No Surrender

Haiku for a Harvard Square Street Performer*

Older hippy guy,
With an Uncle Sam Puppet,
Baffling passersby.


*He has been working Brattle Street for years. He is no ventriloquist, and he just moves the marionette's jaw while he tells political jokes, mostly about Reagan. I'm not sure if he has lost track of time or if he considers the Gipper stuff to be his best material. I admire his perseverance and always give him a buck.

The Thing That Ate Cambridge

When I first lived alone, in a 1.5 room studio near Harvard Square, I ate mostly takeout and pasta. (The kitchenette probably still reeks of garlic from all the spaghetti aglio e olio I whipped up.) I gained a lot of weight, then went on a crash diet, a regimen so intense that I had to test my ketone levels, and I lost 60 lbs. in three months. After these 90 days of grilled chicken or fish, turkey on whole wheat, and steamed vegetables, all in tiny portions, I was supposed to move on to a "maintenance phase." Brothers and sisters, I never made it.

One night I had a craving for Maple Leaf hot dogs, the kind with natural casings, and I went to a place that served them, the Tastee on J.F.K. Street. It was late, I was the only customer, and when I ordered two hot dogs, the counterman, perhaps a closet commie who wanted to stick it to his boss, gave me a bonus.

"These are awful small," he said, double-loading two buns. "Take four." If I was a processed meat addict, this guy was my co-dependent.

After that I really fell off the wagon. I had Sicilian pizza at Pinocchio's and burgers at Mr. Bartley's. I went for late night walks to the Hong Kong, and because there was one particular appetizer I always got, the clerk at the cash register dubbed me, "Crab Rangoon." I had lamb vindaloo at the Gandhi in Central Square, and the hot curry furnished me with a rationale to insulate my gut with mango shakes and puffy bread. My dining companion K and I found a Burmese place called the Mandalay on First Street. I wolfed down the shepherd's pie lunch at the Plough & Stars. I visited Charlie's Kitchen more often than I visited my parents. I would hit bottom on Saturdays, when I would get a luncheon special at the House of Peking on the 1100 block of Mass. Ave. and chase it with some ice cream from Baskin Robbins on Bow Street. The combination of starches would cause drowsiness, and I would just barely make it home before my knees would buckle and I would crash on my futon in a glorious Glucose Nod.

Some of those eateries are defunct, but I'm more of a gourmand than ever. I live in beautiful South Medford, a block away from my mother's place on Winter Hill in Somerville. Ma is 80 and can fry cutlets in her sleep, so visiting her condo is a near occasion of sin (gluttony). Is there a league for Over 50 sumo wrestling? And if so, do the wrestlers get free tempura?

"Hogan's Heroes" it Wasn't

My late father was in the U.S. Army's 86th Infantry division during World War II. The division entered Germany in March of 1945 and fought in various engagements, advancing all the way to Mattsee, Austria, where they captured the crown jewels of Hungary. But when my father spoke of the war, he stressed not the glory of victory but the grotesque nature of armed conflict.

He crossed the Rhine not long after his 19th birthday and saw that the river was full of graying, bloated corpses. His platoon took machine gun fire from emplacements manned by 12-year-old boys and elderly men. There was a horrible "friendly fire" death in his company when a G.I. returning from a night patrol thought it would be fun to hide in some bushes and practice his high school German with the company sentry. A mean redneck in his platoon would throw packets of chewing tobacco to children who asked for chocolate. German prisoners would weep during processing and beg that their watches and wedding rings not be stolen.

News traveled slowly in the chaos of battle, and one day in April of 1945, a Catholic chaplain informed my father that his brother Jimmy, a sergeant in the 4th Armored Division, had been killed in February near Bastogne, Belgium. My father became both despondent and angry, and he destroyed the one souvenir he had planned to bring home, a little doll dressed like a Wehrmacht soldier.

"I wanted to hate the Germans after that," he once told me. "But after I saw what the war did to German kids, I just thought that it was all one sad deal. Little German kids, the only way they knew to play was to march around in formation. You didn't see little girls playing with dolls, or boys playing ball. It was all military."

The division left Europe in June of 1945 and went to the Philippines later in the year, arriving just as the Japanese surrendered. My father said that he and his comrades received combat pay because there were nationalist guerrillas in the hills around their base, but that, "They never fired a shot, so we just ate bananas and went bowling." He made it sound like an army version of "McHale's Navy," which is the sort of mercy I wish for every person who is caught in the absurdity of war.

A Good Name for a Punk Band?

When I was 14, I used to tweak my elders by bringing home an alternative weekly called the Real Paper. One Sunday, my maternal aunt Helen, a dear woman with a voice like Edith Bunker's, picked up the latest issue of the Real Paper and staring leafing through it.

"I DIG ENEMA THRILLS!" she suddenly screeched, quoting the heading for a personal ad. She was evidently shocked. Mission accomplished. . . .

Soigné

Jerry Lewis, Call Your Sommelier

I once went to a house party on Winter Hill, Somerville where there were some actual French people in attendance. I had met the French crew a couple of months before, and they had been enthused about visiting the U.S., but on this evening they were full of complaints, about the Boston "Metro" not running late enough, about a lack of decent bread in the area, et cetera.

They had bought a mixed case of wine for the party and were holding an impromptu tasting. At one point I poured some white wine into a glass that I had just drunk red wine from. I did it on purpose to hear the oenophiles shriek, which they did. A nice French woman showed me that I should use a fresh glass, and she was as patient with me as a loving mother conducting potty training.

Later, a young man named Michele was swirling some sauternes around in his mouth and managed to spit some on his shirt. "This sometimes happens," he said, a tad embarrassed.

"That's okay," I answered. "We do that with beer at baseball games." I'm not sure if he knew I was kidding.

Synchronicity

When I was a kid, a friend of mine had a bat fly into his house while he was watching a Christopher Lee vampire movie on tv. His brother, wielding a broom and remembering the common wisdom about bats getting into people's hair, donned a football helmet and wrangled the thing outside.

Years later, I was watching, "Play It Again, Sam" for about the fifth time at the Harvard Square Theater. The film reached a scene in which Woody Allen's character, looking for love in a San Francisco art museum, attempts to chat up a beautiful woman who proceeds to give Woody an existentialist, depressing earful. (Woody: "What are you doing Saturday night?" Woman: "Committing suicide." Woody: "How about Friday?") During this particular viewing, just as Woody asked the woman what a certain Jackson Pollock painting meant to her, and she replied, "It restates the negativeness of the universe," the image on the screen dissolved. The film had melted in the projector!

Members of the audience were yelling for refunds, but I just laughed and left. I'm planning to see "Strait-Jacket" at the Brattle later this week, and I'm hoping for an appropriate sideshow.

Bob White's Birthday

You know for years, I was convinced you had to be dead. You and many of your fellow residents of Queensbury street were not living lifestyles that were conducive to longevity. Then when we reconnected so you could be interviewed for the film I was rather impressed. You seemed to have made it through the gauntlet.
I wonder now what you would think if you could hear all the discussion, war stories and respect people had for you. You were not my favorite person Bob. You had an unpleasant side to you that I wanted to avoid at all costs. But you were an Icon. An Original. And One Of Us. I am amazed at how sad and empty i felt when I heard you were gone.
I hope you have finally found peace. We are all thinking about you, on your birthday.
And yes, I know you would hate what i have written cuz it's stupid, sappy and sentimental. Fuck You Bob!
Photo by Eric Systrom

Speaking of Reptiles. . . .

I have an idea for an adult film in which Flo from Progressive Insurance romps with a man-sized Geico gecko. The ancillary expenses would merely entail a simple set, a lizard costume, and some red lipstick. Having the gecko remain small would be more perverse, but this would require special effects and would be blatantly derivative of the story, "Six Inches" by Charles Bukowski.

I am jesting as I write, and yet I blush. Blessed Solanus Casey, patron of weird old bachelors, pray for me.

Cold Blooded

According to today's Boston Herald, a 4-foot long female alligator was captured yesterday along the banks of the Charles River, on the Dedham-Needham line west of Boston. There have been 22 alligators found wandering New England since the beginning of the year, and it is believed that the creatures were imported into the Northeast illegally and abandoned by their owners.

I know that there are folks who like exotic pets, but I'm still trying to fathom the ferret craze. ("Would you like to come up to my place and see my weasel?") Keeping a personal alligator is beyond the pale. Do people like gators because they're easier to keep than crocodiles? Does one feed them Purina Alligator Chow? Are they good with children?

In Florida, where the alligator is a general nuisance, the latest trend in animal companions is the Burmese python. These massive snakes often escape, or are dumped, into the Everglades, where they wreak havoc with the ecosystem. They also occasionally visit suburban neighborhoods and swallow cats.

When there are millions of fellow mammals in animal shelters awaiting adoption, why does anyone choose instead to smuggle a latter-day dinosaur from Boca Raton? Enough already with the reptiles! Just get a damned dog. If they were good enough pets for Neanderthals, they're good enough for you.

Calls from home

Dad was at his girlfriend's because she can't go out, being on an oxygen tank. Why did he call during the day, in the middle of the week? News of suicide, an overdose. That's the second this month ... not that I was close, like the last one. But she was a year older, and lived a few blocks away. Our fathers are still tight, old boxing cronies, and her younger sister and I were best pals in second grade. She was the "tuff" girl that the other girls emulated, but never mean.
At the end of the conversation we discussed another suicide, this time a jumper, who I only remember as a tiny kid, from the next street over. I've taken to reading my hometown paper and it was reported as a homeless man jumping from an abandoned mill. It's hard to picture that in my mind.
Six blocks, two deaths. Hmm.
I keep meaning to tell my Dad that I'm engaged but I just can't seem to find the right time.

I have a love/hate relationship with Price-Rite the discount grocery store. On the one hand, its really cheap and I love that you really get a lot for your money there. On the other hand, its a horrible shopping experience. Everything is in boxes, and not put out nicely on shelves. The meat is always questionable looking. But the vegetables are outstanding and very very reasonable in price. But often the vegetables are not perfect. You can get red peppers for 99cents lb. At Stop and Shop they go for $3.99, but they are perfectly shaped. The ones at Price-Rite are sometimes funky shapes. And this goes for other veggies too. So last night I opened a 5lb bag of carrots and look what I found!
Is it the lower half of Jesus? Or The Virgin Mary? Or Maybe Elvis?
Wonder what I can get for it on Ebay? Well we will never know because after I shot the pics, I chopped it up and put it in a salad. It was delish!

I Wonder What Mr. LaRouche is Doing?

Today is my birthday. Other people born on September 8th are Sid Caesar, Peter Sellers, Patsy Cline, Lyndon LaRouche, and the Virgin Mary. Someone is taking me out for German food, and since I'm named after an uncle who was killed fighting against the Wehrmacht in WW-II, I suppose this closes a circle.

To the Max

A zillion years ago, at the tail end of the Carter Era, I worked in a family-owned hardware distributorship in East Cambridge, Mass. One of my coworkers was a little old Jewish guy named Max Gass.

The name Max Gass may sound like a Mel Brooks shtik, a character with horrible flatulence, but Max was a dignified man. He wore glasses and a neatly clipped moustache, and he donned a dapper fedora when he set off for home. He was in his late 70s and was a retired high school teacher. The word was that he had been denied a university teaching post because of anti-Semitism.

Max said he needed to get away from Mrs. Gass for a while every day, so he asked his friend Mr. Kaufman, owner of Kaufman Industrial Supplies, for a part time job. Every weekday morning, Max would humbly pack boxes in the shipping department at Kaufman's. I was the shipping clerk, and I had great conversations with Max on a variety of subjects. He was of the opinion that vampire movies destroyed the morals of the young. He was worried about his digestion, and every workday at 10:00 a.m. he would put on a yamulke and have a mug of hot water and a banana, a combination that he believed would keep him regular. Once, someone at work played a joke on Max by stuffing a pair of dungarees and a pair of sneakers with newspaper, placing the half-dummy in the men's room toilet stall so that it appeared to be a person hogging the crapper.

Max confessed to me about his wildest caper, when he was a young man during Prohibition. He and some friends went to Montreal on the pretext of going to see the great actor Boris Thomashefsky in a Yiddish theater production, when the main reason for the trip was to have alcoholic drinks! Max's little mamele (mother) was never the wiser.

About a year after I left the place, Max had an industrial accident when a steel locker fell on top of him. He put my name as a witness on the accident report, but he wasn't trying anything fraudulent, he was merely confused. He stopped working not long after that, and he died a couple of years later. I always smile when I think of him, and I believe he may have been right about the whole vampire phenomenon.

Plan 9, Channel 7

I had written this for Bob and posted it originally at Bad Girls Go To Hell, a poetry website that I'm part of. Bob was, and remains, our only follower. I created this blog partly for him to share his writing, but he could never get it together to learn how to post.

Are you happy now?
Am I supposed to send
the flowers of romance
into the void?

F.Y.B.W.
1962 - 2010

©Donna Lethal

The Beauty of Anti-Triumphalism

In Boston there is a subculture of unemployed individuals who spend a lot of time in Catholic churches, and since being laid off last year, I have become a member of the tribe. One day I went to a 5:15 p.m. weekday Mass at a Franciscan shrine downtown. The priest came out of the sacristy with aid of a walker, the lector was an older woman with a hunched back, and one of the men who took the collection had a prosthetic hand. The scene reminded me of the title of a Flannery O'Connor story, "The Lame Shall Enter First," and I found it all to be sublime.