“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part Five: is it a budding romance for Mr. Arnold Schnabel?

We resume Arnold Schnabel’s memoir right where the last installment ended. Or rather, almost. There is an entire half-page of his holograph here that has been completely cross-hatched out. Perhaps a trained cryptologist will someday discover what lies in that paragraph, but for the nonce we will continue with the following. It is still presumably late June or perhaps early July, 1963:

What have I done.

The day after my previously recounted escapade at the Pilot House was no worse than what might have been expected, viz., killing hangover, suicidal depression,pathetic and meaningless remorse and guilt, and unremitting boredom relieved only by an infinite self-loathing, in other words nothing to get excited about, just another day at Villa Schnabel. But the next afternoon, having vowed for the 769th time never to touch alcohol again I was sitting over coffee at a small formica table at the Cape Coffee Shoppe, enjoying the first day of the rest of my life and feeling quite pleased with myself for having written -- and quite successfully I thought, at least by my standards -- a sonnet on the subject of having neither talent nor inspiration, when who should burst through the door but she.

She being this woman from my disgraceful evening at the Pilot House, this “Rhonda” or whomever.

“You!” she shrieked. “You!”

At first I didn’t recognize her but then she shrieked again.

“You!” she shrieked.

“Oh,” I said.

“How are you?”

“I’m, uh --” I stood, trembling I’m sure visibly, but if I were it fazed her not one bit.

“What are you writing?” she shrieked, and to avoid repetition I’ll just stipulate here that she shrieked on the average every other phrase.

“It’s uh --” I gestured dismissively at the damning notebook lying on the table, “it’s nothing.”

“It can’t be nothing!” I should note though that although she shrieked approximately half her phrases, she didn’t necessarily alternate shrieking with speaking in a normal voice, normal for her anyway, phrase for phrase. “I mean it’s gotta be something!” No, there was no pattern. “Is it your diary? What is it?

I learned a long time ago that it’s a mistake to talk to people about my bad poetry. But still I do it anyway, God knows why. But now, hungover, half-insane, bored already to the point of screaming, all I wanted to do was to escape. I grabbed the notebook and shoved it into my Bermuda shorts pocket.

“Well, it was nice meeting you,” I said, but I’m afraid I have to --”

“Oh! Don’t go! You know you don’t have to go! You’re just shy. I think that’s so endearing! And you’re such a gentleman! Won’t you ask a lady to have a cup of coffee with you?”

Don’t ask me how or why -- cowardice, weakness, the aforementioned perhaps-more-than-half insanity -- but before I knew it I was sitting back down with a refilled coffee cup and she was sitting across from me with a cup of her own, not that she needed it.

What happened next was like a Gestapo interrogation; without the pulled fingernails, it’s true, but after a few minutes I was ready to pull out my own fingernails. Oh, sure, she was asking me all about me, but I did not want to talk about me, I am sick of me, I am stuck with me every second of my life, and besides, it’s all so pathetic it’s embarrassing, unless I lie, and then if I lie it’s more embarrassing still.

In the end she got it all out of me anyway. The lifelong celibacy (well, all right, lifelong except for one drunken and depressing episode in the army, about which the less said the better, although I’ll doubtless say something about it before these memoirs are through), the living with one’s mother, the poem a week in the Olney Times, I even told her of my mental breakdown and hospitalization, of my returning to work finally and then being sent away from work indefinitely on half-pay, thinking maybe all this would scare her off. Ha.

“Arnold,” she said, “I’m going to make you my project.”

Oh no.

“Well, I must really be going,” I said, and started to get up.

She put her hand on mine.

“Sit down,” she said. “I know you don’t really have to go. Let’s talk a while.”

I sat down. And she talked. But now she went on to a subject even more boring than me: her.

I won’t go into it all, and besides I wasn’t listening to half of it, and half of what I was listening to I’ve already forgotten and it was only yesterday, but just for the record, she’s from Upper Merion, she works as a dental hygienist, she was married but is no longer, she has a child, a girl of some age I forget, whose name I forget. The child was with the former husband while the mother our heroine was enjoying this, her first ever vacation all by herself. It was all too dull, too much, too real, too little.

“Arnold,” she said, seeming to indicate a shift away from her autobiography. “Such a cute name. Say, you remember my name, don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” I said.

“Then what is it?”

“It’s Rhonda,” I said.

“What?”

“Rhonda?”

“My name’s not Rhonda.”

“Oh,” I said. “I’m terribly sorry.”

“You don’t remember my name?”

“Um, Veronica?”

“No.”

“Um --”

“I can’t believe you can’t remember my name.” I hadn't realized it but the shriek in her voice had gradually diminished in frequency and volume while she had been talking about herself, replaced by a non-hypnotic drone, but now the shrieking returned. "You jerk!" she shrieked.

“Uh, I was drunk, I’m afraid.”

“I was plastered, but I remembered your name.”

“Sorry.”

“You really don’t remember my name.”

Okay, this went on for way too long, but finally she broke down and told me her correct name:

“Mona. My name is Mona.”

“Oh,” I said. Rhonda, Mona, they were pretty similar really.

“Rhonda,” she said. “I should never talk to you again.”

“You’re right,” I thought. “You shouldn’t. Please don’t.”

But she did. And now I must leave off. I must change for dinner. Because I am taking this Mona person to dinner at the Merion Inn.

I am doomed.


(Quickly, click here to find out what happens next. Or check the right hand side of this page for listings of links to other episodes of Railway Train to Heaven, as well as to many of Arnold Schnabel's fine poems.)

Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Joan Jett:

"The Panic in Needle Park"

Check out my review over here.

Arnold Schnabel replies to his public

Arnold Schnabel published this sonnet without fanfare in the July 6 1963 issue of the Olney Times, where it went completely unnoticed by the critical and academic establishment, only to rise up again in 1978 when Sid Vicious declared it his favorite poem. Frequently anthologized, Harold Bloom has called the poem a "companion piece to 'Abandoned'" and I would agree; but it works perhaps even more powerfully considered by itself, preferably at 4 AM, in that hour when consciousness teeters precariously on that rusty razor's edge between despair and madness. Republished thanks to the continuing generosity of the Arnold Schnabel Society.

“Inspiration”

People often ask me, “Where do you get
Your inspiration from, a brand new poem
Every week, fifty-two weeks a year yet?”
It’s really not so hard, or so I tell them,
Not so hard at all once the poet learns
That no one really cares how well he writes,
That it doesn’t matter if his spirit burns
Or hides like a dog through Byzantine nights;
This poet is incapable of writing well
Anyway, but even if he were, it still
Wouldn’t matter; very few of us can tell
The difference between ambrosia and swill.
And that’s okay; now he is ready to sing.
Nothing stands in his way; not a thing.

(For links to many other inspiring Arnold Schnabel poems, and to his previously unpublished memoirs Railroad Train to Heaven, please see the right hand column of this page.)

“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode Two: in which young Harvey meets Dick and Daphne

Previously in Larry Winchester’s A Town Called Disdain: the recently discharged young soldier Harvey returns to his hometown of Disdain NM after a tour in Vietnam. He immediately goes from the bus to Burt’s Roadhouse, where he has a beer and re-unites with his mother Doris who waits on tables there. A neighborhood bully named Bull Thorndyke picks a fight with Harvey, who breaks a beer bottle in Bull’s face. Bull pulls a knife but Sheriff Dooley comes in, breaks up the confrontation with a pistol shot to the floor, and tells Bull to go to the doctor. Bull leaves but comes back a minute later with a shotgun to kill Harvey. The Sheriff stands in front of Harvey and for a moment there is a stand-off. Just then an attractive couple enter the bar-room, and while Bull is momentarily distracted Harvey unholsters the Sheriff’s revolver and kills Bull with a single shot to the heart.


“Oh, Lord,” said Doris.

“Sheeit,” said the Sheriff and he wiggled his forefinger in his ear.

Harvey stood there still holding the gun outstretched, as heavy as that fucking thing was he could barely feel it, in fact he could barely feel anything except his own heart pounding, and then he lowered the pistol, tried to twirl it, nearly dropped it, and handed it to the Sheriff butt-first.

“That was damn good shootin’, Harve, right through the ticker, and I ain’t sayin’ he didn’t have it comin’ but I got me a buzzin’ in this ear like a yellajacket stuck in a moonshine tequila jar.”

Harvey was just damn glad he hadn’t been aiming for Bull’s heart in which case it’d be him and the Sheriff both dead, but, well, that was karma for you.

The young woman in the doorway pinched out a bit of the fabric of her shirt, which was splattered with Bull’s blood.

“Fabulous,” she said.

The man, who was somewhat less liberally blood-splattered, took a silvery cigarette case out of his shorts pocket, clicked it open and offered it to the woman.

“Thank you, Dick.”

Harvey turned around. Standing in the doorway outside the men’s room was Mr. Big Jake Johnstone the rancher. He had a bottle of Pabst in one hand and his beautiful hand-engraved Colt New Service in the other. He’d been sitting on the toilet for the past half hour or so, having himself a good one and reading the paper when he heard the Sheriff’s first shot, and knowing the way things could go in Burt’s he had prudently taken his time finishing his business and then had gotten up without flushing the toilet. After washing his hands thoroughly and drying them, he cracked open the door and peeked out just in time to see Harvey shoot Bull. Only then had he drawn his gun and come out, trying to look like John Wayne in El Dorado. He never did flush the damn toilet, and now he slid his gun into the shoulder holster under his fancy western jacket and looked at the new couple.

“And y’all must be Daphne and Dick. We spoke on the telephone. I’m Jake Johnstone. Welcome to Disdain.”

****

The back lounge was just a small room with the same brown paneling as the big bar-room, but it had a few Tiffany-style lamps hanging from the ceiling, and the tables had red-and-white checked oilcloths. Burt had moved the dartboard back here for reasons of general safety, and the walls were decorated with a series of steel-framed and glass-covered black-and-white photographs of nuclear explosions.

“A V.O. Manhattan for the lady, Boodles Martini for the gentleman, and a Pabst and a Jack Daniel’s for Mr. Johnstone.”

“Thank you kindly, Doris,” said Mr. Johnstone.

“Oh my just look at your lovely blouse, honey.”

The young woman took off her sunglasses and looked. She was smoking a cigarette in a shiny black holder. She’d taken off her pith helmet and her damp dark hair was cut very short. Her skin was only very lightly tanned and it was perfectly smooth.

“I know, isn’t it terrible? I just bought this shirt too at this marvelous little tailor’s in Saigon. I knew I should’ve simply bought a dozen.”

Her eyes were grey and she was the most beautiful woman Doris had ever seen in person.

“Why don’t you let me wash it out for you sweetheart? I mean if you wanta use the ladies and change into somethin’ else I can just wash it out in the sink and hang it up out in the sun and in this heat it’ll be dry in just no time.”

“Oh don’t bother darling all my clothes get stained sooner or later it seems.”

“Oh but it’s such a nice soft cotton.”

“Doris,” said Mr. Johnstone, “tell young Harvey I’d like to see him in a little while if he’s got nothing better to do.”

“He’s only just back to playin’ that ol’ pinball machine. I’ll make sure he comes back to see ya, Mr. Johnstone.”

“Thanks, honey.”

Doris clutched her tray to her bosom and looked longingly at the newcomers.

“You folks married?”

The young woman said nothing but made a physically indescribable but subtle and amusing face, almost as if it had not quite occurred to her for some time that yes they were in fact married, now that you mention it.

“Yes, we are,” said the man. He’d taken off his sunglasses and his hat and he was as handsome as the woman was beautiful. He was about forty, with an athletic build, wavy dark hair flecked with grey, and clear blue eyes.

“Ahh, ain’t that nice. Y’all here on vacation?”

The man and the woman looked at each other.

“Uh, yeah,” said the man.

****

After waiting long enough just to show he would come in when he was damn good and ready and not a moment sooner Harvey finally sidled back into the lounge.

“Well, Harvey boy I see you finally have decided to deign to grace us with your presence. C’mere, boy.”

Harvey came over. Mr. Johnstone had removed his western jacket and his shoulder holster and gun and draped them over the back of his chair, but he still had his big old Stetson on.

“Siddown, son, siddown.”

Mr. Johnstone grabbed Harvey’s thin arm with his big paw and pulled him down into a chair. A bottle of Dom Perignon stood up out of a bucket of ice on the table.

“Ya want some champagne, son?”

“Got me a cold beer, Mr. Johnstone.”

“How about a shot?”

“I’m doin’ fine, Mr. Johnstone.”

“Lemme order ya another beer.”

“I got me a full beer, thanks anyway.”

“Harvey, like you to meet some friends of mine. They’re gonna be spendin’ a little time with me out on the ranch. Harve, this is -- Mrs. -- uh --”

Mr. Johnstone hesitated a moment, looking questioningly at the woman and then at the man.

“Smith,” said the woman and she put her cigarette holder with the foreign-looking cigarette in it from her right hand to her left hand and she extended her right hand palm-downward across the table to Harvey.

“Pleased to meet you, soldier.”

Harvey had never had a woman’s hand presented to him in this way. Her hand was long with long dark red nails that matched her lipstick and the splotches of Bull’s blood on her shirt. Harvey hesitated a moment and then he put his hand in hers so that his fingertips were touching her palm and his thumb was on the knuckle of her middle finger. Her hand felt moist and still and cool and just as he was about to take his hand away she squeezed it in hers with surprising strength and her nails dug into his fingers and he looked into her deep pale grey eyes and he got a tingle in his penis.

She let go of his hand and smiled, and Harvey drew back his hand and then the man extended his hand.

“Dick, uh -- Smith. Pleased to meet ya, fella.”

His hand was tanned and strong looking but the handshake was gentle and friendly. Weird thing was though he had this ugly scar tissue all around his fingernails on that hand.

No one said anything for a long moment. Mrs. Smith took a drag of her cigarette and continued to gaze at Harvey. Mr. Smith poured some champagne into his glass and, smiling, raised the glass to Harvey and drank. Mr. Johnstone just sat with his hands on his gut and a cigar in his mouth, beaming at Harvey.

“Why you call me in here, Mr. Johnstone?”

“Well, Harve, I wanta offer you a job.”

“What kinda job.”

“Workin’, out on the ranch.”

“I’m afraid my shit-shovelin’ days are over, sir.”

Harvey had worked a few summers in Big Jake’s stables.

“Got plenty o’ shit-shovelers already, Harve. Ain’t askin’ ya to be a shit-shoveler.”

“Then what you askin’ me?”

Mr. Johnstone took a big drag of his big cigar and then let it out slow.

“I liked the way you handled yourself out there, Harve. You were cool. Very cool. I could use a cool man like you.”

Harvey shook out a Tareyton. Mr. Smith picked up a scuffed silver lighter and as he leaned forward to give Harvey a light his shirttail rose up and Harvey caught a glimpse of what looked like a pistol grip sticking out of his shorts pocket. Harvey thought that Mr. Smith saw that he saw but Mr. Smith’s face remained smoothly affable as he flicked the lighter on. Harvey accepted the light, drew the smoke in and then let it out slowly.

“I ain’t lookin’ to be no hired pistolero, Mr. Johnstone.”

“I’m not askin’ you to be a pistolero, Harve. I’m just askin’ ya to -- uh -- to --”

“To be there,” said Mrs. Smith.

“That’s right, to be there,” said Mr. Johnstone. “Ya see. Mr. and Mrs. Smith are here on uh --”

“Vacation,” said Mr. Smith.

“Vacation,” said Mr. Johnstone. “And I promised to provide them with a good reliable man who knows the area, to -- to --”

“Show us around,” said Mrs. Smith.

“Show them around,” said Mr. Johnstone.

Harvey took a drink of his beer.

“For how long,” said Harvey.

“Well --” said Mr. Johnstone and he looked at Mr. Smith.

“Well, we’re not quite sure how long we’re staying, Harve. I hope I mean I think it wouldn’t be for too long. A week. Or two. You see it’s really by way of being a working vacation for me, I’m doing some, uh, research in the area and so it’s really hard for me to say.”

Harvey looked at each of them in turn, picked up his bottle of Rheingold and stood up.

“Mr. Johnstone, I appreciate the offer, but to tell ya the truth I just ain’t in the market for a job right now.”

“But, Harvey, like Mr. Smith here just said, this’d just be for a week or two.”

Harvey looked at his beer bottle for a moment before replying.

“Sir, right now one or two weeks is one or two weeks I don’t believe I got to spare.”

“Well, hell, just what you got to do that’s so important, boy?”

“Mr. Johnstone, past two years I been U.S. government property. What I got to do that’s so important now is to be my own property. But thanks for the offer. I’ll be seein’ ya all.”

He turned, and Mr. Johnstone said, “Fifty bucks a day, Harve. Under the table, free and clear, seven days a week.”

Harvey stopped but did not turn around.

“Your own private bungalow out on the ranch. All meals provided for.”

Harvey turned his head but kept his back to the table.

“Use of a car and any ridin’ horse in the stable.”

Harvey stood still.

“A free pass at the Photographic Arts Studio, Harve, for the length of your employment. Any girl in the stable, any time, free, gratis, and for nothing.”

Harvey turned around and looked at his beer bottle again.

“I dunno, sir. I just don’t think so.”

“God damn it boy, I like you. Hell, make it seventy-five bucks a day and that’s my final offer. I don’t pay my foreman that much but it’s just because Mr. and Mrs. Smith are such special guests of mine.”

Harvey took a deep breath but said nothing.

“One hundred,” said Mrs. Smith.

“What?” said Mr. Johnstone.

“A hundred a day,” said Mrs. Smith.

Mr. Johnstone looked at her with his mouth agape and she smiled softly at him, with the cigarette holder between her teeth.

“Yeah,” said Mr. Johnstone, somewhat weakly, “A hunnerd.”

Harvey thought it over for a few seconds, then came back over to the table and sat back down.

“When you want me to start, Mr. Johnstone?”

“How about right now,” said Mrs. Smith.

She was smiling at Harvey, still gripping the stem of the holder between her white teeth.

“Mrs., I just finished twenty-four months in the army, eight days in the San Francisco jail and the better part of two days in a damn Greyhound bus. I ain’t doin’ nothin’ tonight except gettin’ hornswoggled tonguewaggin’ sloppyassed drunk.”

“I’ll drink to that,” said Mrs. Smith.

****

(Click here for Episode Three. For links to the previous epsiodes, check the right hand column of this page.)

Eric Burdon and the Animals: San Franciscan nights --

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part Four: an evening at "The Pilot House", Cape May, NJ, June 1963

We pick up Arnold Schnabel’s memoir Railroad Train to Heaven precisely where our last installment left off. Arnold is still in Cape May with his mother, still enjoying his mandated leave of absence from the railroad, still on the seemingly endless road of recovery from his complete mental collapse the previous winter.

Carbon-testing analysis by a crack team of scientists from the Community College of Philadelphia indicates this passage to have been indited in June (or perhaps early July), 1963...

Two days of tedious sobriety following which I found myself in the Pilot House with a Manhattan before me. The call of the wild. Outside brilliant sunshine and shimmering heat, people in their bathing suits and sandals herding by to and from the beach. But inside the Pilot House all is cool and dim, the dulcet vocalizations of Pat Boone and Perry Como exuding from the jukebox. I prepare myself for oblivion. All is well. Home (my aunts’) is a mere few blocks' staggering distance.

Or, who knows, perhaps I shall do the sensible thing, have one or two, okay three at most, four at the absolute outside and then go home.

While pondering these alternatives and still on my first drink, wondering "Why?" for the thousandth time, and answering myself, “Why? Why anything?”, and reflecting what little good attending mass that morning had done me -- mirabile dictu: a woman spoke to me. She was sitting one stool away at the bar. If she had been there when I came in I had failed to notice her.

“Pardon me,” she said, holding her cigarette in that uptilted way that women do, “Do you have a light?”

“Of course, “ I said.

Like the perfect gentleman I always am unless I am in a state of insanity or extreme drunkenness, I quickly scrabbled up my Zippo from the bar, reached across and lighted her cigarette.

She began to chat with me. She was not bad-looking I suppose. Mid-thirties. With the hard forbidding blonde hair that is in style these days. She was not very interesting at all in conversation, slightly boring in fact, but I have always been the perfect gentleman with ladies, and I listened with I hope an interested and affable expression on my face, or at least what could pass for one. After a while she suggested I sit on the stool next to her, and of course I moved over.

In due course she revealed that she was single, divorced. When she asked me if I were married I told her the truth, that I wasn’t, nor had ever been.

“You’re not one of those, are you?” she asked, pointing her cigarette towards a table of elegant men with extravagant voices, a group of fellows who reminded me disconcertingly of some of our priests and parish ushers in the latter stages of one of our Communion breakfasts at the Schwarzwald Inn after a few rounds of Old Fashioneds had been served.

“No,” I said. “I suppose I’ve just never found the right girl.”

As if it were up to me.

She looked in my eyes, for once not saying anything. In a little while she went to the ladies’ room. I gestured to the bartender to fix us two more drinks. When he laid them down he said something like:

“Looks like you made a conquest, buddy.”

I smiled weakly.

She came back. We each had several more drinks. She became very merry indeed, and after a while Freddy Ayres the singer and accordionist came on with his supposed wife Ursula the saxophonist, and they played their songs. The woman of whom I write, her name was Rhonda, insisted that I dance with her. I did, in my clumsy fashion. She smelled of perfume, she was warm and moist with sweat, her Aquanetted hair abrased my nose. Her breath smelled of whiskey and cigarettes, as no doubt did mine. On about the fourth dance she said into my ear:

“Let’s get out of here.”

Soon we were walking on one of the streets between Washington and the beach. Swirly whirling night had fallen.

“Take me home,” she said.

“Of course,” I said.

We came to one of the rooming houses on Decatur Street.

“Let’s go around the back way,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

Once around the back, surrounded closely by ivy-covered house-wall and enormous fragrant azaleas and rhododendrons she put her arms around my waist.

“Kiss me,” she said.

“Oh, I don’t think we should do that,” I said.

“Why not?” she said. “Don’t you like me?’

“Of course, I do” I said, and it is true that I did not dislike her.

“Then why don’t you want to kiss me?”

“Well, it would be a near occasion of sin,” I said.

“You’re joking, right?”

“No,” I said, “I mean, if we kissed, which in itself may not be sinful, we could very well be making it more likely for us to go a bit further, which would be a sin.”

I took out my cigarettes, offered her one, she shook her head no.

“You’re not serious,” she said.

“But I’m a good Catholic,” I said, lighting my Pall Mall.

“But -- how old are you?”

I let out that first fine lungful of smoke, then told her my age, shaving off only a few years out of vanity.

“And -- you won’t let yourself kiss a woman?”

“Well, I suppose if I were engaged to her -- or of course if I were married --”

“But, how are you gonna know you want to marry a woman if you won’t even let yourself kiss her?”

“Well, I like to think Jesus would tell me.”

“Jesus.”

“Yes. I like to think He would somehow let me know.”

“Okay.”

She paused a bit, then said goodnight and went into the back entrance of the house, the screen door flopping closed loudly behind her.

I started to walk home, but when I was almost there I changed my mind. I turned and headed back to the Pilot House. There seemed little point in stopping now.

And hey presto, I was there again, and ordering another Manhattan.

“So, buddy,” the bartender said. “You sure work quick.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Always leave ‘em wantin’ more. That way they come back.”

“Yeah, you’re right," I said.

I took a sip of my drink, and I lit up another excellent Pall Mall. I turned on my stool and listened to Freddy Ayres sing. “Tiny bubbles,” he was singing, “in the wine, make me happy, make me feel fine. Tiny bubbles make me warm all over with a feeling that I’m gonna love you till the end of time. So here's to the golden moon, and here's to the silver sea, and mostly here's a toast to you and me..."

I might commit the nasty but venial sin of inebriation tonight but at least I would not double the offense by committing the far more vile and mortal sin of fornication.

I sipped again, took another drag of my cigarette, let the music and the drunkenness suffuse my being. Life was, if not good, then at the very least not damnable. Or so I hoped.

(Stagger over to here for Part Five of Arnold's runaway Railroad Train to Heaven. Turn to the right hand side of this page for a listing of links to other episodes as well as to many of his legendary poems. See below for the soundtrack to today's episode.)

Arnold Schnabel does not need you, Calliope!

Arnold Schnabel -- still staying (with his mother) at his aunts’ rooming house in Cape May, NJ, and temporarily bereft of ideas even in this exotic locale -- here somehow summons inspiration even from his very lack of inspiration. Note the complex, even tortuous, rhyme-scheme and the typically Schnabelian note of disquietude with which this stunning sonnet ends. First published in the Olney Times of June 29, 1963. Grateful thanks and all due homage to the Arnold Schnabel Society for permission to rebroadcast this poem.

“Abandoned”

I seem to have been abandoned by my muse,
But I’ve never let that stop me before;
There are so many topics from which to choose,
The poet need only turn the knob of a door
In his brain, walk through, and there, it’s his,
Real as that life to which he wakes with a scream is:
A new world, of which every little bit’s as
Real as a dream, and of course a dream is
Real when you are in it, and, often like the waking
World, a cause not for celebration but for quaking
In fear; but the poet now flies between
The waking and sleeping worlds, taking
What’s most real from both and making
Visible the unseen, and sacred the obscene.

(For links to many other vertiginous poems from Arnold Schnabel, and for a thrilling ride in his previously unpublished memoirs Railroad Train to Heaven, kindly check the right hand column of this page.)

Great Lost TV Shows, Vol. 7.1: the scarily talented Mr. Timothy Carey in “Goodbye, Mr. Wittmar”

If there was one episode that sealed the doom of Phil Leotardo’s classic but short-lived series Section 20, then it was “Goodbye, Mr. Wittmar”, written by Phil Leotardo and Tommy “Legs” Larkin, directed by Larry Winchester. First shown on Oct. 14, 1961 (and never aired again, ever) this show caused such a firestorm of indignation from schoolmarms and pious bawds throughout the land that the show’s primary sponsor, Tareyton Cigarettes, withdrew its association at once, and, after Leotardo failed to attract any sponsors at all besides the notoriously pennywise Pep Boys, the show was cancelled.

So what was all the hoopla about? I recently had the pleasure of seeing this episode for the first time in Larry Winchester’s screening room at his modest but tasteful Missionary/Georgian-style house on North Ivar Avenue in Hollywood. Phil Leotardo’s son Joe has preserved pristine 35mm prints of all the epsiodes of Section 20 in a refrigerated vault in the Leotardo home on Sunset Boulevard, and it was thanks to Joe that he, Larry, Legs Larkin, and I were able to watch the film.

The show begins with one of the most excruciating scenes of pedagogic abuse that I have ever seen since my own Catholic school days. After some minor offense (some snickering, and a muttered epithet that sounded very much like “gaybo”), math teacher Mr. Wittmar (Timothy Carey), hauls wise-ass punk Joey Baldinado (Michael Parks) to the front of the class. He then pulls two 20lb barbell plates out of the drawer of his desk and tells Joey that if he can hold them, one in each hand, arms outstretched, for five full minutes, then he will avoid further punishment. If he lets the weights down before the allotted time passes he will receive ten whacks with “the boot”. He pulls “the boot” from the drawer with a flourish. It is the rubber sole of some very large man’s boot.

Joey, instead of walking right out and getting himself transferred to public school, accepts the challenge. For almost the next five minutes the camera slowly wanders over the faces of the horrified watching students, the ungodly sadistic face of Mr. Wittmar, and the sweating contorted face of Joey Baldinado. At roughly the four-and-a-half minute mark, the boy's arms slowly come down, he drops the weights and almost collapses. The merciless Mr. Wittmar proceeds to force him to bend over a desk while he gives him ten whacks on the backside, as hard as he can. Joey tries to hold it in but finally is reduced to uncontrollable sobs. Close-up on the inscrutable face of Mr. Wittmar. Cut to a Tareyton commercial.

Oddly enough, this scene of disturbing brutality -- a scene the likes of which after all was played out daily in Catholic High Schools throughout the land -- did not cause all the uproar. No, that was caused by what followed.

To put it bluntly, Joey Baldinado, while pretending to be a completely reformed teacher’s pet, plans revenge. And, with the aid of his attractive older sister (Carolyn Jones), his classmates Argus the immigrant lad (Bo Hopkins), Big Mike the big dumb football player (Max Baer, Jr.), and Crazy Eddy the crazy kid (Russ Tamblyn), Joey indeed finally exacts his revenge one night in the woods behind the school, using not only cunning and guile but a screwdriver, a bucket of wet concrete, a can of motor oil, and an abandoned manhole.

What is more, Joey and his friends and sister get away with it, a fantasy come true for every kid who’s ever been abused by some asshole sadistic teacher. A truly satisfying ending (even if it did mean writing the talented Timothy Carey out of the show) but unfortunately the always powerful legions of self-righteous assholes in this country didn’t take so kindly to seeing one of their own dispatched in such a fitting and unpunished fashion.

Once again Phil Leotardo and his collaborators had proven themselves just too far ahead of their time. Or perhaps it would be better put to say they were behind their ideal time, as certainly the Bard of Avon’s audience would have had no problems with the gruesome climax of this episode, nor with the gradually fading screams of Mr. Wittmar as the closing credits rolled beneath the strains of Henry Mancini’s cheerful theme score.


(Turn to the right hand side of this page for a complete listing of other Great Lost TV Shows.)

The Dum Dum Boys

Read all about these nitwits over here.

"A Town Called Disdain", Episode One: in which Harvey comes back home from the army

It is with great pleasure that I present to you the first installment of the uncut complete version of Larry Winchester’s classic novel A Town Called Disdain, written in 1988 while the legendary film maker was recovering from two broken legs following a skiing accident near the town of Schping-Päden in the Swiss Alps. Originally published as a paperback original in 1989 by the Trolley Barn Press (Milwaukee), the book received scathing reviews where it was reviewed at all, but it has since attained a fervent and cult-like army of devotés (Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace, David Byrne, David Lynch, David Bowie, Ray Davies, Larry David, David Lee Roth) who have compared it to classics such as The Sorrows of Young Werther, Moby-Dick, Slaughterhouse-Five, Blood Meridian, and (and perhaps most à propos) Harold Robbins's post-post modern classic, The Carpetbaggers. Mind-bogglingly, A Town Called Disdain has never been reprinted (although even slightly-foxed copies of that first-and-only run of 2,000 have sold on eBay for up to $150).

This 1989 edition of Larry’s mammoth epic was cut by about 75,000 words -- as Larry says of those cuts: “Okay, the book ran a little long, and I needed the dough -- I had had a bad run at the faro tables in Vegas, plus I had tax problems -- so I let the editor cut it by about half.”

Larry has very kindly given me permission to broadcast, in installments, his own “director’s cut” of A Town Called Disdain. Larry again: “This is the real version of A Town Called Disdain. This is the version that pulls no punches. You pays your money and you takes your ride. Don’t yell at me if you fall off the goddamn horse.”

Here is our first episode. (I hope to post up new installments once or twice a week or so as I struggle to decipher and transcribe Larry's much-scribbled-over original typescript.) Enjoy:

A Town Called Disdain

The driver pulled the lever and it was like he’d opened the door to a furnace, hot and bright as all hell, and the thin young soldier in the rumpled dress uniform hefted his duffel bag over his shoulder and stepped down into it. Harvey was back home now, and there was the Welcome to Disdain New Mexico sign lying on its back in the weeds.

The bus took off down the highway and Harvey stood there squinting in a cloud of exhaust and dust and took it all in for a minute, the town and the scraggly hills and the sun burning down on it all.

And a funny smell, he’d never noticed it before because he’d never been away before, a mixture of hot dirt and baking rubber, of gasoline and dried garbage, and a sharp high tingle in the back of his nose with something like squashed lightning bugs and old bones in it.

There was Burt’s Hideyway right in front of him, it hadn’t changed, no, it had, the local kids had discovered spray paint, and there was graffiti all over it, in English and Spanish. The usual collection of heaps was parked in front, along with one shiny new red ‘69 Cadillac Coupe de Ville convertible with a pair of fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview, and that was probably Big Jake’s.

To the right of Burt’s was the dirt lot with some gutted and wheelless cars and trucks in it, and on the other side of that was the hill of automobile tires, all heat hazy in the sunlight, and over there on the far side of Tuk’s Service was the little clapboard bungalow Harvey had grown up in. The first house you passed coming into town and the last one you passed leaving.

Nobody was out in the afternoon heat, not even a dog, and the only thing moving was a tumbleweed rolling in fits and starts down Main Street.

Well, fuck this shit, he was still wearing his dress uniform because all his civvies had got ripped off in San Francisco, and he was breaking out all over in sweat.

He headed on into Burt’s.

*****

On the eve of his eighteenth birthday Harvey had shot his mother’s boyfriend in the thigh and also shot and killed the boyfriend’s dog. Old Judge Moseby had tried to be fair. On the one hand this was the fourth or fifth time the Harvey had been brought up before him, but on the other hand the boyfriend, Bennie Driscoll, had been known to beat Harvey’s mother and had in fact given her a black eye on the night in question. So the judge decided to give the boy a choice between military service or the Youth Detention Center until he reached the age of twenty-one. Harvey had “volunteered” to be drafted, and now he was back after a two-year hitch.

He’d gotten drunk for two weeks in Oakland and San Francisco while awaiting his discharge papers which had somehow gotten replaced, and he wound up breaking the jawbone of a marine lifer gunnery sergeant who’d called him a little army faggot. He sweated out eight days in the San Francisco jail, and then the charges were dropped on the provision that he immediately get on the bus and never set foot in San Francisco again.

****

Inside the door he stood with his bag still on his shoulder as his eyes adjusted to the dimness. He could barely see the people in the bar at first, but he could tell that everybody had turned and was staring at him. And then they all took shape, all the usual crowd who weren’t dead yet. Keely and Mo and Quint were over there at the bar in their usual seats, maybe a little more greenish than he remembered them being but still alive technically, and there was old Burt behind the bar.

An Ipana commercial was on the black-and-white TV and nobody was playing the jukebox.

And he got that smell thing again, this time it was the Burt’s smell of stale beer and stale cigarette and cigar smoke and stale piss and spat-out tobacco juice ground into old linoleum with cow-shitty bootsoles. But at least the joint was air-conditioned.

He headed on over to the bar, put his bag down and took out his Tareytons.

“Well, look who the cat drug in,” said Burt.

“Hey, Burt,” said Harvey. Burt pulled out his lighter and Harvey leaned forward and took the light.

“Fuckin’ Harvey,” said Keely.

“Fuckin’ A,” said Mo.

“Fuckin’ right,” said Quint.

You get the idea. This was not the fucking Algonquin Round Table.

“Lemme buy Harvey a fuckin’ beer.” said Mo.

“Fuck you, I’m buyin’, said Keely.

“Fuck ya both --” started Quint and then Burt said, “Fuck all y’all, I’m gettin’ this one. Whatcha drinkin’ Harve?”

Harvey asked for a Rheingold and Burt pulled one out. Harvey said thanks and took a good long pull. Everyone was still staring at him. Norman Mailer was on the TV now, talking to Mike Douglas about the existential meaning of the moon landing, as if anybody gave a shit.

“Hey, Harve, you kill anybody?” asked Keely.

“Fuck no,’ said Harvey. “I was too busy tryin’ to keep my own ass alive and shittin’.”

Well, this passed for a real howler in this joint, and Mo and Quint and Keely and a few other motherfuckers who didn’t have sense enough to fall over when they were dead all started pounding the bar and guffawing.

Harvey finished his beer in about two more gulps, and one of the Three Stooges bought him another one. He got some change off of Burt, stubbed out his smoke, and took his beer over to the pinball machine. It was new, The Flash. He pulled a chair over to near the machine and put his bottle down on it. He unbuttoned his dress tunic and laid it over the chair back. He got into position in front of the machine and tried to stick a nickel in, and then he realized the fucker had gone up to a dime.

“Well, what the fuck!” she yelled. “Why didn’t someone call me?”

This was Harvey’s mother, Doris, and all the losers started roaring and thumping again. Harvey didn’t turn around. He dropped a dime in, he pressed the button, the machine clunked, and a ball popped up. He pulled the handle back and knocked the ball up the chute, but he could hear her running up behind him, and he braced himself and then she was hugging him from the back and kissing his neck.

“Harvey, why didn’t you write?” Etc., etc., crying and sniffling. Harvey tried to keep his eye on the ball with her hanging all over him. He was still a little pissed off at her. Since he wouldn’t turn around, she slid over to his side so she could look at him. She was wearing that same old polyester cowgirl waitress uniform she had on the last time he saw her. Or else one a whole lot like it.

“You outa the army now?”

“Yep.”

Trying to do that Steve McQueen thing, feeling more like Brandon de Wilde.

“You coulda wrote.”

In fact he had written a few letters, although it had been about six months since his last one, and in fact she’d only written about three or four of her own semi-literate missives, but Harvey let it pass.

“You gonna move back in with me, Harvey? Bennie’s gone now.”

Harvey loosened up a lot when he heard that. He just never could stand that motherfucker, and except for the fact that it had got him two years in the army he had never regretted shooting him. Or his dog.

“You threw him out?”

“Naw, he passed away, unfortunately. Got drunk and fell asleep on the side of the road and got runned over by Big Jake’s compost spreader.”

“Tough.”

His ball went down the hole. He took out his pack of smokes and shook one out.

A tiny hand held up a lit Zippo.

It was Cleb, the Parsons boy. He must have been about fourteen, but he was a skinny little runt. His family’s place had been just a little too close and downwind to the bomb test sites, and they all had radiation sickness. At least a few of them, including his mother, had already died from it. His skin had that same slightly greenish quality to it as Mo and Quint and Keely’s.

Harvey drew in the smoke and let it out as Cleb and his mom looked at him.

“How old you now, Harvey?” asked Cleb.

“Old enough.” Whatever the fuck that meant.

His mother got closer and ran her orange-nailed fingers along his cheek, and Harvey could feel her breasts. She smelled like Jean Naté Cactus Flower and Juicy Froot and Aquanet. She was only thirty-five years old and she had some body. Harvey felt himself getting the stirrings of an erection, so he nudged her away with his elbow and got set to play the machine again.

“Harvey, I got to work tonight, but tomorrow I’ll get off and I’ll make you all your favorite food.”

Harvey popped another ball into play.

“Don’t put yourself out on my account.”

“You kill anybody, Harve?” said Cleb.

“It ain’t puttin’ out. You’re my son.”

“I’ll see. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.”

“I’ll make chicken pot pie with peas, and chocolate mash potatoes, and Jello cake too. I’ll make Kool-Aid.”

“Who you got livin’ with you now?”

She paused.

“Luke Asquith.”

The ball shot right down into that fucking hole.

“How many guys you kill, Harve?” Cleb tugged at Harvey’s sleeve.

“Luke Asquith?”

Harvey turned and looked at her.

“He’s a good man, Harvey.”

“He’s a fuckin’ spaz is what he is.”

“He’s got a nervous disorder ‘cause of the malaria he caught in World War II. He is not a spaz.”

Harvey reached down for his beer, tilted it up and took a long pull. One thing about his mother, she wasn’t ever going to change. Some women went for handsome men, some went for men with money, Doris went for damaged men.

“Say you’ll come to dinner, honey.”

“Hell, I’ll come. Just don’t ask me to look at old Luke while he’s eatin’.”

“You won’t have to eat with Luke, honey. He always likes to eat in front of the TV anyways, and besides all he eats is Spaghetti-O’s or Rice-a-Roni or hot dogs. And, honey?”

“Yep?”

“I’m glad you come back.”

He set down his bottle and turned back to the machine.

“Well I’m glad somebody’s glad,” he said, and sent another ball out.

“I’m glad too, Harve,” said Cleb.

The door slammed open.

“Godamighty I’m thirsty! Doris you bring me three cold cans o’ Piels and three warm shots o’ Heaven Hill! I’ll be settin’ right chyere watchin’ Mike Douglas.”

“The word please wouldn’t kill you, Bull Thorndyke.”

“Why you makin’ time with that soldier boy well wait a minute. Do my eyes deceive me.”

“You just leave him alone. He just got back from the service.”

Harvey didn’t turn but he heard Bull Thorndyke’s heavy boots clodhopping toward him.

“Wayull skinny little Harvey -- so the judge let ya off easy, huh? Shot a man and his dog and all ya get is a hitch in the army probly doin’ nothin’ but cleanin’ out latrines for two years and me whut got five years in the joint just for accidentally killin’ a blind Injun. Hey, boy, turn around an’ let me look atcha.”

The ball dropped down toward the main flippers, he tried to time it, he pressed the right flipper button, he missed, the ball went down the hole.

“I said turn around ya little faggot. Lookin’ at your narra ass is gettin’ me all excited.”

Harvey turned around with the Tareyton hanging from the side of his mouth.

Bull was even uglier than before. He had thrown his filthy cowboy hat onto a table and he appeared to have been scalped since Harvey had gone away: there was a big jagged patch of roiled, red and moist scar tissue all over the top of his skull. Also it looked like his nose had been ripped or cut off, and he’d gained about twenty pounds of fat, too. Most of the set of false teeth he’d gotten up at the state pen seemed to be gone now and the ones that remained were as brown as the pug of pigtail tobacco they were chewing. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-eight or so but he looked about fifty-five.

“Hi, Bull.”

“Hi, soldier boy.”

He stood a few inches away from Harvey, his big old gut almost touching Harvey’s shirt and his shitty-smelling hot breath billowing down into Harvey’s face. “Hey, how you like that barracks life, Harvey? Men sleepin’ with men. No women. No smelly women with they stinkin’ diseased conts. How you like that, boy? That sweet sensation of some big ol’ nigger’s pecker rammin’ up yer narrow butt-hole like a Roto-Rooter? Good huh? Just like takin’ a good long beershit in reverse. I gotta say I developed me a little taste fer that brown eye when I was upstate, so what say you ‘n’ me just retire to the men’s room fer a quick one? I promise I’ll be gentle-like. Less’n of course you don’t like it gentle-like.”

Doris took a step toward Bull and he put his enormous left hand on her chest and pushed her back as if she wasn’t even there. Everybody in the bar was quiet and still and watching.

“Bull,” said Harvey, “there’s one thing I hate that’s to see a good cold beer get warm. ‘Scuse me just a second.”

Harvey took the cigarette out of his mouth, took up the Rheingold, tilted it up, drank deep, and emptied it. He looked at the bottle and then at Bull and then he belched.

“Damn that was good. Whoah, look who’s on Mike Douglas. Fuckin’ Charo.”

Bull turned to look at the TV and Harvey whipped the bottle hard across Bull’s open mouth, the bottle shattered and Bull staggered back then down to his knees and onto his side and a great strangled deep roar came out from between his hands over his mouth as tobacco-stained blood streamed through his fingers and over his shirt and onto the floor.

“Cool,” said Cleb.

“Hey Bull,” said Quint, I think you gonna need a brand new set o’ them fake choppers.”

“Gonna haveta go in the joint again he wants a new set,” said Keely.

“Just spit ‘em all out,” said Mo. “you don’t wanta be sawllowin’ them thangs.”

Bull got up on his hands and knees and spat out the blood-gobbety mess of what was left of his dentures and then he tried to say something.

“What he say,” said Keely.

“Speak up, Bull,” said Quint.

Bull shook his head, just like a bull, and blood-sputtered something else.

“What he say,” said Mo.

“Said he gonna kill Harvey,” said Keely.

Bull heaved himself up, weaving just a little, then pulled a switchblade out of his back pocket and clicked it open.

He said something again, more blood blurting out.

“Speak up, Bull,” said Harvey. “Can’t understand a jackshit word you say.”

Harvey was leaning back against the pinball machine, he held the broken neck of the beer bottle behind his back. He could smell Bull’s fresh pouring blood and he was ready as he was ever going to be; Bull came forward and then an incredibly loud shot rang out, Bull stopped, and there was a big skidded bullet hole in the grey linoleum a few inches from Bull’s left foot.

Sheriff Dooley stood in the doorway holding his long-barreled Smith & Wesson Model 629 at arm’s length and now that familiar cordite smell mixed in with all those other smells.

“One more step and that’s your kneecap blown out, Bull,” said the Sheriff.

Bull turned around and said something.

“Bull, I don’t know what the hell you’re sayin’ an’ I ain’t so all-fired sure I wanta hear it. Now drop that pig-sticker right now.”

Bull held still, a big blood bubble forming in his open mouth, and the Sheriff turned so his big gut was in profile against the doorway; he straightened out his gun arm, thumbed back the hammer on the pistol and looked down the sight.

Bull sucked in the blood bubble and dropped the knife.

Harvey discreetly laid the broken bottleneck on the pinball machine.

The Sheriff uncocked the hammer on his pistol.

“Burt, now who started this ruckus?”

“Well, Sheriff, I wasn’t really payin’ no nevermind. Y’see, they had that there Charo up on Mike Douglas there, an’ --”

“How about you boys holdin’ up the bar there.”

“We was watchin’ Charo too, Sheriff.”

“Pair o’ bazoomers on that gal.”

“She can use my face for a bar seat anytime.”

“Sheriff,” said Cleb. “Sheriff, Sheriff -- I seen it all --”

“You hush up now, sonny. Doris, what happened?”

“Bull started it, Sheriff. He -- he was raggin’ my boy.”

“That right?”

“That’s right, Sheriff,” said Cleb. “He was raggin’ on Harvey.”

Bull made a movement toward Cleb and the boy ducked behind Doris’s hips.

The Sheriff twirled that enormous fucking pistol and slipped it smoothly into his worn black holster.

“Harvey I’d a thought two years in the service woulda taught you not to get so damn excited what some two-bit redneck peckerwood said.”

“I wasn’t excited, Sheriff. I just didn’t wanna hear it.”

The Sheriff ran a finger across his nostrils to hide his grin.

“Well, Bull, I think you better get on over to Doc Goldwasser’s now.”

Bull said something; the blood trickled down his chin. He put his hand over his mouth. The whole front of his filthy old overalls was covered with blood.

“Bull, ain’t nobody can understand a damn fool word you’re sayin’ so get on outa here, and I see you two fellers tusslin’ again I’m throwin’ ya both in the hoosegow with nothin’ to eat but piss-on-a-biscuit for a month. Now git.”

Bull took his hand away from his face and more blood came out; he looked at Harvey, then turned and headed for the open door. He went out without closing the door, a trail of blood spots marked his path. His raggedy old hat still sat on the table right where he’d left it.

You could smell the air getting cleaner already.

“Burt,” said the Sheriff, “long as I’m here you’d better open me up a nice cold can o’ Schaefer’s for me.”

“Sure thang, Sheriff.”

The Sheriff rubbed his great belly with his great big sunblotched hand.

“And whatever Harvey here’s drinkin’.”

“You betcha.”

Harvey saw that little rat boy Cleb pick up Bull’s switchblade and stick it in his back pocket.

“Harvey Harvey Harvey,” said the Sheriff. He took a pouch of Bull Durham out of his shirt pocket and some papers and started fixing a smoke. “Same ol’ Harvey. How old you now, boy?”

“Old enough,” piped in little Cleb.

“I guess he is, Cleb. I reckon he is.”

The Sheriff put his tongue to the paper.

“You kill you any Commies, boy?”

“Ah’m go-na keel he-um.”

It was Bull again.

Looking over the Sheriff’s shoulder Harvey saw Bull in the doorway with a shotgun and it was aimed at the Sheriff’s back.

“Ah got me a 12-gauge Remington pump-action loaded up with double-ought buck aimed right atcha, Sheriff, so you best just turn around real slow.”

His voice still sounded awful mushy but you could hear what he was saying all right.

The Sheriff turned around real slow, all the while smoothing out his cigarette.

“Now you raise up yo’ hands now Sheriff and step out away from that deadmeat motherfucker.”

The Sheriff put the cigarette all the way into his mouth and gently licked it one more time.

“Now you know I cain’t do that, Bull. If I move you just liable to shoot young Harvey, and then where we gonna be?”

“If’n you don’t move I’m gonna keel you too.”

A tall young woman came into the doorway behind Bull. She carried a large canvas shoulder bag and wore a tan pith helmet, sunglasses, a white shirt and khaki shorts. She tapped Bull on the shoulder. She looked like a movie star.

“Excuse me,” said the woman. I’d like to come in?”

Bull turned his head and the Sheriff dropped his cigarette and his pistol was halfway out of the holster before the cigarette even hit the floor when Bull turned back again and said, “Don’t do it, Sheriff.”

The Sheriff let the pistol slip back into the holster.

“Excuse me?” said the woman.

“Raise yer hands, Sheriff.”

The Sheriff slowly raised his hands chest-high.

“Now step aside.”

“Excuse me,” said the woman. “What is going on?”

“What’s the hold-up, sweety?”

And in came a tall handsome man in sunglasses, an Australian bush hat, and a bright white shirt worn with the tails out over paisley bermuda shorts; Bull turned his head for just a fraction of a second, Harvey pulled the Sheriff’s pistol out of its holster, raised it with both hands over the Sheriff’s shoulder, aimed at Bull’s gut and squeezed the trigger just as Bull turned back to see him do it, the pistol bucked up and roared and Bull caught the slug square in the heart, he staggered back in between the man and the woman with blood pumping out of his chest and fell down backwards into the sunlight as his shotgun blasted a load straight up into the sky, and the last things he saw were the unlit neon sign saying BURT’S HIDEYWAY and the young woman looking out at him with cool beauty better than anything he had ever seen, and he regretted his life, his whole miserable life, he wanted to live, and as the buckshot rained back down on him like black hail out of that bright blue sky he died.

****

(Click here for Episode Two. Check out the right hand side of this page for listings of links to further episodes, as well as to appreciations of many of Larry's classic films, such as The Vacant City, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, and Calling All Call Girls.)

"Railroad Train to Heaven", Part Three: the astonishing tale of A. Schnabel, alias the Ant-Man

This section of Arnold Schnabel’s memoir Railroad Train To Heaven picks up precisely where our preceding episode left off, in fact, oddly, in the very same paragraph, continuing the comic book motif which was so brilliantly materialized in the poem “The Hawkman and I”. He is still enjoying the life of Reilly, on leave of absensce from the railroad, in Cape May with his mother. The year is 1963, the month is probably still June.

(Note: Pancho Herrera and Johnny Callison: players for the Philadelphia Phillies. Steve Allen, Victor Borge: witty and popular entertainers of the day.)

(This special broadcast courtesy of the Armed Forces Network in conjunction with the Arnold Schnabel Society.)

I did something I should not have done yesterday. Against not only several doctors’ orders but my own personal experience and supposed good sense, I had one too many last night, all right, perhaps two, what am I saying, three, all right, say four, four too many considering two is my limit and I had six, but no, wait, I think I had seven.

It was at the Ugly Mug on Washington Street. Normally I prefer the slightly more refined Pilot House, but since I had been to the Pilot House two nights running and still felt like going out for a cocktail I chose “the Mug”.

All went well really, considering, until that sixth Manhattan. I had a sort of conversation with a couple of Coast Guardsmen, primarily on the efficacy of Pancho Herrera as opposed to Johnny Callison, and I managed not to disgrace myself. Then a sort of chat with a charming middle-aged couple from Allentown. Well, boring middle-aged couple, but then I was no Steve Allen or Victor Borge in the sparkling repartée department either. Then a blank hour or so staring at the TV and a Yankees-Red Sox game. An hour I shall never retrieve. Then a jumbled sort of exchange of grunts and whinnyings with a couple of young college guys, about God knows what and who cares anyway. Then a period of void staring drunkenness, surrounding by chatter and madness, and then it happened.

It happened again, this leaving of the body, this departure from within myself to without, somehow coolly observing the wreckage of myself leaning upon the bar, surrounded by laughing yelling people shouting words that meant nothing even though the beings shouting them thought they meant something, but none of it meant anything, not their words, nor their thoughts, nor them, nor that drunken wreckage leaning upon the bar there, that thing called me.

I considered leaving it all for good. Just floating away finally this time, and this time no punking out and coming back in no matter how comatose or psychotic a state. Just leaving it all for good.

Well, obviously I didn’t.

Somehow I found myself reeling home through the cool salt ocean air. Arriving at my aunts’ house I heaved myself into my accustomed wicker rocker on the porch. By the dim porch light I saw on the blue wooden floor a pile of my young cousin’s comics, all of which I had read earlier that day. I shoved my hand down and scrabbled them all up, laid them in my lap.

Which super-hero shall I be tonight? I thought, riffling through the comic books. What about Iron Man, after all I wear a layer of iron around me twenty-four hours a day. Or The Thing, because the way the Thing looks is exactly how I look inside, the Human Torch because I am aflame, Mr. Fantastic because I can stretch myself endlesssly, the Invisible Girl because no-one, not even I, sees the real me. Or the Incredible Hulk, because I am scarcely credible and fully a hulk, or Spiderman because a spider is my soul, but no, here we are: the Ant-Man. Yes, that’s it. I am the Ant-Man. Digging my little hole, crawling about looking for my grains of sugar, crawling back into my hole with my precious sweet cargo, I am Dr. Henry Pym, at your service, sir, yes: The Ant-Man.

Perhaps I should write a poem based on the above tale.

But then again, no.


(Scurry over to here for Part Four of Arnold's memoirs. Turn to the right hand side of this page for listings of links to other episodes of Railway Train to Heaven as well as to many of his excellent poems.)

“Shake a Hand” --

My dad's letters home from WW II

Check them out over here.

“In mask accipitrine...”

This sonnet struck the pages of the Olney Times like a bolt from the heavens on June 22, 1963. Arnold Schnabel was still staying at his aunts’ place in Cape May and apparently still deep in a course of intense close reading of his young cousin’s comic books. (Poem broadcast throughout the free world thanks to the continued generosity of the Arnold Schnabel Society.

“The Hawkman and I”

Or would perhaps I were the Hawkman, fitted out
With a special belt made of Nth metal
And a pair of wings allowing me to fly about
In mask accipitrine and an arsenal
Of ancient weapons and of course my wife
And partner the Hawkgirl, who shares my life
As Carter Hall, archaeologist and curator,
But secretly Katar Hol, a cop from Thanagar,
From which planet I brought the Absorbicon,
And with which I could instantly absorb
Every single thing known by every last human
Who ever lived on this spinning green orb,
All their fears and loves, all their final words;
I should also be able to converse with birds.

(For links to other weirdly weird Arnold Schnabel poems and to his previously unpublished memoir Railroad Train to Heaven, kindly peruse the right hand column of this page.)

Mrs. Malazewski, the sweet “Angel” of B Street

Mrs. Malazewski, tending her garden, June 1963

Everyone knew Mrs. Malazewski. A widow whose husband Stanley had worked as a tool grinder at the Heintz steel plant for many years, she lived alone in her small rowhome on B Street right across from the factory. (Right up the corner lived the famous poet-laureate of Olney, Arnold Schnabel, and his mother.) Her three children had grown and moved away, and she often greeted the men and boys coming to and from old Stan’s workplace. Often she would invite one or two of the lads to come in for a beer or two while she rolled pie dough with the enormous wooden roller her mother had brought over from Poland. (Mrs. Malazewski herself did not imbibe but she had always kept beer in the house for Stanley when he was alive and she continued to do so after he passed away at the age of forty-eight, the victim of a massive coronary perhaps hastened by his heavy diet of kielbasa and chops, Mrs. Malazewski’s homemade pies, and four quarts of Schmidt’s beer a day.) Soon it became a nightly event for quite a few of the guys to stop over at Mrs. Malazewski’s after work. Wanting only to cover expenses and to make a modest profit, Mrs. Malazewski regretfully had to begin to charge the boys for their beers and shots of Schenley’s whiskey, not to mention the hot brisket sandwiches and rhubarb pie with fresh whipped cream, but her prices still were half of what Pat asked over at his legal Tavern, not to mention the Green Parrot or the Huddle. (And her food was better than at any of those places!)

As business picked up, Mrs. Malazewski had her basement soundproofed, installed a jukebox and an ice machine down there, and even occasionally hosted informal jam sessions featuring off-duty musicians from the nearby Schwarzwald Inn. Evenings were quiet and mellow affairs at Mrs. Malazewski’s but things always picked up after two AM when the legitimate bars closed. Guys from the Heintz plant who had worked the 6PM-to 2AM shift knew they had a nice nearby stopping place where they could drink and talk, play the new pinball machine Mrs. M had brought in, have a quiet game of 8-Ball on the billiard table that now stood where the dining room table used to be, and then stagger happily home before first light.

Everything went fine until that night in November of 1962 when Hank Titana got out of hand.

Hank was an enormous and boisterous stoker at the plant, loud and obnoxious and opinionated, and no one really liked him, not even his own wife and children, in fact especially not his wife and children. (Hank spent almost every cent he earned on booze and gambling, and it was his wife who kept the household running, taking in sewing and making dresses out of her house on Wentz Street.) Only a year before Hank had finished a three-year jolt in Holmesburg for assault-and-battery, and that hadn’t been the first time his penchant for violence had landed him behind bars, either. Hank when he drank tended to act a lot worse than he did sober which was already bad, and unfortunately he drank every day, a lot. Mrs. Malazewski had never had any time for Hank Titana and had banned him from her house many years before when he broke all four legs of her kitchen table one night during an argument about baseball with her late husband Stanley.

However, one fateful cold November evening, after the inevitable had happened and Hank had finally been flagged from every last bar in Olney, he begged Mrs. Malazewski on bended knee and with cap in hand to allow him the honor of patronizing her establishment. He tearfully explained that it was either Mrs. Malazewski’s or sitting in the woods with a bottle for poor him, because his wife wouldn’t let him drink in the house. Mrs. Malazewski listened to his pleading for a while and finally relented, but only after assuring him that he was being allowed in on a trial basis only.

Something happened that night. There was talk of a big fight at Mrs. Malazewski’s, and indeed a few of the guys came in to the plant the next day with black eyes. But one fellow who didn’t come in to the plant was the fearsome Hank Titana.

Hank had disappeared and no one knew where. The word spread that Hank, who was on still on parole for his last conviction, had skipped town after beating a few guys up, fearing to be sent back to the slammer for good as a three-time loser. When his wife finally reported his disappearance a few days later Detective Morris “Big Mo” Berg stopped by and had a little talk with Mrs. Malazewski. Over good hot Maxwell House coffee and warm rhubarb pie she told Big Mo that, yes, there had been a little conniption that night when Hank and a few other boys were visiting, but that she had thrown Hank out on his ear and his filthy old cap after him and told him never to darken her doorway again. Big Mo took a look around the little house, even went out into the tiny yard where Mrs. Malazewski grew hardy rhododenrons able to survive even amidst the harsh fumes constantly wafting by from the factory, and then he thanked Mrs M and left.

After that one unpleasant night it was business as usual at Mrs. Malazewski’s. (Once a month until the last of her four kids turned eighteen Mrs. Titana found an unstamped envelope with a hundred dollars in it slipped through her mail slot late at night; whether this allowance came from some local benefactor or benefactors, or even from the awful Hank Titana himself, trying finally to do right by his family, no one ever knew.)

In 1979 Mrs. Malazewski finally passed away quietly at home. The Heintz plant had closed many years before, and Mrs. Malazewski had eventually retired her speakeasy, although she was always ready to offer a cup of tea or a glass of beer to a neighbor or a passing policeman.

A nice young Korean couple bought the little house from Mrs. Malazewski’s children. The wife, Mrs. Oh, set immediately to work on the backyard garden, which had been sadly neglected since Mrs. Malazewski’s death several months before. Imagine Mrs. Oh’s surprise when, upon digging up the earth in order to lay fresh soil she found the decomposed remains of a big-boned man, his skull crushed. Next to the skeleton lay a large and severely dented rolling pin. Scientific examination proved that the dead man was none other than the long-missing Hank Titana, and that death had been caused by a blow to the head with the rolling pin, which in fact was Mrs. Malazewski’s, brought over by her mother from Poland in 1904.

Big Mo Berg, himself about to retire after thirty-five years on the force, declared the case finally closed.

Great Lost TV Shows, Vol. 7: "Section 20"

The talented Mr. Dana Andrews

Section 20 (1961; B&W; comedy/drama; 60 min.;; music by Henry Mancini; a Selmur production, created by Phil Leotardo).

One of the most fondly remembered of Phil Leotardo’s often sadly-truncated TV series, Section 20 was another groundbreaker, paving the way for puzzlingly more-successful shows such as Room 222, Welcome Back, Kotter, and Saved by the Bell.

Phil Leotardo planned Section 20 as a four-year series that would follow the entire high school career, roughly in “real time”, of a group of students, most of them just not very bright, some of them bright but unsocialized, and quite a few both not bright and unsocialized if not downright psychopathic.

The students have all been assigned to the same homeroom in Section 20, the absolute lowest academic section in the enormous and labyrynthine Cardinal O’Moynihan High School (loosely inspired by Philadelphia’s Cardinal Dougherty High School, which did in fact employ the 20-section method). A cast of unknowns (perhaps unfortunately all of them at least 18 years old) played this hard-luck gaggle of misfit freshmen, such as: Waldo (George Chakiris), the dumb kid who wanted to be a poet, but who unfortunately could barely read or write; Argus (Bo Hopkins), the middle-European immigrant boy who was indeed brilliant but who spoke not a word of English; Terry and Jerry (Don and Phil Everly), the twins, each one dumber than the other, but who could sing a song as sweet as honey; Big Mike (Max Baer, Jr.), the big dumb football player; Joey Baldinado (Michael Parks), a smart kid actually, but too above it all to bother studying or doing homework, a real smartass who was riding for a big fall someday. Oh, and Kurt (Richard Beymer), who had previously been a smart kid but who had been hit in the head with a baseball while daydreaming in the outfield, and was now a dumb kid; and also Crazy Eddy (Russ Tamblyn), who was not really dumb, just crazy. And Albert and Tim and Sean and Bob, dumb kids.

The stolid and weary Dana Andrews played Mr. Murphy, the homeroom and history teacher who had seen it all and didn’t like what he had seen and didn’t like what he was seeing now either. He always keeps a pint or two of Early Times in his desk drawer, right next to his blackjack.

Scary Timothy Carey was the scary Mr. Wittmar, math teacher and sadist.

Henry Jones played the loveably gentle Father Fitzhugh, religion teacher.

Richard Jaeckel robustly filled the role of Father Brown, the brawny and handsome gym teacher and solicitous advisor to troubled youths.

Richard Chamberlain played young and idealistic Father Hannigan, English teacher.

Toss in Burl Ives as the Falstaffian principal Monsignor Meegan, Sheree North as Dana Andrews’s hot young wife who sings at the local nightclub “The Huddle”, and Marie Windsor as her wisecracking divorced older sister, and you had a cast to dream for. But yet again America proved itself not yet ready and perhaps not quite worthy of Phil Leotardo’s uncompromising vision of a post-war moral wasteland awash in greed, ignorance, and vapidity. The series was cancelled after only six episodes.

Section 20 has never been re-run, although a quite vigorous underground mob of loners buy and trade bootleg tapes and DVDs with all the zeal of Deadheads who must own soundboard tapes of every single concert (and indeed these "Section 20-Heads" quite often co-exist as Deadheads and Dungeons and Dragons Grand Masters.)


(Click here for more on Section 2o. Turn to the right hand side of this page for a complete listing of other Great Lost TV Shows.)

Don't mess with Mario

Read all about it over here.

Railroad Train to Heaven, Part Two: in which Arnold Schnabel meets Mr. Adam Strange

This installment of Arnold Schnabel’s memoir picks up exactly where the previous installment ended. Dateline: June 1963, Cape May, NJ.

Also staying here is my cousin Bert and his wife and three children, all of them squeezed into one small apartment of my aunts’ shambling large house. How odd that they leave their nice three-bedroom home in Lawncrest to cram into these two cramped and stuffy un-airconditioned rooms with a tiny kitchenette and call it their vacation. But I suppose my aunts give them a good deal on the rent, as they do for me and Mom. The one boy, Kevin, sits and reads comic books for much of the day. He goes to the cigar store on Washington Street every morning and trades in his already-used comics (the titles on the covers snipped off) for a fewer number of new used comics. There is some complicated financial formula involved, but the upshot is that for about a quarter a batch he seems always to have at least a half-dozen new used comics to read and obsessively re-read every few days.

He’s an unprepossessing lad, pale, un-athletic, taciturn to a fault. I have attempted to engage him in conversation, just to be a good avuncular sort, and I have failed miserably. However, I have taken a liking if not to the lad then to his comic books, and now each day I sit with him on the porch and read them. I wait patiently till he finishes the first one -- he won’t let me look at any until he’s “finished” with it. But when he does finish one he passes it magisterially over to me. After we have read all that day's comics we read them all again, but this time more slowly and luxuriously, savoring each word and image.

And so I have been introduced to this new heroic and fantastic world. I find this very soothing. My own world these past months had grown far too fantastic in itself. It’s a serene pleasure to read the adventures of this Dr. Strange, whose universe makes even mine look fairly mundane. Or another fellow named Strange, Adam Strange, who periodically gets transported by something called a Zeta-Beam to some entire other planet where he is a rather dashing gallant in a skintight suit with a jet pack on his back and a ray gun on his belt. And, of course, he has an attractive girlfriend.

I would like to be this Adam Strange fellow. If only I could find this Zeta-Beam to transport me to some other world. Oh, but that’s right, I have been transported to other worlds. The only thing is I didn’t like much what I found on those worlds, and I had neither jet pack nor ray gun, nor, needless to add, an attractive girlfriend awaiting me there.



(Beam up over to here for Part Three. Turn to the right hand side of this page for links to other episodes of Railroad Train to Heaven, as well as to many of his fine poems. All material presented courtesy of the Arnold Schnabel Society. Nihil Obstat, Bishop J. Jonah Graham, SJ).

Gene Vincent, unchained --

Those not so Pretty Things

Rave-Up at Roderick’s (1965; Todd-Ao; Cinemascope; 96 min.; Helen Shapiro, Ian Whitcomb, The Pretty Things, Unit 4 + 2, The Small Faces; music by Ennio Morricone; written by Larry Winchester and Tommy “Legs” Larkin; directed by Larry Winchester).

If you ask your average film geek what was the first psychedelic movie, chances are good they’re going to say, “The Trip of course, 1967, Roger Corman. Written by Jack Nicholson. With Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern, Dennis Hopper.” Well, not to put too fine a point on it: “Wrong.”

The first psychedelic film was Larry Winchester’s Rave-Up at Roderick’s, and here’s Larry in his memoir I’ll Take the Low Road, telling us how it all went down:

“I’m doing post sync on The Boxing Milkmaid at the Abbey Road studios with our sound engineer Geoff Emerick, and who walks in one day but my old pal Legs Larkin.

“Hey, Larry, I got a present for ya.”

“All right, give it to me.”

“Nah, later, man. How much longer you gonna be?”

“Give us another hour, Legs.”

“Cool, I’ll meet ya down the pub.”

So an hour later I leave it to Geoff and go down to the Crown & Anchor and Legs has got this big grin on his face, sittin’ there over a pint of Guinness.

“So what’s up, Legs?” I motioned to the barman to set me and Legs up with two more of the same.

“This, daddy-o.” He holds out the open palm of his hand and he’s got this sugar cube in it.

“Hey, great, thanks, Legs, a fucking sugar cube. You’re too good to me.”

“It’s LSD, man, take it.”

Well, all I knew was that Cary Grant had supposedly taken this shit. I figured if Cary had tried it, it couldn’t be too bad. So what the hell, I popped it in my gob and washed it down with a mouthful of Guinness. Imagine my surprise when a half hour later Legs’s head has started to give off a golden radiation, and when he speaks I can feel the words in my fingertips. Also, I was no longer sitting on the barstool but floating three inches above it.

“Legs,” I say, “you’re a motherfucker.” But it was more like:

“Legggggggggs....yerrrrr....uhhhhhh.....motherfugggggggerrh.”

“Cool,” he says. “So, you got a project for me?”

“Well,” I say, “Hammer wants me to do another teen rock ‘n’roll movie with Helen Shapiro. Something with music and a love story. They’ve showed me a couple of scripts but they stink. You got any ideas?”

“Sure. Helen’s this nice young girl, right? Wants to be a singer, right?”

“Yeah, good so far.”

“She meets this cat, he’s in the music biz, promoter, singer, whatever.”

“I dig.”

“Thing is, the cat’s an acid head.”

“What’s that?’

“It’s somebody who likes to take LSD, like we are now.”

“Cool, go on.”

“So he gets her to take acid. And it like opens up her mind to the fuckin' multifarious mysteries of the universe and shit.”

“Right; that’s really fucking dramatic, Legs. They're gonna be lining up around the block for this motherfucker.”

“Hey, we’ll work out the details. All you gotta think about is building it all up to this wild scene where everybody’s tripping on the acid. Like look around you, man.”

I looked around. All the patrons of the pub were giants. And then I’d blink and they’d all become elves. Or barnyard animals.

“All right, Legs, let me think about it. I gotta pee.”

It took me about a year to make it to the john, and then when I did and finally took my johnson out it was five yards long. Maybe this LSD wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Anyway I peed out about ten gallons of technicolor-rainbow pee, and by the time I was finished I pretty much had the three acts of the movie worked out in the enormous swirling funhouse that my brain had become.

Helen Shapiro told Larry flat out that she didn’t think she should play a girl who took drugs, so Larry and Legs simply rewrote the third act in an afternoon to take that part out, and shooting for what was now entitled Rave-Up at Roderick's started not very long after, in September of 1965.

We wanted to get the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks and the Who for the movie. None of them panned out so we settled for Ian Whitcomb, the Pretty Things, Unit 4+2 and the Small Faces. Loved those Pretty Things boys. Rags and I thought we knew how to party, but these guys were dangerous. Good band, too. And lucky for us they actually had a song called “LSD”.

Unfortunately for Larry the Queen’s Councillor shut this film down two days after it opened. It has not played anywhere ever again since. But Larry screened it for me one night at his place on Ivar Avenue and I want to tell you, Rave-Up at Roderick's totally rocks. The "freak-out" scene at the Marquee club (with the Pretty Things jamming with unbilled guest artists Itzhak Perlman and Ravi Shankar) is worth the price of admission all by itself. It’s up to you, all you Winchester fans out there: if you want to see this film re-released start bombarding the movie studios with letters and e-mails today.

You have nothing to lose but your sanity.

(Check out the right hand side of this page for a listing of more of the "Films of Larry Winchester". You might also enjoy our serialization of the "director's cut" of Larry's long-lost novel A Town Called Disdain, available exclusively on this site.)

The Pretty Things:

"Railroad Train to Heaven", Part One

I have some very exciting news. After many months of the most debased begging, wheedling and cajoling on my part the splendid people at the Arnold Schnabel Society have handed over to me the army footlocker containing the hundreds of small notepads which comprise the poet Arnold Schnabel’s unpublished but legendary memoir, Railroad Train to Heaven, and have said, in essence, “Do with this what you will.”

So what I will do is dole out this treasure-trove of modern literature in its unexpurgated entirety, but occasionally, on the installment plan, for litterateurs throughout the universe to read and savor and to cut and paste and send to all their friends.

I should mention that, unlike the poems, which typically went through numerous densely-amended drafts, these notepads appear to be only sparsely revised. All the entries were written with ball-point pen, usually a Bic. Very occasionally a word will be crossed out and replaced, or a phrase or a sentence will be interpolated in the space between the lines. Sometimes a line will be drawn through a sentence or a great X engraved on a paragraph or page, often accompanied by a comment in the margin such as "rubbish" or "nonsense". Schnabel only rarely indicates the date of composition (and usually then only through a reference to a holiday or some historical event, such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy) but, working through internal evidence, I shall do my best to present these memoirs in chronological order.

And so we begin this serialization of Railroad to Heaven, which I would rank alongside the great confessionals of world literature, second only perhaps to the immortal Pepys.

The time would be June, 1963. Observe the complete lack of any sort of preamble. As with his poems he simply gets right to it.

(Note: I have silently corrected the occasional misspelling. Everything else is directly transcribed from the Schnabel holograph. As with the poems, these excerpts are presented thanks to and only with the imprimatur of the generous people of the Arnold Schnabel Society.)

I hate the beach, and truth be told I’m not all that crazy about sunshine.

But I have come here, to my aunts’ place in Cape May, because my mother thinks it would be good for me, and because she likes to see her sisters now and then.

My mother also has no interest in the beach. She spends her days mostly working in the garden, or trimming the hedges.

I read, walk around, try to stay sane.

I go to mass every morning without fail, and I think that helps. (Or so I pray. I pray that the daily mass helps. I pray that my prayers help.)

Occasionally I stop in a bar and nurse a beer. I look at baseball games on the television.

Sometimes I get into conversations with people. Americans seem to be a friendly sort by and large. People like to talk. With little or no prodding they will and do tell you everything about themselves.

I listen, or sort of listen, I like to think I have always been very much a nice guy, but I do not reciprocate their autobiographical effusiveness.

What can I tell them?

That I am a Catholic bachelor in his forties, that I live with my mother and except for the few years of my decidedly unheroic military career have always lived with my mother, that, again excepting for my time in the modest service of Uncle Sam, I have worked my entire life as a brakeman for the Reading Railroad, that last winter I went completely out of my mind and spent eight weeks in Byberry?

That after a while I returned to work but, following a few embarrassing episodes (some of which I was aware of at the time, others to which I was oblivious), it was strongly suggested that I take an extended leave of absence on half-pay?

That I was on prescribed pills but stopped taking them?

That after ceasing to take these pills I would occasionally suffer the most frightening hallucinations, hallucinations which while they were happening were as real as anything I have experienced in my life?

And that -- knock on wood -- it has now been a few weeks since my last “episode”?

No, I choose not to share all this with my new temporary friends.

I won’t say no one wants to hear this sort of thing because actually people love to hear horror stories, as of course do I.

No, I simply don’t want to be the one telling them, with me as the subject; except for here, in this notebook, where it’s all between me, myself and that other lunatic: I.

(Continued here.)

(Up-to-date listings of links to other episodes are posted on the right hand side of this page, as well as links to many of Arnold Schnabel's classic poems. Nihil Obstat, Bishop J.J. "Smilin' Jack" Graham, S.J.)

Seashore reading for Arnold Schnabel

This sonnet first pleased Arnold Schnabel’s public in the June 15, 1963 issue of the “Olney Times”. Through internal evidence we can assume that Arnold is still vacationing with his mother at his aunts’ house on Perry Street, in Cape May, New Jersey.

Note that the accepted old-school Philadelphian pronunciation (or as Philadelphians would say, “pronounciation”) of the word Tuesday is “Toosdy”.

“Newman” doubtless refers to John Henry Cardinal Newman, whose Apologia Pro Vita Sua was found among Arnold’s books after his death, although it showed little sign of actually having been read. It should be noted that Arnold also had a complete collection of all the extant “Parker” novels of Richard Stark on his bookshelf, and indeed his untimely death apparently interrupted him midway through his reading of the most recent one at that time, The Sour Lemon Score.

(Rebroadcast by the courtesy of the Arnold Schnabel Society.)

“The Man With the Getaway Face”

I was browsing through the mysteries this Tuesday
(To not always read Newman is no disgrace),
When I espied a book that seemed to say, “Choose me.”
It was titled The Man With the Getaway Face;
I scurried home; well, to my aunts’ home, not mine,
And in a rocker on the porch I was soon hooked,
As, sipping my TaB, I read this first line:
“When the bandages came off Parker looked
In the mirror at a stranger.” How odd.
I read that sentence again, and thought: If I
Could change my face, would that please me, or God?
No; because behind the face would be the same sad guy.
What I need is someone to cut what’s inside my head away;
Then perhaps I too at last could make my getaway.

(For links to other even more disturbing poems from the prolific Bic pen of Arnold Schnabel, and to selections from his vast and previously unpublished memoir Railroad Train to Heaven, check the right hand column of this page.)

Lino Ventura in "L'Armée des ombres"

Read all about it here.

“Gooney” McFarland, at his disastrous wedding reception, the Catholic War Vets' club, 1969

That's Gooney on the right, posing for his legion of fans

Every neighborhood has one: the neighborhood nut-case; Olney back in the day distinguished itself by boasting dozens of neighborhood nut-cases at any given time. Every block had its nut-case, sometimes every house on the block had its nut-case, and indeed often there were heroic semidetached- and row-homes harboring more than one nutcase, or even a whole roistering clan of nut-cases. Lots of nut-cases in Olney. But in this land of the insane no one was less sane, and no one more feared, reviled, ridiculed, and defamed than one Martin de Pours McFarland, better known simply as “Gooney”.

Gooney McFarland (born in 1950 in one of those ugly "new" houses on Wentz Street, right by the Heintz factory) always seemed to get there first. He first got arrested at the age of eight, for breaking a window of Zapf’s music store and trying to steal one of their brand-new electric semi-hollowbody Gibson guitars. The young Gooney was a major Elvis fan at the time and he wanted his own guitar, so that he could learn how to play it and become a rock and roll sex king. Good thing for Gooney, his father, Frank X. McFarland, was a policeman. And Mr. McFarland’s job continued to be a good thing in the subsequent career of the young scalawag, although this career proved to be far from a good thing for that of the elder Mr. McFarland. It was solely because of the exploits of this young and then not-so-young madman that Officer McFarland was never promoted above the rank of patrolman, this proud ex-marine, this hardworking Joe who put himself through LaSalle College on the GI Bill while working fulltime as a cop, this staunch Catholic who fathered nine children (all of them good kids, except for the middle one, you-know-who).

First of the gang to be arrested, Gooney racked up many other firsts. In 1963 he became the first kid on the block to try pills. He had noticed the slick-suited boys from the “Harrowgate Mob” hanging around the corners of the Heintz factory compound. These guys were cool, with their skinny ties from Krass Brothers and their pennyloafers from Thom McAn, and Gooney wanted to be like them. The Harrowgate boys soon had the young Gooney running back and forth across the street to double-shifting Heintz workers parked in their junkers, handing over little bags of pills in exchange for hard cash, which he would run back and deliver to the Harrowgate boys in one of their souped-up Thunderbirds. The Harrowgates were always wired to the gills and of course Gooney, who would have jumped off the Betsy Ross Bridge if the Harrowgates were jumping too, tried a sample of the product, loved it, and became at the tender age of twelve the neighborhood's youngest drug addict, with a special love for the uppers called “Pink Footballs”. Alas, perhaps it was the drug that made Gooney so bold as to begin stealing from his heroes, shorting them on both pills and cash. But if Gooney was always a bold thief, he was never really a good thief. He couldn’t do anything quietly, the concept of discretion was alien and hateful to him, and he could not stand not to boast to one and all any new crime he’d committed. So it took the Harrowgate Mob about two whole days to realize that this little brat was ripping them off. They beat him up and then tossed him down that trash-filled gorge in the woods across Front Street from Cardinal Dougherty High School. But what did Gooney care, after he finally awoke in Einstein Hospital the next day? This would be just another one of the many stories he could bore people with his whole life.

First to get busted and take pills, first to get the last piece of shit beaten absolutely out of his wiry little form, Gooney was the first to try pot as well; the first in the neighborhood to sell pot; the first to get busted for selling pot; and the first to get sent down to Juvie, despite all the best efforts of the beleaguered Officer McFarland. Down at the Detention Center at 100 W. Coulter Street, Gooney became the first kid ever to attempt escape from the roof, trying to rappel down on a clothesline that turned out to reach only to within 50 feet of the ground.

After six more months in the hospital the now permanently-limping Gooney was released and sent back to the familial mini-manse on Wentz Street. Officer McFarland, a long-time usher at St. Helena’s Church, amazingly was able to talk the priests at Cardinal Dougherty High into admitting Gooney as a freshman in the fall of 1966. He was put into the lowest academic section (section 20, “the Vegetables” as the “Brains” in sections 1-3 cruelly dubbed them), but even the easygoing courses in this nether-region (Basic Shop, Basic Phys Ed, Basic Arithmetic and an English course based on the “Dr. Seuss” books) proved beyond the limits of his attention. He drew all Fs that first semester, but this didn’t bother Gooney because he had scored in those months another first: first kid in the neighborhood to try LSD.

The incredibly patient Principal Father Dean allowed Gooney one more semester to try and buckle down and straighten out. Gooney got four Fs again. Who gets Fs in Phys Ed, anyway? Who flunks a course where the most rigorous reading assignment is “The Cat in the Hat”? A daily tripping Gooney McFarland, that’s who.

Next year it was off to the brutal grey corridors of the dreaded Olney High for our young hero. Little afraid of the striding African American teen gangs the Clang Gang and the Moroccans, Gooney blithely befriended the black kids, even affecting their mannerisms, dialect and mode of dress. He soon became the Clang Gang’s liaison-drugrunner to the school’s white kids. The Clang Gang had apparently not heard of Gooney’s treachery a few years before with the white Harrowgate Mob. But they soon experienced a similar treachery, and one day Gooney was sent sailing, flailing his arms and screaming bloody murder, out of a fourth floor window of Olney High.

Eight months in the hospital and young Gooney was back on the street, or at least back in his parents’ house, where he spent several months watching TV and getting his strength back.

The year was 1968, and every young man in his right mind was doing everything he possibly could to avoid the draft and Vietnam. Gooney of course on his 18th birthday took the subway downtown and volunteered for the marines at their recruiting office at Broad and Cherry. His services were refused by the USMC, on grounds both physical, educational, and most of all, psychological. Gooney marched right over to the army office and was soon frog-marched right out again and ordered never to return. The army was desperate for manpower in that awful year but not quite that desperate. The distraught Gooney went wandering down to the low bars by the docks. In one of these reeking hellholes he met some off-duty sailors from the naval base; words were exchanged, he was taken outside and soundly thrashed, then tossed down into a forty-foot deep urban renewal excavation. So it was off to the hospital again for the patriotic young Gooney, who only wanted to serve, or at any rate who only wanted to, as he put it, “kick ass for my country”, but who instead got his own ass kicked by his country’s servicemen.

So it went for Gooney. When he had sufficiently recovered his old man got him a job as a slag shoveler at the neighboring Heintz plant. Gooney lasted almost a month. Next up was a good job as a janitor at the Tastykake factory, and Gooney managed to last three months there. During his tenure at Tastykake a young assembly line-worker named Barbara “Babbles” Boylan for some mysterious reason or reasons took a shine to the manic, hobbling, broken-nosed Gooney McFarland. She got pregnant, there was a very hurried wedding at St. Helena’s, followed by a drunken riot at the reception at the Catholic War Vets club on Chew Street, and Gooney, instead of heading off to the planned honeymoon in Wildwood, spent the next six weeks in the hospital, followed by six months' convalescence at Holmesburg Prison on four counts of aggravated assault and battery.

Released, Gooney moved into the Rosemar Street rowhome of his pregnant young wife. Mr. Boylan got Gooney a job as an apprentice roofer. On his fifth day at work, while eating a hoagie and drinking a can of Ortlieb's and dangling his feet off the edge of the roof of a 75-foot high warehouse in Kensington, Gooney somehow managed to fall off.

After recovering once more, Gooney flat out refused ever to work again. He applied for a disability pension, and his father and his father-in-law (thinking only of his new baby boy and his poor wife Babbles) pulled some strings with the local Democratic party bigwigs, and Gooney was awarded a modest disability allotment.

Gooney now spent his days in the bars, any bars that would have him, but primarily the Green Parrot, the Huddle, Pat’s Tavern, and Smith’s, never visiting the same bar two days in a row lest he wear out his already tenuous welcome.

One day he walked out of the Green Parrot, took all his clothes off (it was December, and snowing) and went across 5th Street to Fisher Park, where he proceeded to roll down Dead Man’s Hill, over and over again.

It required six patrolmen to get Gooney into a paddy wagon, and his next permanent address was the Philadelphia State Hospital at Byberry, in the the Great Northeast section of Philadelphia, an institution popularly known simply as “Byberry”, or “the looney bin.”

Here at Byberry he achieved perhaps the most difficult of his many “firsts”. He became the first and only inmate in Byberry’s long and inglorious history to escape from the “Violently Insane” ward.

Somehow Gooney removed not only the wire mesh but the steel bars from his fourth floor window. No one knows how. There were no tools found and the mesh and bars seemed somehow simply to have been ripped with main force from the granite window frame. This time there was no rope however, merely two sheets knotted together and seventy-five feet of empty space below the end of them.

Gooney was found the next morning on the front stoop of his parents’ semi-detached on Wentz Street, clad only in his bloodied and soiled hospital pajamas and slippers, with both his legs broken and his skull fractured.

When he awoke from his coma a week later his first words were, “Am I dead yet?”

Incredibly, no. Perhaps it was Mr. Elwood Smith, the venerable proprietor of Smith’s Restaurant at Broad and Olney, who summed up Gooney McFarland best: “Some guys you got to beat into the grave with a stick.”



(Kindly turn to the right hand side of this page for listings of links to other "Tales From the O-Zone". You might also enjoy our serialization of Railroad Train to Heaven, the complete and unexpurgated memoirs of Arnold Schnabel, Olney's beloved "Rhyming Brakeman".)

And now, performing Gooney McFarland's favorite song, The Honeycombs, featuring the fabulously coiffed Honey Lantree on the drums:

Steve Gilliard, 1966-2007

Steve was great. No one wrote like Steve Gilliard, and Steve wrote like no one else. I'll miss this guy.

Steve Gilliard, I raise a glass to you.

Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

Arnold Schnabel, still on vacation

Most people can just take a moonlight walk along the beach and let it go at that. Arnold Schnabel was not most people. Originally published in the June 8, 1963 issue of the “Olney Times”. (Re-transmitted through the cold dark reaches of interstellar space by the permission of the Arnold Schnabel Society.)

“Striding Forth to Cape May Point”

I walk alone along the beach at night,
The curving long beach with no one about,
Only the sea rolling up with flashes of white
Then tossing itself forth with a sudden shout
As I trudge dutifully along through the sand;
And then, something I’d not foreseen at all:
With each sinking step I feel my head expand
And soon my brain is the size of a beach ball;
Will it continue to grow until it contains
All the sea, and the land, and the people on it?
All their nights and days, pleasures and pains,
All of heaven, all of hell, and one bad sonnet?
But no, like a beach ball with a slow leak
My head now shrinks, with a shrill hissing squeak.

(For links to other Arnold Schnabel poems and to his sprawling memoir Railroad Train to Heaven, kindly check the right hand column of this page.)

"The East Oak Lane Boys" in their salad days: looking sharp at the Lord Cheltenham Tavern, 1964

Mike Halloran, Steven Willoughby Jr, Carl Steinberg, Mickey Schwartz, Joe Reilly, Al Stein, Gaetano “Ace” Grappatino

One of the more colorful and somehow not so despicable of the many criminal outfits in Philadelphia history, the “East Oak Lane Boys” -- AKA “The Sturgis Playground Mob” -- came together as an enterprise in the summer of 1963. Most of them dropouts or expellees from Cardinal Dougherty High School or Olney High, this band of rascals started out as a multi-ethnic group of lazy idle young loafers who hung around the Sturgis Playground, mostly on the crabgrassy little hill on the west side that sloped down into Third Street and looked out over the noble broad expanse of the Oak Lane Reservoir. All of these young men lived with their parents in the surrounding neighborhood, in the modest semi-detached- or row-homes of a generation that had survived the Great Depression and World War II and escaped the crowded brownstones and noisome alleys of Kensington and Swampoodle to try for a better life in this relatively green and pleasant land just a few short miles to the north. The trouble with this group of young fellows was simple enough: they just didn’t want to work, or to do much of anything except to sleep a lot, eat, drink, cruise around in cars, and chase girls. In long confabs on that scrubby shoulder of ground outside the playground the boys would smoke their cigarettes and gab and talk about various fantastic schemes to make the money they required, if not to pay for their rent or meals (that’s what their parents were for), then to pay for beer and cigarettes, for snazzy sharkskin suits, for automobiles and for gas to power the automobiles so the lads could cruise around and try to pick up girls with little or no self-esteem.

It was Mickey Schwartz who came up with the plan that would bring the gang fortune and infamy. All those rich people who lived in the neighborhoods on the far side of the city limit of Cheltenham Avenue: these people didn’t stay at home on their tree-lined winding streets all summer -- no, they went on vacation, most of them for at least two weeks and many of them for longer. How many of these houses would be empty, especially in the months of July and August? And how much saleable loot would these foolish suburbanites leave lying around the empty house? Mickey and the boys took the two available clunkers they had among the seven guys in the group and they went on a reconnaissance mission through Cheltenham and Elkins Park. Sure enough, many houses were dark, empty, inviting. The boys drove back to the playground and talked it over. These houses were ripe for the picking.

The next night the gang broke into their first house. This was their modus operandi that night, one which they would follow on all future jobs: One guy would stay in each of the two cars, one on either side of the target house, keeping lookout. Using walkie-talkies, they kept in contact with the other five lads who broke into the house through a rear window and quickly turned the residence over, looking for jewelry mostly but not failing to pick up the odd rare-stamp or coin collection or other easily fencible valuable object. Within five minutes they were out of the house, back into the cars and cruising quietly away.

That first night the boys hit four houses. Next day they took their swag downtown to Jeweler’s Row, to a second-floor wholesale firm called Schwinkelman’s. Art Schwinkelman was an uncle of Mickey Schwartz’z and the black sheep of the family, for the very good reason that he was “mob-connected”. Not to put too fine a point on it, Art Schwinkelman was a professional fence. He took the swag off the boys and gave them $250 back, in crumpled bills no larger than twenties. Not a lot of money even by the standards of 1963, but a lot of money indeed for these seven young fools.

Thus was the rest of the summer spent. Each night (telling their parents that they had jobs delivering advertising circulars) the boys would drive out to a different section of a different suburb and hit four empty houses. Every day following, one or two of the gang would take the loot down to Schwinkelman’s. As the boys got better at finding and recognizing good material, their pay-offs increased. By the end of August they were averaging a thousand dollars a day in proceeds. Still not really big money when split seven ways, but plenty for a group of guys who still lived with their parents and got three free meals every day of their lazy lives.

September came and vacation season gradually drew to a close. The boys decided to withdraw from their illegal activities for the nonce and to enjoy their ill-gotten gains. Each boy now had his own new used car, the acquisition of which they explained to their parents by claiming that they had been out selling magazine subscriptions during the days that they actually spent going to ball games at Connie Mack or shooting pool and playing pinball. Another fall, winter and spring passed by, and, just as the time came when the boys were having trouble coming up with gas and beer money, summer arrived and with it vacations and ripe empty suburban houses.

Several years passed by, each with two months of assiduous burgling paying for a full ten months of loafing. The lads got a little older and a little softer and fatter, and in the summer of ’66 they discovered the rich joys of marijuana. Pot was great, but it was also a brand-new expense on top of the aforementioned beer and gasoline and cigarettes. That summer, to pay for their new addiction the boys decided to start hitting five houses each night instead of their customary four. What was one more house? Properly planned, this would entail perhaps only one extra half-hour’s work a night. They forgot two little things though: one -- they were now pot-heads, and two -- the milkman.

Any pot-head or acquaintance of a pot-head will not be surprised at how it all went down. Al Stein, Mike Halloran and Mickey Schwartz stood around in the master bedroom of the house, talking heatedly about who was the better pitcher, Jim Bunning or Chris Short. All the while Mickey held an unlocked jewelry box in his hands but did not open it. In the dining room Steve Willoughby and Joe Reilly stared obliviously at an open cabinet drawer, shimmering with silver and gold knives and forks and spoons, discussing who they’d rather make out with on “The Patty Duke Show”, Patty or Cathy. Out in the two lookout cars Ace Grappatino and Carl Steinberg were sound asleep. No one saw the milkman pulling into the house across the street from the target house. But the milkman, Joe Schwbanda, saw the two parked cars with slumped dark human forms in the drivers’seats. He continued on his rounds, but, encountering a police cruiser several blocks away, he reported the two suspicious cars. The police officer, Max Studebaker, drove slowly by the house. The two lookouts were still sound asleep and the boys inside were still deep in discussion. Officer Studebaker parked his car down the street and called for back-up. Within ten minutes our seven hoods were in handcuffs and on their way to the Cheltenham jail.

“The East Oak Lane Boys” (as the popular press dubbed them) were never indicted for any other crime, although police suspected them of having broken into some 500 or more houses in their three-and-one-half summers of pillage.

The boys were fortunate in pulling the Honorable Thomas Coogan as the presiding judge in their case. Judge Coogan just so happened to have grown up in “the old neighborhood” (Harrowgate) with Joe Reilly’s father, and a deal was proffered. They could take the case to trial and get two-to-five for burglary, or they could volunteer for this country’s proud armed forces. Figuring that they would have to get up early and make their own beds in either case, the boys conferred and decided to join the army. Well, some of them tried for the air force or the navy but it was only the army who would take them. Pulling family strings right and left, most of the boys managed to spend most of their hitches in Germany or Korea, and only Ace and Carl wound up having to go to Vietnam. Wiseguys to the bone, even there they managed to get over; Ace blackmailing his way into a cozy job unloading body bags in Saigon, and Carl forging some paperwork to magically promote himself to buck sergeant and into a supply job that consisted primarily of keeping the GIs in the Big Red One fully supplied with dynamite weed.

After their terms of enlistment were up the boys returned to their parents’ homes in East Oak Lane, and, older but only infinitesimally wiser, met again each evening on that weedy slope on the west side of Sturgis playground, passing joints and telling stories, gazing out at the still deep waters of the Oak Lane Reservoir, and planning their next big escapade.


(For more "Tales from the O-Zone" kindly turn to the right hand side of this page.)

Ladies and gentlemen, the Rolling Stones: