Channeling Raymond Chandler

The sun was just a rumor. It disappeared like a corpse in Edgar Allen Poe's basement. The sky had a battered look as if it got kicked in its vitals. The western sun fought its way through the cloud cover as it was setting, the way a washed-up middleweight let his bling shine as he called it quits fighting youth in slow motion.

Last night was part of that haze. The goon hiding behind the lamp post had been following me since I left Santa Anita. He had a face like the pony that got stuck in the starting gate. I waited for him when I turned the corner at Alvarado and 6^th, pulled the straw hat over his face and frisked him.

The next thing I remember is waking up inside the G.I. rubbish tank in the alley behind Izzy’s Deli smelling from week-old whitefish and pickled herring.

Izzy was a friend of mine since I let him take me at poker. When I paid him off in two-dollar bills, he put me on his menu under lamination. A Norm Levine: Lox and cream cheese on a bagel with heirloom tomato and cucumber for $2.75, including a Schlitz beer.

I staggered home at midnight and took the longest shower since Noah’s flood. When I got to my feet today for another round, my left eye mirrored the bruised sky. The phone rang louder than the buzz in my head.

The voice in my ear warned me to lay off investigating the dame. That’s all I needed to keep going even if there was less to it than met my knuckled eye.

A forgettable man of mediocre mind had popped into my office last week. I was a sucker for his Peter Lorre eyes and Sydney Greenstreet guffaw. When he announced himself as Murray Hill, I already had his number. He said he wanted me to keep an eye on his sister. I knew he was lying behind a bogus smile like William Buckley's and the way he wiped his sweaty palms with his pink tie. But I was getting ten bucks a day plus expenses, and I needed the dough for my rent, due on Monday.  

I trailed his so-called sister to the Spitfire Grill behind a hangar at the Santa Monica airport. The place was swarming with gumshoes, hoods and undercover cops spying on each other. If you had money to launder, you’d come to the right place.

Looking up from behind my Look magazine I started to ponder the meaning of life in a godless world forgetting that I already did that in the shower last night. If I came up with an answer it disappeared into my oatmeal this morning.

But nothing else fits in this cockeyed world, like what I'm doing here with my good eye on the blonde who turned out to be the twin of a redhead that took the rap and did a stretch up the river for packing a rod. Her face curled the bacon in my BLT. She blew me a kiss that could launch a thousand props on Piper Cubs.

I was ready to blow this joint when I felt something heavier than a double cheeseburger landing on my head. The world is spinning, and I'm deciding to quit this racket and enroll in pharmacy school, recalling my mother's words about finding something I can always fall back on.

I was just a soft-boiled guy in a hard-boiled world.

Circus of Hell

Words travel. From confidence to con. Confidence comes to us from the Latin, fidere meaning trust or good will and con as in joining together. We confide in each other. How far we have devolved can be measured by the term confidence man or con man. The word has been flipped.

First there was Phineas. The autobiography of P.T. Barnum was the bestselling book in the second half of the 19^th century after the Bible. Apparently, we love the con. We can’t get enough of the schemer, his ingenuity and audacity. It’s O.K. if it involves deceit, cheating and greed. After all, capitalism is all about scrambling to the top of the heap. Whatever it takes. It says nothing about how you get there, or the victims of the fraud. Call them losers.

Herman Melville’s last novel published in his lifetime (Billy Budd came posthumously) was titled The Confidence Man.  It is set on a riverboat making its way down the Mississippi. We are presented with an array of stock-scammers, charity hustles and panacea-peddlers. They feed on the trust of the sucker born every minute.

Try a bottle of this pain-dissuader or raw milk. What have you got to lose, says the man with a worm in his brain? Only a bout of listeria, e. coli or salmonella.

We think we have the nose to know what can’t pass the smell test. But consider the trouble in River City, cure-alls, the flimflam man or the hidden persuaders who have us buy $800 running shoes.

When institutions are deemed to be corrupt and inefficient, a vacuum is created which allows the demagogue to rush in with a compelling narrative, however false, with appeal to the aggrieved. Everyone wants to be part of a new movement even if it creates a circus of hell.

The con man is so named because he first gains our confidence which translates into a massive suspension of disbelief. Swallow the hoax and all the rest follows.

The enemy is out there surrounding us in the jungle, said Jim Jones. The Deep State is destroying America, folks. Those immigrants are taking away your jobs and raping our wives in their spare time. Big Pharma is vaccinating us to death.

The riverboat chugs along with half of America on it. Who wants to buy the Brooklyn Bridge?

 

My Alternative Universe

I’m told by friends, who don’t want to hurt my feelings, that they enjoy my blogs…. except for those about baseball. I can only sympathize with their loss. Then again, my brow is too low for opera and I never subscribed to Mechanics Illustrated. We all have our deprivations.

The season about to begin offers an alternative universe to distract me from the real world. It’s a matter of keeping my child alive while finding a human drama, unrehearsed and unrigged, which makes more sense than the seismic upheaval we are living in.

Many great poets and writers have embraced the game. Among them are May Swenson, William Carlos Williams, John Updike, Marianne Moore, Donald Hall, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jack Spicer and Shakespeare. I just threw him in to see if you were paying attention.

There are haikus in the outfield grass and sonnets in the turning of innings. Consider the clash between stats and hunches, precision and randomness. It is a triumph of the inexplicable, linear as a board game, yet with a simultaneity of many moving parts.

The confluence of wood and sphere which reminds the poet in us of an epiphany on the page. The pause between pitches, between innings as if stanzas might be written. The crowd focused on the lone batter. His futility to hit the unhittable or say the unsayable. Slumps like writer’s block. And what of streaks when everything feels so right, so easy and they have exceeded themselves? The fastball down the middle they’ve been waiting for.

The next word, next pitch is unknown. Where does it come from? The poet’s line travels faster than a radar gun and defies gravity with a leap. The game is new every day or night. A curtain goes up on today’s theater. When you may think nothing is happening consider the gulls counting innings waiting to descend for a midnight feast. Regard the umps in black anticipating the next play. Coaches wiggling signs. Fielders in deliberate choreography. The pitcher with his leg kick. The hitter with his cleats, fidgeting with Velcro on his batting glove. Arm angles, launch angles. The route less taken in centerfield. Tarpaulin rolled out for the thunderstorm, gnats of August, October fog. The wind seen in the flag.

The rhythms of the game are poetic. The pitch, the crack, the dash, the throw…. constitute the line or stanza and then the long interval. It can be mythopoeic with outsized heroes, goats, scandals of the fix, the drugs, the curse, stats of super-human feats never to be met. Those glory days which get better every time I remember the feel of perfect contact which renders words incapable.

Baseball is a long haul. A season of sore arms, spiked calves, hitches in swings, pulled muscles, hours in the weight room, taunts from fans, ups and downs. Some salaries are obscene, some are bargains. Careers are uncertain and then what? It’s a game; it’s a business.  A magnificent regression to childhood. It was the first thing I knew that my parents didn’t. A time when we weren’t quite sure what mattered……but this would do for a while as we grew up and some of us never did.

Given its century and a half of tradition and constancy, it creates an illusion of order, strategy and permanence. Every spring is marked by whiffs of hot dogs, mowed grass, cracks of the bat and thwack of a ball in a mitt. Like birdsong, it ushers in spring and the held breath of possibilities.

 

Many Thanks

Many thanks for all your happy birthday greetings. For a while I thought maybe I had already died but it slipped my mind, and this was part of my afterlife.

As ill-fitting as that word, HAPPY, may seem in these days of dread, I'm reminded it was promised to us as an inalienable right in the pursuit of happiness.

Even as our heritage seems suddenly more distant, let us celebrate each other.  

My Birthday Tomorrow

Age is of no number. More and more, it means less and less. Now, the calendar says I am 92. How is this possible? I’m also 17, 29, 40, 60 and dammit, 92 (dyslexic 29). We live to defy the numbers. The imagined candles on my imagined cake could burn the house down but my feet remain on the ground, at the ready for buoyancy.

My architecture and inventory are original equipment. Given all the cells that slough off I’m lucky those marbles in my brain seemed to have repaired themselves better than my joints. So happy birthday, organs, new and old. 

Life is the great poem I could never write; but living it is better. Nothing much rhymes except with itself, and the last lines are still being lived, no end in sight.

I can't come to the phone right now. I’m communing with the barren branch of the coral tree outside the window; the two of us clinging to a memory of summer. I see no sign of chlorophyll, yet I feel certain another season is on the verge. A belief, as Cummings put it, in the leaping greenly spirit of things, illimitably Earth.

I want to say it is fun being old, this last chapter of the great adventure. In spite of the funeral of democracy, I find myself laughing a lot. Anne Lamott calls it carbonated holiness. I’m filled with gratitude and daily amaze. And I still have much to learn from my three daughters and dear friends.

Consider the furniture in this room. As if for the first time I'm gazing at the contours of the table across from me which I hadn’t really given its due. I am even enjoying the near empty shelves which, until recently, housed about two thousand books. In a sense we grow by subtraction.

I can still hear echoes of their discourse. Wendell Berry huddled with Barry Lopez.  Wallace Stevens with Helen Vendler. Wiliam Trevor telling yarns to Niall Williams and Jane Kenyon in dialogue with Eleanor Wilner as well as the ghosts of Kunitz, Roethke and Stafford. All of them exercise my imagination. I am also learning to find alignment with their absence and what is unsayable within myself.

I’m told I was born on March 21^st. I wouldn’t know. As I recall I was busy that day. Surely the date of my arrival is a tribute to family planning. I never took my mother and father to be such visionaries. The first day of spring is Nature’s birthday, at least in this hemisphere. I took my first breath as the lilies were exhaling, and hyacinth bulbs emerging. Whales and migratory birds were in transit on their appointed paths. Seasonal resurrection was in the air.

Somewhere along the way, the firmament shifted, and the vernal equinox moved from the 21st to the 20th. It must have been from Bach's organ music. He shares a birthday with me.

Not everyone can claim an equinox. Equal parts day and night make for a balanced life, granting the shadow side its due. I do have a hate-list which includes dictatorships, religious orthodoxies, willful nescience (junk science) and goat cheese.

Astrologically speaking, a language in which I have no fluency, I have lived my life on the cusp. Part ram (Aries), part fish (Pisces). I’ll settle for amphibian, half in, half out of water, and take my chances. Gurgle and Baa. The cusp has granted me a view from the bridge with an occasional glimpse into the beyond.

The secret to longevity is that there is no secret to longevity.

Pharmacy Life and Times

I am the very model of a modern major pharmacist
I’m armed with information considered fundamentalist
of uses and abuses and all things memorizable
of dosages that are toxic I know what’s over-sizable.
I decipher scribbles which to others seem illegible
am conversant with insurance cards oftentimes, ineligible
of itches that are topical or twitches that are tropical
I know what is historical from those things just hysterical,
an alchemist, an herbalist, occasionally a sorcerist
I am the very model of a modern major pharmacist.

I retired from pharmacy about twenty-five years ago having sold my store to a Russian family. At least I thought of them as Russian since they spoke the language, hated Gorbachev and greatly admired Putin. Gorby, they said, was weak and destroyed the motherland. But Vlad had muscles. In fact, they were from Odessa. Go figure.  

Looking back, I recognize that I never had a passion for pharmacy. At seventeen I was a man-child when I made the decision to pursue my father’s profession. It was a life of counting and pouring. The old vapors of crude drugs which I had grown up with in my nostrils had long given way to deodorized tablets and capsules on the shelf. Gone were the mortar and pestle, ointment slab and spatula and even the torsion scale and weights.

Over time, I realized it was the relationships with patients that enlivened me. Even if I didn't fully know them, I knew what kept them alive.

I stayed on after I sold the store, but the clientele slowly became Russian-speaking and my two-word vocabulary of goodbye (das vidaniya) and thank you (spasibo) didn’t go very far.

The virtue I possessed was that I knew how to listen empathetically. I heard people’s woes, and they felt received. As for the essential expertise, if I didn’t know it, I could find it quickly. When I couldn’t attend to my customer/patient I knew I had lost my reason for being there.

My father, in his corner drugstore, had presided on a raised platform between globes of colored water. Over the years, pharmacy lost its mystique. We had become human vending machines. At some point, I started to write poems in between labels; my prescription for myself. Das Vidaniya, pharmacy. 

Coping

I’ve never cared much for dystopian novels, but I’d rather read about them than live in one as we are now. This is the age of muck and mire or rather musk and liar whose wet dream of scrupulously planned turmoil has been realized.

It may be mayhem to us but, as the elder Corleone said to Corleone the younger, it’s business, son just business. Everything done in the name of governance during this current regime is really all about business, about avarice, money and domination.

It remains for us to figure our way out of or through the carnage. If there is to be a wolf at the door let it be Wolfgang Puck or the novelist Tobias Wolfe rather than the bearer of bad news like Wolf Blitzer. Better yet, I might raid the local library’s shelf of Thomas Wolfe.

Nobody writes like Wolfe anymore. He gushes …but with eloquence. His spigot must have been missing a washer. He creates a torrent of words you find yourself swimming in, which is not a bad way of spending the next few years. Look Homeward Angel, a mere 662 pages, was a bestseller in the 1920s.

His next novel, Of Time and the River, was intended to rival Proust’s seven volumes. It came in at over a million words which he dumped on the desk of his editor, Maxwell Perkins. Over a thousand words got trimmed to a final heft of 912 pages. You Can’t Go Home Again was published posthumously.

If those three books aren’t enough sand to bury my ostrich head into, then I could turn to that other wolf, Virginia, spelled Woolf.

She wrote the way Monet painted. Phrases like brushstrokes. A gesture here, fraction of dialog there, shadows on the wall, a room in the silence of doilies. Images receive the lift of her language. Scenes drift, then return in mid-sentence. Time slides. I could happily dwell in the realm of her interior monologues as if in the music of a cello.

Two wolves, howling at the moon at opposite poles in their writing styles. One spare, one effusive. They died within three years of each other. He suddenly at age 38, she by suicide in 1941. Let their sentences have their way with me. My letters of transit.