The Battle Royale Cometh-The Dogfight For The Soul Of The Democratic Party-Call It Between Sleepy Joe Biden And Feel The Bern Sanders And You Would Not Be Far Off

By Alan Jackson

                                                                               

I have been around the political and cultural commentary business for a long time so nothing surprises me much when readers come out of left-field to have their say. That was the case recently from several readers who got up on their hindlegs when I mentioned, in passing, that a bigtime fight was brewing underneath the struggle for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination. I mentioned, again in passing, that the corporate Democrats have had such a stranglehold on the party that it has become a fossil, has forgotten how to use its majority to actually win and forestall all the bullshit coming from the right. Has become the party of the donor class (or part of it), lobbyists, media mavens, and fussy insider bureaucrats who could not find their ways pass the Beltway with three tries.

No question that the Democrats have never claimed to be anything but a pro-capitalist, pro-corporate globalization party including one presidential candidate who has made a mantra out of declaring she is a “capitalist to the bone.” But in other times, and not to far back, they used to at least use the fig leaf of being a “people’s party.” (That “not too far back” being on the long side the New Deal and short side some variation of the Great Society.) Hence the alienation of former traditional bases like the working class, especially the working poor. The task as they have seen it is to get out the vote on election day and then do business as usual.    

Enter a new approach, an approach that reflects the very real damage Republicans have done to the electorate through voter suppression, increased hoops to pass through to register to vote and getting to the ballot box itself. That is to realize that many constituencies are hungry to have a say in history. Groups that have been neglected or not seen as reliable and worthwhile prospects to organize (from the comfort of Washington offices to be sure). In short what has become known as the Phillips thesis where rather than concentrate on some white working-class voter who might listen to the message, really a mythical figment of the Beltway imagination the party go after the young and energetic en masse, communities of color in all their diversities and the working poor (those who are working two and three jobs to put food on the table).        

So yes two very different ideas of how to avoid in the short term another Trump four years, four years unchained and long term to confine the Republicans to the dustbin of history. These ideas got their first serious workout in the Clinton-Sanders clash for the 2016 Democratic nomination but not everybody, including me, saw how much the corporate Democrats were out of step with the times and could not muster enough energy to beat a second-rate third rate bum of the month like Donald J. Trump. In every way as we head into the 2020 campaign season this fight which has been a long time coming is going to be played out as the race falls between Sleepy Joe Biden and Senator Sanders (with an outside chance of Senator Warren carrying some grassroots water). More later.   

When The Big Boys From The East Got Their Wanting Habits On-A Saga From The Files of Ace Private Detective Phil Larkin 

By Lawrence Parker

The popular best-selling private detective writer Max Bloom says that Ray Chandler mostly got it all wrong back in the 1930s when Private Detective Phil Larkin landed the Sternwood case which made his nut for a long time. Maybe too long as it turned out because after some early successes he fell under the bus, wound up doing repo and key-hole peeping work for some sleazy Post Street agency and then as go-fer for the rising star Sheila Graham over on Bay Street when his star got pulled down in San Francisco. But that was later, later when the shades got pulled down tight. What Max, what Max told me okay, was from the days when Phil was the rough justice windmill guy ready to churn up bad guys and sweep the ladies off their feet and into some silky sheets.

A generation ago if I said the Sternwood case all ears would be listening since that was the one where the rich and famous of early Hollywood mixed freely with the gangster element out in California in the days before the boys from the East decided to crash the party and get some sun as well. Phil Larkin who had worked in the Los Angeles D.A.s office before getting the boot for not being able to look the other way when the graft came around for the office still had some friends there. One of them had some kind of connection to the Sternwoods, maybe had done the old man, a retired general among other things, a favor or two and was he was saying thank you. This Sternwood family by the way is yes the same family or at least the old man was who along with silent partners John D, Rockefeller and Jay Gatsby cornered the La Brea tar pits and the rest is history.      

That part Ray Chandler got right but what he got wrong, wrong as rain was what the General wanted Phil for, what chore needed tidying up. Ray tried to chalk it up to the old man needing help trying to figure out what to do about Carmen, his youngest and wildest daughter’s gambling debts-pay and be bled or throw some rough stuff and be done with it. Even Ray admitted that the job if as described was one for a lawyer rather than a brute-like private eye. What the deal really was, and in the end it turned out to be not the General’s play but his equally wild and oldest daughter Vivian’s was to find her husband, a rough trade guy named Rusty Regan out of the IRA and Irish freedom fight so rough trade is right. It looked like she had tried to do the right thing when she decided to divorce him and take up with the legendary gangster Eddie Mars, the guy who ran every racket legal and illegal in Southern California by stepping over everybody else either with his good-looking charms or guns.  Sure it made for a better story if it looked like some old half dead General was looking for salvation, looking for his boon companion Rusty but there you have the skinny.    

Of course Phil took the case, he needed the dough, needed to work the case for twenty-five and expenses a day. Figured to ride the carousel for a month or two, come up empty and make a mint for little heavy lifting. Phil, an old-school street-smart guy knew he had to kick around the jams a little so he headed first to see what was what with that gambling debt stuff, see if there were any leads there. The General, or rather the General’s man-servant had given Phil the card demanding the gambling debt repayment with the name of a guy fronting a rare books operation out of Sunset Boulevard. An operation which had to have had plenty of protection from cops and gangsters alike since even a schoolboy knew back then that “rare books” were a fancy name for pornography, for smut. In this case for the high-end trade, the perverts with dough and no last names.         

That is where Max says Ray got it wrong although how knowing Phil and his thing for the ladies he didn’t know that Phil was not chasing after elderly male perverts and pedophiles to see what they were buying Max did not know. For no known reason once Phil figured the operation out (helped along by a female clerk who was clueless about rare books or anything else for that matter) he decided to confirm what was going on by following some dandy with a book in his arm grabbed from the bookstore. Bingo-smut. And good citizen Phil keeping such stuff off the streets. Reality. Phil went to another bookstore nearby to see if anybody knew what the owner looked like. Bingo-he found a curvy, vivacious bookworm who did and they whiled away the afternoon drinking brandy and whatever waiting for the owner to show. That owner would show but faced a tough night as Phil would find out after following him and his boyfriend to a secluded cottage where the smut was photographed. Photographs which included young Carmen in the buff. Somebody did not like that idea and shot our smut-peddler very dead. It turned out later that this Nancy and his boyfriend were cooking the books against the real boss-one Eddie Mars and found himself in front of a few slugs. So much for cleaning the streets of garbage.    

Max Bloom after reading and reviewing Phil Larkin’s manuscript about the Sternwood case realized exactly what Ray Chandler had done wrong. Not wrong in a literary sense but wrong as to the actual case and its solution which under his guidance the reader was left up in the air with more questions than answers about what was happening. Of course Chandler was writing his lurid detective novels in the 1930s at a time when every crime detection novel had to have some sexual hook into the case if for no other reason than to justify those saucy and sexy front covers with half-naked women in stressful situations to lure the mainly male readers in. In the usual run of the mill story that was the highlight of the event since about sixteen different codes were in play and everything was done by inference and suggestion.

This situation is where Chandler got played false. He, after setting up Phil on the case to find Rusty Regan via some queen rare books dealer named Geiger plays the scene as revenge for broken romance. According to Ray this young stud chauffer named Owen Wilson was all heated up over this hot pants Carmen Sternwood not knowing just how kinky she was and susceptible to any suggestion especially when she was high as the sky on drugs. One night this Owen followed the play to Geiger’s secluded house where Carmen was in the midst of a photo shoot. Bang, bang one stately queen of a Hollywood naughty book seller bites the dust.

Meanwhile a third party, a grifter named Brody connected to the Geiger operation vis his hard as nails girlfriend of the moment, having seen Geiger killed (and been accused of doing the deed himself) having grabbed some photos of Carmen as blackmail bait decided that he could live on easy street by grabbing the load of books and setting up shop for himself. And he almost succeeded, no, the whole set-up was too many moving parts for a small-time hood, a guy who couldn’t put two nickels together at most times. Ray got this part right. Phil caught up with this Brody looking for those Carmen photos which needed to be squashed. After some chatter and a guest appearance by Carmen to claim the photos (and screw things up) Brody saw Phil’s reasoning, gun in hand. Then Brody winds up making his last fatal move by answering his door. Bang, bang one less grifter is around town.

Along the way the reader finds out that young Owen, you remember Owen, got mysteriously washed up to shore after speeding over a guardrail in one of the Sternwood fleet of automobiles. Along the way Phil trailed the guy who he thinks shot Brophy who turned out to be the stately queen of Hollywood’s boyfriend Carl who thought Brody had done his lover (and meal ticket) in. When everybody put their heads together the whole thing looked like nothing but a classic murder revenge cycle with the dip that it involved homosexuals in the big love mix. That is what the coppers spread anyway.

All bullshit, or almost all although Owen was sexually crazy for Carmen and Carl and Geiger were not so closeted lovers.  What Ray missed, maybe others too was that the big boys from the East, the guys with the funny accents and plenty of muscle and firepower had played out the cities on the coast what with their white slave, prostitution, dope, gambling, protection rackets fully developed and needed to expand their operations. California and sun beckoned, wide open territory at least from the scouting reports. The big player in Southern California, the good-looking guy who could handle a gun and starlet at the same time was one Eddie Mars. Eddie who not so coincidentally was Geiger ‘s protection against coppers and interlopers alike. Let Geiger run the smut and rake in the dough while he provided some of the “models.”     

                     

When the big boys headed west, when they sent guys like Owen Wilson also known as the Boogie Kid which if Mars had known earlier might have saves some grief, their first target was the soft underbelly of the illegal trade-smut. This is why whatever feelings Owen developed for Carmen on the job he was sent West and found out that she was connected with Geiger who was the max daddy of the smut operations right out on Sunset Boulevard. Geiger had to go, and he went leaving for a short enough time room for a classic grifter like Joe Brody to get his fingers on the goods. Thinking he would run the easy street racket. Not knowing that the big boys were in town to start their work. Bang, bang Joe Brody farewell. What Joe didn’t know, and what his killer, Geiger’s boyfriend, Carl who actually wasted Joe had been sent out by those same big boys to soften up Geiger with his predilection for the odd and kinky stuff. They had originally thought they could use Geiger as their front, for a while but no go. With this description you know a soft shoe like Eddie Mars is going to find himself in the Pacific Basin in the not distance future. A lot different story than that romance noise Chandler bought into.  

       

Of course Phil Larkin had his own axe to grind, was protecting himself and that Vivian Sternowood he got tied up with for a while. They might have been married but at least they shacked up together for a while so there is that. Then there is the shadowy role, the not quite legal role Phil played in covering for Carmen around the Rusty Regan matter we all found out (via Phil’s memoir or the police files) was so much noise once it was clear that Regan was some kind of emissary from the big boys in the East. Letting Carmen take the slight fall for the death satisfied everybody. With all that, even the murk, everything falls into place better. It is easier to understand that this was nothing but a death knell for one Edward Mars late of Santa Monica shores. Why although everybody knows Bugsy, Lucky, Woody in the criminal pantheon out west Mars has disappeared from that history.     

The toughest thing Phil had to do once he figured the big move from the East was gaining an ally to find Rusty for the old man. Hot pants Carmen was out of the question so the logical choice was Vivian, after all she had been married to the renegade IRA commando. That was not as easy as it seemed since Eddie had for his own reasons mostly to get in with the old-line Sternwood crowd, let Vivian run up some serious gambling debts on her own and it was only after Eddie did a slow-burn double-cross letting her win one night on his off-limits casinos and then had one of his henchmen try to rob her outside the joint. Which would have happened if it wasn’t for Phil eagle-eyed intervention. So Vivian sees the light, or begins to.   

The main drag from there between Phil and Vivian is to keep Carmen out of the clutches of the coppers over what seemed to be Carmen’s murder of Rusty. That dog bone is what kept Vivian deep-tied to Eddie for so long not knowing that the big boys had Eddie earmarked for the Pacific Basin when they thought (correctly as it turned out) that Eddie had his big fingers in that death. Nobody in New York City, Brooklyn, Hoboken or Newark was going to shed tear number one if Eddie went down for the Rusty killing or because he got in the way of what the big boys were trying to muscle into. In short Eddie was one doomed mother.    

Here's the play on how Eddie went down in the end. Somehow that female clerk at Geiger’s storefront, the one who played footsies with the late Joe Brody found another daddy, a small time second-rate private eye with fewer brains than desires. That two-bit punk played emissary from the witch because she knew exactly where Eddie Mars’ wife was holed up. Eddie had the bright idea to cover tracks by putting his wife in cold storage and letting everybody think she had run off with Rusty. That two-bit private eye wasn’t as brittle in the end as one would have thought, as Phil thought. In any case Phil got the address. Although maybe he should not have wanted it since by the time he had gotten there the big boys’ agents had rubbed out Eddie’s small army. Eddie’s wife got away in the cross-fire with Vivian’s help.  The big boys got to Eddie and his two-so-called bodyguards and Eddie Mars left no trace of his small time Southern California criminal operations. (From Eddie’s perch new-found boss of bosses Bugsy branched out to very lucrative Vegas).

Once Again The Fate Of The Wanting Habits-The Eternal Search For El Dorado  

By Ronan Saint John

Recently in drawing some comments about my hone of its many guises, the most common one that the location was somewhere in the American West during Spanish-cowboy days) I mentioned that for a kid like me, a projects kid, such legends played into the wanting habits all kids from such places had about having “enough.” That comment above all others, maybe reflecting the times or readership, drew sighs of disbelief. Disbelief that a child’s wanting habits were so strong that they would be worthy of comment some fifty years later. The kicker was a reader, a young reader from the tone of the remarks, never had heard of such a term as “wanting habits” except in an old-time Bessie Smith song from the 1920 Down-Hearted Blues. On the one hand I was glad that this person’s frame of reference was so remote but also flabbergasted that some people, young or old, had no clue that a determined part of the population had such desires, and had had them unfulfilled.

Now there is no way that what I, and every project kid from my project, or any growing up project after World War II called that ache in our hearts “wanting habits” but that is what they were. That is as good a way to put the condition, still lingering in the background today, that I felt. You see what that young reader was, is clueless about is that some people grow up in desperate poverty not necessarily of their own making. The classic statement of that would come from hard-pressed mothers when you asked for say a dollar to go to the double-header Saturday afternoon movies. The answer: “we barely have enough money to pay the rent never mind that.” That refrain punctured all my childhood (until, old enough, I figured out way to get stuff that I could sell to do what I needed to do not always legally) in some variation for we were poor dirt through all that period until I got to high school and we got some partial relief.     

         

Memories, sharp memories come back of endless bouts of breakfast oatmeal, of having Karo syrup sandwiches, yes, the blood sugar level was through the roof, endless bologna and cheese sandwiches and Saturday franks and beans. More. Wearing older brothers’ hand-me-down whatever condition including what must have been generations of patched jackets and trousers. Many cold nights when we could not pay the oil bill and could get no more credit. Having girls, girls I was interested in from the ranch house development newly built up the road from the projects dismiss me out of hand once they knew I was a projects boy. Yeah, those wanting habits came in many forms and guises. So don’t tell me that there were no wanting habits developed back then that lasted in some cases a lifetime. Don’t tell me an El Dorado dream was hooey either.  

Rumbling And A-Tumbling On Campaign Trail 2020-The Mysteries Presidential Candidates Jockeying For Position Unfurled-Maybe

By Sam Lowell

In the old projects neighborhood when I was a kid we used to, being very short of money for official store-bought games, play a game called fuzz ball. The idea, the winning idea was to figure out where the twelve to fifteen balls (old golf balls found on a country club golf course just sitting there for the plucking even if we were trespassing) would wind up once the rules were established which basically kept things moving (and each of us off the other’s back about fouls and stuff). It was that ancient silly game that I was thinking about recently when I was asked by my political comrades who are along with me ever since last January knee-deep, no, waist deep in the 2020 presidential campaign on behalf of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.      

The real connection between fuzz ball and this odd-ball presidential election campaign are the number of ups and down in the process before some kind of clear winner is asserted. Many a time I thought I had the game in the bag only to have some goof golf ball come up and whack my chances. When my Bernie group got formed last winter we thought we had it all figured out and in some ways we had, have but mainly the jury is still out. Then Sleepy Joe Biden and Senator Sanders apparently mainly on previous name recognition were assumed to have the front-runner status. Senator Sanders jumped out into the lead as long as Sleepy Joe had not formally declared his candidacy. In the meantime serious contenders like Senator Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts were putting ground games together as were holy goofs like Andrew Yang and little Tommy Steyers were spreading plenty of dough around to keep visible and pray for rain or something.

Then come late spring and Sleepy Joe’s formal announcement that he wanted to be king of the hill. That sent his stock way up the charts. Why? Somehow sight unseen he was the only one who could beat one Donald J. Trump, the only hope of the corporate friendly establishment wing of the Democratic Party. That mantra kept him afloat for far longer than any of us in the Sanders corner expected until the debates, until Sleepy Joe actually opened his mouth and was found to be made of pure dust (which still hasn’t kept some from using the same old, same old argument about electability)

Some people got nervous though and started looking for the next best thing which turned out for a minute through the summer to be Senator Warren, if she could do business, tone down her act. And she come. Every day you would hear about her surging in some polls and if you weren’t just a little wary, and a little cynical about such polls when they were all over the place she looked like she would be queen of the hill. She fell down a bit on Medicare for All and her general wonkish demeanor and draw and right now she is licking her wounds. We shall see what happens in the early going when actual votes are counted. Not everybody put their eggs in one basket though. Pistol Pete from South Bend began to get (and still have) some serious play if Sleepy Joe falls down or Professor Warren can’t make a turnaround. We shall see.

Through all of this I have not mentioned Senator Sanders who took the biggest hit when Sleepy Joe entered the lists. His numbers never really moved all summer and he was written off (if not previously then at that time) as a favorite of the fanatics in the party and not much else. Worse Senator Warren was pulling voters from his fringes (and cadre too) so by early October it looked like he was done for. Especially when the heart attack scare took hold about his age and such. That was the nadir but strangely from his recovery period onward he has moved up the charts again. Not an unimportant consideration that rising star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) saved his bacon by a big endorsement and rally in Queens when he was on the ropes. For that he should be eternally grateful. Who knows what will happen as we head into the actual vote-counting but my political comrades and I have agreed that looking at Iowa and New Hampshire the Senator has a shot at getting over the finish line. Something that in early October seemed totally improbable even to we die-hards.    

Rumbling And A-Tumbling On Campaign Trail 2020-The Mysteries The Preference Polls Unfurled-Maybe

By Sam Lowell

Recently in a quick sketch after reading a crime novel by the late Robert B. Parker which was a fictionalized account of legendary black baseball player Jackie Robinson’s 1940s breaking in the Major Leagues I noted that as a kid I was crazy to crunch numbers, and still am. That despite the fact, unlike Parker apparently and Lowell’s own Beat maven Jack Kerouac, that I did not wile away my hours pouring over baseball stats like RBIs, averages, ERAs. I even admitted to the cardinal sin of 1950s childhood of not going deeply overboard in charting the amazing Mickey Mantle of the New Yrok Yankees. Still I liked the number crunches.       

Fast forward to 2019. I along with a coterie of my old political comrades have taken a very big leap forward in attempting to stem the rot of the age of Trump by supporting a candidate, in this case Senator Sanders from Vermont, for the Democratic Party nomination against Trump next year. Once we had made our decision back in January it was natural for me to be assigned the number crunching task extraordinaire of following and analyzing the preference polls. I will have to say I was amazed at the number of polls that are out there as if each news agency or polling outfit could not trust any other source but their own to give their spin on the numbers. In the old days a few organizations such as Gallup and Harris would do the bulk of the work and that would be that. Now there is literally a whole cottage industry doing this kind of work. Nate Silver over at “538” actually ranks poll reliability among his other chores.     

Here is the funny part, the part where old-time polling meets new technology. Almost every poll contains a caveat warning that their numbers only reflect “a moment in time” during the campaign season. Nice, right. The beauty of having had a large field for the Democratic Party nomination is that a whole layer of candidates are bunched together within, get this, the margin of error, meaning something like a four to five point swing which could mean anything for any candidate.

Here something equally as funny the gaps between the numbers of the two dozen or so authoritative polls is unbelievable wide and frankly baffling considering they all are assumed to use some scientific random processing to get results. Frank Jackman made me laugh one day when he mentioned that based on some of the polling numbers whether maybe the pollers just went out on the street and ask opinions of passers-by. Or use an old dodge like land lines as the source. In any case for now at least I take these beautiful numbers as “moments in time” and we shall see what flushes out as the process goes forward. Enough for now.       

Rumbling And A-Tumbling On Campaign Trail 2020-The Mysteries Of Presidential Politics Unfurled

By Allan Jackson

Anybody serious about politics, meaning me in the first instance, will if they play the game long enough find that they have twisted and turned in the winds more than once. Take this 2020 Presidential election cycle. Normally I would, along with many friends, cover the race without getting our hands dirty. From the sidelines. This age of Trump though has most of us worried that the Republic cannot stand another four years of this madness. If Trump wins reelection, meaning that he will be totally untethered from anything not having to run again then people like me, left-wing people will be facing the bastinado come Inauguration Day 2012, or find ourselves running up in the hills somewhere.

To forestall that possibility, either possibility actually,  a number of us in January met to decide not whether we would cover the campaign but how deeply we would invest in some candidate whom we thought could beat Trump and save us from that bastinado/head for the hills scenario. On its face that idea might not seem surprising since millions of citizens take a crack at politics every four by participating in the presidential sweepstakes. But not us. We, the group that formed the committee in Boston to work some campaign have all been involved in more left-wing political causes that you could shake a stick at, all the time for most of the past fifty years or so (or in the case of Frank Jackman now sixty years). We are the remnant of the Generation of ’68 who abhorred the idea of getting bogged down in elections for individual candidates with blah-blah programs soon forgotten when the power boys roll their dice. We would particularly scoff at somebody like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for, as socialist in good-standing, even thinking about running for elective office. Be as we said and still say more often than not part of the problem not the solution.    

            

But we live in troubled times, a time when we feel the Republic, that beautiful old ragged institution that we would all prefer to work under is in danger from forces well beyond whatever one Donald J. Trump can unleash. And hence that early January 2019 meeting to decide who to support with cash, time and energy in 2020. The meeting itself was made up of veterans, including veterans now peace workers, old-time civil rights advocates, a sprinkle of students, mostly bogged down with college debt, community organizers and activists and the like. The key was that each invitee had been, was, is an organizer who would go out and organize others to swell our ranks (something that has actually happened although as any political organizer knows you can never have enough of them).  

That first meeting, that contentious first meeting centered on two points-who to support and where to expend our energies since we were close to New Hampshire the first primary state in the nomination process come February 11, 2020. That latter point was fairly easily settled although a couple of people balked at focusing on New Hampshire when there was plenty of work to be done at home. They left but the rest of us agreed that Iowa and New Hampshire were important historical grounding boards for most successful campaigns.

That brought us to which of the then myriad (and still plentiful) candidates ready to take on Trump, some serious, others who knows what they were about. This is where some of us got a little shamefaced (actually Frank Jackman brought up the old refrain about electoral candidates being part of the problem not the solution although he was among the strongest partisans that we set up a committee early and grab a candidate as well. The “contest” if you will had been centered on one Bernard Sanders, U.S. Senator from Vermont who had run hard but unsuccessfully against Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Massachusetts U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren. Others were vetted, including the perennial Joe Biden, former Vice President under Barack Obama and the darling of the Democratic Party establishment (maybe less so now in the winter of 2019) but came up with too much negative baggage, or were too light-weight to take the heavy mud fight that will be the 2020 General Election.       

I found it hard to believe that after a million years of scoffing one Senator Sanders that I would be his biggest partisan come selection time. But such are the times. The kicker for many of us was that despite being out in the wilderness from many years with his entirely supportable programs like Medicare for All, his version of the Green New Deal and college debt forgiveness he stood fast all these years and you could trust him to work like seven dervishes to enact the programs after 2020. Trust a characteristic in very short supply these days. Courage too now that I think about it. In the end that would be the main draw from selecting Senator Sanders as our candidate. Senator Warren has adopted many of Senator Sander’s ideas along the way and for a while was dishing out a new program a week but we felt she was a weak reed against a guy like Trump. Somebody mentioned that there were only so many wonks who would appreciate her papers (including us who wound up having to read them all). Not enough to    

beat Trump in a mud fight. I will leave it at that.

When The Oklahoma Kid Did Not Infest My Childhood Dreams-Complete With Reasons

By Sam Lowell

Recently on an airplane ride of some duration I did a little light reading to pass the time. The book I was perusing by the well-known late crime novelist Robert B. Parker was a fictionalized account of the trials and tribulations of the legendary baseball player and heroic breaker of the color-line in Major League baseball Jackie Robinson-and his white bodyguard. That later part carrying the bulk of the fiction around the story. One of the subplots in the story is the utter devotion of a young male baseball fan who whiled away many hours dealing with players, their statistics and their teams. That dedication to task got me to thinking about others whose spent their lonely or forlorn childhoods in that manner. The great Beat novelist Jack Kerouac even had imaginary leagues and all kinds of statistical materials. Others, some well- known, some not had similar stories.

Not me. Not me despite growing up in one of the golden ages of major league baseball when it was for all intends and purposes the dedicated national pastime. This before the endlessly boring football fouled the airwaves and our Sundays and other television nights. I grew up in the 1950s, in the post Brooklyn to Los Angeles and New York to San Francisco times when the leagues reached nation-wide levels despite the crying, the continual crying if I hear right about the diehards, of the Dodgers and Giants leaving the town bereft. My time was the time of New York Yankees run when they were almost unstoppable if healthy. And maybe that is why I was nonplussed by baseball, by counting major league players and their stats and whatever else was going on in that world.          

This was the time of stand-out star Mickey Mantle, the Oklahoma Kid who could hit homers, bring in runs and hit for average like nobody’s business. But let’s look at it this way even though I was no homer for the then horrible Boston Red Sox how could a kid from the waterfront projects relate to such athletic prowess from out in dustbowl Oklahoma. Funny, because I loved to deal with numbers too. Sorry Jack and cast but your devotion leave me cold.          

Buy The Ticket-Take The Ride-The Trials And Tribulations Of Scoping The 2020 Democratic Party Nomination-Part  

By Allan Jackson

As long as I have been in politics, interested in politics which is a very long time now it never fails to hit me on the impeachment process (Fall 2019) of one Donald J. Trump, POSTUS who by any standard of decency or hygiene should have been shown the door a long time ago. But the rages against the night over that one are not what has me exercised today. Especially since once the process gets to the Senate floor it is given the actual political configuration dead on arrival, DOA, in every sense of that expression. No what has me exercised in light of the political reality of the day is how the issue of impeachment and acquittal will lay out to Trump’s unearned advantage. More pressingly how it will affect the configuration going into 2020. This after having recently spent an afternoon in the wiles of New Hampshire stirring up the pot for Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont who at this point (unlike a couple of months ago) has a track to the Democratic Party nomination if things work out for him early in places like Iowa and New Hampshire.  

From what I can gather after one afternoon (and some other time not in New Hampshire but courtesy of modern technology calling voters in the state from home) is that impeachment business among the somewhat culled working lists is more a spectacle for the pros than a living, breathing concern of those out in the hinterland. But that could cut both ways. As far as I know every Democratic presidential candidate has come out one way or another for impeachment, including Senator Sanders, so that will color politics going forward if not now then come fall general election time. That is probably all that subject is worth at this time but stay tuned.

What is really intriguing is the play in New Hampshire and nationally this fall as candidates jockey for position. I am the first to admit that in early October I thought Senator Sander’s chances due to health and a trend toward other candidates, particularly the rising star of Senator Elizabeth Warren as former Vice President Joseph Biden’s star was fading was at best stalled. Since then with his recovery and with a crucial endorsement and major rally in Queens with rising super-star AOC things have turned somewhat, turned for the better. Strangely, if thankfully, during that period the Senator Warren star has fallen somewhat. Fallen mainly over fudging the issues around Medicare for All but in general not convincing people that she will not, or would not, cave in to muddled maybe someday pie in the sky medical care issues favored by the Democratic Party establishment. Perhaps the biggest if most expensive political lesson she has had to learn in her short political career.     

It really comes down to the question of trust, and maybe time too. Senator Sanders has been touting his social and political agenda for the past forty years-and people have finally caught up to him. He did not cut corners when he was virtually alone out in the wilderness and he has not now when he has a whole freaking movement at his back to raise holy hell. Yeah, it comes down to trust, a commodity in short supply in the political universe these days. That and a certain amount of undefinable courage to fight the fight against the greed-heads, the con men, the ever present bag men and the corner cutters. That is the sense that I get talking to people in the hills of old New Hampshire about Senator Sanders whether they support him or not. You can hardly get anybody to disagree that he will not fight like seven dervishes once he hits the White House running. Forward to victory in the New Hampshire come February 11, 2020.

No Question Impeachment Is Not Enough, Not Nearly Enough For What One Donald J Trump Has Done But Where The Hell Do You Go With It

By Alan Jackson

Back in the early 1970s when we had a comparable problem with a POSTUS, then one Richard Milhous Nixon, petty thief and major criminal I remember reading a headline from some left-wing newspaper which heralded in big bold type “Impeachment Is Not Enough.” And it was not, could not be for all the violations of bourgeois political norms as loose as they were then to speak nothing of his role in keeping troops in Vietnam long past their due date. The political configurations were a bit different then, including that it had been a century since a sitting president was to head to the dunking stool. The gest of that headline was that Nixon should face an international tribunal composed of his war victims, or their representations (the dockets would have been overflowing in that case for he would not be alone in that housecleaning). That real justice never happened since the felon avoided the perp walk complete with orange jumpsuit by resigning before the gauntlet fell.

Now we have a situation which clearly admits to an impeachment proceeding for violations of bourgeois norms and conscious obstruction of justice staring with the boss, with the POSTUS, now one Donald J. Trump, petty thief and major criminal all the way down the slippery slope to who knows what end. But the configuration is all wrong this time although if there was a way to get a conviction in the Republican-dominated Senate  I would move mountains to see that small piece of justice done. But the times have no such look. A Democratic major in the House responding to their base, or their sense of what is right in American political discourse, has though myriad committees decided to draft and eventually vote on some articles of impeachment. That task done the ball is in the Senate’s court which I have already mentioned is stacked the other way. Once again the bad guys will draw a pass from a little social justice.   

What I worry about and you should too is the fallout from the failure to convict. Stacked or not this would be a tremendous propaganda victory for Trump and his minions. The only virtue is that perhaps it is far enough away from next November’s elections so that the factor is blunted, although it will not go away. The Democrats, including their current crop of presidential candidates ready to smite Mr. Trump, have generally supported the impeachment process. But they, despite some candidates’ significant poll edges over Trump NOW, will bear the burden of the hellfire and mud coming down on this one. You did not hear this bad tiding news here first but you have heard it here.     

       

Why Is Everybody Picking On Ellsworth Kelly Just Because He Figured Out He Liked Colors And Shapes

By Seth Garth

I don’t usually like to get into the mighty thicket of controversy in the art world not having paid all that much attention to trends over the past several years or more since Sam Lowell and then amateur (her designation) Laura Perkins took over the major assignments in that area. Except now I have been challenged on my defense of one Ellsworth Kelly who passed away a few years ago at an old age after have imbibed various art trends most notably color, the color school that formed at least in part to a reaction against the dominance of abstract expressionism and its going off the deep end.  

Here is how this played out since it is hardly a current controversy or even for that matter an ancient one at this point. A friend of mine and I were walking in the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco when we came upon a series of Ellsworth Kelly paintings, the usual interesting combination of colors and shapes that gave me a gathered collective effect after sitting and observing for a few minutes. That friend asked me point blank whether I liked the configuration or liked any particular piece. I said I liked most of it although I was far from being a color aficionado now, or then when it was serious trend. She responded that the work left her cold, left her somewhat disturbed by the hubris and hinted at the question of questions always hidden in the depths of the art world coterie whether this was really art when you came down to it.    

The match was on. Let’s start off with the true proposition that art is the highest expression of humankind’s capacity to wonder, and to act on that impulse to create some piece of simple beauty in a stark world. The question then becomes taking on the process of decision made throughout history by pros, by the people paying the freight for the productions or by the artist him or herself to create something beyond the mundane to determine what is what in any particular time-or fashion. That is when a million schools contend although more so since the post Renaissance period where fashion and taste have tended to move much faster in the world. Unlike said the period immediately before, medieval times when, the narrow contests were between those who created (and adored) say the Blessed Mother Mary, complete with baby Jesus on lap and putti asunder and the grizzly scenes around the various tortures of Jesus, the Christ before the nailed him to some tree.        

It is that edge, that sense of need to produce something different, to take art in a different direction that has been the most common and explosive development of the last few centuries. And hence to Ellsworth Kelly (and others like the latter Rothko) who having seen high style Impressionism give way to war-torn Surrealism and Dadaism then Abstract Expressionism take the art world by a storm after the latter carnage of World War II reacted in the one of two possible ways-back to some form of representational art which has sustained the profession forever or shift gears and move away from the hodge-podge of abstraction to a more stylized sense of color (and form always together in my book). Brilliant, if not always understandable choice especially with Rothko).       

It is entirely possible (and probable) that my argument will leave that friend who shuttered at colorist works still unconvinced, still shaking her head. But like they say about pornography or other seemingly offensive materials avert your eyes. In any case leave poor Ellsworth alone, please.

Holy-Holy -The Fourth Great Awakening Has Still Not Run Its Course-The End Times, The Fire In The Lake, The Book Of Revelations And Much More

By Seth Garth

One of the great political mysteries of the age, the age of Trump, is how faithfully those who call themselves evangelicals (white brethren portion) have supported the heathen city dweller and philanderer over the past four years. In the end they may be his last bulwark against the flood tide coming down on his head not so much from the impeachment process which is very iffy but his bid for reelection. Recently I was re-reading some articles by the late Gonzo journalist (the father of the genre) written a couple of years before the 1988 elections for the San Francisco Examiner.  In one article (maybe more than one) he noted that the previously fringe evangelicals hovelled up in their local churches had begun via tele-evangelists to break into the political sphere-and organize around that idea of political power, bringing it to bear. That factor got me wondering about when the latest “great awakening” will run its course since it already is and remains a major factor in American political life.  

These great awakenings have a certain cycle. The first one came as far as I know sometime in the 18^th century when the likes of Cotton Mather ruled the roost and some of the old-time pilgrim pioneers “got religion” after they had started the road to devastation of the continent. The second awakening came and “burned over” areas outside the East Coast citadels. Names like Grandison and Pike played to large tent crowds from Albany to South Bend. The third great awakening was more problematic since it edged considerable on politics although the evangelicals themselves were at the margins in campaigns like William Jennings Bryan and the ill-advised Prohibition Amendment which had to be revoked. And now the fourth awakening which seems to have started around the late 1970s in reaction to what some saw as the excesses of the 1960s to provide some space for the woe-begotten and lost.     

This fourth awakening is of its own kind since along with the dramatic increase of numbers the cash started rolling in once the major tele-evangelists found out that their message played well out in the heartland to those with televisions and credit cards. The rise of big mega-churches, conventions, sale of merchandise, etc. got some of those preachers like Jerry Farwell and Pat Robinson to dream bigger dreams especially when what they were advocating socially fit in nicely with what the Republican Party was espousing. In tried and true political ABCs fashion they began to fill the branches of the Republican bureaucracy, state and local. And there we have it except to say that for the look of things even after the heathen Trump finds the door these evangelical will play a part in public life.    

In the headline I mention “end times,” the “fire in the lake” and the dreaded Book of Revelation. The reason for that is once you buy into these concepts (and the search for the lost tribes of Israel) then whether the POSTUS is a heathen, a philanderer, a habitual liar, so crooked that he needs a phalanx of valets to put on his pants and a little crazy does not matter. Judgement day is coming and everybody should be ecstatic.     

The Fate Of The Wanting Habits-The Eternal Search For El Dorado  

By Ronan Saint John

When we were kids, when I was a kid, at a time when we had not had a sense of wonder beaten out of us by life, by the damn wanting habits that plagued that childhood we were fascinated by stories of legends, especially legends that had a pot of gold at the end of them. None caught my fancy more than the tales about the lost treasures of El Dorado, the main vein coming out of ancient times. Of course as a project kid, as a kid strung out a mile on the idea of having something more than the meager stuff we had and the endless “noes” of mother some such secret treasure loomed larger than that in the imagination.

The idea of treasure, of something you could just grab and win the prize got me crazy sometimes. I remember once in the spirt of that quest that I took some coins, maybe a couple of dollars’ worth and buried them in the yard. When playmates came over I told them I had heard from some old sailor at the nearby Sailors’ Home that there was treasure buried all over the place in the area from the days when harbor the projects were built next to was a contact point for privateers and others gaining their wares in an ill-gotten manner. With that spark I was able to lead those playmates to the so-called treasure and for the next few months you would find little molehills of dirt in various yards and fields based on that simple “discovery.” All for a couple of dollars’ worth of coin. Imagine finding El Dorado.       

But that was then and this is now. Recently I read an article that down in South America some explorers, maybe archeologists, had found a map or markings I am not sure which since this is all new that appears to be on the trail to El Dorado somewhere in the lower Andes where the indigenous peoples there held sacred ceremonies. These ceremonies, essentially rites of passage to manhood of the young bravos were long rumored to have been occasions when each received gold and silver to be thrown by them into a pile in a designated cave. That cave, the repository of the whole tribal experience was considered sacred, meaning leave it alone-or else. Of course when the Spaniards and later Europeans came to grab their shares of gold and silver and whatever else was not nailed to the ground they would hear of this pot of gold just waiting to be found like money on the ground.

Some of the stories of those who actually tried to find the trail, tried to follow the markings is one of the sad tales of history. More than a few were killed once the by the locals found out what they were looking for, others never came back to the small village where the trail was allegedly to start. Some came back with wild tales of huge monsters and other oddities guarding the cave. Then once the silver ran out, the gold and explorers looked elsewhere the story was left behind. These latter-day explorers are the first known adventurers to go looking again. Good luck, but maybe I should give a cautionary tale while I am on the subject. Maybe I was not the first guy to “seed” other dreams as I did when I was a kid back in the projects. Maybe some young indigenous kid back then played the same game by conveniently leaving a map or markings for some unsuspecting people with severe wanting habits to happen upon.                   

Of The Big Fix, The Bagman Cometh And The American Political Scene Circa 2019

By Allan Jackson

Ever since the Supreme Court handed down Citizens United several years ago which has essentially allowed unfettered political contributions from who knows where there has been a steady stream of complaints about the role of money in politics. Some Democratic presidential campaign like the Warren and Sanders efforts have highlighted the overwhelming weight corporations and billionaires have over the political process. And something must be done about it, at least to curb the flow for now. Today though I want to deal with the rise of that money flow well before that Supreme Court decision opened the floodgates since it can be traced back at least to the 1980s if not before.

I was reading, or rather re-reading the late Hunter Thompson’s Generation of Swine mainly articles compiled from work he did for the San Francisco Examiner during that period and noted that in more than one piece he was hollering against the role of money in politics back then. His thesis is that sometime after Richard Nixon’s reelection in 1972 which cost in total, if you can believe this, 20-million dollar chicken feed today for maybe a small town mayor’s race, a new generation of politicians figured out that it was well-placed money targeted to particular audiences that won the day not some programmatic or ideological scheme. That would make a certain amount of sense since the role of parties, the hold of parties over the electorate has been severely eroded and it is essentially each candidate for him or herself.         

The funny thing about all this is that money has always played some role in politics but in the old days, the days of party machines when they controlled votes and patronage it was small time stuff. I remember Biff Walsh the old reporter at the State House in Boston for years telling me when I was starting out that when somebody wanted something, maybe a city contract they would have their courier, their bag man deliver the dough in small bills in a bag, a freaking lunch bag. Biff told a couple of memorable stories, one about how somebody’s bag man delivered the bag to the wrong John Kelly. Put twenty thousand right on the desk. Right or wrong Kelly that was the last that bag was seen and what was anybody to do about it since everybody was “on the take,” right door or wrong. The other story was how a member of the State Senate leadership took a fit when Bernie Walsh’s bagman delivered the cold hard cash in hand. Seems the guy was sentimental and refused to take the donation unless it was in the classic bag. Small time stuff but there you have it.

Of course now everything is done with mirrors and computers with every known organizational trick in the books. Super-Pacs and “interest” groups abound. Now for the upcoming 2020 elections well over a billion dollars will flow, mainly for media. And that is the rub. That is the point old Hunter Thomson was trying to make when he interviewed some bright young K Street lobbyists and dealmakers. Everything in a divided country is now targeted to a small portion of the population that might change its mind and the rest is so much wasted money and time. Sad but maybe Bernie or Elizabeth can turn things around if they get into the Oval Office.  

Something From The Ancient Archives When This Site Spent Plenty Of Space Predicting A Major College Nation Champion

By Ronan Saint John

In a sports-crazed nation it is hard to get worked up about the doings of one Joe Jordan, average sports guy maybe ten, fifteen years ago and then he went cold turkey. Almost. He just couldn’t give up following the major college teams that had gotten him started down that road when he was a kid. In those days, unlike now, the major colleges did not have a play-off style tournament to determine who was king of the hill but got the “mythical” national championship settled by various coaches and sports-writers’ polls with number one and two in the ratings fighting it out for the prize. (That polling system is still in use today to determine who the final four will be in the playoffs). In short the college associations have met the demand half-way for some kind of definitive play-off system to determine the champion. Fair enough.        

What has Joe Jordan continuing to plug away is that polling business, the rating of teams by various standards to see who has a say top five, ten or nowadays twenty-five team. That intrigued him as a kid interested in numbers but also interested him in how he would rate his own selections. So minus the selection of the final four he is still in business. Of course probably the main initial impetus for Joe getting involved at all was that he was the son of a “subway fan” of the famous Notre Dame football teams, the Fighting Irish, a natural choice in a mostly Irish Catholic neighborhood where the adults, including that father would have drinks and bet on the games come Saturday afternoon at the local Dublin Grille. (And spent the weekly paycheck, including Joe’s father on more than one occasion, on a misplaced wrong bet but that is a story for another time when we are speaking about wanting habits down at the base of society.) That “subway fan” by the way has its own tradition since the working-class guys who followed the Irish had no relationship to the college or anything else except they all took the Redline subway to work in Boston and hence the name.         

The rating system, systems really, Joe used in his own calculations consisted of predicting the weekly match-ups (for money) and then on Sunday grabbing the newspaper and see what had happened to the various teams. Then, at least in the old times, he would wait for say the AP or Coaches poll to come out Monday morning during the fall. That was the fun part particularly when you got down to the selections for say the last five or ten spots on the now standard twenty-five spot roster. Should a good 9-2-Navy team get the number twenty spot over an 8-3 Rutgers team. Even further up the food chain controversies would abound when Joe and friends did their friendly wagering at the self-same Dublin Grille.      

Which brings us to today (2019) and the latest rankings for the coveted final four spots which are still up for grabs-this just before the various league championships which factor heavily at the end. Clemson, undefeated, looks like a lock against Virginia, Ohio State, undefeated, ditto, LSU though may have all it can handle against a fired-up Georgia team that has a flunk loss earlier in the season. Which might let say Oklahoma or Oregon in. We shall see. What we shall not see is our Joe Jordan worrying over the actual playoff picture or results. That part is boring he says.       

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- Ancient Dreams, Dreamed- Magical Realism 101

Introduction

The following sketches, and that is all they pretend to be, flash-colored sketches, are based, mainly, on stories told to me by my old friend Peter Paul Markin, although I have taken the usual liberties with the truth to “jazz” some of the stories up. I might add that these sketches are more or less in chronological order (although exact dates or time periods may be off slightly, like all misty remembrances), although he told them to me in helter-skelter order time over many years, some under, well, let’s just call them trying circumstances and be done with it.  I might add that occasionally he will speak in his own voice on stories that are either too fantastic for me to write with a straight face, or too deep for me to comprehend rightly.    

Markin and I first met long ago in the searching for the great American West 1960s good night the details of which are supplied in a few of the sketches from that period. This however, is not a “memoir” of that period, although we are both certified members in good standing of the generation of ’68, the generation who at one time promised to fight for a “newer world.” And lost, or retreated before that massive task. The literary universe is thick with, and frankly I am sick unto death of, memoirs from that period, great or small.

What these things pretend to be in earnest, using Markin as a lightning rod, are looks at the extreme variety of human experiences that our wicked old world has spewed forth. Given the very long and arduous human struggle to meet our immediate daily needs, they also underline the narrowness of human expression in facing the great tasks that confront us in living on this wicked old earth.  Josh Breslin- September 2012     

When Miss Cora Swayed

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Postman_Always_Rings_Twice_(film)

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the 1946 film adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Yah, sometimes, and maybe more than sometimes, a frail, a frill, a twist, a dame, oh hell, let’s cut out the goofy stuff and just call her a woman and be done with it, will tie a guy’s insides up in knots so bad he doesn’t know what is what. Tie a guy up so bad he will go to the chair without a murmur, the electric chair for those not in the know or those not wound up in the love game with a big old knot very tightly squeezing him. That is he will not murmur if there is such a merciful chair in his locale, otherwise whatever way they cut the life out of a guy who has been so twisted up he couldn’t think straight enough to tie his own shoes, or hers.

Here’s the funny part and you know as well as I do that I do not mean funny, laughing funny, the guy will go to his great big reward smiling, okay half-smiling, just to have been around that frail, frill, twist. dame, oh hell, you know what I mean. Around her slightly shy, sly, come hither scents, around her, well, just around her. Or maybe just to be done with it, done with the speculation, the knots and all, six-two-and even he would go back for more, plenty more, and still have that smile, ah, half-smile as they lead him away. Yah, guys just like Frank.

Frank Jackman had it bad. [But you might as well fill in future signatures, the Peter Paul Markins, the Joshua Lawrence Breslins, and every corner boy who ever kicked his heels against some drugstore store front wall, name your name, just kids, mere boys, when they started getting twisted up in knots, girl knots, and a million, more or less, other guys too, just as easily as Frank, real easy]. Yah, Frank had it bad as a man could have from the minute Miss Cora walked through that café door from the back of the house, the door that separated the living quarters from the café, a cup of joe in her hand. Just an off-hand plain plank door, cheaply made and amateurishly hinged, that spoke of no returns.

She breezed, Frank thought later when he tried to explain it, explain everything that had happened and how to anyone who would listen, trade winds breezed in although this was the wrong coast for that, in her white summer frilly V-neck buttoned cotton blouse, white short shorts, tennis or beach ready, maybe just ready for whatever came along, with convenience pockets for a woman’s this-and-that, and showing plenty of well-turned, lightly-tanned bare leg, long legs at first glance, and the then de rigueur bandana holding back her hair, also white, the bandana that is. Yah, she came out of that crooked cheapjack door like some ill-favored Pacific wind now that he had the coast right, some Japan Current ready, ready for the next guy out. Jesus.  

I might as well tell you, just like he told it to me, incessantly told it to me like I was some father-confessor, and maybe I was, before he moved on, it didn’t have to finish up like the way it did. Or start that way either, for that matter. The way it did play out. Not at all. No way. He could have just turned around anytime he said but I just took that as so much wind talking, or maybe some too late regret. Sure there are always choices, for some people. Unless you had some Catholic/Calvinist/Shiva whirl pre-destination Mandela wheel working your fates, working your fates into damn overdrive like our boy Frank.

Listen up a little and see if Frank was just blowing smoke, or something. He was just a half-hobo, maybe less, bumming around and stumbling up and down the West Coast, too itchy to settle down after four years of hard World War II Pacific battle fights on bloody atolls, on bloody coral reefs, and knee-deep bloody islands with names even he couldn’t remember, or want to remember after Cora came on the horizon.  He was just stumbling, like he said, from one half-ass mechanic’s job (a skill he had picked in the Marines) in some flop garage here, another city day laborer’s job shoveling something there, and picking fruits, hot sun fruits, maybe vegetables depending on the crop rotation, like some bracero whenever things got really tough, or the hobo jungle welcome ran out, ran out with the running out of wines and stubbed cigarette butts. He mentioned something about freight yard tramp knives, and cuts and wounds. Tough, no holds barred stuff, once tramp, bum, hobo solidarities broke down, and that easy and often. Frank just kind of flashed that part of the story because he was in a hurry for me to get it straight about him and Cora and the hobo jungle stuff was just stuff, and so much train smoke and maybe a bad dream.

Hell, the way he was going, after some bracero fruit days with some bad hombre bosses standing over his sweat, the “skids” in Los Angeles, down by the tar pits and just off the old Southern Pacific line, were looking good, a good rest up. Real good after fourteen days running in some Imperial Valley fruit fields so he started heading south, south by the sea somewhere near Paseo Robles to catch some ocean sniff, and have himself washed clean by loud ocean sounds so he didn’t have to listen to the sounds coming from his head about getting off the road.

Here is where luck is kind of funny though, and maybe this is a place where it is laughing funny, because, for once, he had a few bucks, a few bracero fruit bucks, stuck in his socks. He was hungry, maybe not really food hungry, but that would do at the time for a reason, and once he hit the coast highway this Bayview Diner was staring him right in the face after the last truck ride had let him off a few hundred yards up the road. Some fugitive barbecued beef smell, or maybe strong onions getting a workout over some griddled stove top, reached him and turned him away from the gas station fill-up counter where he had planned, carefully planning to husband his dough to make the city of angels, to just fill up with a Coke and moon pie. But that smell got the better of him.  So he walked into that Bayview Diner, walked in with his eyes wide open. And then she walked through the damn door.                 

She may have been just another blonde, a very blonde frail, just serving them off the arm in some seaside hash joint as he found out later, but from second one when his eyes eyed her she was nothing but, well nothing but, a femme fatale. Frank femme fatale, fatal. Of course between eyeing, pillow-talk dreaming, and scheming up some “come on” line once she had her hooks into him, which was about thirty seconds after he laid eyes on her, he forgot, foolishly forgot, rule number one of the road, or even of being a man in go-go post-war America.

What he should have asked, and had in the past when he wasn’t this dame-addled, was a dish like this doing serving them off the arm in some rundown roadside café out in pacific coast Podunk when she could be sunning herself in some be-bop daddy paid-up hillside bungalow or scratching some other dame’s eyes out to get a plum role in a B Hollywood film courtesy of some lonely rich producer. Never for a minute, not even during those thirty seconds that he wasn’t hooked did he figure, like some cagey guy would figure, that she had a story hanging behind that bandana hair.      

And she did. Story number one was the “serve them off the platter” hubby short-ordering behind the grill in that tramp cafe. The guy who, to save dough, bought some wood down at the lumber yard and put up that crooked door that she had come through on first sight and who spent half his waking hours trying to figure how to short-change somebody, including his Cora. Story number two, and go figure,  said hubby didn’t care one way or the other about what she did, or didn’t do, as long as he had her around as a trophy to show the boys on card-playing in the back of the diner living rooms and Kiwanis drunk as a skunk nights. Story number three was that she had many round-heeled down-at- the-heels stories too long to tell Frank before hubby came along to pick her out of some Los Angles arroyo gutter. Story number four, the one that would in the end sent our boy Frankie smiling, sorry half-smiling, to his fate was she hated hubby, hell-broth murder hated her husband, and would be “grateful” in the right way to some guy who had the chutzpah to take her out of this misery. But those stories all came later, later when she didn’t need to use those hooks she had in him, didn’t need to use them at all.

Peter Paul Markin Interlude One:  “I swear, I swear on seven sealed bibles that I yelled, yelled from some womblike place, at the screen once I saw her coming through that door for him, for Frank,  to get the hell out of there at that moment. This dame was poison, no question. Frank stop looking at those long paid for legs and languid rented eyes for a minute and get the hell out of there to some safe hobo jungle. Hell, just walk out the diner, café or whatever it is door, run if you have too, get your hitchhike great blue-pink American West thumb out and head for it. There’s a hobo jungle just down the road near Santa Monica, get going, and tonight grab some stolid, fetid stews, and peace.”

But here is where fate works against some guys, hell, most guys. She turned around to do some dish rack thing or other with her lipstick-smeared coffee cup and then, slowly, turned back to look at Frank with those languid  eyes, what color who knows, it was the look not the color that doomed Frank and asked in a soft, kittenish voice  “Got a cigarette for a fresh out girl?” And wouldn’t you know, wouldn’t you just know that Frank, “flush” with bracero dough had bought a fresh deck of Luckies at the cigarette machine out at that filling station just adjacent to the diner and they were sitting right in his left shirt pocket for the entire world to see. For her to see. And wouldn’t you know too that Frank could see plain as day, plain as a man could see if he wanted to see, that bulging out of one of the convenience pockets of those long-legged white short shorts was the sharply-etched outline of a package of cigarettes. Yah, still he plucked a cigarette into her waiting lips, kind of gently, gently for rough-edged Frank, lit her up, and dated her up with his eyes. Gone, long-gone daddy gone, except for dreams, and that final half-smile.   

Peter Paul Markin Interlude Two: “I screamed again, some vapid man-child scream, some kicking at the womb thump too, but do you think Frank would listen, no not our boy. You don’t need to know all the details if you are over twenty-one, hell over twelve and can keep a secret. She used her sex every way she could, and a few ways that Frank, not unfamiliar with the world’s whorehouses in lonely ports-of-call, was kind of shocked at, but only shocked. He was hooked, hook, line and sinker. Frank knew, knew what she was, knew what she wanted, and knew what he wanted so there was no crying there.”

Here is what is strange, and while I am writing this even I think it is strange. She told Frank her whole life’s story, the too familiar father crawling up into her barely teenage bed, the run-aways, returns, girls’ JD homes, some more streets, a few whorehouse tricks, some street tricks, a little luck with a Hollywood producer until his wife, who controlled the dough, put a stop to it, some drugs, some L.A. gutters, and then a couple of years back some refuge from those mean streets via husband Manny’s Bayview Diner.

Even with all of that Frank still believed, believed somewhere from deep in his recessed mind, somewhere in his Oklahoma kid mud shack mind, that Cora was virginal. Some Madonna of the streets. Toward the end it was her scent, some slightly lilac scent, some lilac scent that combined with steamed vegetable sweat combined with sexual animal sweat combined with ancient Lydia MacAdams' bath soap fresh junior high school crush sweat drove him over the edge. Drove him to that smiling chair.           

He had to play with fire, and play with it to the end. Christ, just like his whole young stupid gummed up life he had to play with fire. And from that minute, the lit cigarette minute, although really from the minute that Frank saw those long legs protruding from those white shorts Manny was done for.

And once Frank had sealed his fate (and hers too) on that midnight  roaring rock sandy beach night when the ocean depths smashing against the shore drowned out the sound of their passion everybody from Monterrey to Santa Monica knew he was done for, or said they knew the score after the fact. Everybody who came within a mile of the Bayview Diner anyway. Everybody except Manny and maybe somewhere in his cheap- jack little heart he too knew he was done for when Cora, in her own sensible Cora way, persuaded him that he needed an A-One grease monkey to run the filling station.  

The way Frank told it even I knew, knew that everybody had to have figured things out. Any itinerant trucker who went out of his way to take the Coast highway with his goods on board  in order to get a full glance at Cora and try his “line” on her knew it (Manny encouraged it, he said it was good for business and harmless, and maybe it was with them). Knew it the minute he sat at his favorite corner stool and saw a monkey wrench-toting Frank come in for something and watch the Frank-Cora- and cigar-chomping Manny in his whites behind the grille dance play out. He kept his eyes and his line to himself on that run.

Damn, any dated –up teen-age joy-riding kids up from Malibu looking for the perfect wave at Roaring Rock (and maybe some midnight passion drowned out by the ocean roar too) knew the minute they came in and smelled that lilac something coming like something out of the eden garden from Cora. The girls knowing instinctively that Cora lilac scent was meant for more than some half-drunk old short order cook. One girl, with a friendly look Frank’s way, and maybe with her own Frank Roaring Rock thoughts, asked Cora, while ordering a Coke and hamburger, whether she was married to him. And her date, blushing, not for what his date had just said but because he, fully under the lilac scent karma, wished that he was alone just then so he could take a shot at Cora himself.  

Hell even the California Highway Patrol motorcycle cop who cruised the coast near the diner (and had his own not so secret eyes and desires for Cora) knew once Frank was installed  in one of the rooms over the garage that things didn’t add up, add up to Manny’s benefit. And, more importantly, that if anything happened, anything at all, anything requiring more than a Band-Aid, to one Manny DeVito for the next fifty years the cops knew the first door to knock at.

Look I am strictly a money guy, going after loot wherever I could and so I never got messed up with some screwy dame on a caper. That was later, spending time later. And maybe if I had gotten a whiff of that perfume things might have been different in my mind too but I told Frank right out why didn’t he and Cora take out a big old .44 in the middle of the diner and just shoot Manny straight out, and maybe while the cop was present too.  Then he /they could have at least put up an insanity or crime of passion defense. Not our boy though, no he had to play the angles, play Cora’s evil game.

These two amateurs gummed up the job every which way, gummed it so that even a detective novel writer would turn blush red with shame. Murder is, from guys that I know who specialize in such things, make a business out of taking guys out for dough, an art form and nothing for amateurs to mess around with.  They tried one thing, something with poison taken over a long time that couldn’t be traced but Manny was such a lush it didn’t take. Then they tried to get him drunk and drown him off of Roaring Rock but that night around two in the morning about sixty kids from down around Malibu decided to have a cook-out after their prom night. In the end they just did the old gag that the cops have been wise to since about 1906 and conked him, threw him in the car, drove to the Roaring Rock and pushed him and the car over the cliff. Jesus, double jesus.  

Peter Paul Interlude Three: “Frank, one last time, get out, get on the road, this ain’t gonna work. That poison thing was crazy. That drunk at the ocean thing was worst. The cops wouldn’t even have had to bother to knock at your door. Frank on this latest caper she’s setting you up. Who drove the car, who got the whiskey, who knew how to trip the brake lines, and who was big enough to carry Manny?  Why don’t you just paint a big target on your chest and be done with it. She just wants the diner for her own small dreams. You don’t count. Hell, I ain’t no squealer but she is probably talking to that skirt –crazy (her skirt) cop right now. Get out I say, get out.”  

If you want the details, want to see how she framed him but good and walked away with half the California legal system holding the door open for her, just look them up in the 1946 fall editions of the Los Angeles Gazette. They covered the story big time, and the trial too. That’s just the details though. I can give you the finish now and save your eyes, maybe. Frank, yah, Frank was just kind of smiling that smile, what did I call it, half-smile, all the way to the end. Do you need to know more?