I was determined I wouldn’t be made a fool of again by a pretty face, I would cast my lot in the romantic wars of two-seaters with some other company, some different nation’s product. There would be no further British presence in my life.
That’s when I saw Emily.
She was shiny black. She had polished spoke wheels and her body was impeccable. Take her for a drive if you’d like, the seller said, and so I cruised the neighborhoods of Spring Hill, wandered out on 65 and watched the needle rise effortlessly to 70. She was a 1979 B; she was 33. I was 62. I figured we’d both been around some, that we would be good for each other.
One morning the key stuck in the ignition and I had to have Emily towed to get fixed. She’s leaking a little oil, I said, can you fix that too? It took almost a month before I got the call to come get her. I gave the mechanic my arm. I gave him my leg. I threw in my eyeteeth as a tip.On the way home smoke began to rise from the floorboard. I tried ignoring it, but it soon began seeping out from the dashboard making it difficult to see. A car pulled up beside me and a fellow yelled out the window, “Hey buddy, your car’s on fire.” I had to pull over to the shoulder and Emily had to go back to the shop.
Rinse and repeat.
After many ordeals Emily came home. A few days later I went to meet my wife for dinner on a Tuesday afternoon, singing along with Linda Ronstadt to “You’re No Good” on the radio. A Mercedes pulled out of a lot and I watched it come toward me from the side, figuring sooner or later it would stop. It managed to do just that when it hit me, obliterating the passenger side, knocking me twenty-odd feet, bending the steering wheel in my hands like I was Superman from Krypton set down in Music City.
Emily was T-boned. Emily was totaled. She would never be on the road again. I felt that old pervasive feeling of doom and sadness wash over me once more while I watched the wrecker haul her away.

Zelda
I found her on ebay. She was in Washington state, 2000 miles away. There was a picture and a box to place a bid. I put in a figure and waited a week. An email came and said that I was the winner.
I named her Zelda. I drove her around and waited for her to break down, to blow up, to fall to pieces before my eyes, but nothing happened. She chugged on. On occasion she needed things, a starter, a battery, a distributor, and there were times when the mystic MG part of her came and made itself known, like the way the speedometer stopped working on weekdays and then functioned perfectly on Saturdays and Sundays, but that was okay. I learned to live with her and she learned to live with me. Don’t ask for too much, she told me. I am old. I am 47. That is 329 in dog years. Ah, Zelda, I said, but I am old too. I have learned to never ask for too much and to be pleased with very little. And when a miracle comes along. To be overwhelmed.
And so we are content, Zelda and I, happy in our tiny road trip world.
And one other thing.
I found myself standing at a gasoline pump on a June afternoon, filling Zelda’s tank with high test. A beautiful girl approached me, dark raven hair, smiling blue eyes, cheekbones high and prominent, all the things a man’s dreams and visions consist of, those I carried with me all those many moons before.
“My daddy had a car like that,” she said, running her fingers across Zelda’s fender. “He used to take me for rides in it when I was a little girl. I just love cars like this!”
“I do too,” was all I said, for I was old and this sort of chance encounter and time was long ago gone. But it was nice to remember such things.
I got in the car and Zelda started up just fine. The motor made a nice purring sound as I drove away, and I knew the beautiful girl was standing back there at the station watching me and Zelda disappear down the road. The top was down and the sun was shining and it was another in a long series of wondrous days.
Halleluiah.

Big Brother

Five Things I Remember About My Brother

My brother Jerry died last week in a small town in Florida. Jerry was 71. He was tested a borderline genius and was also pretty much nuts 90% of the time; I don’t think anyone who knew him will argue about either of these statements. He was an electrician and a guitar player and a dog-lover when he was at his best; when he was at his worst he was a holy terror. Nobody knows this better than me. I was his kid brother.
Five things I remember about Jerry:
(1) Jerry could talk exactly like Donald Duck. He learned this from an early age and used to ask me questions as Donald, following me around the house and yard to make quacking noises before pummeling me into submission. I suspect if he had gone to Disneyland at an early age he would have had a nice career reading Donald’s lines for all the cartoons. To this day, I have trouble viewing a Donald Duck cartoon without flinching, expecting from learned response to get clocked by my brother any minute.
(2) Jerry loved dogs more than anyone I have ever encountered. He couldn’t live without a dog in his life, no matter how dire his circumstances or pathetic his surroundings. If he was short of money his dogs always ate before him. They slept in his bed and rode shotgun with him wherever he went. His dogs adored him because he understood them and spoke their language, so there were never misunderstandings or resentful feelings between him and his pack. They lived on equal footing. Unfortunately, this great wisdom with his four-legged friends did not carry over to his human acquaintances. He never could bridge the gap completely with either men or women, and I’m not too sure he tried that much. I think he was smart enough to know there was too much distance for him to travel there, and besides, I’m pretty sure he preferred the company of dogs anyway.
(3) He tended bar in the roughest joint I’ve ever been in down in North Miami in the 80s. When I visited him there I met a drug dealer named Duane who drove a red Cadillac Deville with license tags that said “God is My Co-Pilot” on the front. It was explained to me that the cops in Miami wouldn’t mess with someone who had religion, which seemed to make some sort of sense at the time. The walls of the bar were riddled with bullet holes, and when I first walked in about fifty people were crowded around the floor guzzling booze, snorting lines of coke off the bar, and eating grilled dolphin someone was cooking outside. Have some Flipper, my brother said, handing me a plate. I could hear Steely Dan playing on the jukebox, “Do It Again”; my theme song, my brother told me. As the evening ensued I took off with an awfully cute barmaid named Marian in a tiny rowboat with a trolling motor, and we cruised up and down the canals until dawn singing sailor songs. I woke up in my brother’s apartment the next afternoon, not knowing how I’d got there but aware that I’d had a noteworthy experience I would have liked to have been able to recall. Jerry laughed at me and for the rest of my visit told all his friends that I was definitely his kin and how such behavior as I had exhibited on the night in question ran in the family. I am still not exactly certain what it was I had purportedly done, and to this day I wonder if I will have to answer for my Miami crimes on Judgment Day.
(4) On that same visit Jerry and I went into the Fontainebleau Hotel, where he promptly introduced me to Jackie Gleason, who smiled and called me Pal and bought me a drink. I believe it was bourbon, but whatever it was I drank it right down, seeing that the elixir came from The Great One himself. To this date, this is the highest brush with fame I have ever been around and not one of those moments a fellow easily forgets. I did ring up a Butterfinger for Little Richard at Kroger once, but drinking with Ralph Kramden sort of makes that moment minor. So thanks to Jerry for that.
(5) My cousin Loretta, who walked on herself a decade ago, always baby-sat Jerry and me when we were little kids, on those occasions when my parents stepped out for the evening. Loretta, thirteen years my senior, always said I was the one who was the little angel, quiet and respectful and self-entertained, but that Jerry was the ultimate handful, possessed, she ascertained, by some form of demon from a far-reaching hell and always trouble in the most bizarre and unsettling ways. How many times I wanted to kill that child, she’d say, rolling her eyes and looking up to Heaven, wondering how she’d managed in those days to not club my brother like he was some murderous life-threatening baby seal. Loretta never fooled me though; I knew different. Just last week, while digesting the news of my brother’s passing and pondering how I was suddenly and for the first time in this world brother-less, I passed by Loretta’s gravestone during my daily walk through the Spring Hill Cemetery in Nashville. I’d already told my departed parents—buried on the northern opposite hill--the day before about Jerry’s death and how they should probably be looking for him to show up sometime soon, since I somehow take for granted he will be allowed inside the Pearly Gates (perhaps on Probation), and so I told Loretta what to expect.
I could imagine her rolling her eyes and looking upward for help for some kind of Divine solution for the trouble and consternation heading her way, but I knew in the end she’d be like everybody else who ever ran across Jerry Walter Bland.
I knew eventually she’d be smiling. I knew that despite herself she wouldn’t be able to keep the little corners of her mouth from turning upward.
That’s the thing I remember about Jerry the most, that talent he had of making you smile even when you wanted to kill him. He had this way of doing that to you.

New Novel Release

My 9th novel, ANTICIPATION, is now available on Amazon.