“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 351: “H.G.”

Let’s rejoin our hero Arnold Schnabel and his godly companion “Josh”, here in the Tussaudian stillness of the black-and-white world of the Little Caesar Room…

(Kindly go here to read our previous thrilling episode; advanced students of mental disorder may click here to return to the very first chapter of this Gold View Award™-winning 53-volume autobiography.)

“Arnold Schnabel has with some justice been compared to ‘outsider’ artists such as Henry Darger or Adolf Wölfli, but to my way of thinking it is Arnold Schnabel who is on the inside, and all we need do to join him there is to enter into his endlessly astounding magnum opus.” — Harold Bloom, on 30 Minute Meals with Rachael Ray.



“Feel better now?” he said, and he was smiling.

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

And it was true, the pain in my head had been replaced by what felt like a plum-sized hole in my cranium, but when I touched the spot with my free hand I felt only a small slight rubbery bump.

I tried to disengage my hand from Josh’s, but he seemed reluctant to let it go, and of course he was infinitely stronger than I, as I suppose he was stronger than everyone else in the universe, with the possible exception of the other two persons of the Trinity.

“Let me just feed you some more of the old cosmic energy, Arnie. You’ll feel good as new in another minute.”

“No, really, I’m fine, Josh,” I said, and in fact I could now feel this energy surging a bit too strongly, and hotter, as if it were about to cause my brains to bubble out of the top of my skull like a pot of beans that’s been left on the stove too long. The reader must remember that Josh was still quite under the influence of drink, and so was probably not in complete command of his usual miraculous skills.

“You’re sure?” he said. “’Cause you still look a little, I don’t know –”

“Seriously, Josh, you can let go of my hand now,” I said, and I could swear I now felt drops of hot blood oozing out into the porches of my inner ears.

“Okay, pal,” he said, and he finally disengaged my hand, cutting off the bright hot current in mid-stream, and leaving my hand just a little numb, but I felt the droplets of blood crawling back into the recesses of my inner ears, and my head hadn’t exploded, so no harm done. I was however, and for the thirty-seventh time that day, as drenched as if I had been dipped into a vat of sweat.

“So,” he said, looking at the shelves of liquor, “one more for the road?”

I knew we shouldn’t, but I was suddenly as thirsty as a man who’d just come in from jogging a few miles in the middle of the Sahara desert at midday.

“Well,” I said, “just one more, then we really should go I think.”

“Hey, what about this stuff?” he said, and he picked up a bottle of Seagram’s Seven.

“It’s okay, Josh,” I said. “But –”

“Is it one of those private stock fine malt whiskies?”

“No,” I said. “But –”

“Where d’ya think they keep the good stuff?” he said.

“Josh,” I said. “Remember I said we should stick to beer?”


“But,” he said.

I was getting tired of repeating myself with him. If it was truly his intention to become a normal human being he was definitely picking up some very human traits.

“No buts,” I said. “One more mug of Rheingold apiece, and that’s it.”

“But,” he said.

“No,” I said.

He stood there, looking at me. I guess he was wondering if he should pull rank or not. And, really, what could I do if he did? He looked at the bottle of Seagram’s, which he was still holding in his hand.

“I really liked that private stock stuff that Henry guy had upstairs,” he said.

“Josh,” I said.

“What’s this about private stock stuff?” said a voice I had never heard before. Josh and I had been facing each other, standing there behind the bar, and I turned and saw a little man walking in our direction from the hallway entrance that Josh and I had just come through a month or so ago.

“Oh, hello,” said Josh.

“You fellows look like you’ve been having a little party,” said the man, coming closer. He wore a derby and a dark grey three-piece suit, and he walked with a cane, although I don’t think he needed the cane, I mean he wasn’t crippled. He looked to be about fifty, he was about five-foot-four, and he had a bit of a pot belly.

“Just a couple of drinks is all,” said Josh.

“What’d you do, anyway, stop time?” said the little man.

He had reached the bar now, and he was looking at Bubbles and Blondie, both of them frozen with one arm curved as if gracefully in the air.

“Yeah, stopped time,” said Josh. “Arnold here thought we needed a little break.”

“A little break from the festivities,” said the man. He was still looking back and forth from Blondie to Bubbles, looking at their bodies that is.

“Sort of,” said Josh. “A quiet moment. A drink. A chat.”

“Well,” said the little man. “If you fellows are having one I suppose I will. That is if I’m not intruding.”

“No, not at all,” said Josh. “What would you like? We were just wondering where they would keep the really good stuff here.”


“I believe it’s normally kept on the top shelf,” said the man.

“But,” I said.

“I see a bottle of Napoleon brandy up there if I’m not mistaken,” said the fellow.

“Napoleon brandy?” said Josh. “Is that good?”

“It can be,” said the little guy. “Hand it down.”

Josh reached up, brought down this brandy bottle and handed it down to the little man. The bottle was very dusty and its top was sealed with black wax.

The man looked at the label, then put the bottle down on the counter. Hooking his cane over his forearm, he reached inside his suit-jacket and brought out a pair of wire-rimmed pince-nez eyeglasses and put them on his nose. Then he picked up the bottle again, blew some of the dust off it, and examined the writing on the label.

“Hey, Josh,” I said. “Maybe we really should just stick to beer, you know?”

“Maybe,” he said, and then, speaking to the little man, he said, “So, what do you think? Good stuff?”

“It’s probably all right,” he said. He put the bottle back on the bar top, then took off his glasses and put them away again. “At least it hasn’t been opened. We’re going to need a corkscrew.”

“Corkscrew, corkscrew,” said Josh. “Arnie, help me find a corkscrew.”

“But,” I said.

“Oh, wait, never mind,” said the little man. “I forgot.” He reached into his trousers pocket and brought out a handsome curved wooden-handled pocket knife. He pulled a corkscrew out from the handle. “See? Be prepared, that’s my motto.”

“I have to get me one of those,” said Josh.

The little man turned and looked around the room.

“There’s an empty booth over there,” he said. “Bring three glasses. Snifters if they have them. Better make sure they’re clean.”

“Three snifters, coming up,” said Josh. “By the way, Arnie and I were going to have a beer, do you want one?”

“What kind of beer?”

“Rheingold,” said Josh.

“Oh. Rheingold,” said the man. “None for me, thanks.”

The little man took up the bottle, turned and started walking toward an empty booth across the barroom.

“Josh,” I said, in a low voice. “We were just going to have one beer, remember?”

“Well, we can have a beer too,” he said.

I gave up.

“Okay,” I said. “But really, we should be going soon.”

“Sure,” he said. “Look, you draw us a couple more Rheingolds, Arnie, and I’ll grab the snifters.”

“Right,” I said.

He leaned in close to me. His breath smelled like geraniums on a fresh summer day, even after all he had drunk, and all the cigarettes he had smoked, and after throwing up.

“You’re probably wondering who that guy is,” he said, in a slightly loud whisper.

“Well, I was, sort of,” I said.

“You started to ask me about him earlier.”

“I did?”

“Yeah.”

The little man had sat down at the booth, and I could see him starting to peel the wax off the mouth of the bottle, using the blade of his pocket knife.



“Oh, look, here’s some snifters,” said Josh.



There was a row of them upside down on a towel on a shelf. He picked one up and held it up to the light, the white light.

"This one looks clean," he said.

He put it down, and then glanced over at me.

"Hey, how about those beers, Arnold?" he said.

“Oh, right,” I said.

I picked up the two mugs we had emptied.

“Uh-oh,” said Josh.

“What?” I said.

He was holding up two more snifters to the light.

“Lipstick on this one,” he said.

He put down one of the snifters, the one without lipstick. He had a handkerchief in the breast pocket of his suit jacket, I probably never mentioned it before. The handkerchief that is. He took it out and began wiping the lipstick off the snifter.

He glanced over at me again.

“Go ahead, Arnie,” he said. “Pour us two cold ones.”

“Right,” I said.

I started to turn and head for the beer taps.

“We call him H.G.,” he said.

“Pardon me?” I said. I stopped and turned again.

“The little guy.” He blew into the snifter, gave it another wipe with his handkerchief. It looked like silk, and I could see it was monogrammed, with the initials J.C. “We call him H.G.”

“H.G.?” I said. “You mean H.G. Wells?”

There was another famous author I wasn’t very familiar with, although I had a vague memory of reading The Invisible Man when I was in the army.

“No, not that H.G.,” said Josh. He held the snifter up to the light again.

Wait, come to think of it, I think I had only read the Classics Illustrated version. Anyway, I had definitely seen the movie, with Claude Rains.

I looked over at the little man in the booth. He was digging his corkscrew into the bottle now, with a determined expression on his face.

I looked back at Josh. He was refolding his handkerchief. 

“This is a different H.G.,” he said. “You would know him by his more popular name though.”

“What’s that?” I said.

He tucked the handkerchief back into his breast pocket.

“The holy ghost,” he said.

(To be continued, despite the dictates of so-called common sense.)

(Please turn to the right-hand column of this page to find what might possibly be an up-to-date listing of links to all other pixeliticially available chapters of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train To Heaven©. Now published concurrently in the Collingswood Patch™: “New Jersey’s last lone keening voice in the wilderness.”)



Thanks to birthday girl Jackie Jones for:




“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 350: oblivion

Our hero Arnold Schnabel, in attempting to vault the bar in the Little Caesar Room, has thus rendered himself unconscious...

(Please click here to read our preceding chapter; if you really can’t get enough of this nonsense then go here to return to the very beginning of this Gold View Award™-winning 69-volume memoir.)

“Arnold Schnabel – truly not just the greatest writer of his own time, but perhaps of any time and of any universe, real or imagined, or otherwise.” — Harold Bloom, in his “Books Are Not Just For Eggheads” column in Man’s Adventure Magazine.

Obviously the state of unconsciousness into which I had fallen was not a permanent one, or I would not now be inscribing these very words.

Was I unconscious for only a few moments, or was it for a few hours, or even centuries?

The question I suppose is basically meaningless, since Josh had stopped the flow of time anyway.

I’ll only say that after an unspecified period of oblivion I once again became aware of myself, but it was not simply an awareness of that self which currently lay sprawled on the rubber floor mat behind the bar of the Little Caesar Room. 

 

That particular awareness was certainly there, but simultaneously I was aware of another self lying in a very similar position by the street window of Mr. Arbuthnot’s kitchen in Cape May, as well as the madman who, if not in his darkest hour then at least in one of his darkest hours, had been visited by the son of God himself, and I was also aware of that Arnold Schnabel who had traveled with my friend Dick Ridpath through a painting hanging on a stairway wall to a French seaside resort in the previous century, where I had met that young fellow Marcel Proust, and I was also that other version of me who had been struck by lightning and had then gone to the next world and to the mansion on the hill of the father of the son of God, where I had spent most of my time looking fruitlessly for a bathroom, but then I was sent back to the earth again, and I was the me who later that day had opened a door in Mrs. Biddle’s house only to find himself in the Philippines, in the 1930s, where I had inadvertently contributed to the demise of the young Mrs. Biddle’s husband Jimmy, and I was the Arnold who had met St. Thomas Becket, and the sub-devil Jack Scratch, and finally even the prince of darkness himself, with whom I was to do battle on some several occasions.

I was the Arnold Schnabel who had awoken one morning to find himself condemned by the aforementioned and vindictive prince of darkness to being a character in a tedious novel written by a woman of my acquaintance who was possibly even more mentally unstable than myself. 



And I was the Arnold who, having managed (and not for the first time) to defeat the prince of darkness, had returned yet again to his own world and had then met a man who was a character from yet another novel, invading my nonfictional world, or at least the world I considered to be nonfictional. 



I was the bold adventurer who had traveled once again into the world beyond in an attempt to bring a degenerate old man back from the dead, and who had somehow succeeded in doing so.



I was the Arnold who had partaken in a potentially scandalous series of escapades with a Victorian doll who came to life, and the Arnold who was friends with a talking fly, the Arnold who had allowed himself to be bullied by a talking cat.



I was that Arnold Schnabel who had perhaps foolishly gone back to the universe of the aforementioned madwoman’s tedious novel in search of his friend the son of God, who now went by the name of Josh, and who had passed out in a bar in a 1930s movie, after he had halted time in its tracks.


And, yes, I was the character in a bad novel who had entered into yet another novel, probably just as bad, and thus become yet another fictional character, a character who had then escaped into another novel he found on a bus station rack in that fictional world within a fictional world, and who had, after a series of highly implausible adventures, escaped also from that thricefold fictional world back into the first fictional world by the skin of his, or my, teeth.

Somehow none of this seemed confusing, at least to me it didn’t.

I was all these Arnolds, and many others.

I was even the rather sad and boring Arnold I had been for the first forty-two years of my life.

I felt that all I had to do was to will it and I could return to any of these incarnations of me, and to the time that at the time seemed to be the present time.

And if I did so, would events then transpire differently? Would I behave differently?

I had no idea, just as I had never known what was going to happen next in any of those billions of present moments in any of my lives, any of my incarnations.

But besides all these lives which I had lived, and which still were being lived in a universe in which the past was the present, I could also sense – as if just around the corner, on the next street, or maybe down a hallway or up a flight of stairs – the existence of myriads other Arnolds I had yet to encounter in who knew how many worlds, and all I had to do was to go down a stairwell, or hop on a bus, or open a door, and I might then inhabit any one of these other Arnolds in worlds as yet unknown to me, these future worlds which were as much a part of the present as the past was, and as much here as anywhere, and all I had to do was to will myself into one of these worlds and there I would be.

Or, I could remain where I was, floating somehow around and above and yet within all these selves and universes, just as Josh’s father was alleged to be everywhere at once.

Or should I return?



Return to which Arnold? 



There were so many of them, at least a million that I knew of, at a rough estimate, and there might well be millions more. 

And was it even up to me whether I returned or not?

I wasn’t sure…

“Hey, wake up, buddy.”

I woke up.

It was Josh, squatting next to me, gently slapping my face.

“Come on, pal, snap out of it,” he said.

“Where am I?” I said.

“You’re lying on this wet dirty mat behind the bar here at the Little Caesar Room. Where did you think you were?”

“Oh, nowhere,” I said. “Or everywhere. It’s hard to explain.”

“How does your head feel?”

He was touching what I now realized was a lump on the right side of my skull.

“It hurts,” I said.

“Arnie, Arnie, Arnie,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

“What am I gonna do with you?”

“I was wondering the same thing about you,” I said.

“Touché,” he said. “Here, let me take care of that bump for you. A little laying-on-of-the-hands, you’ll be good as new, pal.”

“You know, that’s okay, Josh.”

“What, you don’t want me to fix it?”

“I don’t think it’s anything serious.”

“You just said it hurts.”

“I’m used to something hurting,” I said.

“I’m getting the feeling you just don’t want me to heal you.”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“Why in God’s name?” he said, which sounded funny coming from him of all people.

“I can’t really explain it,” I said.

“Can’t or won’t.”

“I’m afraid an explanation would only become possible after at least a couple of months of psychiatric consultations,” I said.

“Fine,” he said. “But let me help you up at least.”

The reader should know that I had remained lying on my back on that thick wet nubbly floor mat throughout all this conversation.

“Okay,” I said.

With that fluidity of movement and physical grace so typical of Josh, he took my left hand in his right hand and rose to his feet, pulling me to mine. I felt a warm bright energy flowing from his hand into my own hand as he did so, and I realized that this was a healing energy, I could feel it flowing up my arm and through my shoulder, up the back of my neck and into my skull directly to the bump on my head, and I could feel the bump tingling in a pleasant way, and the pain that had been emanating from it seemed to hiss away like air from a punctured bicycle tire into the smoky atmosphere of the bar.



That was Josh. He was a nice guy, but if he really wanted to do something he was going to do it, and that was about all there was to it.

(Continued here, because there’s no turning back now.)

(Kindly look to the right-hand column of this page to find what is meant to be a current listing of links to all other officially released chapters of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train To Heaven©. Now published simultaneously in the Collingswood Patch™: “New Jersey’s last lonely voice of literacy and high culture.”)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 349: leap

Let’s rejoin our hero Arnold Schnabel here in the black-and-white world of the Little Caesar Room, where his divine but somehow all-too-human friend “Josh”, under the influence of that most recent mug of Rheingold, has fallen asleep face-down on his arms at the bar...

(Kindly go here to read our previous episode; if you’re looking for a new reason not to leap from the top of the Eiffel Tower you may click here to return to the very first chapter of this Gold View Award™-winning 53-volume autobiography.)

“To tell the truth, Jack, the only thing that really keeps me going these days is the prospect of reading another chapter of Arnold Schnabel’s inimitable masterwork.” — Harold Bloom, on The Jack Paar Show.

I took a quiet moment for myself here.

After all, Josh had stopped time, which meant that I myself now had all the time in the world, in this world at least, and, who knew, perhaps in every world and every universe or dimension or mode of existence, fictional or otherwise.

I could even take a nap myself now if I so chose, simply cross my forearms on the bar parallel to my torso and then lean forward, lowering my weary head and burying my face, just as Josh had done, and with any luck I wouldn’t even fall off my barstool. But I wasn’t that sleepy, or quite that drunk, not yet I wasn’t anyway.

I could even, if I wanted to, without fear of scorn or censure, remove all my clothing and shout Communist slogans, and when I grew tired of that I could jump up on the bar and dance the Watusi while whistling “Dixie”, and for a mad moment I considered doing all that but then it occurred to me that if I did I might wake Josh up, which would be embarrassing, for me, anyway, and maybe even for Josh, too.

He was snoring now, but gently and in a muffled way, face-down there on his forearms, his straw Trilby hat still on his head.

I wondered if he was dreaming.

What does the son of God dream of?

Are the worlds he dreams of real worlds?

Or, once he has dreamt of a world, does it then perforce become real?

As usual with me when it comes to philosophical questions, I lost interest almost as soon as the questions were asked.

On a much more mundane level, I wondered if I should have one more beer before waking Josh up and trying to get him out of here and also incidentally trying to get myself back at long last to what I still liked to consider the real world.

And then while I was just beginning to ponder this last question I found myself looking at Josh’s open pack of Pall Malls, still standing on the bar where he had left it, with his beautiful black enamel-and-gold Ronson standing up right next to it, back to front.

This would be a perfect time for a cigarette, if ever there were one.

Now it was true that I had only given up cigarettes the morning of the day before, but it was also true that to me at least if no one else that, as I had just said to Josh, yesterday morning felt like at least half-a-decade in the past. I couldn’t even remember at the moment most of what I had experienced since awakening the previous day with my usual dry hacking cough in my little attic room. No, the remembering would come later, when I finally found some quiet hours to sit with my marble copy books and my Bic pens, on my aunts’ front porch, or at the metal table under the shade of the oak tree out back, scribbling obliviously away, attempting to preserve these adventures, if only for myself, or for my sense of myself, as no one else will ever read these memoirs with the possible exception of a psychiatrist or some earnest student of mental illness.



One cigarette wouldn’t kill me.

But then what would it say about my willpower if I couldn’t refrain from cigarettes for not even two days, no matter how long those not even two days seemed?

But on the other hand, who cared what it said about my willpower, and so I reached over and picked up the pack and the lighter and set them down in front of me.

Just one.

One cigarette, here while time was stopped in this black-and-white world, in which, now that I thought about it and took notice, immobile clouds of cigarette and cigar smoke gently marbled the atmosphere, and frozen streams of various shades of grey curved and swirled from the noses and mouths of my fellow inhabitants and from the cigarettes and cigars and pipes in their fingers or lips, or balanced in ashtrays.

But if I was going to have a cigarette I might as well have another beer.

One beer wouldn’t kill me either, at least not immediately. Like the cigarette it would probably have to be followed by who knew how many thousands more of its kind before contributing in its own small way to my demise, and after all I might just get accidentally run over by a trolley car first or fall victim to a stray ricochet in a gangland shoot-out, or I might get bitten by a rabid dog, or struck by lightning while swimming (as I admittedly sometimes did) in a thunderstorm. The only sure thing was that something was going to get me in the end, and just that grim certainty itself made the prospect of a cigarette and a beer all the more inviting.

With a cigarette and a beer I could relax for a few minutes, enjoy the silence, this silence tempered only by Josh’s gentle snoring. I could think things over, or, even better, just let my mind go blank if only for a short time. Then I could stub out my butt, put down my empty mug, breathe a satisfied sigh, and then give Josh’s shoulder a shove or two, whatever it took to wake him up and get the show on the road again. He wouldn’t even notice that I had smoked one of his cigarettes, and he wouldn’t know I had helped myself to another beer, either, so I could pretend that I had merely sat there, patiently giving him some time to sleep it off for a bit. It’s not every day that one gets the chance to appear morally superior to the son of God.

So I made my decision.

One cigarette, but only one, and one mug of draft Rheingold, and only one, and definitely no B&B, nor even my favorite cocktail, a Manhattan, even though no one was there to stop me from mixing one, and I could even use the good stuff if I wanted to, Four Roses, or Old Forester, instead of the Fleischmann’s or Carstairs I normally settled for.
 

I got up off my barstool. All I had to do was pick up my empty mug, walk down to the nearest end of the bar, lift up the wooden flap that I could see down there, go to the beer taps and help myself, thus realizing a fantasy which I suppose most drinking men have entertained at one time or another.

But Josh had sailed so easily over the bar, twice, that I guess I thought if he could do it, I could do it – forgetting that I still had a not completely recovered sore right knee, and forgetting the even more important fact that Josh was the son of God and that I was a mortal man – and so, instead of doing the sensible thing and going down to the end of the bar and getting behind it that way, no, I stepped back a couple of paces, took a breath, and attempted to vault over the counter, using my left hand as a fulcrum if that’s the word.

I remember my left foot getting caught on the edge of the bar, I remember my left hand slipping on something liquid, probably beer, I remember tumbling over the bar as if I had not leapt of my own volition but had rather been the victim of one of Haystacks Calhoun’s fearsome body throws, and after that came a burst of white light and then blackness and unconsciousness.

(Continued here, because someone’s got to do it.)

(Please turn to the right-hand column of this page to find an up-to-date listing of links to all other published chapters of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train To Heaven©. Now appearing also in the Collingswood Patch™: “The voice of a small town with a collective soul as big as all the world.”)







tales of the hotel st crispian: chapter 111

"speaking of kevauver"

by manfred skyline 

illustrated by konrad kraus and eddie el greco

a rhoda penmarq studios™ joint

(please click here to read the entire sordid chapter.)