Po Boy Views
By
Phil LaMancusa
All The Kings Horses
Or
Hey Jude
Hurricane Katrina: what can I say that hasn’t been said ad nauseam? What can I tell you that you haven’t already seen on ‘Treme’? That we were some of the last ones to leave and some of the first ones back (and that’s with putting in over five thousand miles on the road)? That when we left the city was broken, we thought beyond repair, and when we came back, it was to a battered but unbowed wreck, mugged by nature, left to drown when levees didn’t hold, occupied by the military and ravaged by civil disobedience? Yes.
Yes, we came back to take a sad song and make it better. What else could you do after a wash the size of 16 Manhattans bitch slapped the Gulf Coast? 50,000,000,000 gallons of water from broken levees in 80% of New Orleans alone and alone we found ourselves; 500,000 citizens displaced, blown to the four corners. “Crying won’t help you, prayer won’t do you no good; when the levee breaks, Mama you’ve got to move”.
The waters shredded all boundaries with its destruction: economic, social, political and racial. Patricians and plebeians alike perished and providence had no regard for the pureness or poorness of a person’s soul; we all took the hit. All at once, we all became very fragile and extremely… mortal.
For the first nine months back we swept our own streets until the mayor signed a company for five times the cost of pre Katrina times, recycling became a distant memory, light poles were out and eighty percent of the city was in darkness, coffin flies blackened the air and trash and rotting refrigerators lined the street. No mail delivery. Remember? Debris piled up stories high, our stories piled up like psychic debris, we came back not because we wanted to; we came back because we had to. In prescience how could we not have come back? Unthinkable. Would we abandon a wounded comrade? A dying relative? A beaten home team?
We rolled up our sleeves and got to work putting back together the city that care forgot; we were a city of motherless children coming back to care for our home--we are still orphans of the storm--it’s been three steps forward and two steps back for five frigging frustrating years. It’s as if greener pastures are not in our futures.
The mayor said that he wanted the recovery to be driven by the economy; ergo rents doubled. The mayor said that the city wanted everybody back; and so they closed and eventually tore down the projects and homelessness tripled.
We developed three different strains of Katrina coughs; predictably, we were told that there was no such thing. We knew about lootings, rapes, bodies and gun battles between police and citizens; blithely that was all swept under the rug and whitewashed.
The fuster cluck of the repairing of miles of sewer pipe and fresh water lines and gas pipes and streets, oh the streets. Get this, the administration said that, purposely, they, and this is five years in, only went around repairing twenty percent of the streets that accounted for eighty percent of the traffic; that traffic being commuters. I personally don’t know who these commuters are and I also don’t know how, in five years, we have only been able to fix a paltry twenty percent.
Five years in, we have cell phone towers in our streets that serve no function; we have electronic parking meters (even in less affluent sections of town) with increased rates, property is being taken away under the guise of imminent domain, still almost 60,000 residences on the blighted list, new hospitals in the works while storm affected ones remain shuttered and the majority of the so called ‘recovery effort’ being accomplished by volunteers and faith based groups. Five years in and we are still a city racially divided four ways from Sunday.
Do you want to talk about drugs and violence? Want to know the murder statistics and how we are still highest per capita in the country? Don’t get me started.
Five years in and we’re still the country’s step-child; should another storm or disaster occur we will still be crying ‘po mouf’ to our neighbors. We are still in no position to offer succor to others should they need us. The great American city.
Five years in and we wouldn’t live anywhere else in the whole damn hemisphere and although our optimism flags at times, we are here for the long haul; we are among others that feel the same. At our home we pay private recyclers; our neighbor composts. I work the voting polls and participate in the process in which we elect our officials, I reserve the right to bitch about our inequities. We have a new mayor and hopefully our city is on its way to a better future: physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.
There is a philosophy that tells you that only by your cognition does the universe actually exist and that when you close your eyes it no longer does; that when you put your head down for the final sleep it will be gone. Poof. In the meantime all that happens is illusion spurred ahead by greed; the grand scheme that goes on within you and without you is here for your temporary education, enlightenment and transcendence.
That existential crap only goes so far until you may realize that, even if true, you have this one life to live; that you still bleed when cut, that you still cry when hurt and that you still are inclined to live a full, happy, productive and honorable existence. Even though it appears, at times, that the cards are stacked against us; even though we take pistol whippings by the fates; even though when the going gets tough(er) we are inclined to get going. To experience New Orleans is to experience love; for me, to live here is to want to make it better.
“The minute you let her under your skin, then you begin to make it better”
“The minute you let her into your heart, then you can start to make it better”
To be continued…
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Friday, May 7, 2010
Big Easy Picks 2010
Big easy picks
Best Television Production Yet Starring New Orleans
HBO’s Treme, first of all, is NOT a documentary. It is a fictional story told about a real time; that time being three months after the Gulf Coast’s decimation by hurricane Katrina. It’s characters are based on real people and the real people are based on characters and they run a gamut: Rich man, Poor Man, Beggar man, Thief. Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief with a Chef and WWOZ DJ thrown in. Treme is a ‘you love it or you’re still sore from the last hurricane to enjoy’ program. I’m not sure that it will play in Peoria, where they’ll probably need subtitles but, check it out. Local Sundays at 9pm. Local musical performances and recognizable storyline.
Best Guilty Summer Pleasures
That too but…the Casino at City Park for a butter pecan cone under the oaks on a hot Summer afternoon is almost as good as good can be and …. a trip to Angelo Brocato’s at 214 N. Carrollton Av is simply a giddying experience and the iced creams and confections are nothing if not bordering on sensual; however, after reading Sara Roahen’s hunger inspiring Gumbo Tales I became a Hansen’s Sno-Blitz Sweet Shop (4801 Tchoupitoulas St) disciple and have joined the ranks of knowing New Orleanians that wait each Spring to watch for the updated sign outside updating the years that they’ve been in business that signals the beginning of their business year (now having been open 71 years). In Hansen’s you may wait in line because there are ‘no shortcuts to quality’ and the original snow making machine still operates at it’s own pace and the syrups are house made and new flavors are always surfacing to our amazement and enjoyment. Open 1 til 7 every day but Monday
The Very Best Local Cookbook
Books about our local foods have been written for over a century and a half and there is not a runt in the litter. Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana kitchen is where Creole/Cajun became cool for the rest of the world. Written in 1984, it’s in it’ 91st printing, it took two years to write because at the time he was not measuring any ingredients. Paulette Rittenberg stood next to him and cooked and wrote and tested, bless her heart and patience, consequently all of his spice mixtures (for every dish) are broken down by ingredient. The Remoulade Sauce is the blueprint for every one you’ll have today in New Orleans, color photos on how to make a roux and how to blacken a fish. Every basic recipe and I mean every basic recipe. Check out the Sweet Potato Pecan Pie and the BBQ Shrimp. $28.99 new but working copies can be had for less.
Best Unadvertised Restaurant
Café Maspero 601 Decatur St. at Toulouse not to be confused with Pierre Maspero which pales, has been open since 1974 and run by the same family from inception. The philosophy is simple; large portions, small prices, no frills.
The very best Muffelatta in the city; served hot, individual size and there is more filling than bread. Seafood platters as big as your head, $1.00 daiquiris and house wine; tap Abita in frozen mugs and a great onion soup among other offerings. No credit cards, no reservations, no dessert, no blaring televisions and no waitress in a uniform explaining the daily specials and telling you their name and that they’ll be your ‘server’. Cost conscious, brisk, casual with the occasional celebrity or walk in party of thirty. Open 11:00 am-10:00 weekdays 11:00 pm weekends. Closed Christmas and Thanksgiving.
French Quarter Computer Café in operation
Oxymoron? Pretty much. With the closing of the Bastille and other private ones that couldn’t hold on after hell and high water hit (not to mention escalating rents and naive management) The French Quarter Postal Emporium at 1000 Bourbon St. has been the only place to send anyone in need of computer time, fax services and mailing services. Into this breach comes That Internet Café On Toulouse, 717 Toulouse (off Royal toward Bourbon) to be exact next to Glass Magick. 522-2020. Summer hours are 7am until 2:30. They’ll be offering access, sales repairs, fax and tutoring. Again another locally owned and operated and in need of support in these trying times.
Best Television Production Yet Starring New Orleans
HBO’s Treme, first of all, is NOT a documentary. It is a fictional story told about a real time; that time being three months after the Gulf Coast’s decimation by hurricane Katrina. It’s characters are based on real people and the real people are based on characters and they run a gamut: Rich man, Poor Man, Beggar man, Thief. Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief with a Chef and WWOZ DJ thrown in. Treme is a ‘you love it or you’re still sore from the last hurricane to enjoy’ program. I’m not sure that it will play in Peoria, where they’ll probably need subtitles but, check it out. Local Sundays at 9pm. Local musical performances and recognizable storyline.
Best Guilty Summer Pleasures
That too but…the Casino at City Park for a butter pecan cone under the oaks on a hot Summer afternoon is almost as good as good can be and …. a trip to Angelo Brocato’s at 214 N. Carrollton Av is simply a giddying experience and the iced creams and confections are nothing if not bordering on sensual; however, after reading Sara Roahen’s hunger inspiring Gumbo Tales I became a Hansen’s Sno-Blitz Sweet Shop (4801 Tchoupitoulas St) disciple and have joined the ranks of knowing New Orleanians that wait each Spring to watch for the updated sign outside updating the years that they’ve been in business that signals the beginning of their business year (now having been open 71 years). In Hansen’s you may wait in line because there are ‘no shortcuts to quality’ and the original snow making machine still operates at it’s own pace and the syrups are house made and new flavors are always surfacing to our amazement and enjoyment. Open 1 til 7 every day but Monday
The Very Best Local Cookbook
Books about our local foods have been written for over a century and a half and there is not a runt in the litter. Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana kitchen is where Creole/Cajun became cool for the rest of the world. Written in 1984, it’s in it’ 91st printing, it took two years to write because at the time he was not measuring any ingredients. Paulette Rittenberg stood next to him and cooked and wrote and tested, bless her heart and patience, consequently all of his spice mixtures (for every dish) are broken down by ingredient. The Remoulade Sauce is the blueprint for every one you’ll have today in New Orleans, color photos on how to make a roux and how to blacken a fish. Every basic recipe and I mean every basic recipe. Check out the Sweet Potato Pecan Pie and the BBQ Shrimp. $28.99 new but working copies can be had for less.
Best Unadvertised Restaurant
Café Maspero 601 Decatur St. at Toulouse not to be confused with Pierre Maspero which pales, has been open since 1974 and run by the same family from inception. The philosophy is simple; large portions, small prices, no frills.
The very best Muffelatta in the city; served hot, individual size and there is more filling than bread. Seafood platters as big as your head, $1.00 daiquiris and house wine; tap Abita in frozen mugs and a great onion soup among other offerings. No credit cards, no reservations, no dessert, no blaring televisions and no waitress in a uniform explaining the daily specials and telling you their name and that they’ll be your ‘server’. Cost conscious, brisk, casual with the occasional celebrity or walk in party of thirty. Open 11:00 am-10:00 weekdays 11:00 pm weekends. Closed Christmas and Thanksgiving.
French Quarter Computer Café in operation
Oxymoron? Pretty much. With the closing of the Bastille and other private ones that couldn’t hold on after hell and high water hit (not to mention escalating rents and naive management) The French Quarter Postal Emporium at 1000 Bourbon St. has been the only place to send anyone in need of computer time, fax services and mailing services. Into this breach comes That Internet Café On Toulouse, 717 Toulouse (off Royal toward Bourbon) to be exact next to Glass Magick. 522-2020. Summer hours are 7am until 2:30. They’ll be offering access, sales repairs, fax and tutoring. Again another locally owned and operated and in need of support in these trying times.
Friday, April 30, 2010
July in New Orleans
Po Boy Views
By
Phil LaMancusa
Jewel Eye
Or
Isle Of Views
Well, here we are in another July with another set of a thousand words to amaze, entrance, mystify and amuse you………or not. And as we sit, looking for any breeze at all, watching the weather channel and hopefully sipping on a cool one, our thoughts harmonically converge on ways to pay our bills, preferably without breaking a sweat.
How about we write the Great American Novel? That’s great! That’s novel and that’s American, huh? Well, hold on Pilgrim; it’s not as easy as all that. Pretty much in these economic times, getting a first book published is called fat chance. Getting any other books published is possible if you have already published or if you are somebody; add to the blah blah blah that you cannot become somebody until you’ve been published and you’ve got your predicament and mine: you’re not a recognized author until you’ve been published and you, in this economy, cannot get published until you are a recognized author or have shagged a celebrity out of wedlock (fat chance).
Or, unless you have a plan; I’ve got a plan. We, hit the lottery, steal a couple of horses, jump a twenty foot fence and make it to Mexico, riding hard, by morning. Noooo, that’s my escape plan. My ‘getting a book published’ plan is simply this: start small.
By starting small I mean, write a short story, enter it in a contest, win the contest and BAM! publishers will be breaking down your door to get you to accept a book deal and give you a bazillion dollars just because that’s what publishers do. Are you up to running off eighteen pages double spaced in the font of times new roman?
We think that we are ready (using second person here); besides that, we’re ready to set four circumstances, antagonists, protagonists or pains in the asses into motion if that’s what it takes to get a story moving. Advice that they have been receiving (slick switch to third person) had them being aware that more than a four cornered (for example: the Cook, the Thief, the Wife and Her Lover) manuscript was daunting to all those readers other than the wise guys that can fathom Shakespeare, Virginia Wolff or the first chapter of Genesis; no wonder our lives seem so complicated. If we only had to concern ourselves with three challenges (persons, places, things) at a time…
Speaking of which, writing should be relatively easy for them/you/us because all it really takes is for the suspension of reality as we/me/y’all know it. Simply do not believe what is happening in everyday life and it friggin flows. i.e. “I don’t believe I left my driver’s side window down in that rain storm, got a ticket, there’s a Tomahawk Missile in my back seat, I can’t find my cat, a cop car just pulled up, I gained ten pounds just standing here in my pajamas and boy, do I gotta pee.” translates to the writer’s mind as: ‘Well, what wouldja believe?’
1. It’s not really your car; your car is still at the nightclub and you were too drunk to drive last night.
2. Somebody laced your morning coffee with LSD and you’re hallucinating everything except your bursting bladder.
3. You’re being set up by aliens from a fraternity on a distant planet who think that it’s one big funny flummoxing inferior bipeds.
4. It’s your cat’s fault for leaving the window open when she put the missile in the car and you’re really still asleep in your bed and about to wet it.
Orrrrr: “It was a dark and stormy night, somewhere in the distance a dog barked; three men sat around a camp fire. One of the men, the good looking one, asked the returning veteran to tell the blind one about his tone deaf daughter with the wooden leg playing for tips at the smokehouse with her little dog who was worrying towels with vowel usage and syntax.
Sudden storm warnings appeared on the horizon; they were in a category all of their own, fighting a burning oil spill while the governments of four states formed committees to study the subject of the missing cat, who had stolen heavy artillery in her attempt to fight fire with fire only to blow out the window of the sleeping crime fighter’s car window. Very little was revealed except that a note was left on the windshield disguised as a Christmas card of a pleasing and very attractive design, especially appealing to officials who mistook them for dinner invitations or sliced luncheon meat, “dressed or undressed?” I asked.
The sun came up, the phone rang, the waters rose and Dondi was packing his batteries in a carry on bag that he hoped to store in the overhead compartment without an additional charge; the Goodyear blimp glided over depositing weight everywhere and discouraging forecasters who only predicted rain from open windows of squad cars equipped with radar detection. “Sorry” said the elephant in my nightclothes, “I don’t do windows; you’ll have to ask the midget posing as a little wolf in sleep’s clothing.”
“PJ’s? Sorry, no coffee for you; it’s bound to stunt your growth” I replied with candor, alacrity and a Hubig’s humble pie.
“Well, cry me a river” said the person surveying the broken window on the driver’s side eyeing the Tomahawk Missile in the back seat as the cop car pulled up to examine the ticket on the windshield. The missing cat stuck her head out from under the vehicle, trading oil, with Olive the other reindeer, and replied: “I hope not The Yellow Stream by I. P. Freely!”
The End.
Now wasn’t that simple, minds? Was that such a dill, Emma? Just suspend your bee, Lief!
I do it all the time and look where it’s gotten me; a one way ticket to Palooka-ville, is where. I could’ve been a contender and still can. I’m writing a short story about a soldier that comes back from……… sorry……. they also told us at the class to never tell anyone what your writing because you cannot trust other writers not to steal. Shame shame. It’s on my blog but don’t tell anyone that I told you, okay? Me? I gotta pee.
By
Phil LaMancusa
Jewel Eye
Or
Isle Of Views
Well, here we are in another July with another set of a thousand words to amaze, entrance, mystify and amuse you………or not. And as we sit, looking for any breeze at all, watching the weather channel and hopefully sipping on a cool one, our thoughts harmonically converge on ways to pay our bills, preferably without breaking a sweat.
How about we write the Great American Novel? That’s great! That’s novel and that’s American, huh? Well, hold on Pilgrim; it’s not as easy as all that. Pretty much in these economic times, getting a first book published is called fat chance. Getting any other books published is possible if you have already published or if you are somebody; add to the blah blah blah that you cannot become somebody until you’ve been published and you’ve got your predicament and mine: you’re not a recognized author until you’ve been published and you, in this economy, cannot get published until you are a recognized author or have shagged a celebrity out of wedlock (fat chance).
Or, unless you have a plan; I’ve got a plan. We, hit the lottery, steal a couple of horses, jump a twenty foot fence and make it to Mexico, riding hard, by morning. Noooo, that’s my escape plan. My ‘getting a book published’ plan is simply this: start small.
By starting small I mean, write a short story, enter it in a contest, win the contest and BAM! publishers will be breaking down your door to get you to accept a book deal and give you a bazillion dollars just because that’s what publishers do. Are you up to running off eighteen pages double spaced in the font of times new roman?
We think that we are ready (using second person here); besides that, we’re ready to set four circumstances, antagonists, protagonists or pains in the asses into motion if that’s what it takes to get a story moving. Advice that they have been receiving (slick switch to third person) had them being aware that more than a four cornered (for example: the Cook, the Thief, the Wife and Her Lover) manuscript was daunting to all those readers other than the wise guys that can fathom Shakespeare, Virginia Wolff or the first chapter of Genesis; no wonder our lives seem so complicated. If we only had to concern ourselves with three challenges (persons, places, things) at a time…
Speaking of which, writing should be relatively easy for them/you/us because all it really takes is for the suspension of reality as we/me/y’all know it. Simply do not believe what is happening in everyday life and it friggin flows. i.e. “I don’t believe I left my driver’s side window down in that rain storm, got a ticket, there’s a Tomahawk Missile in my back seat, I can’t find my cat, a cop car just pulled up, I gained ten pounds just standing here in my pajamas and boy, do I gotta pee.” translates to the writer’s mind as: ‘Well, what wouldja believe?’
1. It’s not really your car; your car is still at the nightclub and you were too drunk to drive last night.
2. Somebody laced your morning coffee with LSD and you’re hallucinating everything except your bursting bladder.
3. You’re being set up by aliens from a fraternity on a distant planet who think that it’s one big funny flummoxing inferior bipeds.
4. It’s your cat’s fault for leaving the window open when she put the missile in the car and you’re really still asleep in your bed and about to wet it.
Orrrrr: “It was a dark and stormy night, somewhere in the distance a dog barked; three men sat around a camp fire. One of the men, the good looking one, asked the returning veteran to tell the blind one about his tone deaf daughter with the wooden leg playing for tips at the smokehouse with her little dog who was worrying towels with vowel usage and syntax.
Sudden storm warnings appeared on the horizon; they were in a category all of their own, fighting a burning oil spill while the governments of four states formed committees to study the subject of the missing cat, who had stolen heavy artillery in her attempt to fight fire with fire only to blow out the window of the sleeping crime fighter’s car window. Very little was revealed except that a note was left on the windshield disguised as a Christmas card of a pleasing and very attractive design, especially appealing to officials who mistook them for dinner invitations or sliced luncheon meat, “dressed or undressed?” I asked.
The sun came up, the phone rang, the waters rose and Dondi was packing his batteries in a carry on bag that he hoped to store in the overhead compartment without an additional charge; the Goodyear blimp glided over depositing weight everywhere and discouraging forecasters who only predicted rain from open windows of squad cars equipped with radar detection. “Sorry” said the elephant in my nightclothes, “I don’t do windows; you’ll have to ask the midget posing as a little wolf in sleep’s clothing.”
“PJ’s? Sorry, no coffee for you; it’s bound to stunt your growth” I replied with candor, alacrity and a Hubig’s humble pie.
“Well, cry me a river” said the person surveying the broken window on the driver’s side eyeing the Tomahawk Missile in the back seat as the cop car pulled up to examine the ticket on the windshield. The missing cat stuck her head out from under the vehicle, trading oil, with Olive the other reindeer, and replied: “I hope not The Yellow Stream by I. P. Freely!”
The End.
Now wasn’t that simple, minds? Was that such a dill, Emma? Just suspend your bee, Lief!
I do it all the time and look where it’s gotten me; a one way ticket to Palooka-ville, is where. I could’ve been a contender and still can. I’m writing a short story about a soldier that comes back from……… sorry……. they also told us at the class to never tell anyone what your writing because you cannot trust other writers not to steal. Shame shame. It’s on my blog but don’t tell anyone that I told you, okay? Me? I gotta pee.
Friday, April 16, 2010
Short story submitted to glimmertrain 7/18/10
Strawberry Nest
By
Philipe LaMancusa
For my grandfather, growing up in a small town in Northern Georgia, life was neither confusing, nor was it challenging; it just was. The rituals and dramas of youth were played out, as they had been for generations, with no surprises and few variations. A child’s year began each spring and culminated in the ocher skies that signaled the ending of summer’s independence. Fall and winter were restrictive, with reprieves of too few holidays and no conception of incremental time.
Universally, children are on wavelengths of their own; adults, young and old, are strange and alien to their ken and comprehension. As we all know (or eventually find out), adults, as well, have no clear understanding of themselves; awareness of the passage of time and its significance is their reward for maturity. Wisdom is a diaphanous veil of subjectivity.
And so it turns out that being grown up is what proves the most challenging and this is that kind of story, the kind of story about being grown up. This is the recounting of near a century ago, when life in the rural south was a system of orbits and auras, where grownups revolved around each other in degrees of intensity. This is the story of how one man’s attempt to understand, and make peace within himself, if nowhere else, had all the earmarks of a great catastrophe and all the prospects of a grand adventure.
Tom Callas came back a little later than other survivors of the Great Conflict overseas and without fanfare. He was a son of the sons of the pathfinders and trailblazers of the Chattanooga Southern Railroad that had come through the American south with oxen and wagon in the 1880’s, and had stayed to build a town and a life for themselves and the generations that would follow.
His arrival could have been viewed as surreptitious were it not for the lack of ceremony or grace that came as natural to him as falling off a log, or in this instance, falling out of a train. Tom took his leave of a slow moving freight train with the markings of the Tennessee Alabama Georgia Railroad, locally known as the TAG line, one fine April morning and hopped off at the Blanche water tower just south of the Pigeon Mountain tunnel. He was too excited to sit and wait another mile or minute and eager to put his feet on home soil. His time away hadn’t changed him much physically, but his heart was emaciated with longing for red clay dirt in his lungs. He landed lightly on the balls of his feet, tripped and skinned his knees, bruised his chin, chafed his hands and, by divine providence, received a lung full of red clay dust. Ask and you shall receive.
Unselfconsciously he picked himself up, stretched tall and took a deep breath; he held his nose up like a coonhound ‘ownin’ the line’ and slapped the red clay dust from his clothing with a worn and shapeless slouch hat. He had made his exit from the train on the far side of the tower, and set off through the familiar woods, like a nefarious lover slipping through the back door; the scent of poplar, black walnut, fox grapes, and wild jasmine intoxicating his senses while the tall pines that held up the sky hushed the terrain like a cathedral. This was Lookout Mountain area and he was well acquainted with the Smokey Mountain countryside. Tom Callas was a healthy twenty-two year old man and he was glad to be alive and home.
Shortly he reached a country lane where he stopped at a little store run by coloreds and splashed his face in the yard pump, drinking from his hands cool well water, splashing his face and snorting like an old steam shovel; a few local ancients in rockers and some half pints playing with a wagon hoop watched his performance. Unfazed, Tom flashed a lopsided grin and waved with his neckerchief. He hitched up his britches, shouldered his rucksack and headed toward Burgess: a postage stamp of a town nestled between the soft rolling land and the hard steel of the railroad. The day was as perfect as warm pie on a kitchen windowsill.
Being alone for more time than is normal for a person sets him ‘talkin’ at hisself’ as hill folks would say and Tom had been alone a long time and was no exception; “I used to play here when I was just a little’n and the smell’s just the same,” he said to no-one in particular. His lean frame traveled easy and quick and he passed the four miles into the town with spring in his step, in his heart and in the woods of Walker County.
“Yonder lie Blue Pond, and yar Little River by the trestle, uppin’ to Cherokee and down to Gadsden” he recited like a schoolboy, nodding his head, eyes wide and jaw set proud.
“It’s the smells that really bring you back”, Tom Callas later told Mick Percy, the town’s sheriff, pharmacist and only practicing lawyer.
Mick had sat out the Great War on the advice of his Grandpappy, who had seen action at Chickamauga in sixty-three, where over ten thousand young men a day had lost their lives in a half a week of slaughter. Mick was nobody’s fool and didn’t relish becoming fodder in a conflict that had so little concern for, what he considered, the sanctity of human life. The boys who came back from this last one had witnessed horror and terror beyond belief and a good percentage of them had missing parts of their anatomy that he was sure was not only damn inconvenient, but added nothing to their employment opportunities, which in the early 1920s was slim to nothin’ thereabouts, if you couldn’t mine the coal or harvest timber.
Mick had allowed that he was hell-bound-lazy from birth and only aspired to live up to that potential; spending as much of his time and his Daddy’s money on schooling and finally settling down to a two story clap board house more or less in the center of a town where few crimes were committed, rare litigation was heard and only an occasional headache powder or horehound cough syrup was ever needed in this terminally healthy and sane little town.
Townsfolk up and about their business on that fine Tuesday morning would have taken little notice of a young man tramping through town, if not for his familiar hill-folk gate and the shock of red hair escaping from under his hat; even then they were only reminded of someone once familiar. Tom walked the dirt streets until he got to the small ‘business district’ and then took to the wooden sidewalk.
Of course, Mick Percy was bench lounging in the shaded area in front of his office/residence and of course, Mick Percy recognized him.
“Hey, Red.”
“Hey, Mick” Tom replied. Tom stopped and went to stand in the shadow of Mick’s overhang, adapting a friendly posture but not sitting unless he was invited as was country custom. Mick did not ask him.
“Jest gettin’ back?”
“Yep.” Tom replied.
“How was it?”
“I’ve had better times.”
“Got plans, Red?” Mick asked.
“Live as long as I can without fuss, I guess,” Tom said.
“Sounds fair,” said the Sheriff, Pharmacist and the town’s only practicing lawyer and Tom Callas wandered on, marveling at the fact that he was here and it was now. As if by homing instinct, he found himself headed down to the place in town that had always held sway in his mind, that place in Burgess known to its townsfolk as, Four Corners.
It seemed in those days that every small town across America had an intersection that divided it into quadrants: economic, social, political and geographical; that junction was usually known as Four Corners. Burgess was no exception. In the case of Burgess, the four intersecting roadways pointed one by one to the coalfields and lumber mills, the affluent and white sections and the ‘dark side’ or negro section of town. The fourth roadway led you out and away from Burgess and all it’s functions and foibles; this was the road that Tom had taken six years ago, when he went to seek his fortune and found a world at war. He could not but stare.
Miss Emily Early was nothing, if not that. All of her life, all twenty-six years of it, she had been prompt, dependable and sturdy. She was the first one in her family to get highly educated and she was proud of her teaching skills. Since the colored children’s schoolhouse had burned last year, she had found work and lodgings at Miss Minette’s where she instructed, directed and motivated a staff of maids, waiters, porters and pot washers with kindness, intimidation and maternal sternness worthy of the Mary Sharp College from which she was a graduate. She dealt fairly with tradespersons and supervised the rotation of the plantings and pickings of the truck garden out back; it was her inclination to keep and stay busy and productive. With honor and pride she had ‘indentured’ herself to Miss Minette for two years time with the payment, by Miss Minette’s solemn word, being the rebuilding of the school. Emily Early was going to do proud by Miss Minette, if it took every bit of patience, humility and hard work she could possibly muster. Her motto was, “All we have in life is our time;” she couldn’t quite put a meaning to it, but she had read it someplace and believed that it was as good a motto as any for her life. She was known to dispense these words freely and often to slack employees, and when she did, she felt good about it. To the less than motivated staff of Miss Minette’s, it was taken to heart like water off a duck’s back.
Tom found a room in the back of the newspaper office for a dollar a week and looked for a job with no success. He bought a second-hand bicycle and got around easily. Uncomfortable with his own people, he took to riding out at night down to the negro section of town with his hat pulled close and bundled up; the nights that spring were just cool enough for the outfit and the foolishness. He would envy the ease in which evenings seemed to pass there. Here were simple folks, he thought, poorer than dirt and yet they seemed to weave through each other’s lives, as if from a common thread. “Goldurnit” Tom thought, “life around these colored folks is so damn near…” he searched for the word “predictable!
I reckon it’s white folks unpredictability that screws up theys lives like it do”. And all of a sudden he felt…enlightened.
One day he hit upon a novel thought, an idea to find work in the less reputable section of town and found himself knocking at the back door of the Royal Palms Hotel. The door was opened by a tallish, light skinned colored woman, not noticeably unattractive, in a grey, calf-length, house uniform dress; he caught the scent of gardenias and ladies notion store powder.
“Sorry, Mister, we don’t open until nightfall; Sheriff’s orders.”
“I’m looking for work,” Tom said
“Doin’ exactly what?” asked Emily with a hint of suspicion and sarcasm.
“Anything really,” Tom said. “Mostly, I can cook”
“Cook? That’s for women and coloreds, and if’n I can beg your pardon, Suh, you aint one of those.”
“All the same,” Tom said, “I do have experience.” Equally, he thought to himself, he had the scars to prove it.
Minette Crawford owned, had built and named the Royal Palms Hotel in Burgess, although there was not a palm tree within four hundred miles and no royalty to speak of within a thousand. The Royal Palms wasn’t exactly a hotel either, for one thing it was only open at night and for another, none of the male guests who frequented the Royal Palms ever did much sleeping there. Right now Minette Crawford was anything but happy. “I swear, for every pound of cook I get in here I get ten pounds of trouble.” You can assume by that statement that the trouble was of the domestic help kind, and it was; another of her key kitchen staff had come down sick, not shown up or simply walked out. She adjusted her ample frame behind her parlor desk and reminded herself that this time next year, she would be comfortably retired in Paris… Paris, France that is. She had busted her butt for enough years and was really, really ready for a long stretch of stress-free living. One more year in Georgia, she mused, if only she could keep the girls in line and the kitchen running smoothly. “Damn that nigra bitch” she muttered, taking off her thick eyeglasses and slamming down her book of French verbs.
Emily was not in the best of moods either; when Minette wasn’t happy, t’weren’t nobody happy and she had put Emily through paces that day enough to try the patience of a saint. That and that damn fool white boy had shown up again at the back door looking for work, this time with some kind of coloring on that evidently he thought could almost pass him for a negro, although Emily, for the life of her, couldn’t reason why anyone would want to do that. She was feeling just testy enough to turn to Miss Minette and say coolly: “there’s a colored boy by the back door, says he’s a cook, says his name’s Cal Thomas.”
Miss Minette closed her eyes and folded her hands across her ample girth. Emily stood quietly at the door, minutes ticked by like flies on a dung heap.
“God Almighty’s scrotum!” cursed Minette at last, “tell him to cook me something and I’ll see, but make no promises, hear?”
“Cook you what?”
“Hell, if he’s a cook, he’ll find something to cook; that’s what cooks do, isn’t it? Cook?”
Three nights later, Mick heard a commotion out behind the newspaper office and went out to find the night porter holding a pistol on a black boy; at their feet was a bicycle.
Mick addressed the porter by name.
“What’s going on, Earl?”
“I caught this boy trying to steal Tom’s contraption.”
“It’s alright, Tom sold it to him, I witnessed it” Mick said
Where’s Tom? Earl asked suspiciously.
“Moved on, and I appreciate your citizen’s concern, but you’ll have to let this one pass; the boy aint done nuthin’ wrong… at least not tonite. I’ll keep an eye out, rest assured and I’ll take it from here.” Earl wandered off slowly, shooting hard looks back at the colored.
“Red, that was a close one.”
“I thank you, Mick.”
“Well, Red, seein’s I sold you the pigment, I couldn’t have them bury no appaloosa in town. Someone would be sure to pass remarks. Besides, I knew your folks and I couldn’t very well let your insanity go un-abetted. Just keep your hair covered with that black bandana and you just might make it back to Minnie’s.”
The day of his acceptance into Miss Minette’s employ, Tom/Cal had surveyed the kitchen, starting with the larder and vegetable area before shooting his head out the back door to see what could be incorporated into his meal from the garden; the meal would make or break his employment opportunity and he wanted to show his stuff without, he mused, showing his all. “Don’t play all your cards at once,” was his philosophy. He turned to Emily and asked politely “Could you get one of them boys,” here he eyed some of the staff loafing by the back door, “to kill me a nice tender young chicken fo Miz Crawford’s lunch? And fetch me some special china?” He turned his attention to setting the wood right in the big stove and never looked to see how she was going to accomplish his request; “please” he added, with a tone of genuine respect. At that point, they both became in charge of the household.
He worked quickly and quietly and the kitchen staff made believe that they were working at something or other, but what they were doing was watching the man, a stranger to them, build a masterpiece of food, while moving with the grace and motion of a dervish dancer.
When the food was ready for service, Cal/Tom plated it nicely, stretched up from his hunched position and said, “Behold Miss Emily; that which was not, is.” Thus speaking, he retrieved a pipe from his pocket and went outside to smoke, wiping his face with the neckerchief that he had pulled from his back pocket.
A while later, Emily fetched him from the shade of an outside oak. “I don’t know what you cooked for the Missy, boy, but you got yourself a job and she wants to talk at you.”
Miss Minette was studying her French book when Cal was shown in; she looked him over myopically and took a deep breath before beginning. “Well, your cooking is passable and I’m willing to put you on, trial basis, of course. Make no mistake--the hours are long, the pay is low and the kitchen is hot. You’ll be on call most days, so you bunk in the back; Emily’ll get you settled and you start work…now.”
“I need to tell you that I have high class clientele here, coming in from as far as Memphis, going as far as Atlanta and what they want is to relax, have a good meal and some genteel company.” Here Miss Minette took another deep breath into her deep lungs and continued. This was the longest conversation, albeit one sided, that she had had in months.
“The dinners will be for two at a time mostly and then there’s breakfast in the morning. You’re off from work after breakfast Sunday morning and all day Monday; that suit you?” she asked.
“Yes’m and I thank you kindly,” said Tom/Cal.
And so began Tom Callas’ tenure at the Royal Palms Hotel as Cal Thomas, and from the beginning he was under scrutiny. Emily spent a good deal of time each day darting in and out of the kitchen, like a gadfly, for the first few weeks, until she was satisfied that the new cook not only was a good fit, but performed to her standards as well. Cal treated her with the respect of her station and was content to exceed expectations with his cooking.
And so he cooked. Roasts and chops, as tender as a mother’s love; wild greens with the taste of the woods and fence lines from where they were gathered; butterbeans and Crowder peas from the gardens; creamed potatoes, lighter than butterfly wings; cakes and ice creams and cobblers and crisps, so satisfying that it would bring water to your mouth just recalling their taste. Smells, cooking odors and gaseous miasmas emanating from that locomotive of a wood burning stove and ovens, attracted layabouts who passed time outside the hotel in idle states of olfactory contemplation and meditation.
A turn in the young couple’s relationship came on a late May morning; breakfast was over and the staff had trundled off to do whatever they did before the night’s occupation. Cal was about to step outside for a sit and a pipe and found Emily at the door, arms akimbo, facing an itinerate salesman selling notions from the back of a dilapidated wagon.
“Ahm tellin’ you, Suh, we don’t need nuthin,” Emily was saying.
“I aint talkin’ to you girl. I wants to see the ‘Lady’ of the house” said the salesman. “I’ve got some real quality stuff that I know she’ll be wantin.”
“Miss Minette’s not to be disturbed after eight a.m., period.”
“Now you listen here, nigger…” the salesman said, taking a threatening step toward Emily; looking up saw Cal standing behind her, his arms crossed and holding a cleaver the size of a scimitar.
The salesman whirled, eyes wide and gaped at some street loungers who were snickering, a good funny at the salesman’s expense.
“You saw him! You saw that buck threaten me! He wanted to kill me! You all are my witnesses! He fairly screamed as he fled back to his wagon and made a beeline towards the office of the Sheriff, Pharmacist and the town’s only practicing lawyer.
Emily turned and saw Cal leaning against the wall, tamping golden flakes of tobacco into his pipe. “What did you do?” she asked, raising that eyebrow like she was famous for.
“Who me? Nuthin.” Cal said, “I was just gonna have me a smoke ‘fore I clean up the morning mess; that white man must be seein’ spooks.”
“Now, why don’t I believe you?” Emily said sternly, with just the slightest trace of a grin.
“You look right handsome when you smile, Miss Emily; you should try it more often.”
It wasn’t a day later, at a reasonable hour, that the Sheriff came calling on Miss Minette and asked to see Emily and ‘Cal’ as well.
“Well, Minnie ” Mick started with a deep sigh, “it seems we got a complaint about some darkie threatening to kill a white man, salesman by trade, and he was meaning to press charges.” Here Mick stared at Cal with a knowing look.
“Well yourself, Mick,” said Miss Minette. “What’s that got to do with these two?”
“Third, ‘well’ and it’s a deep subject, Minnie. It seems that before he could make a formal complaint, he received a visit from someone who scared him off with the threat of bodily harm, to wit, a gelding performed with alacrity for the purpose of intimidation.”
“Get on with it, Mick, and stop using those ten cent words; do you think that these two had anything to do with that?”
“Hell, Minnie,” said Mick, “ it couldn’t have been one of them; feller said some white boy was the perpetrator, with hair like a nest of wild strawberries, his words not mine; I just wanted to know if your staff had any ideas on the subject, seemed like the alleged ruckus started on your property.“
Here both Miss Minette and Mick Percy turned on the couple that looked up honestly and shook their heads.
“No Suh and No M’am, we don’ know nuthin’ ‘bout no white man; things pretty peaceful ‘roun heah, these days, aint that right Miz Emily?” said Cal Thomas, in his best servant’s voice. Emily nodded in agreement.
“Oh get outa here, you two; anything else Mick?” said Miss Minette.
“Naw.” Mick half smiled, “I guess that’s all. Hey Cal, what’s for dinner tonight?”
Tom had planned Celery Victor, Chicken Villeroi with sauce allemande, pommes soufflé, followed by watercress salad and a light sabayon.” Cal grinned and replied, “Why sheriff, Suh, I thought it perfect weather for some chicken with creamed gravy and field peas.”
`The two young people closed the sitting room door quietly behind them, looked into each other’s eyes and exhaled a deep and holding breath.
“Cal, you sure can grovel when you have to,” said Emily.
“Part of my larger education,” said Cal.
“Didn’t Mr. Booker T. Washington write something with a title like that?”
“I believe that he did, Miss Emily”
“Let’s get back to work” she said, and as they walked together toward the back of the Royal Palms Hotel, towards the kitchen and the rest of their lives, the backs of their hands brushed one another and without a thought otherwise, there came the linking of their little fingers.
Emily smiled, “Strawberry nest, indeed”.
END
By
Philipe LaMancusa
For my grandfather, growing up in a small town in Northern Georgia, life was neither confusing, nor was it challenging; it just was. The rituals and dramas of youth were played out, as they had been for generations, with no surprises and few variations. A child’s year began each spring and culminated in the ocher skies that signaled the ending of summer’s independence. Fall and winter were restrictive, with reprieves of too few holidays and no conception of incremental time.
Universally, children are on wavelengths of their own; adults, young and old, are strange and alien to their ken and comprehension. As we all know (or eventually find out), adults, as well, have no clear understanding of themselves; awareness of the passage of time and its significance is their reward for maturity. Wisdom is a diaphanous veil of subjectivity.
And so it turns out that being grown up is what proves the most challenging and this is that kind of story, the kind of story about being grown up. This is the recounting of near a century ago, when life in the rural south was a system of orbits and auras, where grownups revolved around each other in degrees of intensity. This is the story of how one man’s attempt to understand, and make peace within himself, if nowhere else, had all the earmarks of a great catastrophe and all the prospects of a grand adventure.
Tom Callas came back a little later than other survivors of the Great Conflict overseas and without fanfare. He was a son of the sons of the pathfinders and trailblazers of the Chattanooga Southern Railroad that had come through the American south with oxen and wagon in the 1880’s, and had stayed to build a town and a life for themselves and the generations that would follow.
His arrival could have been viewed as surreptitious were it not for the lack of ceremony or grace that came as natural to him as falling off a log, or in this instance, falling out of a train. Tom took his leave of a slow moving freight train with the markings of the Tennessee Alabama Georgia Railroad, locally known as the TAG line, one fine April morning and hopped off at the Blanche water tower just south of the Pigeon Mountain tunnel. He was too excited to sit and wait another mile or minute and eager to put his feet on home soil. His time away hadn’t changed him much physically, but his heart was emaciated with longing for red clay dirt in his lungs. He landed lightly on the balls of his feet, tripped and skinned his knees, bruised his chin, chafed his hands and, by divine providence, received a lung full of red clay dust. Ask and you shall receive.
Unselfconsciously he picked himself up, stretched tall and took a deep breath; he held his nose up like a coonhound ‘ownin’ the line’ and slapped the red clay dust from his clothing with a worn and shapeless slouch hat. He had made his exit from the train on the far side of the tower, and set off through the familiar woods, like a nefarious lover slipping through the back door; the scent of poplar, black walnut, fox grapes, and wild jasmine intoxicating his senses while the tall pines that held up the sky hushed the terrain like a cathedral. This was Lookout Mountain area and he was well acquainted with the Smokey Mountain countryside. Tom Callas was a healthy twenty-two year old man and he was glad to be alive and home.
Shortly he reached a country lane where he stopped at a little store run by coloreds and splashed his face in the yard pump, drinking from his hands cool well water, splashing his face and snorting like an old steam shovel; a few local ancients in rockers and some half pints playing with a wagon hoop watched his performance. Unfazed, Tom flashed a lopsided grin and waved with his neckerchief. He hitched up his britches, shouldered his rucksack and headed toward Burgess: a postage stamp of a town nestled between the soft rolling land and the hard steel of the railroad. The day was as perfect as warm pie on a kitchen windowsill.
Being alone for more time than is normal for a person sets him ‘talkin’ at hisself’ as hill folks would say and Tom had been alone a long time and was no exception; “I used to play here when I was just a little’n and the smell’s just the same,” he said to no-one in particular. His lean frame traveled easy and quick and he passed the four miles into the town with spring in his step, in his heart and in the woods of Walker County.
“Yonder lie Blue Pond, and yar Little River by the trestle, uppin’ to Cherokee and down to Gadsden” he recited like a schoolboy, nodding his head, eyes wide and jaw set proud.
“It’s the smells that really bring you back”, Tom Callas later told Mick Percy, the town’s sheriff, pharmacist and only practicing lawyer.
Mick had sat out the Great War on the advice of his Grandpappy, who had seen action at Chickamauga in sixty-three, where over ten thousand young men a day had lost their lives in a half a week of slaughter. Mick was nobody’s fool and didn’t relish becoming fodder in a conflict that had so little concern for, what he considered, the sanctity of human life. The boys who came back from this last one had witnessed horror and terror beyond belief and a good percentage of them had missing parts of their anatomy that he was sure was not only damn inconvenient, but added nothing to their employment opportunities, which in the early 1920s was slim to nothin’ thereabouts, if you couldn’t mine the coal or harvest timber.
Mick had allowed that he was hell-bound-lazy from birth and only aspired to live up to that potential; spending as much of his time and his Daddy’s money on schooling and finally settling down to a two story clap board house more or less in the center of a town where few crimes were committed, rare litigation was heard and only an occasional headache powder or horehound cough syrup was ever needed in this terminally healthy and sane little town.
Townsfolk up and about their business on that fine Tuesday morning would have taken little notice of a young man tramping through town, if not for his familiar hill-folk gate and the shock of red hair escaping from under his hat; even then they were only reminded of someone once familiar. Tom walked the dirt streets until he got to the small ‘business district’ and then took to the wooden sidewalk.
Of course, Mick Percy was bench lounging in the shaded area in front of his office/residence and of course, Mick Percy recognized him.
“Hey, Red.”
“Hey, Mick” Tom replied. Tom stopped and went to stand in the shadow of Mick’s overhang, adapting a friendly posture but not sitting unless he was invited as was country custom. Mick did not ask him.
“Jest gettin’ back?”
“Yep.” Tom replied.
“How was it?”
“I’ve had better times.”
“Got plans, Red?” Mick asked.
“Live as long as I can without fuss, I guess,” Tom said.
“Sounds fair,” said the Sheriff, Pharmacist and the town’s only practicing lawyer and Tom Callas wandered on, marveling at the fact that he was here and it was now. As if by homing instinct, he found himself headed down to the place in town that had always held sway in his mind, that place in Burgess known to its townsfolk as, Four Corners.
It seemed in those days that every small town across America had an intersection that divided it into quadrants: economic, social, political and geographical; that junction was usually known as Four Corners. Burgess was no exception. In the case of Burgess, the four intersecting roadways pointed one by one to the coalfields and lumber mills, the affluent and white sections and the ‘dark side’ or negro section of town. The fourth roadway led you out and away from Burgess and all it’s functions and foibles; this was the road that Tom had taken six years ago, when he went to seek his fortune and found a world at war. He could not but stare.
Miss Emily Early was nothing, if not that. All of her life, all twenty-six years of it, she had been prompt, dependable and sturdy. She was the first one in her family to get highly educated and she was proud of her teaching skills. Since the colored children’s schoolhouse had burned last year, she had found work and lodgings at Miss Minette’s where she instructed, directed and motivated a staff of maids, waiters, porters and pot washers with kindness, intimidation and maternal sternness worthy of the Mary Sharp College from which she was a graduate. She dealt fairly with tradespersons and supervised the rotation of the plantings and pickings of the truck garden out back; it was her inclination to keep and stay busy and productive. With honor and pride she had ‘indentured’ herself to Miss Minette for two years time with the payment, by Miss Minette’s solemn word, being the rebuilding of the school. Emily Early was going to do proud by Miss Minette, if it took every bit of patience, humility and hard work she could possibly muster. Her motto was, “All we have in life is our time;” she couldn’t quite put a meaning to it, but she had read it someplace and believed that it was as good a motto as any for her life. She was known to dispense these words freely and often to slack employees, and when she did, she felt good about it. To the less than motivated staff of Miss Minette’s, it was taken to heart like water off a duck’s back.
Tom found a room in the back of the newspaper office for a dollar a week and looked for a job with no success. He bought a second-hand bicycle and got around easily. Uncomfortable with his own people, he took to riding out at night down to the negro section of town with his hat pulled close and bundled up; the nights that spring were just cool enough for the outfit and the foolishness. He would envy the ease in which evenings seemed to pass there. Here were simple folks, he thought, poorer than dirt and yet they seemed to weave through each other’s lives, as if from a common thread. “Goldurnit” Tom thought, “life around these colored folks is so damn near…” he searched for the word “predictable!
I reckon it’s white folks unpredictability that screws up theys lives like it do”. And all of a sudden he felt…enlightened.
One day he hit upon a novel thought, an idea to find work in the less reputable section of town and found himself knocking at the back door of the Royal Palms Hotel. The door was opened by a tallish, light skinned colored woman, not noticeably unattractive, in a grey, calf-length, house uniform dress; he caught the scent of gardenias and ladies notion store powder.
“Sorry, Mister, we don’t open until nightfall; Sheriff’s orders.”
“I’m looking for work,” Tom said
“Doin’ exactly what?” asked Emily with a hint of suspicion and sarcasm.
“Anything really,” Tom said. “Mostly, I can cook”
“Cook? That’s for women and coloreds, and if’n I can beg your pardon, Suh, you aint one of those.”
“All the same,” Tom said, “I do have experience.” Equally, he thought to himself, he had the scars to prove it.
Minette Crawford owned, had built and named the Royal Palms Hotel in Burgess, although there was not a palm tree within four hundred miles and no royalty to speak of within a thousand. The Royal Palms wasn’t exactly a hotel either, for one thing it was only open at night and for another, none of the male guests who frequented the Royal Palms ever did much sleeping there. Right now Minette Crawford was anything but happy. “I swear, for every pound of cook I get in here I get ten pounds of trouble.” You can assume by that statement that the trouble was of the domestic help kind, and it was; another of her key kitchen staff had come down sick, not shown up or simply walked out. She adjusted her ample frame behind her parlor desk and reminded herself that this time next year, she would be comfortably retired in Paris… Paris, France that is. She had busted her butt for enough years and was really, really ready for a long stretch of stress-free living. One more year in Georgia, she mused, if only she could keep the girls in line and the kitchen running smoothly. “Damn that nigra bitch” she muttered, taking off her thick eyeglasses and slamming down her book of French verbs.
Emily was not in the best of moods either; when Minette wasn’t happy, t’weren’t nobody happy and she had put Emily through paces that day enough to try the patience of a saint. That and that damn fool white boy had shown up again at the back door looking for work, this time with some kind of coloring on that evidently he thought could almost pass him for a negro, although Emily, for the life of her, couldn’t reason why anyone would want to do that. She was feeling just testy enough to turn to Miss Minette and say coolly: “there’s a colored boy by the back door, says he’s a cook, says his name’s Cal Thomas.”
Miss Minette closed her eyes and folded her hands across her ample girth. Emily stood quietly at the door, minutes ticked by like flies on a dung heap.
“God Almighty’s scrotum!” cursed Minette at last, “tell him to cook me something and I’ll see, but make no promises, hear?”
“Cook you what?”
“Hell, if he’s a cook, he’ll find something to cook; that’s what cooks do, isn’t it? Cook?”
Three nights later, Mick heard a commotion out behind the newspaper office and went out to find the night porter holding a pistol on a black boy; at their feet was a bicycle.
Mick addressed the porter by name.
“What’s going on, Earl?”
“I caught this boy trying to steal Tom’s contraption.”
“It’s alright, Tom sold it to him, I witnessed it” Mick said
Where’s Tom? Earl asked suspiciously.
“Moved on, and I appreciate your citizen’s concern, but you’ll have to let this one pass; the boy aint done nuthin’ wrong… at least not tonite. I’ll keep an eye out, rest assured and I’ll take it from here.” Earl wandered off slowly, shooting hard looks back at the colored.
“Red, that was a close one.”
“I thank you, Mick.”
“Well, Red, seein’s I sold you the pigment, I couldn’t have them bury no appaloosa in town. Someone would be sure to pass remarks. Besides, I knew your folks and I couldn’t very well let your insanity go un-abetted. Just keep your hair covered with that black bandana and you just might make it back to Minnie’s.”
The day of his acceptance into Miss Minette’s employ, Tom/Cal had surveyed the kitchen, starting with the larder and vegetable area before shooting his head out the back door to see what could be incorporated into his meal from the garden; the meal would make or break his employment opportunity and he wanted to show his stuff without, he mused, showing his all. “Don’t play all your cards at once,” was his philosophy. He turned to Emily and asked politely “Could you get one of them boys,” here he eyed some of the staff loafing by the back door, “to kill me a nice tender young chicken fo Miz Crawford’s lunch? And fetch me some special china?” He turned his attention to setting the wood right in the big stove and never looked to see how she was going to accomplish his request; “please” he added, with a tone of genuine respect. At that point, they both became in charge of the household.
He worked quickly and quietly and the kitchen staff made believe that they were working at something or other, but what they were doing was watching the man, a stranger to them, build a masterpiece of food, while moving with the grace and motion of a dervish dancer.
When the food was ready for service, Cal/Tom plated it nicely, stretched up from his hunched position and said, “Behold Miss Emily; that which was not, is.” Thus speaking, he retrieved a pipe from his pocket and went outside to smoke, wiping his face with the neckerchief that he had pulled from his back pocket.
A while later, Emily fetched him from the shade of an outside oak. “I don’t know what you cooked for the Missy, boy, but you got yourself a job and she wants to talk at you.”
Miss Minette was studying her French book when Cal was shown in; she looked him over myopically and took a deep breath before beginning. “Well, your cooking is passable and I’m willing to put you on, trial basis, of course. Make no mistake--the hours are long, the pay is low and the kitchen is hot. You’ll be on call most days, so you bunk in the back; Emily’ll get you settled and you start work…now.”
“I need to tell you that I have high class clientele here, coming in from as far as Memphis, going as far as Atlanta and what they want is to relax, have a good meal and some genteel company.” Here Miss Minette took another deep breath into her deep lungs and continued. This was the longest conversation, albeit one sided, that she had had in months.
“The dinners will be for two at a time mostly and then there’s breakfast in the morning. You’re off from work after breakfast Sunday morning and all day Monday; that suit you?” she asked.
“Yes’m and I thank you kindly,” said Tom/Cal.
And so began Tom Callas’ tenure at the Royal Palms Hotel as Cal Thomas, and from the beginning he was under scrutiny. Emily spent a good deal of time each day darting in and out of the kitchen, like a gadfly, for the first few weeks, until she was satisfied that the new cook not only was a good fit, but performed to her standards as well. Cal treated her with the respect of her station and was content to exceed expectations with his cooking.
And so he cooked. Roasts and chops, as tender as a mother’s love; wild greens with the taste of the woods and fence lines from where they were gathered; butterbeans and Crowder peas from the gardens; creamed potatoes, lighter than butterfly wings; cakes and ice creams and cobblers and crisps, so satisfying that it would bring water to your mouth just recalling their taste. Smells, cooking odors and gaseous miasmas emanating from that locomotive of a wood burning stove and ovens, attracted layabouts who passed time outside the hotel in idle states of olfactory contemplation and meditation.
A turn in the young couple’s relationship came on a late May morning; breakfast was over and the staff had trundled off to do whatever they did before the night’s occupation. Cal was about to step outside for a sit and a pipe and found Emily at the door, arms akimbo, facing an itinerate salesman selling notions from the back of a dilapidated wagon.
“Ahm tellin’ you, Suh, we don’t need nuthin,” Emily was saying.
“I aint talkin’ to you girl. I wants to see the ‘Lady’ of the house” said the salesman. “I’ve got some real quality stuff that I know she’ll be wantin.”
“Miss Minette’s not to be disturbed after eight a.m., period.”
“Now you listen here, nigger…” the salesman said, taking a threatening step toward Emily; looking up saw Cal standing behind her, his arms crossed and holding a cleaver the size of a scimitar.
The salesman whirled, eyes wide and gaped at some street loungers who were snickering, a good funny at the salesman’s expense.
“You saw him! You saw that buck threaten me! He wanted to kill me! You all are my witnesses! He fairly screamed as he fled back to his wagon and made a beeline towards the office of the Sheriff, Pharmacist and the town’s only practicing lawyer.
Emily turned and saw Cal leaning against the wall, tamping golden flakes of tobacco into his pipe. “What did you do?” she asked, raising that eyebrow like she was famous for.
“Who me? Nuthin.” Cal said, “I was just gonna have me a smoke ‘fore I clean up the morning mess; that white man must be seein’ spooks.”
“Now, why don’t I believe you?” Emily said sternly, with just the slightest trace of a grin.
“You look right handsome when you smile, Miss Emily; you should try it more often.”
It wasn’t a day later, at a reasonable hour, that the Sheriff came calling on Miss Minette and asked to see Emily and ‘Cal’ as well.
“Well, Minnie ” Mick started with a deep sigh, “it seems we got a complaint about some darkie threatening to kill a white man, salesman by trade, and he was meaning to press charges.” Here Mick stared at Cal with a knowing look.
“Well yourself, Mick,” said Miss Minette. “What’s that got to do with these two?”
“Third, ‘well’ and it’s a deep subject, Minnie. It seems that before he could make a formal complaint, he received a visit from someone who scared him off with the threat of bodily harm, to wit, a gelding performed with alacrity for the purpose of intimidation.”
“Get on with it, Mick, and stop using those ten cent words; do you think that these two had anything to do with that?”
“Hell, Minnie,” said Mick, “ it couldn’t have been one of them; feller said some white boy was the perpetrator, with hair like a nest of wild strawberries, his words not mine; I just wanted to know if your staff had any ideas on the subject, seemed like the alleged ruckus started on your property.“
Here both Miss Minette and Mick Percy turned on the couple that looked up honestly and shook their heads.
“No Suh and No M’am, we don’ know nuthin’ ‘bout no white man; things pretty peaceful ‘roun heah, these days, aint that right Miz Emily?” said Cal Thomas, in his best servant’s voice. Emily nodded in agreement.
“Oh get outa here, you two; anything else Mick?” said Miss Minette.
“Naw.” Mick half smiled, “I guess that’s all. Hey Cal, what’s for dinner tonight?”
Tom had planned Celery Victor, Chicken Villeroi with sauce allemande, pommes soufflé, followed by watercress salad and a light sabayon.” Cal grinned and replied, “Why sheriff, Suh, I thought it perfect weather for some chicken with creamed gravy and field peas.”
`The two young people closed the sitting room door quietly behind them, looked into each other’s eyes and exhaled a deep and holding breath.
“Cal, you sure can grovel when you have to,” said Emily.
“Part of my larger education,” said Cal.
“Didn’t Mr. Booker T. Washington write something with a title like that?”
“I believe that he did, Miss Emily”
“Let’s get back to work” she said, and as they walked together toward the back of the Royal Palms Hotel, towards the kitchen and the rest of their lives, the backs of their hands brushed one another and without a thought otherwise, there came the linking of their little fingers.
Emily smiled, “Strawberry nest, indeed”.
END
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Kid Stuff
Po Boy Views
By
Phil LaMancusa
Boys of Summer
Or
Once Upon a Time
By the time Big Red’s tuberculosis was in remission, I was four years old. Doctors had relieved her of one of her lungs stemming from the infection that she had inherited from her first husband (deceased: same malady), and she had recently taken up smoking Pall Mall unfiltered cigarettes. Go figure.
Red went to regularly scheduled check ups at the free hospital in our town ( Bellvue Hospital, New York City) and being that babysitting in the daytime had yet to be invented, I was taken along. As a ritual Red would meet up with other women that she had been patients with and over coffee at a nearby diner they would shoot the breeze before appointment time.
At my young age, (and long before and after) I had ants in my pants, mischief in my soul and to keep me still and quiet, Big Red did what mothers have done from time immemorial, she got me something to divert my attention, something to put in my mouth.
While she and her cohorts commiserated over coffee and toast, she had delivered to petite moi, by waitress express, an English muffin and a cup of cocoa. Like my elders, I dunked my buttered toast in my hot beverage
We lived in five rooms on the tenth floor of the Elliot Housing Projects on Twenty-seventh Street and Tenth Avenue; my father and mother and my two older sisters and me. When I was five years old my kid brother was born; later there would be a younger sister along, but that had to wait for the third husband whom we referred to simply as ‘The Greek’.
Whether it was my propensity for trouble or the world around us, life was only frenzied at best; the rest of the time it was pure madness. Had I know at the time how un-natural a chaotic life was, I might have found it a bit odd that everything that could go awry around me, in fact, did. Feuds were commonplace among the extended family members and neighbors, tempers flared, violence erupted and grudges were kept and nurtured like a sour dough bread starter. Passions were exhibited in high drama and decibels exceeding out and out armed conflict.
We were a rough lot, children as well as adults, in those days; women formed cliques and alliances, the men were just back from killing other men in a World War and had short tempers; children played games in the streets both competitive and cruel. Teenagers formed gangs and warred with eachother for territory carved out in blocks and half blocks. Rock and Roll was born and whipped youngsters into dancing frenzies. Teenage girls wore their skirts above their knees or became ‘dungaree dolls’ and encouraged the raging hormones of their boyfriends past, present and future. For recreation the adults would while away evenings in bars drinking hard alcohol and amusing themselves as best they could. Anyone that couldn’t or wouldn’t conform to accepted social mores was considered a weirdo, a communist or a homosexual.
Sophistication was not a recognized concept except in movies; my life consisted of movie stars and people like us.
Kids my age never fit anywhere, we were always too young or too old. I don’t know how it happened but there was a between age of us that never, and even to this day, ever fit in. The older kids were jaded at an early age and the younger ones were born cynics. We were naive and malleable.
Neighborhoods had identities and residential areas were for the rich; anyone that had more money than the welfare checks that served as lifeline to us was rich. Living in the projects put us in the upper echelon of the surrounding areas of the dirt poor in New York City in the forties and fifties. My elders all had first hand knowledge of the Great Depression. We all brimmed over with attitude.
The seasons for me were separated into kite, tops, marbles, beach, stickball, school and snowball. When we were bored we pitched pennies, played cards or listened to the radio. There were group games with names like Red Rover, Ring-a-levio and Rattlesnake as well as the more commonplace Tag or Hide-and Seek. We shot bottle caps into designated spaces chalked on the sidewalk, girls played jacks or jumped ropes, boys built scooters from skates and wooden soft drink cases and shot homemade carpet-guns, we'd bounce Spalding balls to songs. Skates could be adjusted with a ‘skate key’ to fit all and we collected and flipped baseball cards. We threw old shoe heels into hop-scotch squares and in the summer we ‘borrowed’ monkey wrenches and turned on fire hydrants to cool off. There was a public swimming pool on Twenty-eighth St, where I almost drowned once or twice. After Christmas we burned trees in the street. There was grass at Central Park and an ice skating rink, rumor had it, but we had to wait until we were bigger to see for ourselves.
We were ignorant of world affairs, national affairs or any other kind of affairs. We didn’t know what went on on television because only two families in the building had one. One friend confided in me in later years that she didn’t know that she was Jewish until she was ten because she thought that the world was made up of either Yankees or Dodgers.
We rode buses and subways where we put pennies in Chiclet machines, we ate Sabrette hot dogs and drank Nedick’s orange drinks or Mission sodas. We spent our pittances on knishes or chestnuts from carts or penny candies. I sold newspapers in bars on Eighth Avenue when I was twelve and turned over the money to Big Red. I hitched rides on the backs of trucks and caught belts regularly for infractions both real and imagined.
For any dinner that we had there was always multiple shops to visit. The young shopper (me) needed to know their way around the green grocer, the meat market, the fish-monger’s and the delicatessen. We all ran errands for our elders cigarettes, beers, racing forms. When you grew up you could boss the kids around and rightfully so; what did they know?
People of my age now consider that a simpler time. Phones had rotary dials, manuscripts were written on typewriters and kids were old enough to smoke when they could pay for their own cigarettes.
Big Red outlived her three husbands and around me the kids that I knew are getting older and older. Nobody remembers anything any more. But I remember; I remember a small boy sitting in a booth surrounded by women and the epifanic taste of a buttered English muffin being dunked into steaming hot cocoa.
By
Phil LaMancusa
Boys of Summer
Or
Once Upon a Time
By the time Big Red’s tuberculosis was in remission, I was four years old. Doctors had relieved her of one of her lungs stemming from the infection that she had inherited from her first husband (deceased: same malady), and she had recently taken up smoking Pall Mall unfiltered cigarettes. Go figure.
Red went to regularly scheduled check ups at the free hospital in our town ( Bellvue Hospital, New York City) and being that babysitting in the daytime had yet to be invented, I was taken along. As a ritual Red would meet up with other women that she had been patients with and over coffee at a nearby diner they would shoot the breeze before appointment time.
At my young age, (and long before and after) I had ants in my pants, mischief in my soul and to keep me still and quiet, Big Red did what mothers have done from time immemorial, she got me something to divert my attention, something to put in my mouth.
While she and her cohorts commiserated over coffee and toast, she had delivered to petite moi, by waitress express, an English muffin and a cup of cocoa. Like my elders, I dunked my buttered toast in my hot beverage
We lived in five rooms on the tenth floor of the Elliot Housing Projects on Twenty-seventh Street and Tenth Avenue; my father and mother and my two older sisters and me. When I was five years old my kid brother was born; later there would be a younger sister along, but that had to wait for the third husband whom we referred to simply as ‘The Greek’.
Whether it was my propensity for trouble or the world around us, life was only frenzied at best; the rest of the time it was pure madness. Had I know at the time how un-natural a chaotic life was, I might have found it a bit odd that everything that could go awry around me, in fact, did. Feuds were commonplace among the extended family members and neighbors, tempers flared, violence erupted and grudges were kept and nurtured like a sour dough bread starter. Passions were exhibited in high drama and decibels exceeding out and out armed conflict.
We were a rough lot, children as well as adults, in those days; women formed cliques and alliances, the men were just back from killing other men in a World War and had short tempers; children played games in the streets both competitive and cruel. Teenagers formed gangs and warred with eachother for territory carved out in blocks and half blocks. Rock and Roll was born and whipped youngsters into dancing frenzies. Teenage girls wore their skirts above their knees or became ‘dungaree dolls’ and encouraged the raging hormones of their boyfriends past, present and future. For recreation the adults would while away evenings in bars drinking hard alcohol and amusing themselves as best they could. Anyone that couldn’t or wouldn’t conform to accepted social mores was considered a weirdo, a communist or a homosexual.
Sophistication was not a recognized concept except in movies; my life consisted of movie stars and people like us.
Kids my age never fit anywhere, we were always too young or too old. I don’t know how it happened but there was a between age of us that never, and even to this day, ever fit in. The older kids were jaded at an early age and the younger ones were born cynics. We were naive and malleable.
Neighborhoods had identities and residential areas were for the rich; anyone that had more money than the welfare checks that served as lifeline to us was rich. Living in the projects put us in the upper echelon of the surrounding areas of the dirt poor in New York City in the forties and fifties. My elders all had first hand knowledge of the Great Depression. We all brimmed over with attitude.
The seasons for me were separated into kite, tops, marbles, beach, stickball, school and snowball. When we were bored we pitched pennies, played cards or listened to the radio. There were group games with names like Red Rover, Ring-a-levio and Rattlesnake as well as the more commonplace Tag or Hide-and Seek. We shot bottle caps into designated spaces chalked on the sidewalk, girls played jacks or jumped ropes, boys built scooters from skates and wooden soft drink cases and shot homemade carpet-guns, we'd bounce Spalding balls to songs. Skates could be adjusted with a ‘skate key’ to fit all and we collected and flipped baseball cards. We threw old shoe heels into hop-scotch squares and in the summer we ‘borrowed’ monkey wrenches and turned on fire hydrants to cool off. There was a public swimming pool on Twenty-eighth St, where I almost drowned once or twice. After Christmas we burned trees in the street. There was grass at Central Park and an ice skating rink, rumor had it, but we had to wait until we were bigger to see for ourselves.
We were ignorant of world affairs, national affairs or any other kind of affairs. We didn’t know what went on on television because only two families in the building had one. One friend confided in me in later years that she didn’t know that she was Jewish until she was ten because she thought that the world was made up of either Yankees or Dodgers.
We rode buses and subways where we put pennies in Chiclet machines, we ate Sabrette hot dogs and drank Nedick’s orange drinks or Mission sodas. We spent our pittances on knishes or chestnuts from carts or penny candies. I sold newspapers in bars on Eighth Avenue when I was twelve and turned over the money to Big Red. I hitched rides on the backs of trucks and caught belts regularly for infractions both real and imagined.
For any dinner that we had there was always multiple shops to visit. The young shopper (me) needed to know their way around the green grocer, the meat market, the fish-monger’s and the delicatessen. We all ran errands for our elders cigarettes, beers, racing forms. When you grew up you could boss the kids around and rightfully so; what did they know?
People of my age now consider that a simpler time. Phones had rotary dials, manuscripts were written on typewriters and kids were old enough to smoke when they could pay for their own cigarettes.
Big Red outlived her three husbands and around me the kids that I knew are getting older and older. Nobody remembers anything any more. But I remember; I remember a small boy sitting in a booth surrounded by women and the epifanic taste of a buttered English muffin being dunked into steaming hot cocoa.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
June Advice for New Orleans
Po Boy Views
By
Phil LaMancusa
June Goon
Or
Gone Fishing
Booze and pills and powders; tablets, tinctures and teas --- there aint no cure for the summertime blues. Yep, just in time for the first day of the rest of your ever-confusing life, June is busting out all over. There’s an old song whose lyrics state that “It’s June in January because I’m in love…” Don’t believe it; it’s not June until after the thirty-second of May and that’s just before the twelfth of never.
In June, spring is over, Easter bonnets are collecting dust, Jazz Fest is a recent memory and hurricane season has officially started. Congratulations, you’ve made it back to the gates of summer hell.
Why hell? Maybe because another picture perfect season where you should be enjoying easy living (fish are jumpin’, cotton is high, blah blah blah), will be celebrated, at best, by a weekend getaway or two, or possibly a cook out on a weekend and then the next thing you know, you’re setting the clocks back an hour and getting out your corduroys. BAM! Note: there’s a rumor that a certain chef has trademarked the word BAM! (OMG, Mr. Bill, I’ve said it again!).
So, you’ll be at work or taking those summer school make up classes and there will not be a way to avoid the heat even with your air conditioner set to the ‘hang meat’ setting; your mind will, at least a few times, harken back to simpler times.
Work your fingers to the bone, whaddya get? Boney fingers! I’ll bet that you probably didn’t think that growing up was going to be like this, did’ja?
Harken back, if you will, (yes, harken, harken!) and recall the time… remember when (this is another ‘remember when’ story): your hair was just a bit thicker, your body parts were a bit perkier, you were lighter on your feet and nothing hurt you for very long, except unrequited love.
You were indestructible and when summertime rolled around you were ready for some freedom and action! The beach, the park, the woods or just up the block on the corner; time was on your side. You could wander somewhere for a cold drink and, if you were like me, sit on your stoop and commiserate with your peers and peeps about how bored you were with nothing much to do and all the time in the world to do it and wasn’t it hotter this year than last and do you think it will rain and cool things off and how about a crawfish boil this weekend?
Remember when you came running up from the beach and your mama told you to hose that sand off you before you got in the car or the mystery and adventure of a couple of weeks at summer camp, stops at the Waffle House or an Ice cream sundae on a stool that you swung three-sixties on or making that hideous sucking sound at the bottom of a cool glass of drug store soda? You were a kid for Christ sakes, you wore your attitudes like badges: defiance, recklessness, invincibility, daring!
Or were you an unfortunate that only got to play jacks or sand lot ball and swing on ropes from trees and when was the last time you caught fire flies and put ‘em in a jar? What happened? And when, exactly, did you get too old for such things and start turning into your parents?
Battery operated radios, breakneck bike rides, swings and see saws, kites, jump rope and spinning around in a circle until you got real dizzy and fell down laughing.
Of course I’m not talking about you. You are about to take the summer off, aren’t you? No laundry, rent, dishes, cat litter or walking the dog for you, right? No yard work, housework or any other kind of work will make it to your agenda starting June first and going on until Labor Day; not if you can help it, right? That’s better known as ‘fat chance’ right?
Well, you’re going to thank me, or not, because I’m going to push this article out to the blog earlier than June. Of course, it won’t be published until June but you‘ll have a jump. This is what you should do starting right now: stop spending any money on anything except essentials and sock the rest away for your summer vacation. Decide to go somewhere, anywhere, just somewhere for at least a month. Buy tickets, find somewhere to stay, rent a room somewhere and take some time off. Yes, YOU!
You can do it; summer is really slow here and your boss will be glad to cut back on his workforce. Use the computer to find a space: sublet.com is a good place to start, but American or International Youth Hostels may suit you, or check out craigslist; use your and brain think creatively; the world is your oyster. Maybe do an apartment swap with someone; cool, huh?
A friend of mine and of my age laid one on me the other day about working your life long and then at a certain age getting put to pasture (pasteurized?). She told me that now that she has all the time in the world, she’s pretty much too tired to do much; succinctly she stated “retirement is wasted on the old”. Period. Can I say it any better than that? There is no future in all work and no summer vacation.
And you know, I’m not just blowing smoke here and it might be too late for me to accomplish it this year BUT (although I am taking a planned week off) I promise you that next year I’m shooting for a full month of time off; that is, a full month at least.
Just like my last few holidays, this year my tickets were paid for well in advance, credit cards were paid off and lodgings secured. We’re traveling light and keeping our spending monies adequate enough to have a real good time.
[ …Lastly, a couple of words about saving money and spending money only on essentials. It is essential to not live like a hermit for eleven months for the sake of one month of freedom. That’s sick and wrong. Just cut back, say, 10% a month and you’ll have enough to take a real break while still having your fun. All you need to do then is decide what the perfect vacation will be for you and go for it! ] Amen.
By
Phil LaMancusa
June Goon
Or
Gone Fishing
Booze and pills and powders; tablets, tinctures and teas --- there aint no cure for the summertime blues. Yep, just in time for the first day of the rest of your ever-confusing life, June is busting out all over. There’s an old song whose lyrics state that “It’s June in January because I’m in love…” Don’t believe it; it’s not June until after the thirty-second of May and that’s just before the twelfth of never.
In June, spring is over, Easter bonnets are collecting dust, Jazz Fest is a recent memory and hurricane season has officially started. Congratulations, you’ve made it back to the gates of summer hell.
Why hell? Maybe because another picture perfect season where you should be enjoying easy living (fish are jumpin’, cotton is high, blah blah blah), will be celebrated, at best, by a weekend getaway or two, or possibly a cook out on a weekend and then the next thing you know, you’re setting the clocks back an hour and getting out your corduroys. BAM! Note: there’s a rumor that a certain chef has trademarked the word BAM! (OMG, Mr. Bill, I’ve said it again!).
So, you’ll be at work or taking those summer school make up classes and there will not be a way to avoid the heat even with your air conditioner set to the ‘hang meat’ setting; your mind will, at least a few times, harken back to simpler times.
Work your fingers to the bone, whaddya get? Boney fingers! I’ll bet that you probably didn’t think that growing up was going to be like this, did’ja?
Harken back, if you will, (yes, harken, harken!) and recall the time… remember when (this is another ‘remember when’ story): your hair was just a bit thicker, your body parts were a bit perkier, you were lighter on your feet and nothing hurt you for very long, except unrequited love.
You were indestructible and when summertime rolled around you were ready for some freedom and action! The beach, the park, the woods or just up the block on the corner; time was on your side. You could wander somewhere for a cold drink and, if you were like me, sit on your stoop and commiserate with your peers and peeps about how bored you were with nothing much to do and all the time in the world to do it and wasn’t it hotter this year than last and do you think it will rain and cool things off and how about a crawfish boil this weekend?
Remember when you came running up from the beach and your mama told you to hose that sand off you before you got in the car or the mystery and adventure of a couple of weeks at summer camp, stops at the Waffle House or an Ice cream sundae on a stool that you swung three-sixties on or making that hideous sucking sound at the bottom of a cool glass of drug store soda? You were a kid for Christ sakes, you wore your attitudes like badges: defiance, recklessness, invincibility, daring!
Or were you an unfortunate that only got to play jacks or sand lot ball and swing on ropes from trees and when was the last time you caught fire flies and put ‘em in a jar? What happened? And when, exactly, did you get too old for such things and start turning into your parents?
Battery operated radios, breakneck bike rides, swings and see saws, kites, jump rope and spinning around in a circle until you got real dizzy and fell down laughing.
Of course I’m not talking about you. You are about to take the summer off, aren’t you? No laundry, rent, dishes, cat litter or walking the dog for you, right? No yard work, housework or any other kind of work will make it to your agenda starting June first and going on until Labor Day; not if you can help it, right? That’s better known as ‘fat chance’ right?
Well, you’re going to thank me, or not, because I’m going to push this article out to the blog earlier than June. Of course, it won’t be published until June but you‘ll have a jump. This is what you should do starting right now: stop spending any money on anything except essentials and sock the rest away for your summer vacation. Decide to go somewhere, anywhere, just somewhere for at least a month. Buy tickets, find somewhere to stay, rent a room somewhere and take some time off. Yes, YOU!
You can do it; summer is really slow here and your boss will be glad to cut back on his workforce. Use the computer to find a space: sublet.com is a good place to start, but American or International Youth Hostels may suit you, or check out craigslist; use your and brain think creatively; the world is your oyster. Maybe do an apartment swap with someone; cool, huh?
A friend of mine and of my age laid one on me the other day about working your life long and then at a certain age getting put to pasture (pasteurized?). She told me that now that she has all the time in the world, she’s pretty much too tired to do much; succinctly she stated “retirement is wasted on the old”. Period. Can I say it any better than that? There is no future in all work and no summer vacation.
And you know, I’m not just blowing smoke here and it might be too late for me to accomplish it this year BUT (although I am taking a planned week off) I promise you that next year I’m shooting for a full month of time off; that is, a full month at least.
Just like my last few holidays, this year my tickets were paid for well in advance, credit cards were paid off and lodgings secured. We’re traveling light and keeping our spending monies adequate enough to have a real good time.
[ …Lastly, a couple of words about saving money and spending money only on essentials. It is essential to not live like a hermit for eleven months for the sake of one month of freedom. That’s sick and wrong. Just cut back, say, 10% a month and you’ll have enough to take a real break while still having your fun. All you need to do then is decide what the perfect vacation will be for you and go for it! ] Amen.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
And More Cosmic Debris in New Orleans
Po boy views
By
Phil LaMancusa
Legends And Lies
Or
How I Won The War
Lost in a Sunday morning reverie at the shop between customers and the reading of The New York Times Book Review.
Between coffee and clientele, I fell down the rabbit hole of literature; as the articles and reviews ran into one another, a different book emerged; with WWOZ playing Bob Dylan on the speakers, Hip Hop coming from passing cars and memories of stale cigarette whiskey breath, I entered the zone chronicled below. One where we are all mad.
Now, a book review is a book review is a book review, but when you get a score of them all at once, and you try to digest them all at once you are asking for literary indigestion. With all of those reviewers trying to outdo one another for content and critique it does have my information 'in box' apporoaching overload. I'm not saying anything (and I wish my blog had spell check here) derogitory about the reviewers, they're doing one hell of a job, BUT my advice would be that unless you're going to review the reviews as I have done, just read one at a time. Remember the lesson of trying to read more than one of Flannery O'Conner's short stories at a time? If you knew then....
So here's what happens when you sit down and glut yourself on magnificent words strung together by intelligent people and your short attention span dummy gets placed in the ring with your reading comprehension genius with the electrodes of your brain synapses screaming "CLEAR!!!".
It’s a view, a Po Boy View if you will. It’s a written contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction taking several wrong directions. One of those ‘you had to be there’ and be grateful that I wasn’t reading the rotogravure. The proper nouns have been changed to project the ignorance. Cheers.
****************************************************************
There was a time when I was sent north to nursing school and when I came back I refused to marry the rich doctor and instead opened a school for orphans, my life was hard then and I was a victim of post-Soviet yearning; my family having been deported from North Ossetia and the odor of unfulfilled fantasies soon translated into acts of tenderness. At that time the angels were actually beautiful and iridescent monsters asking me why, as a white person, I wasn’t trying to pass for black. I intended to counter with “what’s so bad about ending up alone?” But instead I married someone with a widow’s peak and a weird laugh. The hero in me was long overdue and I was looking to find the symptoms of an imaginary illness called “informational ennui”; my own research and invention are impressive, although I avoid the false tension of interrupted conversation. Needless to say, lost in the grips of a passion for homemade spirits, I hobbied hard; and after three sips, my mouth was numb.
In truth, satire remains alive across most of American media; clearly it has the power to captivate, not only the in belly laughs but also the sadness attendant upon the cultural failure that it describes. Publishing it has always been risky business.
Is it true then that the study of dead librarians is more interesting than that of any other type of dead person? It is an anguished intimacy with a region’s peoples and their secret and mythic pasts. It is with the slurred clamor of a startled heartbeat, the humid conspiracy of a grandmother and the lumpy wodge of stirabout that is cereal left too long in its bowl of milk, that I speak, for am I not hither drawn?
************************************************
Intermezzo: take a breath.
************************************************
Like Zeus, I tormented my wives; having spent my life in the pursuit of the infinities and hopelessly bungling the finite. Dear life is what I could never quite get the hang of. An unprecedented combination, this ethnic complexity is aggravated by tribal divisions and by an unruly spillage of religions, and I respond with outstanding energy and courage for I know not only from whence I speak, but why. A shameful examination of my sources and my soul; whatever my protestations to the contrary, my heart remains part Turkish.
How do you write an English village novel—if you ever wanted to do such a thing?
Never use a verb other than ‘said’ to carry dialog, never use the words ‘suddenly’ or ‘all hell broke loose’ but indeed it is what happened. You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and overexposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Suddenly, all hell broke loose.
She arose at the crack of noon and assembled the fragments of her shattered dreams. She thought of going in to town to the florist. She thought of lighting a cigarette. She considered her life without the prospect of love. She imagined stepping in front of an oncoming metro. "In any case", she figured "I'd better put some clothes on".
The village shop is in the hands of a family of Pakistani origin. He wanted to lve the life of a librarian. That love can overcome cultural barriers is no new theme, but it should be presented with a great intensity and delicacy. We want this couple to find romance—and they do.
***************************************************
another breath
**************************************************
The fall of the Soviet Union, this was, the death of analog; the beginning of aggressively marketed nachos. Jack thrashes about trying to stay afloat while he luxuriates in his growing despair and resentment. He was frozen out by his quite friendly but unapologetically adulterous wife, Rita; even disrespected by his penis-obsessed preschooler. To make matters worse, he has an illegitimate son, Ron—a viciously angry Iraq war amputee. What matters most is a world free of flimflam, hype or irrational exuberance, what matters is putting one foot in front of the other and not stopping. And here’s something odd: the family that the Godfrey’s bought the house from are descended from a soldier ennobled by Mary, Queen of Scots, after she had “the upstart and treasonous Elizabeth Tudor” beheaded.
In fact it provoked a manhunt “that exceeded in intensity and scope any other manhunt in the chronicles of counterfeiting” precisely because his ineptitude was so bewildering. What explains the current appeal of mildly depressive small town sleuths running around in the snow?
So we settled in an empty office and she took dictation for a memoir about his stint in the early thirties as editor of The Bangkok Daily Mail. Mostly, though, they just sat and smoked, and she listened to him talk. He had an affection for lowlifes and crooks. He loved the sounds of ice cubes in a rocks glass, the stale smell of a pool hall at dawn and the curve in the small of a dame’s back.
****************************************************
Had enough? Nonsense you say? No pearls of wisdom or redeeming quality?
Question: have you considered our lives (your life) as a book(s) and why should you? Answer: a matter of introspect and retrospect, a view both objective and subjective; it's a good exercise. Try putting it on paper. Shouldn't our lives make more sense than what I just wrote using the subject of book reviews as a springboard? Do we, or do we not, every day, see the nonsense, satire and absurdity of our reality as a tome hiding in plain sight, viewed through a glass darkly; the mysteries of our existences a novel of breaking glass and crying women? We shouldn't, we deserve better. No, it should not and better not be. After all, are we not all writing the stories of our lives ourselves? Have we no control of the consequences of our circumstances? Each of us deserves to be able to write a cheery book about our lives; and it (the book and our lives) deserves all available prizes. And, as for happy endings, we deserve that too from the beginning to the end and at all points in between. Here's wishing you a constant happy endearing endering, my Dear, may the farce be with you.
By
Phil LaMancusa
Legends And Lies
Or
How I Won The War
Lost in a Sunday morning reverie at the shop between customers and the reading of The New York Times Book Review.
Between coffee and clientele, I fell down the rabbit hole of literature; as the articles and reviews ran into one another, a different book emerged; with WWOZ playing Bob Dylan on the speakers, Hip Hop coming from passing cars and memories of stale cigarette whiskey breath, I entered the zone chronicled below. One where we are all mad.
Now, a book review is a book review is a book review, but when you get a score of them all at once, and you try to digest them all at once you are asking for literary indigestion. With all of those reviewers trying to outdo one another for content and critique it does have my information 'in box' apporoaching overload. I'm not saying anything (and I wish my blog had spell check here) derogitory about the reviewers, they're doing one hell of a job, BUT my advice would be that unless you're going to review the reviews as I have done, just read one at a time. Remember the lesson of trying to read more than one of Flannery O'Conner's short stories at a time? If you knew then....
So here's what happens when you sit down and glut yourself on magnificent words strung together by intelligent people and your short attention span dummy gets placed in the ring with your reading comprehension genius with the electrodes of your brain synapses screaming "CLEAR!!!".
It’s a view, a Po Boy View if you will. It’s a written contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction taking several wrong directions. One of those ‘you had to be there’ and be grateful that I wasn’t reading the rotogravure. The proper nouns have been changed to project the ignorance. Cheers.
****************************************************************
There was a time when I was sent north to nursing school and when I came back I refused to marry the rich doctor and instead opened a school for orphans, my life was hard then and I was a victim of post-Soviet yearning; my family having been deported from North Ossetia and the odor of unfulfilled fantasies soon translated into acts of tenderness. At that time the angels were actually beautiful and iridescent monsters asking me why, as a white person, I wasn’t trying to pass for black. I intended to counter with “what’s so bad about ending up alone?” But instead I married someone with a widow’s peak and a weird laugh. The hero in me was long overdue and I was looking to find the symptoms of an imaginary illness called “informational ennui”; my own research and invention are impressive, although I avoid the false tension of interrupted conversation. Needless to say, lost in the grips of a passion for homemade spirits, I hobbied hard; and after three sips, my mouth was numb.
In truth, satire remains alive across most of American media; clearly it has the power to captivate, not only the in belly laughs but also the sadness attendant upon the cultural failure that it describes. Publishing it has always been risky business.
Is it true then that the study of dead librarians is more interesting than that of any other type of dead person? It is an anguished intimacy with a region’s peoples and their secret and mythic pasts. It is with the slurred clamor of a startled heartbeat, the humid conspiracy of a grandmother and the lumpy wodge of stirabout that is cereal left too long in its bowl of milk, that I speak, for am I not hither drawn?
************************************************
Intermezzo: take a breath.
************************************************
Like Zeus, I tormented my wives; having spent my life in the pursuit of the infinities and hopelessly bungling the finite. Dear life is what I could never quite get the hang of. An unprecedented combination, this ethnic complexity is aggravated by tribal divisions and by an unruly spillage of religions, and I respond with outstanding energy and courage for I know not only from whence I speak, but why. A shameful examination of my sources and my soul; whatever my protestations to the contrary, my heart remains part Turkish.
How do you write an English village novel—if you ever wanted to do such a thing?
Never use a verb other than ‘said’ to carry dialog, never use the words ‘suddenly’ or ‘all hell broke loose’ but indeed it is what happened. You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and overexposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Suddenly, all hell broke loose.
She arose at the crack of noon and assembled the fragments of her shattered dreams. She thought of going in to town to the florist. She thought of lighting a cigarette. She considered her life without the prospect of love. She imagined stepping in front of an oncoming metro. "In any case", she figured "I'd better put some clothes on".
The village shop is in the hands of a family of Pakistani origin. He wanted to lve the life of a librarian. That love can overcome cultural barriers is no new theme, but it should be presented with a great intensity and delicacy. We want this couple to find romance—and they do.
***************************************************
another breath
**************************************************
The fall of the Soviet Union, this was, the death of analog; the beginning of aggressively marketed nachos. Jack thrashes about trying to stay afloat while he luxuriates in his growing despair and resentment. He was frozen out by his quite friendly but unapologetically adulterous wife, Rita; even disrespected by his penis-obsessed preschooler. To make matters worse, he has an illegitimate son, Ron—a viciously angry Iraq war amputee. What matters most is a world free of flimflam, hype or irrational exuberance, what matters is putting one foot in front of the other and not stopping. And here’s something odd: the family that the Godfrey’s bought the house from are descended from a soldier ennobled by Mary, Queen of Scots, after she had “the upstart and treasonous Elizabeth Tudor” beheaded.
In fact it provoked a manhunt “that exceeded in intensity and scope any other manhunt in the chronicles of counterfeiting” precisely because his ineptitude was so bewildering. What explains the current appeal of mildly depressive small town sleuths running around in the snow?
So we settled in an empty office and she took dictation for a memoir about his stint in the early thirties as editor of The Bangkok Daily Mail. Mostly, though, they just sat and smoked, and she listened to him talk. He had an affection for lowlifes and crooks. He loved the sounds of ice cubes in a rocks glass, the stale smell of a pool hall at dawn and the curve in the small of a dame’s back.
****************************************************
Had enough? Nonsense you say? No pearls of wisdom or redeeming quality?
Question: have you considered our lives (your life) as a book(s) and why should you? Answer: a matter of introspect and retrospect, a view both objective and subjective; it's a good exercise. Try putting it on paper. Shouldn't our lives make more sense than what I just wrote using the subject of book reviews as a springboard? Do we, or do we not, every day, see the nonsense, satire and absurdity of our reality as a tome hiding in plain sight, viewed through a glass darkly; the mysteries of our existences a novel of breaking glass and crying women? We shouldn't, we deserve better. No, it should not and better not be. After all, are we not all writing the stories of our lives ourselves? Have we no control of the consequences of our circumstances? Each of us deserves to be able to write a cheery book about our lives; and it (the book and our lives) deserves all available prizes. And, as for happy endings, we deserve that too from the beginning to the end and at all points in between. Here's wishing you a constant happy endearing endering, my Dear, may the farce be with you.
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