Living

Mortality and morbidity have darkened these days, though not unexpectedly in the winter of one’s life. Movies seem also to dwell on this season of death and dying. It is as if cinema and the documentary of my life are indistinguishable. Breaking news can break one’s heart and personal messages even more so.   This year’s crop of films comprises various takes on soullessness, carnage and abuse of power. The pharmacist in me calls for a remedial prescription, a tonic against toxicity; not the schmaltz of the Spielberg’s Fabelmans but the slow-paced redemption in the character embodied by Bill Nighy in the film, Living.   Written by Kazuo Ishiguro, this American adaptation of Kurosawa’s 1952 movie,  Ikiru, strikes the perfect note to lift us out of the morass. We are presented with a 1950’s British bureaucrat who is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Yet he is already half dead not from disease but from ennui.   How he comes to life is a thing of beauty, a kind of human rhapsody. The journey is registered on Nighy’s face — the folly and the stumbles, then the fugue of awakening.   He is helped back to life by the presence of a young woman, formerly one of his workers. As an outsider, she transcends the mind-numbing life ahead. which the men cannot see. Her instinctual compassion and vitality touches Nighy. Through her presence he glimpses his own unlived life. Her open heartedness allows him to share his fate with her. We witness an animation coming to his eyes as he rouses his staff from their zombie-like existence.   The four men with their bowler hats on the train are closely positioned just as they live out their claustrophobic existence in the same proximity in the office. Their physical closeness can be contrasted with an emotional distancing. Constraint and indifference are the unwritten code of behavior. Stacks of scrupulously unread projects pile up on their desks as a marker of their own unexamined lives.   The trigger for the plot is introduced early on. It took a group of women with the vision of converting a bombsite into a playground. The feminine principle was displayed as if swords were bent into plowshares.   When Mr. Williams (Nighy) exerts his will and pushes through the stultifying system with its other somnambulant civil servants, we cheer silently. And when his legacy is actualized, it is accompanied by the artistry of the cinematographer coming together with the music and framing of the man. We see a boy-like old man on a swing of his own making. The effect is the restoration of humanity and its possibilities. What had been lost has ­been returned to us.

 

 

Willard Manus Remembered

When the announcement came of his memorial, I thought I would come only to listen. How is it possible to count a man as a friend for over thirty years but regrettably not know him well at all? Will was the empty chair at lunches with Mavis. He was the order-to-go which she took home for dinner and the no-show at our sunday salons.

While we were eating or chatting, he was busy creating. He started writing as a young man and never let up, putting yellow number two pencil to yellow notepad and then transcribing it to his worn-out keyboard.

Whether it was spear-fishing or paddle ball he found his target and nailed it. Will was a virtuoso pounding the keys on his ancient typewriter in his garage turned atelier, the room where it happened.

What happened was dozens of novels, essays, reviews, travel pieces and theater-works. I knew Will from his words on the page brought to life on the stage. I felt his passions for social justice, and for historical truth through the nuance of his cast of distinct voices. He ventriloquized those voices into the mouths of his imagined characters. He wrote dialog for the Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio in his head as well as Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, S.J. Perelman, Charlie Parker and dozens of others. Will’s imaginative field was a bumper crop; an orchard of forbidden fruit along with excavated tubers buried deep. 

He heard America struggle and yearn, love and celebrate. He heard the treachery and redemption and he heard America’s song, our hymns, anthems and psalms. From dry history he found the drama. We left the theater with his stirrings and carried his dirge and his odes of joy in our hearts.

There was much more to Will than this, I’m sure, but that is how I shall remember him. The gift he gave us will endure.

 

Wind

Done with the hot air of bloviating Congressmen

and done with the winds of war, 

The wind is now out of breath that filled sailing ships

on their way to conquest and carnage

Let the ocean churn

 

for Turner’s brushstroke. Even then

there is a calm in my inland sea

for the wind that hides in the word window,

vividly unseen except as it bends the palm

 and scatters leaves like schools of fish.

                   

Wind-chill that stirs my memory

 in those squalls of yesteryear when three sweaters

 were no match for the nor’easter

  as it laid me low in the vise of the grippe.

   (no, not the grippe)

My mother knew exactly which wind to blame

fluent as she was in the glossary of winds.

She knew the dreaded draft with its cargo of maladies

from fresh air which filled our lungs and chased miasma.

Wind, you devil.

 

Wind, you saint. Wind of cross-ventilation,

river of breeze we called air-conditioning.

Wind on fire-escapes those August nights.

Wind which blew fly balls into home-runs

or stilled them in mid-flight.

 

Wind, you choreographer

giving wings to skirts and undershirts.

Chorus-line on the clothesline.

On wind’s invisible carpet dreams and sparrows

hitch a ride.

 

We see the wind in curtains sway and swoon

from bedrooms when the camera pans

signifying lovers across the room

 blowing candles out and sculpting

 cigarette smoke dancing like dervish to exhausted bliss.

 

 Gazing through the glass

 the window is a portal to unknowable wind.

 A gust of the imagined seizes me

  with this windfall of gusto

  carries me to the other side of the wind.

       

 

 

 

 

Inalienable Right

Thomas Jefferson has had tough year considering he’s still dead. Tearing down his statue is a redress of grievances long simmering. It must smart a little having your marble melted down or turned to dust. Here’s another bone I have to pick with him.

Among the inalienable rights he enumerated, I contend that a good night’s sleep should be at the top of the list.  Maybe that is included in the pursuit of happiness or maybe T.J. fell asleep while writing the Declaration of Independence. I doubt his slaves ever slept very well.

Thomas, my good man, how am I to attain life and liberty without a good night’s sleep, I ask you. And how else to dream the American dream without quality shut-eye?

The older I get the harder it is. At least I have no memory of fitful sleep as an infant unless an errant diaper pin was sticking into me. And then there was the dreaded colic. No, not colic, please. (Eight decades later that morphed into GERD,) 

I logged in my eight hours all throughout high school. In college I had a few nights when I forced myself to stay up cramming for some exam which tested our rote learning. Over the next sixty years I drifted off with all my synapses and neurotransmitters seemingly in sync. Then they weren’t.  

As if in compensation for diminished cognition my brain asserts itself around midnight. I start thinking great thoughts. I know they are great because I can’t remember any insights the next morning. Big ideas call for big erasures. Great thoughts get mixed up with the mundane and shards of that all of which make for sludge; the kind of sludge that sticks in my craw, wherever that may be.

I lay there reviewing my life, parts of which should be boring enough to put me to sleep. At least they would put anyone else to sleep. Eventually, just as I’m about to nod off I think I may have to pee. Better get up. No, don’t miss the chance to drift away. No, get up you fool! So, I do and now must start all over again. I could try my old mantra: Beaujolais. Beaujolais.  Yes, I feel it working. It is an intoxicating potion. If I wake up drunk I’ll know it worked.

However, what works on Monday no longer works by Wednesday. My sleep apparatus is like the coronavirus. It creates variants or more accurately, tolerance. Yesterday’s soporific brew is tomorrow's ho-hum. The subject has me flummoxed. I'm thinking about my rights endowed by my creator. My lids are getting heavy. Don’t speak. I’m off. 

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Un-Googled

I Googled myself the other day and discovered that I do not exist. I know I've been losing weight but I didn't realize I had disappeared. Maybe I died and it slipped my mind. But if that were the case, whose teeth was I flossing this morning?

Indeed, there are pages of imposters having taken my name when I wasn’t looking. I think of them as my generic equivalent. At one time I counted seven Norm Levines in the San Fernando Valley. One of them was my customer. I coveted his orange sweater. Another Norm Levine was a pharmacist. I hired him for one day back in 1968. I couldn’t handle the two of us side by side.

The Norm Levine impersonators included a man who entered a marathon and approached the finish line from the wrong side. I admire him for thinking outside the box. Another one sold knives at gun shows. I suppose that’s a step in the right direction. Then there was a man who I braked for on a highway in the Catskills. He was an antiquarian bookseller using my name. I blessed him and moved on. 

Flying under Google's radar takes a special skill. I ought to lecture those in witness-protection programs except I don’t know what I didn’t do to go unmentioned. I suppose if I won the lottery I may get noticed but that would entail buying a ticket which is out of the question. 

Perhaps I have moved on to my next incarnation. as a fly on the wall. Though my preference is to first be a fly in gazpacho soup swimming the backstroke.  

Since I am a certified man of no importance, I imagine there must be thousands of us. We are among the rank and file, the extras in a Cecil B. DeMille epic, the also-rans, the uninvited party-crashers whose attire blends in with the sofa. We have achieved anonymity.

I remember disappearing around age 8 or 9 when I got lost in a sea of beach umbrellas at the beach. I was rescued by a lifeguard who swam the Australian crawl in the sand to reunite me with family who probably didn’t notice I had dematerialized. Then, in a pharmaceutical chemistry class presided over by a proto-fascist professor who delighted in humiliating students I managed to disappear behind some extra large body.

I have had about fifty poems published in literary magazines but all of them before the world went digital. Count that as prehistory. I wonder if those Greek playwrights thought of themselves living in minus time.  

I don't suppose loving friendships register on Google. My eleven hundred blogs also do not ring Google's bell. I expect when my name does appear on the obit page old friends will say, Gee, I thought he died years ago. In the meantime I can report that being disappeared by Google is only a flesh wound and it's not terminal. 

 

Looking Back With New Eyes

I just realized what’s been missing for a long time. Not only the corner drugstore and movie houses with their triangular protruding marquee but what has disappeared is the nothingness, the vacancy, the empty lot.

I miss what wasn’t there. The house, gone. All that remained was a chunk of fireplace. Maybe the rest burned down. But wait, it’s not really the house I miss, it’s the lot never built upon or long lost to dust. The shortcut. The place where I once found a quarter. A few patches of grass. A dandelion. It’s the space. Real estate unwanted.

But we wanted it to put to our use. We had pocket knives possibly with a bottle opener and screwdriver as attachments. We played a game called Territory carving out our pieces of earth, the object of which escapes me. It was the last weapon I ever carried unless you count my water pistol.

It’s where kids played, there and the sidewalk. We were a tribe whose rules came down by oral tradition, possibly variations on games played between Goths and Visigoths. We watched the big kids until we were big and little kids picked it up from us. Chalk and marbles. Jump rope and tennis balls with skate key around the neck, a football needle in one pocket and a stack of baseball cards under crossed rubber bands in the back pocket. The essentials of life.

One potato, two potato. Eeeny-meenie-miny-moe, Ringalevio. Potsie. Sliding bottle caps. Manhole covers. Pitching pennies. A, my name is … We were a canvas in a Brueghel painting.

The artifacts of another age. Stoopball needs stoops. Bubblegum cards now sell at auctions. Has this tribe called children silently moved on?  Was all that a mid- 20^th century urban phenomenon, a moment in time? If so, I’d say we were the lucky ones having been suckled by street games in those good-old Depression years and wartime when our collected tinfoil defeated the enemy.

What did all this prepare me for? Such questions are never asked. We played as if it mattered, outside of time. Only looking back can I see how this period equipped me for a sort of communal life with competition that was fun in of itself. However, when I was about ten, plus or minus, I was ready to move on and ready myself for a career as a major league first baseman. If that failed I could always be half of Superman, the half that was Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for the Daily Planet but with my cape underneath to rescue Lois Lane and a phone booth never far away.

There is actually a street in the Bronx called Stickball Blvd. Otherwise all those essentials of life are extinct. But what about that barren land with the good earth? Paved over no doubt. It was the chalked pavement that was our playing field and the adjacent street, now an unmarked thoroughfare. Traffic was cursed for interrupting the flow. Perhaps this was the last stand against the internal combustion engine. Unknowingly we were at the barricades, way ahead of our time. And were we not also the last generation fluent in the unwritten language of the sidewalk and the empty lot?