Martha, the Last of the
Passenger Pigeons
A lone passenger pigeon, stuffed, returned this (2010)
year to Waukesha, Wisconsin, a town where I went to high school oh, so many years
ago. Was she an analog for the buffalo hunters with their stacks of skulls set to
bleach on the prairies? Also―a brief from Aldo Leopold. Let’s see how they come
together along with―John Herald, angular and introspective, a singer and guitarist,
and Martha, another wild bird, likewise gone extinct.
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Harry and the
Mudman
Harry had studied the Mudman's early recordings, slowing them
down to pick up the difficult passages. At the bottom of the grooves, struggling
against a tidal surf of record noise, lay genius. These recordings, the Mudman's
grip on history, had been made at an Alabama prison camp in the 20's. The Mudman
had killed someone at a card game. With an axe handle.
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The diary of an
Ohio farm wife
Winter smelled like wet wool, oatmeal and coal oil, and
lungs gurgled with persistent coughs. When it snowed, the mud of the dooryard was
dotted with great, plashy wet flakes, piling into drifts in a day; the brown mud
seeped up as the coal smoke seeped down. Wind-blown snow exposed striations of white,
black, and brown eddying in the gritty film that covered all outdoors. Soot clotted
on the snow, the walls, the curtains, and in the lungs. Two kitchens and four stoves—the
soot and ash filtered into every room of the house.
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McMuckle makes a Minyan
Ivor McMuckle, a song plugger, has been summoned to Hyperion II, planet of the Last
Diaspora, where all faiths mingle in a shared state of abject poverty. He sells
off shares in excess of 120 percent of a bad, really bad, pop tune. His client,
Maven Lipchutz, a lounge pianist with a dream, is not beyond a little interspecies
hanky-panky: the Maven's light o' love, Heidi, is a singing fish. Final judgment
devolves upon a Higher Power, said Higher Power being among the company of the conned.
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Scrotum, a wrinkled old
retainer
It was the usual workday. I arrived at the radio station, plumped
the book bag with my lunch, Maalox and humorous magazines on the control room table
next to the Associated Press computer station, and headed to the coffee service.
My name is Robert Hunter, professionally Rob Hunter, except for a year in the late
1960’s when I was Tom Mitchell, a house name. WSAR in Fall River, Massachusetts
had bought a jingle package and, before it arrived, Tom departed. I became Tom.
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That Old-tyme Religion
The goddess got a far-away look in her eyes. She searched the middle distance, a
shepherdess seeking lost innocence. Wrist to brow she felt for a fainting couch
with her spare hand. “All events that will or would ever occur in each and every
universe or imaginable universe from the innards of the dust mote to the googolplex
of stars have already happened. All and at once at the moment of creation.” She
leaned backwards, then fell down. “Shit! There should have been a velvet couch.”
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Basil Rathbone and
Robert Sheckley
The elegant gentleman in the announce booth finished
his reading, stretched, and collated his discarded pages back into an impeccable
order. The year was 1966 and they still blew up the Bullwinkle and Underdog balloons
for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade two cross-town blocks away along Central Park
West. John Lennon yet flourished and Strawberry Fields was still called The Sheep
Meadow. The actor looked up, as if for approval. “I wonder what the hell that was
all about,” Basil Rathbone said. Well into his seventies his voice had the ring
of authority. He kept supple practicing fencing moves in Central Park; it was just
that cold reads were not his cup of chamomile. The program being recorded was “Beyond
the Green Door,” a radio series written―mostly―by Robert Sheckley.
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Aldo and the Bristleheads
If I could choose, I guess H. V. Kaltenborn would be my bristlehead of choice. I
was a kid in the 1940s and 50s, and who you hear first defines the rest as Johnny-come-latelies.
Kaltenborn had those rare commodities Rush and Glenn lack: courtesy, brains and
grace. I can’t help notice that through the years, the quality of bullshit has declined.
There was no Fox News in 1955, television hardly at all. However, we enjoyed the
blessings of Joe McCarthy, Bishop Sheen and HUAC all the same.
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Why William Powell?
Libby Pease is my favorite person out of all of Willipaq County—an evocation
of the usually broke and always hopeful denizens of, perhaps, just perhaps, Washington
County, Maine—living free and wild in their very own Yoknapatawpha. The Libby
tales became a triptych and she picked up a spiritual counselor, a 400-year-old
medicine man. Ah, but Libby's interlocutors, even as Doctor Who's companions, had
to start somewhere. William Powell was the first choice. The Carnegie Repertory
Cinema—three floors down under Carnegie Hall where the subway (57th St. Station,
a loop on the Q line) passed by on the far side of plush-covered walls—ran all the
Thin Man movies back-to-back one weekend a month. The big sliver faces and the discrete
drapery of Myrna Loy’s shimmering dressing gowns got me hooked on the Thin Man and
Myrna Loy. read more
>>
The Death of James A.
Garfield
You probably picked up this tale expecting one of those conspiracy
theory tell-alls. I mean from the title and all. Nope. Postwar USA, and I had my
first set of new tires in four years... It was 1948 and mysterious things were still
reported in the Southern Highlands. However, in real life, hauntings, hexings and
supernatural doings were as strange to the post-bellum South as pit barbecue, Winn-Dixie,
Dr. Pepper and Royal Crown Cola were familiar. Well, there was this one item about
an exploding deer that got buried in the back pages.
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James A. Garfield
backstories
Raw pork—schlach—is an old Milwaukee delicacy. Or was until
after the All-Star Game when half the parishioners of St. Stanislaus got wiped out
by toxoplasmosis from contaminated pork. That was July 8th of last year, 1947, a
Tuesday to allow travel time over an extended 4th of July weekend. Joe DiMaggio
of the Yankees was in the outfield along with Ted Williams from the Boston Red Sox.
One hell of a game—Ed and I listened to it on the radio at the Antlers bar—the American
League took it 2-1. The St. Stanislaus church picnics were always held during the
All-Star break. Six hundred died, but Joe DiMaggio escaped the stain of blame and
the buffet caught the rap.
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Judge Crater's
First Miracle
“‘Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and
cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not.’ James 4:2,”
said the man in the doorway. “The Bible is a almanac of failed good intentions,
Sister. You can help me; I am asking. Here, accept this as a further token of my
sincerity.” The visitor produced a large fruit basket, beribboned and covered with
cellophane, of the kind often left by a well-wisher in a stateroom of a great ocean
liner. “Your chastity is safe with me, I am a Democrat.”
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Judge Crater's
Second Miracle
“A gray place with vapors. Rather like a hot springs health
spa. But without the health. No whole grains and celery tonic. No colonics, upper
or otherwise, I fear—high or low. Not much fun, in short. But I am certainly revivified.
I don't feel a day over forty-one. That is the age at which I died. I was garroted
and stabbed by a pair of burly policemen and buried in Brooklyn. Coney Island, under
the boardwalk.”
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Necrophilia Jones
(Judge Crater #3)
“She lured me to my death. Dear Necrophilia Jones—she
was such a cozy little piece. I was smitten; what could I do but follow the call
of the glands. I allowed myself to be murdered. Anything else would have been unfeeling,
insensible. That's French. Nekki was a dancer in the Roxy chorus, a showgirl.
Breasts like a renaissance whore, tight blonde curls. What we called a flapper in
those days. A veritable heart-stopper, sister. She had that indefinable something,
a je ne sais quoi.”
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The Nooz at Newn
A disc jockey’s life is a permanent disconnect—imagining an audience while staring
ahead and counting the holes in the same Celotex wall tile over and over. The resulting
numbers are always the same. Every time. Pete Myers was a friend some forty years
ago. We were flat, dreaming of a world where we could be round.
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Play it (again), Sam
That Casablanca might be available for consultation as a spirit-channel from the
Great Hereafter, I did not guess. But, wait! It had in its day been intended as
an ad hoc guide to the dilemma of an isolationist America. Lucky Lindy loved the
Fuehrer. Errol Flynn loved Hitler by most accounts. But then, no one took Flynn
overly seriously―his premier accomplishment was playing "You are My Sunshine" on
a piano with his penis, a party stunt.
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3 Days with Claudette
Colbert
The single rose in the bud vase made everything else look incredibly
tacky. John Malkovich, Meryl Streep, Keir Dullea and Kelly McGillis hadn't rated
this treatment. They had put up with the accumulated crud just like we did. This
time we were getting a visit from a real star, from when there were stars. Claudette
Colbert. read more
>>
Miguel Santandrea
My old neighborhood, St. Agnes parish, was Crazy Joey Gallo's turf. You cleaned
up after. One piece of litter—a candy wrapper, a cigar butt, and he'd have your
guts for garters. Like kiss your ass goodbye. His mother lived over on Wyckoff Street.
Not quite Brooklyn Heights, but close. The real estate speculators who hoped to
cash in on the “Brooklyn Renaissance” dubbed it Boerum Hill.
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Umberto Eco and
the pygmy shrew
I had brought along a laptop and a book, Baudolino, by
Umberto Eco. I trust that very little of the Eco-esque penetrated into Rice Barge
Coolie. If it has—well, we learn from the masters. I once rented a video of The
Name of the Rose and thoroughly relished the film version: Sean Connery as a medieval
monk, William of Baskerville. Then I had to read the book. I held on to a yard sale
paperback for eight years, and just finished it for the second read. Starting takes
time. And I would some years later take a crack at Dan Brown's DaVinci Code; pale
stuff when held up against Eco’s.
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The fastest hound dog
in the State of Maine
I came from Wytopitlock, where I was living at
the time, down to Mattawamkeag on the Bangor & Aroostook Railroad one day to buy
myself a hound dog. Up to Wytopitlock we was having a run on long-legged rabbits
then, I didn't want none of these short-legged dogs that can run all day and not
move any. I wanted one with rangy pins that could get close enough to a Wytopitlock
rabbit so he'd exert himself and know he was chased. The short-legged dogs we'd
been using was no good at all, and I says to myself, “The Hell with that!”
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The Manticore's Tale
“Level with me. You believe I am a figment when I am only a story that got better
with the telling. The telephone syndrome—travelers from the Land of Cathay chatted
with African merchants who talk to a Turk, the Ottoman natters to a Tatar mujhik
who spills the beans to an itinerant Italian who in turn goes home with a marvelous
tale of what he expected to see in the first place and tells the homefolk what they
already knew. I am an article of faith. This is how legends begin. I might have
begun life as a simple giraffe. But I am here with you. Now. Deal with it.”
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The Milwaukee Road
Ed Crowley was a retired brakeman from the Soo Line. Not really old as railroaders
go, he was in his mid-fifties and waiting out the years to his pension working at
an inside job—night telegraph operator. Ed had done some long hauling on the CB&Q—the
Chicago, Burlington and Quincy, on a transfer crew riding the Northwestern tracks
to Ashland, Wisconsin. Ed was crippled with arthritis that twisted his hands and
wrists. Thirty years in the yards in all weather had done for Ed as a brakeman.
The only parts of his hands that he was still able to articulate were the index
and middle fingers before the first joint. With his wrists turned in he would yank
at the patch cords and make their weights rattle in the falls, looking like a praying
mantis going at its dinner.
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Miss Sweet Potato
Pie
The dog, a border collie, was waiting by the parking meter. She was
staring at a spot in the sky, somewhere above the heat exchanger on the roof of
the Pick N Pay supermarket. She threw back her head for a lonesome shivering howl,
a primal coyote crying down blood from the moon.
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The year we invented
rock n roll
Charles Scott King and I leaned on the bar, lost in the wonder
of frozen lemonade dished out by Red Margolis, bartender at Martin's Bar, 59th and
Broadway, as a substitute for whiskey sour and collins mixers. At work, across the
street, Central Park was spotted with fall reds and slick, sickly silver and gray:
native maples and sycamores. The year was 1962 and we all worked at the same radio
station. If you accepted as an operating premise that anything west of the Hudson
was camping out, the RealLemon Red Margolis concocted his whiskey sours with had
made it in stages from the Caribbean to Jersey and thence Manhattan by a kind of
reverse osmosis. read
more >>
A Deuce of Moose
Nunzio Calabrese did not think of himself as a bad person. He loved his mother,
most black people because the insides of their mouths were so pink, and his pigeons.
He flew his pigeons from a rooftop. He felt joy at their tight formations and gratitude
when they returned to his lure, a scrap of red bandana flown at the end of a bamboo
pole. Where a lesser man would unburden his sins at Confession or between the polished
pillars of a willing woman's thighs, Nunzio partook of the freedom of the skies.
He was a born killer. read
more >>
The Illuminati owe
Carl .57
The day the Illuminati—secret, sinister—reentered my life Harold
Junior pulled up in his rusted-out Lincoln Continental as I was checking my mail.
Our mailboxes, down by the road, do double duty as street addresses too, here in
rural Maine. Harold's huge domestic battle cruiser had been bought cheap and came
with a titanic appetite for gas and oil. But it never had to go far, only start.
And it plowed through drifts that would stall a Jeep.
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Fred Splendid, boy
announcer
Fred Splendid was developed in the 1980s, a backward-glancing
homage to the 1960s Chicken Man (Dick Orkin) radio comedy series (He’s everywhere!
He’s everywhere!). The commercials were the best part.
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The tales of onetinleg.com
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St. Velcro™ and the swan
(my heart belongs to Dada)
St. Velcro™ had a nagging feeling he
had forgotten something. He squinted myopically. No, he had always stood here on
a precipice at the banks of a wide muddy river.
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Lucy and the Mouse
“Jesse Ventura,” said Lucian Hobart, known as Lucy. A cat that walked at his feet
looked up questioningly. “I recall a picture of him in his wrestling getup. With
a nice blond with her boobs out.” The cat was a Burmese shorthair as far as anyone
could tell. She stalked small things in tall grass, ate dry kibble and was a vegetarian
by choice. Sixteen mousetraps hung by strings from the handlebars of Lucy’s walker.
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Zeitgeist is the Right
Geist
The baby was named Oversight. Sophie Rae Shufflebeam picked her
up from a dumpster behind the Pick ‘N’ Pay. She had been shopping for olives. Presumably
some young mother-to-be had evacuated her bundle of joy and was not thrilled by
the prospect of returning home to inquisitive parents. The baby, Oversight, had
been saved for Sophie Rae’s arrival by the dumpster’s missed pickup that week.
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Hooray for the Pulps
There once was a golden age when I was barely old enough to slip in under the tent
flap and into the show. We now call it the golden age of the pulps. The pages were
raggedy-edged and they were expensive. Well, twenty-five cents mostly, but they
were thick. Tales of wonderment and awe, a life of adventure and romance down at
the corner drug store. Good stuff.
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Loose Lips Sink Ships
As a five-year-old in World War II, I never realized that we were doing without.
This was normality—life’s necessities were rationed. We did a lot of things for
the war effort. In retrospect, I realize the civilian activities were aimed more
at building home front morale than defeating the Axis powers. We saved string in
big balls. We saved tinfoil in big balls. We saved bacon fat in big cans. We planted
a Victory Garden to supply the family with fresh vegetables so the troops could
enjoy canned and dehydrated vegetables. Yummy! There were scrap drives, bond drives,
us kids bought Postal Savings Stamps at school. When our little books were filled,
we got a U.S. bond.
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Tom Ashley and the Coo-coo
Bird
Tom Ashley’s tremulous high tenor sang through the scratches on
the Library of Congress archive disc—“The cuckoo is a pretty bird she sings as she
flies / She brings us glad tidings, and she tells us no lies…” Tom was recorded
in 1928, a young man with a banjo.
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How the Orange Virgin
came to be
“wotthehell toujours gai I always say, there's life in the
old girl yet.” ―Don Marquis’ Archy and Mehitabel
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Duct tape references
in the Bible
Maine is big on signs. As I have written elsewhere in this
blog, I live on a fjord, a fresh water river that connects with the sea—the Bay
of Fundy, eventually the Atlantic Ocean—and turns brackish twice a day as the tidal
surge backs things up just like the tenement plumbing that serenaded us in Brooklyn’s
Gowanus Canal basin: “Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal... As spirits
they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time,” a saying attributed
to C.S. Lewis of Narnia fame.
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Sylvester and Beany
The year the monarch butterflies didn't return to Maine, I went home to Brooklyn.
“Something in the milkweed,” they said. With a cold winter and no milkweed to browse
to keep up their strength on the long flight from Mexico, the butterflies weakened
and froze, dying in their millions far from the thoughtless haciendas. Almond eyes
pouchy with sleep denied by fever dreams of avarice and the night sweats of free
trade, the latafundistas and tin shanty dwellers alike wondered at the deaths, but
with never a thought for Maine or for me. A preoccupation with the exigencies of
day-to-day survival will do that. Greed will do that. Starvation clears the mind.
I was busy, too, and forgot the butterflies. They were, after all, dead.
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