“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode Forty-Six: a most disturbing wireless communication

We continue our Harold Robbins Award-winning serialization of the unexpurgated “director’s cut” of this classic novel by the man Harold Bloom called “not only a great film-maker and a great novelist, but a great guy”, a man I am honored to call my friend and mentor, and at whose Mission/Colonial house on North Ivar Avenue in Hollywood I have spent many happy hours: Larry Winchester.

Early September, 1969.

That land of enchantment, New Mexico.

A large Victorian house on a ranch just several miles outside of a town called Disdain...

(Go here to review our previous episode.)

Dick lay on the bed, his hands folded behind his head. Only the one night-table lamp was lit. Daphne was taking her turn in the bathroom, and he was still wearing only his old kimono. he could smell the beef roasting down in the ranch-yard, and he was hungry.

He had Big Jake’s son’s transistor radio sitting on his stomach. So far, nothing.

Then someone or something spoke in an electrical voice and he sat upright like a shot and the radio fell off his stomach and down between his legs. He stared at it, the voice continued but it was not coming from this radio. It wasn’t making any sense either. It was either speaking some foreign language he’d never heard or the transmission was screwed up in some way. But where was it coming from?

Over there. Near that chair. The chair he’d thrown his jacket on.

He got up, feeling as if he were in a dream but knowing he wasn’t that lucky, and he walked over to the chair.

He stared at the jacket. The voice was coming from that pocket, definitely.

He reached into the pocket and took out the shot-up transistor radio. The voice continued to crackle from it, pouring right out of the bullet hole in the front of it.

Daphne came in the door, draped in a Palm Grove Hotel bath towel.

Dick was sweating. He could barely talk.

“Daphne.”

“Yes?”

“Can you hear this?”

“Yes. Of course I can hear it. What is it, Swahili?”

“Daphne, this radio is wrecked. It has a bullet hole though it.”

“Oh. How come it’s working then.”

“I -- Daph --this is the voice I told you about.”

“Oh. So you weren’t kidding.”

“No. Of course I wasn’t.”

“Well,” she said, “I thought maybe you were speaking -- you know -- metaphorically.”

“No,” said Dick.

“So, what’s it saying?”

“I don’t know.”

“But before you could understand it.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Well, turn it off if it’s not going to speak English.”

“I can’t turn it off,” said Dick, clicking the useless on-off switch. “It wasn’t on in the first place. It -- it --”

“Well it’s damned annoying,” said Daphne.

“I know.”

“Give me it.”

“Why?”

She came over and held her hand out.

“Because I’m getting rid of it.”

He handed the jabbering thing to her.

She shook it, then stared at it.

“Damned annoying,” she repeated.

She went over to the open window and tossed it out. It made a slow thin disappearing whine as it fell.

“Nasty thing,” she said. “Creepy. Now let’s get dressed for dinner. I’m famished.”

****

Agent Philips had been standing bemused watching the bare-chested sweating Chang turning the enormous side of beef on the spit and occasionally squirting it down with what looked like blood from a giant-sized syringe (which was otherwise used to inject cows with sperm) when the transistor radio landed in the dirt a few feet to his left.

He glanced up and then around, and then went over and picked it up.

It seemed to have just dropped from the sky.

It seemed to have a bullet-hole through it.

He looked up at the massive and looming house. The thing could have come from any number of windows, or even from the gabled and towered roof.

No one else seemed to have noticed it. He looked it over again and then put it in his windbreaker pocket.

(Click here for our next bewildering chapter. Kindly turn to the right hand side of this page for an up-to-date listing of links to other episodes of Larry Winchester’s A Town Called Disdain ™, as well as to appreciations of many of his classic films. Coming soon, from Ha! Karate MultiMedia: a special double-sided disc of two of Larry’s classic action epics with Dolph Lundgren: Blunt Force Trauma {1992} and Coup de Grace II: Galactic Hitman {also 1992}.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part Fifty-One: Arnold Schnabel meets the chairman of the board

In the previous episode of our Walmart Award shortlisted serialization of the memoirs of Arnold Schnabel, we left our hero sitting on the porch of his aunts’ ramshackle Victorian guest-house in Cape May NJ.

Also on or in front of the porch are:

Steve Jones: Arnold’s friend; sometimes appears in the form of Jesus.

Charlotte Rathbone: Steve’s date for the big cook-out they’re all going to tonight; spinster art teacher; lives with her mother, smokes pink Vanity Fair cigarettes.

Gertrude Evans: attractive novelist; Ayn Rand and Rock Hudson aficionada; like Miss Rathbone a tenant of the guest-house.

Mr. and Mrs. DeVore: young annoying boring couple; also guests at the house.

And crossing the street on this warm August evening in 1963: Elektra, Arnold’s bohemian inamorata...

“Well, look at you!” called Steve. “Don’t you look gorgeous!”

Elektra raised her arms, she had a small black purse on a long strap in her hand, and she did a twirl as she crossed the lamplit street, her red and black dress flying around her and then settling on her figure as she strode toward us.

“Oh my goodness, Miss Elektra, I’ve never seen you quite this dolled up before,” yelled Steve. He had disengaged his arm from Miss Rathbone’s, and he clapped the fingertips of his hands together.

I noticed that Miss Rathbone rolled her eyes, while Miss Evans stared at Steve with her head slightly cocked.

Mr. And Mrs. DeVore stared quite blatantly from Steve to Elektra and back again.

I stood up.

“Excuse me, Miss Evans,” I said, and went over to the steps and started down them, Steve still yelling compliments to Elektra,
but just then I heard my cousin behind me, saying:

“Cousin Arnold!”

I turned on the second step.

“Yes, Kevin?” I said.

He was standing in the doorway, holding the screen door open. Behind him I could just see my Aunt Greta and my mother leaning forward on the couch and staring out the door.

“I just wanted to say hello to Elektra!”

“Oh,” I said.

This kid was getting a little obsessed. Not that I blamed him really. Elektra was a knockout, and God only knows what she was doing with me.


The next few minutes were very confusing, complicated, and somewhat boring.

It involved Elektra coming up to the porch steps and being introduced to everyone she hadn’t been introduced to, and re-introduced to everyone else, and Kevin babbling up at her as she leaned forward to listen to him, one hand holding back a mass of her shining black hair, and giving him a look at her breasts that will probably give the boy material for self-abuse for untold years ahead.

The one good thing about this scene was the fact that after a minute Elektra put one of her hands on my arm, and kept it there.

Steve was right, she did look swell. Now that she was close to me I saw that the red and the black print of her dress was made up of large red and black roses. She wore red lipstick, and had make-up on her eyes that made them seem even darker and larger than their normal dark largeness. Around her light brown neck she wore a necklace of varicolored Cape May diamonds. Her dress was low-cut, and I confess that, just as Kevin stared at them shamelessly as she leaned over to chat with him, so also and just as shamelessly did I.

Finally Steve seemed to get bored with it all.

“Okay! Let’s go while the night is young! Gertrude, you are accompanying us, aren’t you?”

She also had come down to the foot of the steps.

“I feel like a fifth wheel,” she said.

“Every car needs a spare, honey. Come on! Frank Sinatra!”

So, soon enough we were all turning through the gate in awkward disorder.

Kevin suddenly ran forward and grabbed Elektra’s arm.

“Electric! Take me with you!”

“Sorry, Kevin,” I said. “This is a grown-up party. Go back and watch TV.”

Reluctantly he let go of her, and we followed the others out of the gate.

Mr. And Mrs. DeVore stared mournfully at our little band, outcast from our feast, left with no one to bore but themselves and possibly Kevin; but no, not even him. He turned and quickly scrambled up the steps and back into the house, anxious no doubt not to miss any more of Route 66.

Steve led the way, with Miss Evans on his right arm and Miss Rathbone on his left.

I deliberately let some space pass between our two groups as we walked, and I stopped Elektra with my hand.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello, Arnold.”

I realized then that she was about the nicest thing that had ever happened to me.

“You don’t really want to go to this, do you?” she asked.

“Not particularly,” I said.

“Let’s just go for a little while. I know it’s stupid, but I want to see what Frank Sinatra looks like. Then you and I can split.”

“Okay,” I said.

So our little group walked along.

Steve started to cross at Congress, but I called out for him to turn right.

The house was a great turreted affair on the corner, with a screened porch on both the first and second floors, a garden filling the space between the house and the sidewalk. Down past the sides of the house we could see lights and people in the back.

Steve led the way through the gate, up a flagstone walkway that went through the garden and to the left of the house, and to the back yard where the party was.

Dick Ridpath excused himself from a conversation with an older woman and came over and greeted us warmly. Steve introduced Miss Evans, and Dick not only was gracious to this uninvited guest but knew of her work and said he was looking forward to her next novel.

With Dick’s able help, soon we had drinks in our hands and were mingling with the pleasant men and women there.

I was mildly surprised that one by one Dean Martin, Joey Bishop, Sammy Davis Jr -- and, finally, even Frank Sinatra -- came up and introduced themselves to me and Elektra.

And then, as Frank was chatting with Elektra, asking about her jewelry store, it finally dawned on me, it was she who was attracting these stars of stage, screen, and television, and not the odd fellow she was with. I’ll say this for Frank though, he was a gentleman; because after chatting with Elektra for about five minutes (during which time she kept her arm in mind, while I stared off into space and occasionally at Mr. Sinatra’s hairpiece) he said to me, “And what do you do -- Arnold is it?”

“Yes,” I said. “Well, I write poems, Mr. Sinatra.”

“No kidding. Do they rhyme?”

“Oh, always,” I said.

“Did you ever think of writing song lyrics?”

“No,” I said.

“If you ever want to give it a try, I’m always looking for new material. I could give the lyrics to Jimmy Van Heusen, say, see if he could turn them into a good song for me.”

“Well, I doubt I could do that, Mr. Sinatra,” I said.

“Call me Frank. Why not, Arnold?”

“Well -- Frank -- it’s the things I write about.”

“Like what?”

“Like -- I don’t know. Worms on the pavement on a rainy day. The scariness of an amusement arcade. Having a conversation with Jesus, or with an hallucination of Jesus. Fighting off demons while you’re trying to watch TV. That sort of thing.”

“You don’t think you could just write me a love song?”

“I’ve asked him to write me a poem,” said Elektra, “and he still hasn’t done it.”

“But I’m determined to do it,” I said.

“Don’t rush him, honey,” said Frank. “You got a real poet on your hands here. Most bums would jump at the chance to work for me. I’d like to read your poems, Arnold. You got any books out?”

“No,” I said. “Just a lot of clippings from the papers the poems have appeared in.”

“Yeah, how many?”

“Oh, a lot,” I said. Like thirteen hundred, but I didn’t want to boast.

Frank reached into his back pocket and took out a thick worn old wallet. He was not a big man at all. Like me he was dressed in bermuda shorts and a polo shirt, except he wore white shoes with no socks, whereas I wore white Keds with white socks. For a second I thought he was going to give me some money. But instead he pulled out a visiting card with gold edging. He handed it to me. All it had on it was a phone number, embossed in gold.

“This is my number, kid. You ever think you’ve got some good material for me, give me a call. Collect.”

“Thanks, Mr. Sinatra.”

“Frank.”

“Thanks, Frank.” I looked at the card, wondering if that was real gold on it. “I doubt I’ll come up with anything suitable though.”

“You let me be the judge of that,” he said. “Something about love is always good.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Or like loneliness. Loss. Late at night with the deep blue blues. Maybe that’s more your style.”

“You’re probably right,” I said.

“Just nothing about worms,” he said. “Or Jesus. Or demons.”

Steve was working his way toward us, with Miss Rathbone and Miss Evans.

“Put the card in your wallet, Arnold. I don’t want you to lose it.”

I took out my wallet and did as he advised.

I didn’t think I’d ever call him, but I didn’t want to make the guy feel bad.

(Go here for our next action-packed chapter. And turn if you will to the right hand side of this page for a listing of links to other episodes of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train to Heaven™, and to many of his fine poems. All rights reserved by the Arnold Schnabel Society. Imprimatur, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen.)

“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode Forty-Five: Dick knows it's foolish even to try to lie to Daphne

Daphne MacNamara (later, Ridpath) at Frank’s Playland, Cape May NJ, 1963

Return with us now to the book Harold Bloom called “not just the great American novel, but one of the greatest of all novels, able to stand on equal footing with such masterpieces of world literature as Natascha: Lass of the Steppes, Dr. Xing’s Stepdaughter, and The Seven Lives of Señor Doyle” as Larry Winchester reveals yet another dimension of that glamorous and mysterious couple, Dick and Daphne Ridpath.

(Click here for our previous installment.)

We are of course in the month of September, 1969, on a ranch on the border of the vast and wasted New Mexico desert, just several miles outside of a town called Disdain...

They lay side by side on their backs across the bed, their legs dangling off the side. Daphne’s hand lay on Dick’s damp upper thigh. Dick lay with his hands folded on his stomach and he and Daphne both stared up at the grim old floral-papered ceiling.

A cooling dying-day breeze smelling of rock and salt blew in through open the window.

Daphne rolled over partway on Dick’s chest.

“I want to know who you were thinking about.”

“You, sweety.”

“Balls.”

And she pulled at a clump of his chest hair.

“Well, who were you thinking about?” asked Dick.

“The Maharishi.”

His head jerked down to look into her eyes.

“No,” he said. “Don’t say that.”

“I wasn’t fantasizing about him. I was just remembering. You were the one fantasizing.”

It was never any use arguing with Daphne. She read him like an open comic book.

“It was that Hope girl,” said Daphne, with complete certainty. “Wasn’t it?”

“Of course not,” said Dick, although of course it had been, but the funny thing was that with him also it had been not so much like fantasizing but remembering. But how could he remember something that had never happened?

“You’re such fantastic liar,” she said, and squeezing him hard down below, she stuck out her tongue and licked his left nipple slowly like some beautiful sated leopardess.


Dick lay quiet, feeling Daphne’s sweaty breast on his sweaty chest, her warm breath in the hairs on his chest, her smell of sex and Chanel No.5, the smell of her hair, her hand on him.

He felt really odd, emptied of everything but a thin ghostly oddness.

Not that he’d felt much of anything else but odd for some years now. But there were degrees.

He tried to remember the details of what he had been fantasizing that he’d been remembering, but all he could recall now was that it was indeed this Hope girl, and that some people or some creatures had been watching them.


And now this woman here, Daphne, she and her warm woman’s body were the only thing keeping him here now, the only thing keeping him from just floating up off this bed and through that ugly floral paper on that ceiling and up and out of this house and just out there, out there.

Out where?

Get a grip on yourself, boy. Just get a grip here.

He put his lips to the top of her head and he kept them there, in her damp soft short hair, the smell of the Palm Grove hotel shampoo and of sweat, the damp cork smell of that pith helmet of hers, this strange head.

After a few moments she lifted her face up and looked into his eyes.

Then they joined into each other through their eyes, and they were beyond time and beyond flesh and words.

Their eyes closed together and they fell asleep.

****

(Click here for our next exciting chapter. Kindly take a look at the right hand side of this page for an up-to-date listing of links to other episodes of Larry Winchester’s a Town Called Disdain ™, now in development by Ha! Karate Films as a major motion picture starring Billy Zane, Kari Wührer and Stephen Dorff, to be directed of course by Larry Winchester, provided the funding doesn’t fall through again.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part Fifty: "Kings don't mean a thing on the street of dreams..."

Return with us again to that warm August night in 1963, to the seaside town of Cape May NJ, where Arnold Schnabel, author of these memoirs, sits on the porch of his aunts’ large Victorian guest-house...

(Go here to review our previous episode.)

Miss Evans came around to the front of the porch, put one foot on the first porch step, but hesitated.

“I wonder if I should just go to that movie?” she said in my direction.

“What were you going to see?” said Mrs. DeVore.

I’d almost forgotten Mr. and Mrs. DeVore were still sitting there. But they were still there all right.

“A Gathering of Eagles,” said Miss Evans. “With Rock Hudson.”

“Oh I love Rock Hudson,” said Mrs. DeVore.

“Me too,” said Miss Evans.

“He’s so handsome. And tall. Darling,” she said to her husband, “should we go see the movie?”

“Is it a war picture?”

“Is it a war picture?” Mrs. DeVore asked Miss Evans.

“I don’t think so,” said Miss Evans. “But I believe Rock Hudson does play a bomber pilot.”

“I love men in a uniform. Should we go, darling?”

“Okay,” shrugged Mr. DeVore.

“The only thing is Arnold’s friend Steve said it wasn’t very good,” said Miss Evans.

“Oh,” said Mrs. DeVore. “Now I don’t know what to do.”

“Well, that’s just his opinion,” said Mr. DeVore.

“I know, but --”

“Mr. ‘Frank Sinatra’ there.”

“Oh, my God, that’s right!” chirped Mrs. DeVore. “Arnold, is Frank Sinatra really going to be at that cook-out?”

The problem here was that listening to them all talk had driven me slightly insane again. I felt like they were all part of some boring movie that I had been transported into, except that I was a real person and they were just projections on a screen.

“Arnold?” said Mrs. DeVore again.

“Argyle,” I said.

“What?”

“Aardvark.”

“What?”

“What did he say?” asked Mr. DeVore.

She turned back to face him.

“Argyle,” she said, sounding a little frightened. “And aardvark.”

Miss Evans came up the porch steps and over to in front of where I sat.

“Are you okay, Arnold?” she said in a low voice.

I took a deep breath.

She put a hand on my arm, and this helped. Her eyes were kind. I came back. Or the world came back to me.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m okay.” I took another breath and, trying to sound normal, I turned to the DeVores and said, “Yeah, Frank Sinatra’s supposed to be there.”

Mrs. DeVore smiled nervously at me. Mr. DeVore beyond her leaned forward and also smiled nervously.

Miss Evans continued to hold her hand on my upper arm.

“So, should I go to this cook-out, Arnold?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I would like to meet Frank Sinatra,” she said. She patted my arm and then removed her hand. “Wouldn’t you?”

I thought about this.

“I did meet him,” I said. “He asked me for directions.”

“What was he like?”

“Well, just like anybody else,” I said.

“You really talked to him?” said Mrs. DeVore. “Where is this cook-out? Is it around here?”

“It’s on the Street of Dreams,” I said.

“What?”

“Love laughs at a king,” I said. “Kings don't mean a thing on the street of dreams. Dreams broken in two can be made like new, on the street of dreams.”

Mrs. DeVore stared at me. Her husband beyond her leaned forward in his rocker and stared at me.

The husband tapped the wife on the shoulder, beckoned her to lean toward him as he leaned toward her. He whispered something in her ear, something no doubt to the effect of, “He’s crazy. Better leave him alone.”

They both settled back in their rockers and lifted up their magazines.

It was almost full evening now.

Miss Evans leaned down toward me.

“Wasn’t that a Frank Sinatra song?” she asked in a low voice.

I nodded. And I wondered, had I quoted those lines to Mr. And Mrs. DeVore because I was still at least somewhat in the grip of an attack of madness, or had I simply wanted to make them stop butting in?

But then Steve came around the side of the house, arm in arm with Miss Rathbone, who wore a long gauzy ivory-colored dress and carried a small pink purse with sparkles on it. She had made her hair into a sort of billow above her forehead, with silver or silver-colored barrettes above her ears guiding it in waves behind her bare shoulders. She carried what looked like a pink silk scarf draped over her forearms and behind her back.

“Arnold,” said Steve, “Gertrude! Look how marvelous my date looks!”

“Oh be quiet, Steve,” said Miss Rathbone, but she let him guide her around to the front of the porch, her arm in his.

“Hello, Miss Evans,” said Miss Rathbone.

“You look wonderful,” said Miss Evans.

“Thank you. You don’t look bad either.”

“Great,” said Steve, “everybody looks fabulous, now let’s get this show on the road!”

“But Arnold’s waiting for his lady friend,” said Miss Evans.

“Oh, I forgot. Well, we’ll see you there then, Arnold. Come on, darling,” he said to Miss Rathbone.

He tried to pull her arm, but she wouldn’t budge.

“I loved your poems, Arnold,” said Miss Rathbone. “I devoured them. I found them extraordinary.”

“Are they really?” said Miss Evans.

“Extraordinary,” said Miss Rathbone.

“Oh, God, Arnold, the women love you!” said Steve. “That’s it, I’m going to start writing poems tomorrow!”

“I’m afraid it’s not quite that easy,” said Miss Rathbone. “Arnold has honed his craft. And he has suffered.”

“I can hone!” said Steve. “And God knows I can suffer!” Mr. and Mrs. DeVore were paying attention again, indeed how could they not, and Steve said to them, “Really, I know about suffering!”

Once again they smiled uncertainly and picked up their magazines.

Thank God, or whomever, I saw Elektra coming down from Perry Street.

Steve was speaking some nonsense, I don’t know what.

I watched Elektra crossing North Street.

I hadn’t realized it before but the street lights had come on, and it was as if she was walking on to a stage. She wore a dress I hadn’t seen before, all splotched with silky red and black.

Mid-street she stopped, the street lamp throwing white light off her dark hair, and she looked at this group of people sitting on the porch and in front of it.

Then bravely she continued toward us.

(Click here for our next exciting chapter. Kindly turn to the right hand side of this page for up-to-date listings of links to other episodes of Arnold Schnabel’s K-Mart Award-winning Railroad Train to Heaven™, as well as to many of his easy-to-understand poems.)

And now a word from the very talented Miss Anita O'Day:

“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode Forty-Four: Daphne seeks out spirtitual enlightenment

It’s September, 1969, and a young soldier named Harvey returns from ‘Nam to his wretched home town in the New Mexico wastelands.

His first day back he kills the bully Bull Thorndyke in self-defense. The big rancher Big Jake Johnstone immediately hires Harvey to act as guide to two guests of his, the beautiful and mysterious couple Dick and Daphne Ridpath (AKA “Smith”).

Later that same night Dick kills a member of the brutal motorcycle gang the Motorpsychos. Their leader, a former Oxford don called Moloch, vows revenge.

Two international assassins named Hans Grupler and Marlene are also stopping as guests at the ranch, along with two suspected government agents named Philips and Adams, and a dissipated English rock star named Derek Squitters.

Big Jake’s beautiful daughter Hope has an attack of hysterics on Dick and Daphne’s bed.

And this is only the beginning of Larry Winchester’s sprawling masterwork, a novel which, says Harold Bloom, “...contains all of life, and so much more...”

When Dick got back from his shower he was sporting an erection, so Daphne stopped what she was doing (looking for those missing seashell-blue panties from Chez Ghislaine), pulled off his robe, he was sweating profusely poor thing, she pulled him over to the bed and naked as she already was she climbed into it and grabbed a couple of pillows and told him to go right ahead.

And oddly enough something about the animal-waste way the air smelled coming in through the window looking out on the brown land and the darkening mountains returned her mind to the little village at the foothills of the Himalayas where they had gone to study at the feet of the Maharishi.

Dick had expressed some dubiety but Daphne’s friend Mia had been absolutely rapturous about the Maharishi and she offered to pay their way so off they went.

Dick’s jazz boîte in Paris had been burnt in the student riots and he was in a glum mood. But wouldn’t you know it Dick Mr. Skeptical was soon this terrific convert just chanting the livelong day.

But not Daphne. Two or three minutes of chanting were plenty for her, thank you.

All these people would be sitting in this temple place just chanting like mad and Daphne would excuse herself saying she had to go to the ladies’ room, and she would go outside and light up a bidi, one of these cunning little native cigarettes, and then take a long stroll along the Ganges.

Little Indian boys and girls would trail along behind her. She supposed she cut an exotic figure for them. Nearly six feet tall, her hair in a pixie and dyed honey blonde. (Mia later copied the style and did quite well by it.)

The children were all barefoot, wearing shorts and no shirts.

She would sit by the river, looking at it and up at the enormous mountains.

The children squatting all about her looking at her quietly with their huge brown eyes.

Then strolling along a bit more, smelling the wood burning in the villagers’ stoves and the cooking smells of odd foods and spices, the smells of animals and growth and rot.

Goats and cows standing by the road, people coming out of their little houses to look at her.

The children followed her everywhere.

On the third day she discovered this tennis club and she went in, had a cocktail and became great friends with the people in the bar there.


The days went on and each day Daphne sat and chanted for a bit, each time trying to stick it out for at least five minutes.

But after two or three minutes she got up “to go to the ladies’ room”.

Her little Indian friends would be on the road outside, and she took to bringing them presents, little trinkets and whatnot that she would pick up in the temple when no one was looking.

One day she forgot to bring them anything so she gave them an English Vogue she had in her handbag, and they were quite ecstatic about that.

She pointed out the various models and named them for the kids.

“This is Jean Shrimpton. Say Jean Shrimpton.”

“Jean Sheenton,” they said.

“And this is Twiggy. Say Twiggy.”

“Teegy,” they said.

In their turn the children gave her little white rock candies.

And off she would stroll, sucking on the rock candy, and down to the club where she would play tennis and swim and have lunch and cocktails that she never had to pay for.

Several men made heavy plays for her, but as usual with men the more ardent they got the more boring they became.

And one day one of the Maharishi’s assistants told Daphne that the Maharishi would like to have a private talk with her.

Daphne met with him in this comfortable little room where he sat crosslegged on a low couch covered with gaily colored pillows.

He called her my child and beckoned her to sit on the rug by his side where some more gaily colored pillows were strewn.

Daphne curled up on the pillows, folding her legs under her. She was fresh from the tennis court where she had beaten this young English tea merchant in three straight sets; a couple of weeks’ daily practice on the excellent red clay court had sharpened her game marvelously, and she felt quite close to that merciless form she had shown in leading the Bryn Mawr women to the regional championship back in ‘64. She had showered and changed into a crisp white full-skirted dress that she thought made her look like an actress in some Fifties movie about the Rains of Ranchipur or something.

“Well, my child, you do not seem to have much patience for our chanting nor for my lectures neither.”

“Oh no,” she said, “your highness darling it’s just I have the most weakest possible bladder. You can’t imagine.”

“But then why do you not return after you have voided your bladder my child.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well you know I hate to disturb the others with all my silly comings and goings.”

“The others are in a state of advanced meditation which makes them quite oblivious to the comings and goings of one small tiny little girl in our physical universe my child.”

“Well your excellency I am hardly what you might call small and tiny or little.”

“In the great scheme of things you are but a tiny mote in the eye of a gnat who has flown into the farthest reach of outer space where his buzzing cannot be heard by even the ears of ten thousand gods.”

“Chilling thought. Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Your lungs are meant to breathe only the goodness of pure air my child.”

“No. Really.” She took her cigarettes and lighter out of her pocket book. “Then why are you people always lighting incense every other second?”

In fact there was a censer burning incense right there at the foot of the old boy’s couch.

She lit her cigarette and clicked her lighter shut.

“And another thing,” she said, blowing out a stream of smoke. “If you’re such an all knowing wise man how come you don’t know you have a teensy bit of rice stuck in your beard?”

“I do?” He looked down and began fingering his long brindled beard.

“I mean, really,” went on Daphne, “and who made you the King of Wisdom? If you ask me you’ve got some racket going on here with all your rock-and-roll stars and movie actresses. I mean not that I blame you, everyone has to earn a dollar some way I suppose, but just don’t get so high and mighty with me.”

He had found the grain of rice and put it in an engraved golden plate. He put the plate down on the floor next to Daphne, and she tapped her ash into it.

“You have humbled me, my child.”

“Well, no hard feelings,” she said.

“I am but a weak thing, a mere insect --”

“I know, floating around out by Neptune, so far out even Flash Gordon couldn’t find you.”

“I feel it is I who could learn much from you my child.”

“I don’t know what.”

“I feel you know many things.”

“I feel you are full of baloney,” she said.

“I think that you could teach me my child. You have very strong bagala energy.”

It sounded something like bagala but she wasn’t quite sure at all, and she didn’t feel like asking him to repeat it.

“I myself,” he went on, “I have always been a person with strong mamanana energy, which of course is the masculine counterpart to bagala energy.”

Or was he saying baccalà energy, like the fish?

“When you combine a strong pure bagala energy such as you have within you with a strong pure mamanana energy such as I have within me then when these two energies combine you have the even stronger energy the bagamamanana.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about, your worship. I must have been in the ladies’ room when you were covering this material.”

“It’s all in the pamphlets you’ve been given.”

“I’ve been meaning to get to those.”

“I am talking about the essence of male and the essence of female.”

“Oh,” said Daphne.

He was sitting up straight now, looking or rather leering down at her.

“I am talking about the joining together of the two corporeal hosts for the purposes of spiritual advancement.”

He had entwined his hands together now and he was breathing a bit heavily.

“Uh-huh,” said Daphne, suspecting where this was leading.

And sure enough before she knew it he had slipped down from the couch and had his arm around her, his hand gripping her arm.

“You have such strong bagala,” he whispered, and his beard was suddenly all over her shoulder and she could feel his lips within it like some wet little animal crawling towards her neck.

So she gave him a hard elbow straight into his tubby little gut and he fell backwards gripping it.

“Oh,” he moaned. “My mamanana. It is surging within me.”

He started to sit back up again and she put her hand on his chest and shoved him back down.

“Well,” she said, “this bagala energy is surging right out of here, your holiness.”

She stood up and straightened out the skirt of her dress.

He raised a hand toward her.

“Please,” he implored.

“God,” said Daphne, taking a drag on her cigarette, and blowing it down at the old man. “You’re just another dirty filthy old man aren’t you. Is this real gold?”

She put her finger on a large ornately carved vase sitting on a table near the couch.

“Yes my child.”

“If you give it to me I won’t tell anyone about this disgraceful incident.”

“It is not mine to give. All here belongs to our community and all we have belongs to all the world.”

“Well that includes me then.”

She took the vase under her arm and walked out. They were able to sell it at Sotheby’s for five thousand pounds and this financed a quite pleasant vacation in Monaco.



Dick collapsed upon her and she let him stay there for a minute, their bagala and mamanana energies breathing into each other as one.

****

(Click here for our next enthralling episode. Kindly look to the right hand side of this page for an up-to-date listing of links to other episodes of Larry Winchester's A Town Called Disdain™. Check out our listings of "The Films of Larry Winchester" too, and remember to send in requests for these to Turner Classic Movies.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part Forty-Nine: a gathering of eagles, Cape May, NJ, August 1963

In our last episode of these unexpurgated memoirs of the man Harold Bloom called “the John Coltrane of 20th Century American Literature” Arnold Schnabel managed once again to escape the embrace of the attractive novelist Gertrude Evans.

But the sultry evening is yet young...

I made my way out the side entrance in a successful maneuver to avoid my mother and aunts. The porch was empty except for a couple of tenants, a young married couple named DeVore.

I said hello and went to the other side of the porch to my usual rocker. Miss Evans’s novel was still sitting on the little table, so I picked it up for something to read while waiting for Elektra.

Emily decides to take up the Montgomery Clift poet guy’s invitation to spend the night at his Greeenwich Village apartment, but strictly on a platonic basis, supposedly. Before they go up to his “pad” however, the guy, what’s his name, Porter Walker, invites her for a drink at a local bar. A jazz trio are playing on the small stage.

“Can’t you hear what those cats are doing?” he asks Emily.

Emily listens for a minute and then says, yes, she can hear it.

Then the old rag-and-bones lady shows up again and comes over to the table where Porter the poet and Emily are sitting and drinking cheap beer.

“I told you you would find love,” she says.

She goes away and Porter asks her what’s in the briefcase she’s brought along with her overnight bag.

She considers telling him that she’s got his epic poem in there, but decides not to.

They go up to his pad, and it’s just the one room, with a bathtub in it. Porter says he’ll sleep in the tub. Emily gives him a hard time about this. He says he’s used to sleeping in tubs. It goes on like this, and then all of a sudden Emily kisses him. It started to get pretty hot and heavy here, and I felt embarrassed reading it on the porch.

“What are you reading?” called Mrs. DeVore.

“Um, it’s called Ye Cannot Quench,” I called back.

“Isn’t that the novel Miss Evans wrote?”

Everyone knows everyone’s business around here.

“Yes,” I said.

“You must lend it to me when you’re finished,” she said.

“Well, it’s not my book,” I said. “Miss Evans lent it to me.”

“Oh, she must like you. And what about your lady friend?”

See what I mean? How did they even know I had a lady friend?

“I hear your lady friend is a real hot ticket, Arnold,” said Mr. DeVore.

Already we’re on a first-name basis, and I’d never done more than say hello to these people.

“Jewish girl, isn’t she, Arnold?” said Mrs. DeVore.

“She is a member of the Israelite tribe,” I said, and I have no idea why I said that, but it, or the way I said it, somehow seemed to take them aback and they smiled and went back to their magazines, she a Holiday, he a New Yorker.

I went back to Miss Evans’s book and the steamy scene. They were now on Porter’s bed, and Emily’s bosom was heaving and she was running her hands over his slim lithe muscles and breathing in his “musk of the city and manhood”. And just when you think she’s about to -- you know -- she goes into a long remembrance of a date she had with a high school boy back in West Virginia, on a night “scented with honeysuckle and sweet warm sweat”. The boy, named Cletus, or “Clete”, takes her out to a remote mountain spot in his Model T --

But meanwhile I’m thinking, why is this Emily all of a sudden daydreaming about this old boyfriend of hers while she’s busy kissing and running her hands along the lithe muscles of this Porter guy?

But I kept reading anyway, thinking there was still a chance it might make some sense.

And then all of a sudden Steve is standing there, saying, “Aren’t you engrossed?”

I wasn’t sure if this was Steve himself, or another apparition of Steve as Jesus. He was carrying a bouquet of calla lilies, so that made me suspicious. I glanced over at the DeVores, and they were both looking at Steve, although seeming to be trying to pretend that they weren’t blatantly staring at him. So this made me think it was probably really Steve. If things have gotten to the point where other people are seeing Jesus too, well, then we’re all in big trouble.

“Hi, Steve,” I said.

“So you’re coming tonight, right?” he said.

“Where?” I asked.

“To the cook-out.”

Once again I’d forgotten all about it.

“You know, he said. "The one with Frank Sinatra. And the Rat Pack. Swimming pools. Movie stars?”

“They have a swimming pool there?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” he said. “But you are coming, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m waiting for Elektra.”

“When is she supposed to be here?”

I checked my watch.

“About a half hour ago,” I said.

“Primping, I’m sure," he said. “I feel so much better now myself. Had a beauty nap. How do you think I look?”

He was wearing white loose trousers and a long-sleeved white dress shirt of some very light-looking material. He also wore white shoes I noticed.

“You don’t think the white bucks are a bit de trop?” he asked.

“No, not at all,” I said.

“And the calla lilies?” he asked.

They did seem odd to me, but I didn’t say so.

“She told me she likes calla lilies,” said Steve.

“Who?” I asked.

“Who? My date! Charlotte.”

It all came back to me now.

“What do you think of her?” he asked. “May I sit?”

“Sure,” I said.

And he sat down in the rocker next to mine. He leaned over toward me and spoke lowly, as if he didn’t want the DeVores to hear him, and in fact I could see them over his shoulder, pretending to read their magazines, but straining their ears to catch our every word.

“Tell me true, what do you think of her?”

“She seems nice,” I said.

“I think she’s divine,” said Steve. “Magnificent. She reminds me of Deborah Kerr. With just a bit of Katherine Hepburn. Or Joan Greenwood. Just -- fabulous. And her mother -- isn’t her mother a scream?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“So what do you think of her and me?”

“Miss Rathbone and you?”

“Yes. I certainly didn’t mean Mrs. Rathbone and me.”

He had gotten progressively louder, but now I spoke in a very low voice.

“Do you mean -- for you to -- go out with her?”

“Yes? What d’ya think?”

It was getting dark now, inside the house in my aunts’ living room Route 66 was playing on the TV. The DeVores were still trying to eavesdrop.

“Steve,” I said in my lowest voice, “I was under the impression that you -- didn’t like girls.”

Steve whispered, “You mean I’m queer as a three dollar bill?”

“Well, yeah,” I whispered back.

“Well, what if I am?” he asked, in a normal voice, or normal for Steve. “Does that mean I can’t go out with a woman?”

“But -- why would you want to?” I asked.

“Oh, so just because I’m not interested in -- in ravishing her -- does that mean I can’t go out with a woman?”

“I --”

“Arnold, can’t you get your mind out of the gutter for just one minute?”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“There are more things to life than sex you know.”

I really couldn’t think of anything to say to this.

Steve sat back and took out his cigarettes. I felt bad, so I gave him a light.

“Thank you, Arthur,” he said. So now I was back to being Arthur again, but I didn’t have the heart to correct him.

I lit up one of my own, and we sat in silence for half a minute.

Bugs were starting to come out for their evening’s adventures. Little gnats, and probably mosquitoes soon enough.

“I’d like to get married too,” said Steve, although no one had mentioned marriage. “I don’t see why I can’t have all that, like everybody else. A nice wife. Maybe even a brat or two.”

This was all too confusing to me, to be honest. I thought homosexuals were not supposed to like women. Why would a homosexual man want to be married to a woman then?

“You think I would be living a lie?” asked Steve. Unfortunately he was speaking normally loud, and I could see the DeVores were hanging on his every word. Steve saw me looking at them, and he turned his head around to look at them also.

“Would you like me to speak louder for your benefit?” he asked them.

They both immediately picked up their magazines and buried their faces in them.

Steve finally turned back to me, and shrugged.

“Why can’t I have my cake and eat it too?” he asked me. “I think I would make a marvelous husband. I wouldn’t be pestering her for you-know-what all the time. Oh, I know what you’re thinking, what if she wanted to be pestered?”

Actually I wasn’t thinking that. I didn’t know what I was thinking.

“Well,” he said, “I venture to say I could rise to the occasion. You know, close my eyes and think of England.”

“Why would you think of England?” I asked.

“It’s just a saying, Arthur,” he said. “Look, you’re my best friend. Give me your blessing.”

“Okay,” I said. After all, what did I know about any of this?

“Thanks, buddy. She likes you, you know.”

“Miss Rathbone?”

“Yes. She’s mad about you. Or mad about your poems, anyway. After you fell into your deep plummetless slumber she and I sat together for a full hour while her mother snoozed too, and most of that time Charlotte spent reading your poems. I dare say she’d prefer you to me. Well, I guess I should get back there; she’s waiting for me. You are coming tonight, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I’m as excited as a schoolgirl on prom night. I just want my slice of the pie, Arthur. My piece of the American dream. I don’t want to grow old in some fussy old parlour with some other old queen. I’d like a proper wife to go home to. And I can always have my fun on the side, can’t I?”

“Well, that wouldn’t be right, Steve,” I said.

“Oh, Mr. Morality. Get with it, Arthur, don’t you know how many husbands fool around on their wives? And not only just with other women?”

“That still doesn’t make it right, Steve.”

He paused here, looking at his white shoes.

“You’re right,” he said. “It’s not right. That’s why if I do marry Charlotte I’ll just have to -- to change my ways. That’s what I’ll do.”

“Steve,” I said, “don’t you think maybe you’re jumping the gun a little here?”

He looked at me.

“Like maybe we should go out on a first date before we register at Lit Brothers?”

Just then Miss Evans came walking around the side of the house. She stopped at the side of the porch.

“Hello, Arnold,” she said.

She was still wearing the polka dot dress, except now she carried a white pocket book, and she had a white sweater over one arm.

“Arnold!” said Steve. “And here I was calling you Arthur again! Hello,” he said to Miss Evans.

“Hello,” she said.

“My name’s Steve. My friend Arnold has such barbaric manners.”

“My name’s Gertrude. Gertrude Evans. Are you the friend who’s read The Fountainhead?”

“Yes! By Ann what’s-her-name?”

“Ayn Rand.”

“I loved that book!”

“You have excellent taste. And I see you’re still reading my book, Arnold?”

I still held it in my hand.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m --” I tried to think of a way not to lie outright. “I’m amazed,” I said. Amazed at how absurd the book was.

“Well, thank you very much, Arnold,” she said.

Steve had leaned over and looked at the cover of the book, touching it with two fingers.

“Oh my God,” he said. “You wrote this?” he asked Miss Evans.

“Yes,” she said.

“I’m so impressed. Arthur I mean Arnold you’ll have to let me read it when you’re finished. May I, Gertrude?”

“Of course,” she said.

“Where are you off to, may I ask?” he asked.

“I’m going to the movies,” she said.

“Oh really? To that Rock Hudson show?”

“A Gathering of Eagles, yes,” she said. “I’m sure it’s terrible, but I’m a sucker for Rock Hudson.”

“Honey, I hate to tell you, but it’s very boring. It’s just Rock flying B-52 bombers all around.”

“Really?”

“Really; now if it was Lover Come Back, or Pillow Talk, or even The Spiral Road it would be a different story. Why don’t you come to the cook-out with us?”

“What cook-out?”

“Some pals of ours are having a cook-out down the street. They told us to bring friends. Frank Sinatra’s going to be there.”

“Frank Sinatra?”

“Yes,” said Steve. He turned around to look at the DeVores again and said, loud and clear, “Frank Sinatra.”

They picked up their magazines again.

“I don’t know,” said Miss Evans.

“Wait here,” Steve said to her, and he stood up. “I have to go back and get my date.”

Steve went down the steps with his calla lilies, around the porch and past Miss Evans, saying, “Go on up, darling, wait on the porch with Arthur.”

Right then and there I decided Steve was definitely not Jesus.

(Click here for our next thrilling chapter. And check out the right hand side of this page for links to other episodes of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train to Heaven ™, all rights reserved by the Arnold Schnabel Society.)

Nancy and Lee and summer wine:

“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode Forty-Three: Dick grapples with Marlene

When last we saw Dick Ridpath in Larry Winchester’s Genesee Cream Ale Award-winning epic, he was narrowly avoiding calamity in the boudoir of Hope, the beautiful daughter of the vile rancher Big Jake Johnstone. But he’s not safe home yet, not by a long shot, not while Marlene (the sultry partner of the international assassin Hans Grupler) is on the premises...

Outside Hope’s room Dick stood still for a moment, breathed deeply, and then glanced down. In the insane rioting of his soul he had not quite realized the embarrassing extent of his erection.

There was a sound, as of an approaching panther. He turned and saw Marlene in a short red terrycloth robe, carrying a hairbrush and a towel and apparently headed toward the bathroom.

He stood to one side to give her plenty of room to pass, but she stopped as she came abreast of him.

“I trust there is still some hot water. Mr. -- Schmidt?”

“I certainly hope so,” said Dick.

“You must have taken a very hot shower,” she said. “Still you are schwitzing.”

She put out a red-nailed finger, laid it on his chest and then showed him a bead of sweat quivering on her perfectly still fingertip. She smiled, put out her tongue and put the bead of sweat on it. Then she drew the tongue back in between her full red lips and swallowed.

Dick started to turn to go and she stepped closer to him, pressing her bosom against him.

“I can help you,” she said. “I can dispose of Grupler for you.”

Dick made to step away again and she pressed him against the wall. She let the towel over her left arm drop and she reached under his kimono and put her hand on him. The stiff sharp bristles of the brush in her right hand pressed through the silk of his robe against his chest.

“We could go together,” she said. “I caught your wibration at the table today.”

“You caught my wibration?”

“Yess.”

Her left hand worked expertly down below while her strangely strong right hand and hard but soft torso kept him pinned against the wall.

Dick reached down, grabbed her left wrist and pulled it slowly but firmly out of the fold of his kimono.

“You are strong,” she whispered. “I like strong.”

She pressed herself harder against him.

“And you have a big one. Grupler has a tiny one and he does not satisfy me. You could maybe satisfy me.”

“That’s flattering, Marlene, but you forget I’m married.”

“Your wife could be eliminated too.”

Dick heard Hope’s door open. He looked over and there she was, looking at them.

He pushed Marlene away and her robe came open, revealing her quite remarkable breasts. She stood there looking coolly from Dick to Hope, making no effort to close her robe.

Dick made a sort of foolish shrug in Hope’s direction and then headed back down the corridor, following that part of himself that Marlene had so expertly aroused.

He felt slightly faint.

****

(Go here for our next amazing chapter. An up-to-date listing of links to other episodes of Larry Winchester’s A Town Called Disdain appears on the right hand side of this page.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 48: sempre libera

Maria Callas as Violetta, La Traviata

Arnold Schnabel: man or myth? 21st Century Schizoid Man? Poet, prophet, mystic, madman? Liberal fascist? Conservative bohemian? Tragic hero or bumbling clown? All of the above?

Return with us now to our Walmart Award-winning serialization of these complete and unexpurgated memoirs (of the man Harold Bloom called “...not only the finest poet of his generation, but -- with the possible exception of Larry Winchester -- its finest prose stylist”) as Arnold walks with his inamorata Elektra on a hot late afternoon in August of 1963 in the careworn but quaint seaside town of Cape May, New Jersey...

(Our previous episode ended with Elektra informing Arnold that the attractive novelist Gertrude Evans had impure intentions toward him.)

I said nothing. What could I say? It seems to me that for years I talked to people, and they talked to me, primarily in a sort of code composed almost entirely of clichés, a code whose purpose was not the transmission of meaning but the lack of meaning. But ever since my breakdown I have found it harder to speak in this code. So instead I find myself often saying nothing (or else something completely idiotic).

We walked up to Washington Street and turned. People were starting to come back from the beach, blistered-red, sweating and weary, looking as if they had been through a battle. Even the little children hobbled and staggered as though on a death march, or else were carried by their sandal-dragging parents or brave older siblings.

“If you want to go to bed with her, don’t let me stop you,” said Elektra.

“With Miss Evans?” I said.

“With Gertrude. Yes.”

“Oh. I don’t think I want to,” I said.

“Why not? She’s attractive.”

“Well --”

I didn’t say anything else though, because I wasn’t sure of the answer, or answers.

She put her hand on my arm, stopping me.

I looked into her brown eyes, they seemed so cool and welcoming in the midst of the tired hot world all around us.

“Why not?” she asked again.

“Because I’m trying not to go completely insane,” I said.

“Do you think she’s that nuts?”

“I guess I should know,” I said.

She looked at me but said nothing.

We walked up Jackson and back to her place.

(Once again Arnold Schnabel’s modesty appears to have gotten the best of him, because the next seventy-two lines of his notebook holograph are vigorously crossed out.)

...lay on my back, halfway on the bed and half off, panting and sweating. She lay on the rug near my feet, and for a full two minutes we both lay where we were, saying nothing. Anything we could possibly have said would have been inadequate.

Finally she got up, climbed over me and lay down on the bed.

We listened to each other’s quieting breathing, to the sound of of people’s voices from the street below, that other world.

After a while she said, “Ask me anything.”

I thought about it for a while and then I said, “What’s your last name?”

“Ross,” she said.

“Ross,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“And your real first name is Betsy?”

“Right.”

“So your parents named you Betsy Ross.”

“They wanted to give me an American name. But believe me, it gets to be a real drag telling people your name is Betsy Ross. So one night I was high on reefer with my friends and I changed it to Elektra. Now Elektra seems a little pretentious to me, but I’m kind of stuck with it.”

(Arnold’s modesty strikes yet again here. The next three lines are crossed out.)

“Arnold, listen.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Why don’t you stop swimming alone at night? I’m afraid you’re going to drown.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Really?”

“Sure,” I said. “But I can still swim on the quiet beach, can’t I?”

“Well, okay. But just be careful.”

“Okay,” I said.

And it was funny, a little more than a week ago I didn’t really care too much if I drowned or not. But now, to be frank, I did care.

“Let’s go swimming now then,” she said.

“Sure,” I said.

And so we went down to my beach together and took a swim in the early evening light. We swam out together, and after a bit Elektra said, “Okay, this is enough for me." The waves lifted her up and down, her dark hair was as sleek as oil. "I’m not in your condition, tough guy. I’m going in.”

“Do you want me to come in, too?” I said, not really wanting to come in yet.

“No, you go ahead, Arnold." She tossed a wet rope of hair out of her face, turned and swam in.

I didn’t want to scare her, so I didn’t go out much farther. I simply swam up toward the Point, following the curve of the beach. When I reached the old shore-defense bunker I turned around and swam back and then in.

Elektra sat on her towel smoking a a cigarette and watching me.

She handed me my towel, I dried myself off, laid the towel down next to her, sat down and lighted up.

“So,” she said, “have you seen Jesus lately?”

I hadn’t told her of my several Steve/Jesus sightings the day before, nor of my previous night’s levitation. I didn’t really want to get into it, but I didn’t want to lie, either.

“Not today,” I said, truthfully enough. “But wait, I just remembered the strangest thing. I spoke with Frank Sinatra today.”

“Arnold,” she said. “Please don’t joke. Or don’t joke if I can’t tell if you’re joking or not.”

So I told her about the Sinatra incident.

“And you say you know these people who are having this cook-out?”

“Yeah. In fact they invited me to come, and to bring you, too.”

“Tonight?”

“Well, yeah.”

“And are you going to go?”

“I’ll go if you want to go,” I said.

“But you won’t go if I don’t want to go?”

“I can take it or leave it,” I said.

“Don’t you want to meet Sinatra?”

“I already did meet him, sort of,” I said.

“You don’t really care, do you?”

“About going to the cook-out?”

“About Frank Sinatra.”

Well, let’s face it, when you’ve got Jesus turning up in various forms several times a day Frank Sinatra isn’t so special.

We walked back to her place, to her door in the back yard. Evening was coming on.

“So can we go to this cook-out?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said.

“All right, let me take a shower and change. I’ll come over in about an hour.”

I sidled off, and home. I wanted to slip upstairs quietly, but my mother was sitting on the porch, saying a rosary. She asked me if I wanted some sauerbraten, but I told her I was going to a cook-out. She seemed understandably amazed by this.

I went upstairs, resigned to running into Miss Evans again. I took a shower and went back to my little attic room. I took out my memoir notebook and wrote for a while. Before I knew it almost an hour had passed, so I went downstairs, wearing a clean pair of bermudas and a fresh polo shirt.

I heard opera music coming from Miss Evans’s door again, but nevertheless I stepped as quietly as I could. But as I got abreast of her door I heard the sound of sobbing.

Now I felt bad.

I wanted just to go on downstairs, but somehow I couldn’t. I knocked on the door and called hello a couple of times.

The sobbing stopped, I heard the scritching sound of the phonograph needle being lifted, the music stopping in mid-note.

The door opened. Miss Evans was wiping her eyes with a handkerchief.

“Oh, Arnold, how nice.”

She was still wearing the polka dot sundress.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Am I okay? Of course I am. Why?”

“I heard you crying.”

“Oh. That was me listening to Callas. La Traviata. I always cry listening to opera.”

“Oh,” I said.

“But it was so thoughtful of you to check. Would you like to stop in?”

“No, I’d better not,” I said.

“You’re such a tease. I thought I wanted to come down here to Cape May to be alone, but right now I don’t want to be alone. But I suppose you’re going to meet your lady friend.”

“Well, she’s coming here,” I said.

“I still want to read your poems.”

“Miss Rathbone still has them,” I said.

“I must get them off her. Pry them from her hands.”

“Well, I’ll see you later,” I said.

“I’ll take a walk perhaps. By the ocean. Buy some cotton candy.”

“That sounds nice,” I said.

“Would you like to kiss my neck and shoulder again?”

She lowered one of the straps of her dress.

“I don’t think I’d better,” I said.

She put the strap back up.

“Oh well.”

A tear came to her eye. She dabbed it with the handkerchief, which I now noticed was sopping wet.

“Don’t mind me,” she said. “I shouldn’t listen to so much opera. There’s a Rock Hudson movie at the theatre. Perhaps I’ll go see that.”

“Well, okay then,” I said, trying to escape.

“Elektra is lucky,” she said.

“Listen, Miss Evans, I’m a loony tune. I -- have visions of Jesus. I imagine myself to be floating in the air. I live with my mother. You’re not missing much.”

She looked at me for a moment, then said, “Well, have a good time, Arnold.”

And she closed the door.

For some reason I just stood there. I don’t know why. But then I heard the scritching noise again, this time of a phonograph needle being dropped onto a record. The opera music began again.

I went downstairs.

(Go here for our next exciting chapter. Kindly turn to the right hand side of this page for an up-to-date listing of links to other episodes of Arnold Schnabel's Railroad Train to Heaven, soon to be a major motion picture directed by Larry Winchester, starring Ralph Fiennes as Arnold, Rachel Weisz as Elektra, Judi Dench as Mrs. Schnabel, Jack Black as Steve, Laura Linney as Charlotte Rathbone, and Cate Blanchett as Gertrude Evans.)

“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode 42: bad place

In our previous episode of Larry Winchester’s praised (“Quite simply, the greatest novel ever written” -- Harold Bloom) and reviled (“The Mein Kampf of Liberal Fascism. -- Jonah Goldberg) sprawling masterwork, Dick Ridpath somehow found himself, clad only in his old kimono, in the boudoir of Hope, clad only in a diaphanous nightgown.

He finds himself quite overcome.

A hazy shade of September in 1969, some several miles outside of a town called Disdain in a land of enchantment...

That falling outward feeling. He’d felt it first when he was eight years old, walking down the aisle to Communion in St. Pat’s in Philadelphia, this feeling that he was leaving his body, floating upward, up to the vaulted ceiling and through it and out into space. He had grabbed onto the arm of the kid in front of him, and the kid turned and looked at him like he was crazy. Dick said something to the kid, something stupid, mundane, anything, something to pull himself back before he slipped away entirely and forever. And he felt himself coming back, back safely into his body, here, in this church, in this city on this planet, and he sighed as if he had just crossed a tightrope over some yawning great bottomless gorge.

These attacks or whatever they were had recurred throughout Dick’s childhood, usually when he was lying in bed at night, and he had learned to fight them off by running into the bathroom and turning on the light and staring at his face and repeating Hail Mary Hail Mary full of grace Hail Mary Hail Mary full of grace until he felt himself coming back, settling back again into his body.

Once it happened when he was lying in his room listening to Fibber McGee on the radio. He felt himself slipping rapidly away, and he ran (with what seemed like a comet’s trail of his own self trailing behind and above him) into his father’s den where his father was reading a book, and he babbled something and his father said, “Are you all right?”

As Dick became more adept at pulling himself back he also learned to tell the warning signs and how to avoid the attacks.

And so he grew up and never quite went insane, and by his early twenties he felt he had himself under control. The trick was simply not to let his mind drift too far toward a certain place where it became all too aware of its utter aloneness. He was already quite aware that he was alone, but to be too aware was to open the doorway to, and step into, insanity.

When Admiral Quigley first asked him to experiment with LSD Dick went right ahead, and, very much to his surprise, he loved the experience. (Some of the other guys had a terrible time, and in fact a couple had been turned into gibbering wrecks and had spent months in the psych ward at Walter Reed as a result.) But even at the peak of a “trip” Dick kept away from, and was able to keep away from, that awful place of utter aloneness.

Some years and dozens of LSD and mescaline trips later, along came Daphne. That glorious beginning of their affair, and she read an article in Life about LSD and Ken Kesey and his mob. She wanted to try it. He happened to have some excellent government-issue stuff stowed away in his old seabag for a rainy day. They gave it a go, and as they were peaking they started making love. He was on top of her and she was staring deep into his eyes. As many times as he had taken hallucinogenic drugs he had never done so while having sex, let alone while having sex with Daphne, which was already an amazing experience in and of itself, and he began to have that feeling again, but instead of floating up he was falling down into those grey eyes and he was not afraid, and it was like all the universe was passing through him into her and up out of her eyes into his.

Then they lay there drenched in sweat, listening to the sounds of their own breathing, to the sounds of the city. Then it was up and out to the Automat, because Daphne wanted cherry pie and coffee.

And so they experimented, taking acid together, trying to break through into some permanently accessible exalted state.
They discovered that they could go even further than they had gone that first time. He would let himself go, falling away inside her, and these journeys into some disembodied almost but not quite egolessness became longer and deeper, swooping wild soaring flights, and Daphne was always there flying right along with him, in him, and he in her, until one time he went in so deep that suddenly she was not there. It had happened. He was alone, horribly alone and all in darkness, and there was no going back ever and not even the hope of extinction. And he howled and howled but the howling was silent, all was silent and black.

He gradually awoke and became aware of his body again to realize he was huddled in a fetal position in a dark closet. He got out of it and Daphne was over on her bed, sleeping. It had been the most horrifying experience of his life, and he had seen a good deal of horror in his life.

When he talked about it later with Daphne she listened quietly and then said, “You shouldn’t have been afraid. You should have gone on.”

“I couldn’t go on,” he said. “There was nowhere else to go.”

She pause for a few seconds and then she said, “There might have been.”

But that had been enough for him. He knew how far he could safely go now, and before he reached that point he always forced himself back. He would neither go there willingly nor let himself be pushed there. If he went to that black place again there was no guarantee he would come back, and that place was the one place he did not want to get stuck in. If there was something beyond that place -- and he was pretty sure the only thing beyond it was oblivion -- he would just have to reach it by going around the black place, and if that were not possible he would simply have to live and die the ignorant unachieved fool that he was.

But now for some reason, standing here caught in the scary but thrilling charm of this mad little witch Hope, he wanted to let himself go there, to that place. He was tired, tired of holding back.

But it didn’t seem the thing to do, really. Not here and now with this poor girl. He felt he’d better speak and break the spell before it was too late, or perhaps he would fall, willy nilly, fall away into those bottomless brown eyes.


Hope had asked what?

Why were he and Daphne here.

“I don’t really know,” he said.

His voice sounded stale and flat, the snapping of a dead twig on a dead branch of a dead tree, but he knew that by speaking he had pulled himself back, and he could already feel the sweat on his back cooling.

A sighing moment passed, and he was actually on the verge of taking a deep breath and going into the whole tedious transistor radio business for the second time that day, but then she simply took her hands away and said, “Are you going to the barbecue?”

“Um, yeah --”

“I’ll see you there,” she said.

He could feel where the energy from her hands had been cut off from his hand, and suddenly his hand felt cold, and separate.

****

(Click here to go to our next enthralling chapter. An up-to-date listing of links to other episodes of Larry Winchester’s A Town Called Disdain appears on the right hand side of this page.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part Forty-Seven: Arnold Schnabel awakens into a dream

When last we met Arnold Schnabel, the author and star of this Schaefer Award-shortlisted memoir, he had just fallen asleep in the sackcloth hammock hanging in the backyard of his aunts’ shambling Victorian guest house in Cape May, New Jersey, on a hot August afternoon in that forgotten year of 1963...

I dreamt that I was walking along the roofs of an enormously long train, trying to reach the locomotive.

This is a recurrent dream, and indeed I have walked along the roofs of thousands of hurtling railroad cars in my brakeman career. How odd that I got so used to it. To this day I am afraid of heights, but after a year or so as a brakeman I was striding back and forth along the tops of moving trains as nimbly and as naturally as a monkey.

With the new trains we don’t have to walk along the roofs any more except in certain rare circumstances. A brakeman’s job is so much easier and less dangerous nowadays.

But this dream. The usual dream I have is that I’m trying to reach the locomotive but I’m never able to. More and more cars magically appear and prevent me from ever reaching the locomotive.

And then there’s the variant dream where I’m walking along the roof of a train and all of a sudden a tunnel appears out of nowhere. I lay myself down on the roof of a car and the dark tunnel rushes over me, just inches above my head, and I lie there holding onto the bare metal, and the tunnel keeps rushing and swooshing darkly above me, and the tunnel keeps going on and on and on in darkness.

I’d have to say the tunnel variant is by far the more disturbing dream.

So anyway I was dreaming the first variant, marching smartly along, but I couldn’t even see the locomotive it was so far away, and I kept walking along, leaping from one car to another, and then all of a sudden the second variant kicked in, and a tunnel in a big mountain came rushing toward me.

I decided that for once I wasn’t going to lie down and be stuck in this endless tunnel, and so I just leaped up, and the most wonderful thing happened, I kept flying up and up, up the side of this green and rocky mountain, and finally I was at the top of the mountain, and I just touched down on a big rock at its peak and then pushed off and up again, flying down the other side of the mountain, and I saw the train snaking out of the tunnel on the other side, except the train was so long that I still couldn’t see its locomotive, even though I was about a mile above it, the train just went on and on over this green and rolling countryside, and disappeared in the far-off hazy green hills.

I flew along, above the train. I didn't know where I was flying to. But I kept flying.

Then I woke up, and Elektra was standing there, her arm folded across her chest, smoking a cigarette.

“Hello,” she said.

For a moment I couldn’t speak, but I felt like I was still floating in the air. I flapped my arms, the hammock turned over and I fell out onto the grass.

I sat up.

She crouched down next to me.

“Dreaming?” she said, one hand steadying the swinging hammock.

“Yes,” I said.

She was wearing a flowered shirt tied at the waist, with a white bathing suit under it. I realized she also had a big orange towel folded under her arm. I’d never seen her in a bathing suit before.

“Do you mind me coming by?” she said.

“No, not at all.”

I looked over at the metal table. Steve and Miss Rathbone and Mrs. Rathbone were gone, God knows where.

“Looking for someone?” she said.

“Oh. Steve was here,” I said.

“Him again? I think he’s in love with you.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said.

I stood up, went over to the table and got my cigarettes and lighter.

“I took off a little early,” she said. “I thought maybe you’d like to take a swim with me, Arnold.”

“Oh,” I said, lighting up my usual post-nap cancer stick. “But I usually go for my swim in the evening.”

“So can’t you adjust your little schedule? Or do you have writing you want to do?”

“Oh, no, I’ve already done my writing for the day.”

“Did you write me my poem?”

“Uh, no. I’m afraid not. But I will.”

She came forward and stood close to me. She hadn’t buttoned her flowered shirt at all, just tied the tails together at her waist. She looked magnificent in this white bathing suit.

“I wonder,” I said.

“Wonder what?”

She was so close to me I had to blow the smoke up over her head.

“I wonder if we can take a swim later,” I said.

“Do you want to go up to your room?”

“Oh, we couldn’t do that, Elektra.”

“Oh, right. I guess your aunts and mother would never let you hear the end of it.”

“Maybe after a million years,” I said.

“All right, let’s go,” she said. “But get your bathing suit so we can take a swim afterwards.”

I said okay, and I walked her around front. Kevin was still on the porch. He was now reading some old Tom Swift book that he’d gotten from the library.

I left Elektra there and went upstairs, very quietly, and changed into my bathing trunks. I grabbed a towel and went down to the third floor, again stepping as quietly as humanly possible, but unfortunately I did have to go to the bathroom. I went in and peed as quietly as one is ever able to pee. And then I flushed, creating the usual racket of an entire cellblock of convicts attacking the bars of their cells with tin cups in some cacophanous protest. I drank some water from the tap, cupping it into my mouth with my hand as the metallic symphony slowly subsided. Then I went back out into the corridor, and, sure enough, Miss Evans popped out of her room.

“So, there you are,” she said. She wore a yellow-and-black polka dot sundress, and she seemed hot and sweaty. Well, it was a very hot afternoon.

“Hi,” I said.

“Going for a swim?”

“Uh, yeah."

She took a thick strand of her hair and wound it around her index finger.

“How was your sandwich?”

“My sandwich?”

“The sandwich Miss Rathbone made you.”

“Oh, it was her mother who made it, actually. But it was fine.”

She let go the coil of hair and it fell to her neck.

“And did Miss Rathbone like your poems?”

“I guess so,” I said, and started to walk by.

“What’s the hurry, Arnold? The ocean’s not going anywhere.”

“It’s just that my friend’s waiting,” I said.

“Oh, your lady friend?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“I want to meet this paragon. I’ll go down with you. I was just going down to read on the porch.”

And it’s true, she had a book in one hand.

I let her lead the way down the narrow stairs. “I want to read those poems when the Rathbone is finished,” she said over her shoulder.

“Sure,” I said.

“Have you read this?”

She stopped and I almost fell over her. She held up the book. The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand.

“No,” I said, “but I think this friend of mine was talking about that book.”

“Elektra?”

She even knew her name.

“No,” I said. “This guy Steve.”

“Steve,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Hmmm. I’ve hardly ever met a man who likes Rand. I’d like to meet this Steve.”

Somehow it seemed inevitable that she would.

“Oh, but your friend is waiting,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

She turned and went down the stairs.

Normally guests will leave by one of the side entrances on the ground floor, but since I knew that Elektra was waiting on the porch I opened the door to the front section of the house, where my aunts live. We had to go through the kitchen, and as luck would have it all four of the old women were in there performing various kitchen activities. I immediately knew I had made a mistake by taking Miss Evans through the front part of the house.

I could never describe the complex of emotions, hidden but obvious, conversation, superficial but fraught with meaning, all of it somehow managing to be deeply boring but completely unmemorable, which ensued in the next three minutes of chatter among the old women and Miss Evans.

Miss Evans seemed to have completely forgotten that I was there, so I started to sidle out of the kitchen.

“Where are you going, Arnold?” she asked, as if I hadn’t told her this a few minutes before.

“Uh, swimming?” I said.

“Oh, right, your lady friend is waiting,” she said. “His lady friend is waiting outside,” she said to the ladies.

“Invite her in, Arnold,” said my mother.

“Is she coming to dinner again?” said Greta.

“We’ve got plenty of sauerbraten,” said Elizabetta.

“They’re getting serious,” said Edith.

Sometimes you just have to get tough if you don’t want a one-way ticket back to Byberry.

I held up a hand.

“Elektra won’t be coming for dinner,” I said. “In fact, don’t hold dinner for me. I’ll get something out. ‘Bye.”

I turned and headed for the front door.

Miss Evans followed on my heels.

“Wait for me, Arnold,” she said.

I crossed the living room and came out onto the porch. Elektra was there, leaning back against the rail, apparently chatting with Kevin.

“Well, there you are at last,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

I awkwardly held the screen door open for Miss Evans.

“So,” she said, “you must be Elektra.”

“Hello,” said Elektra.

“Elektra,” I said, “this is Miss Evans. She’s staying here.”

“Gertrude,” said Miss Evans, and she walked over and extended her hand. Elektra took it.

“You’re a very lucky girl,” said Miss Evans.

“Am I,” said Elektra.

“Such a talented handsome man. What was it first attracted you, his poetry or his physique?”

“Neither. But the physique didn’t hurt.”

“You have a lovely figure yourself.”

“I could lose some weight.”

“Not at all. Men like a girl with some meat on her bones. Well, don’t mind me, I’m just going to read my book.”

She sat down in the rocker next to Kevin.

“And your name is Kenneth?” she said to him.

“Kevin,” he said. ”Kevin Armstrong.”

“And what are you reading?”

“Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle.”

“Have a good -- swim,” said Miss Evans to me.

“Okay,” I said.

“Nice meeting you, Elektra.”

“Nice meeting you, Gertrude,” said Elektra.

We went down the steps, down the slate path, through the gate and onto the sidewalk. We turned down North Street and walked quietly across it and up Perry.

As we reached the other side Elektra said, “Who is that madwoman? With her Ayn Rand?”

“She’s a novelist,” I said.

“Oh.” She put her arm in mine. “She wants to go to bed with you, Arnold.”

(Click here to go to our next chapter, one for all you Verdi buffs called "Sempre Libera". Kindly check the right hand column of this page for up-to-date listings of other episodes of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train to Heaven as well as to many of his classic poems.)

“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode Forty-One: Dick shares a private moment with Hope in her boudoir

Larry Winchester -- long renowned as a master film maker, and only now receiving his due as perhaps the greatest American novelist since the days when Harold Robbins, Jacqueline Susann and Ayn Rand rode roughshod over the literary landscape -- now shifts his point-of-view to that of Dick Ridpath (AKA “Dick Smith”), former naval officer and man of mystery, a guest with his lovely wife Daphne at the ranch of Big Jake Johnstone, father of Hope, the enigmatic child-woman who earlier that day had suffered a disturbing attack of hysterics on Dick and Daphne’s bed.

September, 1963, New Mexico, several miles outside of a town called Disdain...

(This episode rated M for Mystifying Plot Development.)

Dick came out of the bathroom in his kimono, walked down the dusky hall, and then saw the somehow familiar dark eye peering through the slightly opened door.

“Mr. Smith?”

The door opened a bit more and it was Hope, in her nightdress.

“Oh, hi, Hope. How ya feelin’?”

“Better, thanks.”

“Great. Well, uh, see you at dinner --”

“Mr. -- Smith -- would you -- come in for just a minute?”

Dick found himself glancing furtively up and down the hall.

“Well -- okay.”

He came in. She closed the door behind him and stood there with her back to it, her small fingers splayed against the wood.

“You smell nice,” she said.

“Thank you. It’s these bath salts that Daphne got in Singapore. At the -- hotel. The hotel, there.”

Dick looked around, nervously. Candles of various colors and scents burned on the dresser and on the bedside tables. The room was dark and soft-looking, with Mexican and vaguely oriental draperies and hangings; deep red velvet curtains covered the windows and barred all but a faint leakage from the failing twilight outside. A black-and-white photograph of Clara Bow brooded over the bed.

Dick turned back to look at Hope again, still standing there with her back against the door. She looked him deeply in the eyes. He glanced away again and wished he had a cigarette.

He thought of six or seven ice-breakers in succession but somehow couldn’t bring himself to say any of them. He just looked around the room again and occasionally glanced back at her seemingly impassive or perhaps simply insane gaze.

I can take this. I’ve stood far worse than this. Eventually she’ll say something.

And finally she did.

“I was in your room,” she said.

“Oh. Yeah,” said Dick. “I heard.”

“You’re not angry?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Not at all.”

“I -- I went through your things,” she said.

“Well, to be honest,” said Dick, “that’s something I’ve always liked to do myself. You know, um, go through other people’s things --”

“Really?”

“Sure.”

“Do you want to sit down?”

“Well --”

“Just for a minute,” she said.

“Um --”

She glided over to the bed and sat in it, seeming barely to disturb the disordered nest of blankets and sheets and clothing that lay upon it. She looked at him and patted the bed with her left hand.

Dick hesitated for a fraction of a moment and then went over and sat on the place indicated.

Drawing her legs up under her nightdress she turned to face him.

It was a very comfortable bed, a feminine bed of the sort Dick had always loved, one of those beds you wanted just to lie down in and never get out of.

He liked this room and he liked the books he saw on the night table. Jane Eyre. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. Thérese Desqueyroux, in French. A collection of the poems of Lorca, in Spanish.

Finally she spoke.

“One of those men tried to get into your room. That Mr. Adams.”

“Really?” said Dick. “How?”

“He picked the lock.”

“Oh. And did he get in?”

“No. But only because I was already in there.”

“I see. Well, thanks for telling me.”

She said nothing, and once again she kept that seemingly implacable gaze upon him. And once again he couldn’t take it, and again he began to look around the room.

“Why are they after you?” she said.

“I -- honestly don’t know.”

“Are they -- police?”

“I’m not sure what they are but I suspect they work for the government. FBI maybe.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, I used to -- do -- similar work.”

“FBI?”

“No, no. I was in -- uh -- naval intelligence.”

“Top secret?”

Dick smiled nervously.

“Sometimes.”

“Maybe that’s why they’re after you. Some top secret thing you did or knew.”

“I wish I knew.”

“So you’re not -- like criminals or drug dealers?”

“Do we look like criminals?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“So -- why are you using false names?”

“Oh, right,” said Dick. “You saw our papers and things --”

“Mr. and Mrs. -- Smith?”

Dick looked away for a moment, abashed.

“Well,” he said, “it’s all because of your father. See, he thinks we’re criminals, so we’re just playing along.”

“Why?”

“Well, basically because we’re broke, and as long as he thinks we’re hot-shot criminals he seems to be willing to give us free room and board here.”

For the first time she smiled, and Dick felt a warmth in his heart.

“Fabulous,” she said.

Dick smiled too.

“You -- don’t like your dad too much, do you?”

“Oh, I hate him,” she said cheerily. “How could anyone possibly like such a pig?”

Dick shrugged, but slightly. He felt awkward looking into her eyes, and he lowered his, but then he saw the gentle protuberance of her small round breasts and the slight rouged suggestion of her nipples beneath the thin cotton of the nightdress; the way she sat crosslegged the cotton was stretched tight along her thighs, and he couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to pull that material up, to run his hands along those thighs, to make love with her in this comfortable bed.

He thought he had better go. He realized that if he stayed on this bed with this girl much longer that things might get horribly out of hand.

He got up. He realized he had the beginnings of an erection, and he put his left hand in the pocket of his kimono to camouflage it.

“Well --”

He looked down at those dark eyes. Yeah, he had definitely better go. And then she floated up off the bed and stood before him.

“Mr. Smith -- or Ridpath -- or may I call you Richard?”

“Well, no one calls me Richard. Call me Dick.”

“Dick.”

She said nothing else, but stood there looking up into his eyes as a film of sweat enveloped Dick’s torso.

“Well,” he said, “uh, nice talking to you, Hope.”

He held out his hand and she took it in hers and then put her other hand on it; he felt a hot bloodlike energy flowing from her soft fragile hands into his hand, the heat flowing all up his arm and into his chest, down into his stomach and finally down into his groin. Her eyes stared unwavering into his, and this time he didn’t avert his eyes but joined his gaze with hers, wondering how long this would last before she said something. Or did something.

Finally she said: “Why are you and Daphne here?”

She still held his hand. He didn’t want to look into her eyes, but he found himself doing so, he felt the sweat trickling down his back and he knew he was about to experience one of those moments in his life that he had always feared and yet longed for, and he felt something deep and awful in her eyes beckoning him to surrender.

(Click here to see if Dick goes there. Perhaps now may be a good time to review some of our previous episodes of Larry Winchester’s A Town Called Disdain, a listing of links to which you will find on the right hand side of this page.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part Forty-Six: you'll never guess who’s coming to the cook-out

Our previous episode of these memoirs of the legendary poet and sometime madman Arnold Schnabel found our hero sitting beneath an oak tree in the backyard of his aunts’ boarding house with Miss Charlotte Rathbone and her mother and his friend Steve, who may or may not be Arnold’s personal lord and savior.

A hot afternoon in that magical August of 1963, in the town of Cape May, New Jersey...

“Charlotte,” said Steve, smiling as if mysteriously.

Miss Rathbone said nothing to this, not smiling but not frowning either, and continued to read my poems.

“Well,” said Mrs. Rathbone, “I’m impressed. You’re not a cad, are you, Steve?”

He poured himself another glass of water from the flowered plastic pitcher, his cigarette between his lips.

“Now you ask me, Mrs. Rathbone?” he said.

“You treat her right or you’ll have me to deal with.”

Steve took another big drink of water.

“Thrash me with your cane?”

“I’ll thrash you soundly with my cane.”

“Then I assure you I will be the perfect gentleman.”

“I wish you two would stop talking nonsense while I’m trying to read Arnold’s poems,” said Miss Rathbone.

“You shouldn’t read in front of guests, Charlotte,” said her mother. “Put Arnold’s poems away and read them later.”

“How about if I strike you over the head with this book, you old bat.”

“Ha,” said Mrs. Rathbone.

“Now let me read.”

“Are you still sure you want to go out with her, Steve?” said Mrs. Rathbone.

“Oh, positive.”

“You like them with spirit, huh?”

“Yep.”

“What about you, Arnold?” she said.

“Pardon me?”

“Do you like a girl with spirit?”

I thought about this for a moment.

“Yes,” I said.

“You men have it made,” she said. “The world is your oyster. We women have to content ourselves with being the oyster.”

Miss Rathbone made a snorting sound but I didn’t know if she was snorting at what her mother said or at one of my poetic phrasings.

“Her father was a rogue,” said Mrs. Rathbone. “Just like you two scamps. Loved the ladies. And his booze and cigarettes. Kicked off with a heart attack at fifty-one. But left us fixed, I’ll tell you. Don’t be fooled by our demotic appearance. We are swimming in it.”

“Really,” said Steve.

“Loaded. Do I see dollar signs flashing in your eyes?”

“I hope not,” said Steve.

“But,” said Mrs. Rathbone, “I can tell you she has an income of at least fifty thousand a year. Most of which she simply puts in the bank.”

“You know that’s not true, Mother,” said Miss Rathbone.

“Okay, she takes us on a trip abroad every summer, and we rent this cottage in August, but she’s still driving the same old DeSoto we’ve had since 1947.”

“It’s a perfectly serviceable automobile,” said Miss Rathbone.

“Hey, excuse us!”

This was someone calling from our neighbor’s driveway on the Perry Street side. I turned and saw it was group of men who had just pulled up in a long white Cadillac convertible. They were all wearing sunglasses, and one of them was a Negro.

“Can you help us out?” called the guy from behind the wheel.

“Yes?” I said.

Steve put his hand on my arm, I didn’t know why.

“We’re looking for Windsor Avenue, 200 Windsor Avenue?”

“Oh,” I said. This was the address of where Dick and Daphne and Daphne’s father Mac were staying. I thought I remembered Dick saying it was Mac’s mother’s house or something like that. “It’s right down the street there,” I said. “Next corner.”

“Oh, next corner,” said the guy.

“Yeah,” I said, “just back on out and go that way,” I pointed to the right. “Next corner.”

“Great, we have a cook-out to go to.”

“Have fun,” I said.

The guy backed out and drove off down the street.

Steve finally took his hand off my arm.

“Do you know who that was?” he asked me.

“No,” I said.

“It was Frank Sinatra!”

Miss Rathbone finally looked up from my poems.

“What?”

“It was,” said Steve. “And that was Sammy Davis, Jr. in the car with him, and Dean Martin and Joey Bishop.”

“Who was the other fellow?” said Mrs. Rathbone.

“I’m not sure who the other guy was, but I think I might have seen him on TV or in the movies.”

“Was it, what’s his name, Peter Lorre?” said Miss Rathbone.

“You mean Peter Lawford,” said Steve. “No, it wasn't him.” He dug into his pocket and took out a Cape May VFW Club matchbook, opened it up and read something on its inside. “I knew it. 200 Windsor.” He held out the open matchbook for everyone to see. “That’s where we’re going tonight, Charlotte. The cook-out.”

Mrs. Rathbone took the matchbook out of his hand and held it close to her eyes.

“I’ll be hornswoggled,” said Mrs. Rathbone. “You’re sure that was Sinatra?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“I don’t know how I feel about Charlotte going to a party with Negroes.”

“I’ll protect her,” said Steve.

“In my day the races didn’t mix.”

“Your day is gone, Mother,” said Miss Rathbone.

“You behave yourself there, young lady, with these movie stars and Negroes.”

“I fully intend to dance the Watusi with the first Negro I see there. With Steve’s permission of course.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t have it any other way, Charlotte," said Steve. "What do you think, Arnold?”

“About what?” I said.

“About Sinatra and those guys going to the cook-out?”

“It’s okay with me,” I said.

“Are you coming tonight?”

“Well, I told Dick I would. I guess I’ll stop by.”

“You have to come. Are you bringing Alicia?”

“Elektra.”

“Are you bringing Elektra.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask her.”

“You must come.”

“All right.”

Mrs. Rathbone had lowered her chin to her chest and was now apparently sleeping. Steve reached across and took his matchbook out of her fingers. Miss Rathbone was back to reading my poems. I suddenly felt very sleepy myself.

“I think I’m going to lie down,” I said.

“Are you going up to your room?” asked Steve.

“No,” I said. It would be too hot up there. I found I could barely talk I was so sleepy. “I’ll just -- hammock,” I mumbled.

As in a dream I got up from the chair and climbed into the hammock that goes from the oak tree to a hook at the back of the house. I laid my forearm over my eyes. I felt myself suspended between the heavens and the earth.

I breathed in the warmth of the day.

I could hear Steve and Miss Rathbone quietly talking, but their words made no more sense to to me than the sound of the rustling oak leaves above my head.

I fell asleep.

(Click here for our next thrilling chapter. Kindly look to the right hand side of this page for up-to-date listings of other episodes of Arnold Schnabel’s Rairoad Train to Heaven as well as to many of his classic poems.)

“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode Forty: the Doc examines Hope, hears disturbing revelations

Previously in our serialization of this enexpurgated “director’s cut” of Larry Winchester’s inexplicably out-of-print masterpiece, the young and ethereal Hope was found hysterical and half-dressed on the bed of Dick and Daphne Ridpath, mysterious guests of Hope’s father, the rancher Big Jake Johnstone.

Doc Goldwasser has arrived to take a look at her.

A day in September, 1969, some several miles outside of a town called Disdain, in New Mexico, that land of enchantment...

Esmeralda went out and the Doc went over and sat down on the side of the bed.

“Hi, Doctor,” said Hope.

“Hi, Hope.”

The Doc took her wrist and looked at his watch. His watch had stopped. Oh well, her pulse felt pretty normal anyway.

“Doctor, do you believe in incubi and succubi?”

“No,” he said.

He took out his pen light.

“I do,” said Hope.

“Uh-huh.”

He held her right eye open and clicked on the light. She had beautiful deep, deep brown eyes. He shone the light in and the light went in forever.

“Last night someone came to me,” she said.

“Uh-huh.”

He held her left eye open and shot the light into it, the light that went in and in and got lost in a place farther away than he could ever see.

“No, really,” she said.

She grabbed his thin right wrist in her thinner little hand and she looked into his eyes.

“Stop and listen to me.”

“Okay,” he said.

He clicked off the light and put it away. There was no use examining her. There was nothing wrong with her. Not with her body, anyway.

“I was lying in -- in their bed --”

The doctor nodded and reached into his jacket pocket for his cigarettes.

“I was --”

She stopped.

The Doc shook out a cigarette, put it in his mouth, and took out his lighter.

Hope looked away, toward the window whose drawn red velvet curtains revealed the sun pitching down into the mountains and casting what looked like the reflection of the fires of hell across the sky.

The Doc lit his cigarette, clicked the lighter shut and put it back into his jacket pocket.

“You were what, Hope?”

“I was masturbating.”

The Doc swallowed some smoke the wrong way and tried to cover it up with an exaggerated “smoker’s cough”.

“Gotta quit these things,” he said.

“Am I a pervert?” she asked.

“No, Hope. It’s perfectly natural to masturbate. I do it all the time. Or at least I used to do it.”

“It’s not wrong?”

“No, it’s definitely not wrong.”

“The nuns taught me it was a mortal sin.”

“Well, the nuns are full of shit. And I hate to say it, but your father might be right about --”

“My father’s not right about anything,” she said. “He’s the most wrong person I’ve ever met. The only way he could ever be right would be by being so wrong that he would wind up right by accident.”

The Doc took a good drag of the cigarette, let it out slow, coughed lightly.

“All right,” he said. “But the nuns weren’t right, either.”

“That’s what I think too,” she said.

“Oh, well, great. Maybe you’re on the road to --”

“But I was taken last night by an incubus.”

“Oh.”

The Doc tapped his cigarette ash into the bedside ashtray that was filled with Hope’s Salems butts.

“That’s what made me have a thing today,” she said. “I -- I was -- you know -- in their bed --”

“Yeah.”

“And I started to -- you know -- come?”

“Uh-huh.”

He tapped his cigarette again, even though there was no ash on it now.

“And then I remembered,” she said. “What I’d forgotten, what he made me forget.”

“Who?”

“The incubus. Who had sex with me last night.”

“Last night.”

“Yes. He came through my window. And he -- but he made me forget it. Until this afternoon. And then I remembered. And that’s why I had a thing.”

The Doc ground out his cigarette.

“Hope, would you mind if I, uh, took a look --”

She looked right at him with those bottomless dark eyes.

“No,” she said.

****

(Click here for our next enthralling chapter. Kindly turn to the right-hand side of this page for up-to-date listings of other episodes of Larry Winchester’s A Town Called Disdain, as well as to appreciations of of many of his classic films, such as Harvey Harmonica, Long Tall Shorty, Rave-Up at Roderick’s, and Desert Rat Girls, soon to be available exclusively at Kresge’s 5&10s nationwide in the DVD boxed set Larry Winchester: The European Co-Production Years, Vol. 3, from Ha! Karate/Larry Winchester Productions.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part Forty-Five: the gallant Steve comes to the rescue of Miss Rathbone

We resume this Ortlieb’s Award-winning serialization of the adventures of Arnold Schnabel in the back yard of his great aunts’ sprawling Victorian guest house in the quaint seaside town of Cape May on a sultry August day in 1963.

Dramatis personae:

Arnold Schnabel -- bachelor, brakeman, poet and recovering mental patient.

Steve Jones -- alcoholic, and possibly Jesus.

Charlotte Rathbone -- art instructor at the Shipley School, spinster.

Mrs. Rathbone -- Charlotte’s mother.

Props: a metal table, with peeling white paint; a bottle of Sancerre; a plastic pitcher of ice water; four Jetsons jelly glasses; a rusty tin ashtray; assorted cigarette packages and lighters; one large scrapbook filled with the poems of Arnold Schnabel.

Miss Rathbone sat down and poured Steve a glass of ice water.

He thanked her, lifted the glass and drank it all, his Adam’s apple palpitating like a small creature trapped in his throat.

He put the glass down.

“Oh my,” he said.

Miss Rathbone opened up my poetry scrapbook and began to read.

“I wish I could write poetry,” said Steve.

“Are you ready for some wine now, Steve,” said Mrs. Rathbone.

“Oh, please, Mrs. Rathbone, no, thank you.”

She topped her own glass off.

“Don’t mind if I do,” she said. She took a drink. “Don’t you drink, Steve?”

“Oh, boy, do I drink,” he said.

“Hungover, huh?”

“I’m afraid so,” he said.

“You need a woman, Steve,” she said. “Arnold here, he’s got a woman. Nice Jewish girl, hey Arnold?”

I suddenly realized that the old girl was drunk. That she’d been drunk all along and was now getting even drunker.

“Hey, Arnold?” she said again.

“Mother,” said Miss Rathbone, barely looking up from my poems. “Leave Arnold alone.”

She took a drink of wine herself, again barely looking up from my deathless verse.

“Arnold can take care of himself,” said Mrs. Rathbone. “It’s Steve I’m worried about.”

Miss Rathbone turned a page.

“Leave Steve alone as well.”

“He needs a girl.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t,” said Miss Rathbone, while reading another one of my poems.

“You’re a girl,” said Mrs. Rathbone.

“Nominally,” said Miss Rathbone.

“Ask her out, Steve,” said Mrs. Rathbone.

“Mother, be quiet.”

“I’ll ask you out, Miss Rathbone,” said Steve.

“What?” she said. Seemingly reluctantly she looked up from my book, putting a pink fingernail on her place.

“I’d like to ask you out, Miss Rathbone.”

“Are you mad.”

“Perhaps. Will you go out with me?”

“Where?”

“I was invited to a cook-out tonight. Will you accompany me?”

“I was going to make bluefish for mother and myself. We got two nice fresh ones from this Charlie Coleman fellow who works here.”

“Go to the cook-out, Charlotte,” said Mrs. Rathbone. “I can broil myself a bluefish. I’m not a complete cripple.”

“But the other one will spoil.”

“Take it to the cook-out with you. As a house-present.”

“I don’t know.”

She went back to reading my poem.

“I’d love it if you would accompany me,” said Steve. “Miss Rathbone.”

“Call me Charlotte,” she said, not lifting her eyes from my masterpiece.

(Click here for our next chapter. Up-to-date listings of links to other episodes of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train to Heaven, as well as to many of his fine poems, many of them suitable as wedding toasts, appear on the right hand side of this page.)

“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode Thirty-Nine: Enid and the Derek Squitters affair

Previously in Larry Winchester’s sprawling epic of a novel (a Quinn-Martin/Larry Winchester™ production):

It’s been a bleak September day in 1969. Our heroes Harvey, Dick and Daphne went off on a horseback ride whose highlight was the violent death of a local family of two-bit redneck perckerwoods. They are being followed by the sinister Europeans Hans and Marlene, who in turn are being shadowed by the government agents (and fellow guests at the Johnstone Ranch) Mr. Philips and Mr. Adams. Hope, the teenage daughter of the blustering rancher Big Jake Johnstone, has had some sort of breakdown, and the local physician, the drug-addicted Doc Goldwasser, had been called out to treat her. In a foul cave in the hills the motorcycle gangster Moloch smokes opium, plotting foul play.

Meanwhile Enid, the local café proprietor and sculptress, mulls it all over...

Enid lay propped up in her big brass bed, resting, smoking a joint and sipping from a mug of milky honeyed tea.

The phone rang and she picked it up. It was Squitters and he sounded fairly sober.

Enid had finally realized -- in large part thanks to Derek Squitters, the raffish young Englishman now staying out at the Johnstone Ranch -- that like the vast majority of American artsy or intellectual women she had long been a pathetic pushover for all sorts of dodgy men whose sole recommendation was a foreign accent.

She had met Squitters during her last trip to Europe, in November of ‘68. She’d gotten really high with some friends one night in London, they all went to catch the Pretty Things at the Marquee, and someone introduced her to Derek Squitters, wearing a purple velvet cape and a red silk blouse, leather pants and jackboots, and dispensing cocaine from a gold death’s-head locket hanging from his scrawny neck from a silky gold chain.

The next thing she knew she was in an affair if you could call it that with Squitters, who was the leader of this group called the Measles, which had started out as a rough and ready rhythm-and-blues band but had now gone psychedelic along with everyone else, their most recent album being an opera entitled Seven Gates into the Tortured Mind of Mr. Piddlewiddie, yielding the hits “Foghorns and Fiddlesticks” and “Your Face is a Universe”. It had all been slightly flattering at first because he was only twenty-three and kind of cute in a skinny English crooked-teeth sort of way, and he had tons of money and his pick of any number of needle-thin models and actresses, but he said he liked her because she was “a fuckin’ woman”. Of course like every other Englishman of her experience he was lousy in bed and he usually had bad breath and B.O., but there were perks: the limousines, the champagne, the celebrities and nightclubs and drugs. It was okay for a lark.

One night she played him a tape she had made of some Mescalero chants, and he had been “fuckin’ freaked’ by it -- he was tripping at the time (he was usually tripping) -- and he said he wanted to come to New Mexico and record and “get high with the fuckin’ Indians, man; they know where it’s at”. She had dismissed this remark as readily as she dismissed 90% of what he said.

When she went home a couple of weeks after meeting him she was glad to get away from him. He wasn’t a bad kid, he was just young and stupid and not really very interesting, and she realized she had once again succumbed to the Foreign Accent Syndrome, combined with a healthy dose of the Celebrity/Rich Dude Syndrome. She thought about all this on the flight back. She was getting too old to waste her time on boring men. She resolved that the next man she had a real affair with would not be a bore. She thought about it some more and finally resolved also that he could not be a jerk, either.

She was not all that sure she would ever find a man who was neither a bore nor a jerk.

Maybe she was setting her sights too high.

Anyway, it had been almost a year since the Squitters affair, ten non-boring and artistically-fulfilling celibate months when, wouldn’t you know it, who phones from New York a few days ago and says he’s on his way but Derek. Says he’s missed her and really wants to see her and he wants to “’ang wif the Indians”.

She made it clear that he couldn’t stay with her and that he definitely couldn’t have sex with her, but since he seemed bound and determined to come she arranged for him to stay at the Johnstone dude ranch. She really didn’t want him all over her with his gamy leather pants and his creepy silk shirts and his oily spotty skin and the Chanel #5 he splashed under his bleedin’ armpits.

He had shown up the night before last (helicoptered in from Albuquerque), and she had been civil; they had a nice late dinner in her apartment above the coffee shop and she let him know again in no uncertain terms that their affair was over. He accepted her declaration with a little bit more aplomb than her vanity liked; the little bastard knew there were plenty more where she came from. He then proceeded to get absolutely shit-faced drunk.

She drove him out to the Johnstone place. He had never learned how to drive, claiming wisely that if he did he would only wreak havoc on himself and others.

When they got to the ranch he made one more sloppy attempt to “’ave a bit of a shag for old time’s sake”, and she shoved him out of the truck. He curled up in the dirt and went to sleep. She got out, went to the back of the truck and got out his stuff: a an alligator suitcase, a trunk of recording equipment, his guitar. She laid it all next to his snoring body and went up to the house and rang the bell. Chang the houseboy came to the door, and Enid left the rest to him.


She had arranged for Squitters to take part in an Indian peyote ceremony out at the reservation later tonight, and she agreed to drive him out there, which was why she was lying in bed and resting now. He was calling now to invite her to come out early for a barbecue at Big Jake’s; they could eat supper and then afterwards head out to the reservation.

“I hate Big Jake,” she said.

“Fuck ‘im,” said Derek. “Ya gotta come out any’ow, why not get a fee meal and some booze. Besides, there’s all sorts of weird people ‘ere. You’ll dig it.”

Enid had to admit she was intrigued. Everyone at the coffee shop had been talking about this odd assortment of people staying out at Jake’s. What the hell. She told Derek she would be there.

****

(Click here for our next shagariffic chapter. And check out the right hand side of this page for a listing of links to other episodes of Larry Winchester’s A Town Called Disdain™, as well as to appreciations of many of his classic films.)

And now the soundtrack to today's episode, courtesy of Pink Floyd and the great Syd Barrett:

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part Forty-Four: horribly hungover, Steve shows up again

Arnold Schnabel -- brakeman, poet and author of this memoir -- continues his journey through the infinite mysteries of life on this hot August afternoon in 1963 in the seaside town of Cape May NJ, an afternoon that has just been made sultrier by a hallway encounter with the attractive novelist Gertrude Evans; but Arnold, always the gentleman, has promised to show his poems to yet another lady, the artist Charlotte Rathbone; besides which her mother has offered to make him a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich...

After I had splashed the damnable thing with about a gallon of cold tapwater it finally gave up and surrendered and I put it away and zipped up my bermudas. I cracked the bathroom door and peeked down the hall first; somehow I wouldn’t put it past Miss Evans to appear yet again, and as much as I found her attractive I was already feeling pangs of guilt. After all, how long had I been seeing Elektra? Just a week or so? And already I was kissing another woman? That couldn’t be right.

I heard music coming from her room, opera.

I left the bathroom, holding my poem scrapbook, and tiptoed past her door. Well, I was wearing my sandals, so I suppose I wasn’t exactly tiptoeing, but I walked or shuffled as quietly as I could.

Finally I made it downstairs and out the side door, but this really was one of those days, because just then I saw Steve coming down the walk. If I had left the house just thirty seconds sooner I might have avoided him, but no such luck.

He waved weakly to me from the sidewalk. Even from here he looked rather pale and pathetic. I walked to the front and up the slate path to where he stood by the gate, although he made no motion to open it.

“Arnold,” he said, “I just came over to apologize.”

“Oh, that’s okay, Steve.”

“I feel horrible.”

“You shouldn’t feel horrible. All you did was get drunk.”

“No, I don’t mean I feel horrible about getting drunk, although I do, what I mean is I feel horrible physically. I don’t think I’ve ever been so sick in my life. I threw up all over my bathroom at the Chalfonte, and then I passed out in it. Fortunately I woke up in the cold light of dawn and was able to find some Mr. Clean and a sponge under the sink and clean the bathroom up before the maid came in. Anyway I wanted to come over here and apologize, and to thank you for getting me home.”

“Well, Dick helped too,” I said.

“I know. I don’t deserve friends like you guys. What’s that big book you have there?”

“It’s a scrapbook of my poems. I’m supposed to show them to this lady who’s staying here.”

“Oh. Well, I won’t keep you.”

Suddenly I had a brainwave. After that disgraceful Miss Evans incident I was feeling rather wary of this lunch with Miss Rathbone, even with her mother there as chaperone. Maybe if Steve was there he could act as a sort of buffer, or at least prevent things from turning into a complete orgy on the grass.

“Come with me, Steve,” I said. “I’m just going out back.”

“I don’t know, Arnold. I was thinking of just going back to my room and lying down some more. Staring into the yawning abyss of my soul. But it is so hot in that room.”

I opened the gate.

“Come on, Steve.”

“Well, if you insist. I hope this lady isn’t going to expect me to speak coherently. Or God forbid, cleverly.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

So Steve went with me around the house and out back where Miss Rathbone and Mrs. Rathbone sat at the metal table under the oak tree.

“Oh, no,” he muttered. “They have wine.”

“You don’t have to drink it,” I said.

“What a bizarre concept,” he said.

“Miss Rathbone,” I said, “Mrs. Rathbone. This is my friend Steve.”

“Is he what kept you so long, young man?” said Mrs. Rathbone. “We were afraid you had died in your room.”

“Sorry,” I said. I tried to think of some excuse for taking so long and drew a complete blank. Fortunately Steve came to my rescue.

“Are you a painter, Miss Rathbone?”

She was still wearing her paint-splattered smock-dress.

“I dab and daub,” she said. She and her mother were already drinking from the bottle of white wine on the table, out of the jelly glasses that my aunts traditionally provide all their tenants. These were Jetsons glasses.

“I wish I could have been a painter,” said Steve. “I’m so envious of artistic people like you and Arnold.”

“Sit down, Steve,” said Miss Rathbone. “Would you like some wine or a sandwich?”

“Oh, God, no, thank you,” he said.

“Well, sit down anyway. Here’s your sandwich, Arnold.”

It was sitting there on a plate, with sliced pickle and potato chips, a neatly folded pink paper napkin on one side and an empty Jetsons glass on the other.

“Thanks,” I said.

Both Steve and I pulled up chairs.

“Have some Sawn Sair,” Miss Rathbone said, raising the bottle, which I saw was actually called Sancerre.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. As bad as I am I’m still not much of a daytime drinker. Especially with a blazing August midday sun hanging up there in the sky like a balloon full of molten lava ready to burst all over us. And I had just had that rather large shot of gin up in Miss Evans’s room.

“Just half a glass,” she said, and she half-filled the empty Jetsons glass.

I ate my sandwich quietly while Steve and Miss Rathbone chatted about their respective jobs, about where she and her mother lived and where Steve lived. Their words passed into my ears and out again, leaving only the vaguest impressions on my brain. Steve smoked a cigarette. He seemed much more subdued than I’d ever seen him in our brief acquaintance, so I guess he really was hungover. When Miss Rathbone asked him again if he wouldn’t like something to drink he said he would take some water if she didn't mind. She went back into their cottage.

Mrs. Rathbone asked Steve if he was married.

“No,” he said.

“A good-looking man like you. You must have all the girls after you.”

”Oh, sure,” he said. “Beating them off with my walking stick.”

“You know Charlotte’s single.”

“Charlotte is Miss Rathbone?”

“My daughter, yes. How old are you, Steve?”

“Thirty-five.”

“You should ask Charlotte out for a date.”

“I’m sure Charlotte could do better than me,” said Steve.

“She scares men away because she’s very independent. You’re not afraid of independent women, are you, Steve?”

“Not at all,” he said.

I pushed my empty plate away and got out my cigarettes. This was working out better than I could have expected. Working out better for me, anyway.

Miss Rathbone came back carrying a flowered plastic pitcher of ice water and another Jetsons glass.

(Click here for our next intallment. Turn to the right hand side of this page for up-to-date listings of links to other episodes of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train to Heaven, as well as to many of his classic poems.)

“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode Thirty-Eight: Manhattans with Mr. Johnstone

Our Schaefer Award-winning serialization of the legendary Larry Winchester’s unexpurgated masterpiece continues.*

The place: Big Jake Johnstone’s ranch, several miles outside of the town of Disdain, New Mexico. The time: an afternoon in early September, 1969.

(This episode rated R for "restricted plot development".)

*("Not only the only American film maker whose name can justifiably be mentioned in the same breath with Bergman, Fellini and Renoir, but perhaps the only American novelist who could equitably tipple a cocktail with the likes of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Dickens and Cervantes." -- Harold Bloom)

Big Jake was mixing up a batch of Four Roses Manhattans in a stainless steel shaker that had the Playboy Bunny embossed on it.

“What a very cunning cocktail shaker you have, Big Jake,” said Daphne. She was sprawled out on a faded old floral print sofa with yellowed lace anti-macassars here in Jake’s large and somewhat grandmotherly living room. Dick sat in a naugahyde adjustable reclining chair with a lever that didn’t quite work. The chair seemed to want to sit either bolt upright or straight back. He had opted for the bolt upright position.

“Ain’t it nice?” said Jake. “Got it at the gift shop at that Playboy Club up in Chicago. “Y’know that Hugh Hefner fella’s a personal acquaintance of mine.”

“Really, how exciting for you,” said Daphne. “I’ll bet you’re quite the hit with all those little bunnies of his.”

Big Jake halted in mid-shake.

“Miz Daphne, there ain’t a one of them bunnies I seen up there can hold a candle to you in the female pulchritude department and that’s the God’s honest truth. You like a cherry in your Manhattan?”

“Two please.”

“Cherry, Mr. Smith?”

“Twist of lemon peel for me, Jake, please.”

“I can do that, sir.”

Dick and Daphne were still in their dusty riding clothes. Big Jake wore a silk smoking jacket in a paisley design, a scarlet silk ascot around his massive neck, and a bright white Mexican ranchero shirt embroidered in garnet and gold. White silk bell bottoms and red velvet slippers completed his ensemble.

Sticking the thick tip of his tongue out of the corner of his mouth in concentration he brought the completed cocktails over and his hand trembled as he handed Daphne hers.

“Thank you, Big Jake.”

“You’re welcome, ma’am.”

Jake lumbered over to Dick with his cocktail, spilling only a few drops on the priceless Persian rug.

“Thanks, Jake.”

“My pleasure, Mr. Smith.”

Jake went back and got his own drink and sat himself down in the sturdy-looking red leather easy-chair at the foot of the sofa, his enormous lower torso sinking down nearly a foot into its plush seat cushion as both he and the chair emitted a brief whinnying chorus of wheezings.

Jake raised his glass in toast, despite the fact that Dick and Daphne had already sampled theirs.

“To friendship,” he suggested.

Dick was staring off into space, Daphne was massaging one of her bare feet, so Jake went ahead and tasted his drink alone.

“So, Miz Daphne,” Jake ventured again, speaking a bit louder, “lost your boots in the quicksand?”

“What? Yes. What a bother.”

“Well you gonna have to let me get you a pair of genuine handmade Mexican boots. Gila monster skin. As a gift.”

“If you can find a pair to fit these big feet of mine.”

“You got lovely feet, Miz Daphne.”

“They’re enormous.”

“Well, they ain’t small exactly -- what size are they anyway if ya don’t mind my asking.”

“Can I just write it down?”

“Think you might could take a man’s size 8 1/2?

“Well I might just possibly squeeze into them.”

“Esmeralda!” Jake bellowed, and after a long moment or two the little maid came in slowly from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron and blowing smoke out of the corner of her mouth. “Esmeralda, go on up to Little Jake’s room and bring down them boots I got him his last birthday. Por favor, if you please.”

The maid made a clicking sound with her tongue and went off up the great curving staircase, speaking Spanish under her breath.

“Little Jake?” asked Daphne.

“Damn fool pipsqueak son o’ mine. Went off to live in one of them hippie communes and didn’t take nothin’ but his blue jeans and his guitar. Said he didn’t want nothin’ from me so fuck him, pardon my French. Got a beautiful pair of boots he never even took out of the box. He’d rather wear sneakers,” he said with contempt, “or run around barefoot like some God damn greaser or Injun.”

“I can’t imagine why he’d want to leave a nice place like this,” said Daphne.

“Weak blood,” said Big Jake. “His mother is -- ain’t a neither one of you’s of Spanish descent, are ya?”

“Good heavens no,” said Daphne.

“Mexican his mother is,” said Jake. “I was young, and foolish. Thought I knew everything. And she was damn good lookin’ and, you know --” He raised up his turned-in splayed meaty paws and bounced an imaginary pair of enormous breasts. “Biggest mistake I ever made. Made me bring up the kids -- you all ain’t Roman Catholic, are ya?”

“Good Lord no,” said Daphne, although in fact both she and Dick had been raised at least nominally Catholic.

“Thank God for that. She made me bring up the kids Catholic, and I ain’t a prejudiced man but I don’t trust the Catholics and I don’t trust the Jews. It’s white people like you two good people and me what built this damn land o’ liberty and if we don’t watch our steps it’s gonna be overrun by the Catholic Church and the Jews and the damn Black Panthers and Black Muslims and the Communists and the Ayrabs and the Mafia and the Mex-- oh, hey there, Esmeralda.”

The maid had quietly come back down the stairs during Jake’s discourse. She handed him a white cardboard box.

“Mr. Little Jake’s botas,” she said.

“Thank ya, darlin’.”

She went away and Big Jake took the lid off the box. He opened the tissue paper and took out two incredibly garish cowboy boots with pointed silver toes.

“Whatcha think?”

“Oh, marvelous, Big Jake,” said Daphne.

“Lemme help ya on with ‘em.”

He heaved himself up with the boots, lumbered over to the sofa, genuflected at Daphne’s feet and reverently began to slip one boot onto her right foot.

(Dick was paying attention to none of this by the way, sitting in his uncomfortable chair sipping his drink and smoking, staring at nothing on this earth.)

“So where is this wife of yours?” asked Daphne.

Big Jake popped the heel of the boot with the heel of his hand and the boot slid neatly onto Daphne’s foot.

“Run off with a damn priest,” said Big Jake.

“Oh dear, how horrible for you.”

“Good riddance to bad Mex rubbish I say. How’s that feel? Wiggle your toes around in there.”

“Feels fine. A little loose even.”

“Don’t want ‘em too tight. Pair o’ thick socks, they should do fine.” He picked up the other boot and buffed it with his sleeve. “Whatcha think, Mr. Smith? Mr. Smith, Dick --”

“Dick, darling,” said Daphne.

“Hmm?”

“Big Jake asked you what you think?”

“About what?”

“About the lovely boots he’s given me.”

“Oh, they’re -- uh -- nice, uh, really nice,” said Dick.

“They’re a little bit big for me, but I’ll wear them with nice thick socks.”

“That’s swell,” said Dick. “Say, Jake, you don’t have a radio you could lend us, do you?”

“Radio. Don’t listen to the radio much myself. ‘Course there’s one in the Victrola console over there.”

A Jackie Gleason instrumental album had been playing all through this on the old hi-fi set.

“Nothing smaller we could keep in our room?” asked Dick.

“Think Little Jake left one in his room. I’ll have Esmeralda dig it out for ya.”

“Thanks, Jake --”

Doc Goldwasser came in from the front hallway just then and stood there with his homburg on his head and his black bag in his hand.

“Doctor!” called Jake. “Come on in.” Jake stood up, still holding the left-foot boot. “You want a drink, Doc?”

“No thanks, Jake.”

The doctor took his hat off, and put it on the old coat tree.

“Want you to meet some guests o’ mine. Doc Goldwasser, Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”

The Doc came forward, and Dick stood up and shook his hand.

“Have a drink, Doc,” said Big Jake.

“I thought Hope was sick,” said the Doc.

“Well, she was, Doc, she was,” said Jake.

“Then I’d better go have a look at her.”

“Well, thing is, she’s sleepin’ now, Doc.”

“Jesus Christ, Jake, you wake me up out of a sound sleep, I drive all the way out here --”

“Now don’t get your dander up, Doc, I’ll pay you for the visit --”

Suddenly the Doc sat down on the sofa. He put his case on the floor and it fell over.

“You all right, Doc?” asked Jake.

“Fuck,” said the Doc. His face had gone pale.

“It’s your head, ain’t it,” said Jake.

“Fuck,” said the Doc.

Everyone looked at him. He took a deep breath, then reached into his inside breast pocket, took out a small brown bottle. He unscrewed the cap and took a gulp. He waited a couple of seconds then took another gulp. He sat there holding the bottle in one hand and the cap in the other. The Jackie Gleason mood music played.

“You better now, Doc?”

The doctor waited a couple of seconds, then screwed the cap back on the bottle.

“War wound,” said Jake to Dick and Daphne both. “Got a piece of shrapnel in his skull the size of a silver dollar.” The Doc took another big breath and then finally put the little bottle away. “Look, Doc,” said Jake, “stick around to supper. We’re havin’ Saturday night barbecue. When Hope wakes up you can take a little look at her maybe. I’ll pay ya for your time and give you a good meal on top of it. Put a little meat on your bones.”

“All right,” said the Doc. He looked like it really didn’t matter to him either way right now. He sat back with his eyes half closed.

“What’s the matter with Hope?” asked Daphne.

“She’s nervous,” said Jake.

He knelt down again and started to put the other boot on her.

“She’s a very beautiful girl,” said Daphne.

“Yes she is, but she’s nervous. She, uh, she recently had, uh, whatcha might call an attack of some sort. Reason why she’s here at home now instead of startin’ out at Vassar like she should be doin’.”

“What kind of an attack?” asked Daphne.

Big Jake glanced over at the Doc, who remained impassive, taking out his cigarettes and lighter.

“Well,” said Jake, “she climbed up onto the roof of the house buck naked and speaking in tongues to the sky.”

“Oh,” said Daphne.

“I blame it on the nuns at that convent school she went to,” said Jake. “Fillin’ her head with religious hysteria, priest talk. I ain’t against religion, I’m a religious man myself in my own way, but what’s it gonna do to a child kneelin’ prayin’ to some half-naked longhaired bearded whupped man nailed to a cross or to some graven image of some woman with her heart showin’ out of her chest all bleedin’ with thorns wrapped around it, now what’s that gonna do to a child?”

Big Jake looked at each of them in turn, gripping Daphne’s foot in the boot.

“Don’t look at me, I’m a damn kike,” drawled the Doc.

“How about a drink, Doc? Got a shaker of Manhattans all made up.”

“Glass of cold water’d be nice, Jake.”

Jake patted Daphne’s booted foot one last time and hefted himself up.

“Sure thing, Doc. By the way,” he said, looking from Daphne to Dick, “Esmeralda found Hope in your-all’s room. Hope she didn’t upset nothin’.”

“In our room,” said Daphne.

“Yeah,” said Jake. “She was on your bed.”

“On our bed? What was she doing?”

“Well -- she was laughin’. And cryin’.”

“Oh dear.”

“Yeah. Wouldn’t stop. And she had her pants all pulled down.”

“Uh-oh.”

“I blame it on them nuns and priests.”

“How about that water, Jake,” said the Doc.

****

(Click here for our next thrilling chapter. See the right hand side of this page for a listing of links to other episodes of Larry Winchester’s A Town Called Disdain, as well as to appreciations of many of his classic films, such as The Boxing Milkmaid, Long Tall Shorty, and Desert Rat Girls -- now available as a budget-priced boxed set on DVD {The Lost Masterpieces of Larry Winchester, Vol. 8, featuring the documentary My Friend and Mentor, Larry Winchester, by Jim Jarmusch} from Ha! Karate Home Entertainment, exclusively at Kresge's 5&10s nationwide.)