“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 78: "Yeah. That, and everything else."

It’s looking to be another chock-full day for Arnold Schnabel, the author of these Woolworth's Award-winning memoirs. He’s already determined to quit smoking (or at least to start to quit), he’s gone to confession, suffered a brutal nicotine-deprivation fit, had a conversation with his raffish personal lord and savior, and, thanks to a mysterious gentleman named Tommy, had a glass of special iced tea laced with laudanum. He has enjoyed the said libation in the living room of Mrs. Biddle, at whose residence he is supposed to meet the film-maker Larry Winchester. Tommy tells Arnold that Larry is waiting out in back of the house.

Cape May, New Jersey, August, 1963.

I went down the porch steps and around to the left on the tilting and mossy slate path. It was shady along the side of the house, an oak, some box elders, some other trees whose identities I failed to note.

Places always look so different in the day if you’ve only ever seen them at night. Last night the house and its grounds with its lights and its party-goers had seemed mysterious and glamorous; now the house seemed mysterious but in a more prosaic way, like an old book lying open on a table in bright sunlight.

A big and sun-sodden old house, with peeling paint and the smell of damp wood, and all was quiet, all was still, even the leaves on the trees and on the bushes and flowers.

And I had a similar feeling to the one I’d experienced last night alone in the kitchen of this house, that the house itself was alive.

I paused and put my hand on the old painted wood. It was warm and soft, almost spongelike.

Through my fingers I felt and heard babies crying, children laughing, people talking, shouting, whispering. I saw old people dying. I saw and heard young men and women grappling in darkness, some not so young.

I took my hand away and continued on to the back of the house, and I saw Larry sitting at the same picnic table I had sat at with Elektra the previous night. It was shaded by a large elm tree. Larry was sitting there with a portable typewriter. He wore khaki shorts and a short-sleeved white shirt. He had a pair of horn-rimmed glasses on, and he was absorbed in reading a bound sheaf of papers. There was a plastic flowered pitcher of what looked like iced tea on the table and a couple of matching plastic glasses.

Someone had cleaned up the yard. You’d never know there had been a big party out here the night before. There was no one else about. No sign of Frank or Dean, Sammy or Joey, or Shirley, or Dick and Daphne, or Mr. MacNamara. Just Larry.

“Hello. Larry?” I said.

He looked up, and gazed at me for a moment as if he didn’t know who I was.

“Oh, Arnold. You made it.”

“I sure did,” I said.

He stood up and took my hand. He was smoking a cigar, and he had a couple of back-ups in his shirt pocket.

“I’m so glad. Sit down.”

He gestured to the other side of the table, and we both sat down. I noticed he also had a stack of blank typing paper on the table, a notepad, a couple of ball-point pens.

“So, you ready to do some work?”

“I’ll give it a try,” I said.

“Pour yourself some iced tea. It’s good.”

“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know. I just had some iced tea that Tommy made me.”

“Oh. Was it his special iced tea?”

“Yes,” I said.

“No wonder you seem so calm. He must like you.”

“Well, he thought I needed something.”

“Hungover?”

“Not especially. But I’m trying to quit smoking and apparently I looked like death warmed over.”

“Oh. I see you’ve got a cigarette in your ear there.”

“I’m saving it for after lunch.”

“Do you want me to put this cigar out?”

“No, please don’t. I think it helps actually.”

“Fabulous. Here, have some iced tea. Don’t worry, there’s no laudanum in it. At least I don't think there is.”

He poured me a glassful. There was still some ice in the pitcher, and the cubes made delicious little clunking sounds. I picked up the glass and drank. It tasted like the tea Tommy had given me, with the spicy ginger taste but lacking that murky thick flavor which I could now identify as opium, the drug which even now suffused my being and kept me from immediately lighting up my cigarette while devouring one of Larry’s cigars whole, cellophane and all.

“So, anyway,” said Larry, “I keep doing this: I take jobs to make movies out of scripts that read like some retard wrote them. A retard who’s spent his life doing nothing but watch movies written by other retards. Oh," he interjected, recalling who he was talking to, "I -- uh --”

“That’s okay, Larry. I don’t think I’m technically-speaking a retard.”

“No, I guess not. What was it, anyway, your problem?”

Like everyone else, he had heard about it.

“Well, basically I cracked up entirely, and I had to be committed for a while.”

“Uh-huh. How ya feeling these days?”

“Much better, except --”

Should I go into it? Well, it seemed only fair if he was considering working with me. Not to mention paying me.

“Yes?”

He took off his glasses and looked me in the eyes. He seemed simply curious.

“I have visits from Jesus. And occasionally I levitate, or seem to levitate. I’ve also floated up into the air separate from my body. Oh, and yesterday I traveled through a painting in Mrs. Biddle’s house and wound up in 1890s France, where I met the writer Marcel Proust.”

Larry took a drag of his cigar, and let the smoke gently trail up from the side of his mouth.

“Sounds like you lead an interesting life, Arnold.”

I thought about this.

“It is, actually,” I said. “At least now it is.”

“Since your crack-up?”

“Yes,” I said. “It was pretty mundane really before.”

“Working for the railroad?”

“Yeah, that, and everything else.”

“Maybe that’s why you cracked up,” he said.

“Could be,” I said.

“I could never understand it,” said Larry. “Working some job where you do the same thing every day. I realize that’s what most people have to do, but to me it’s death. That’s why I went into show biz, movies. So, you wanta hear about this script?”

“You don’t mind working with someone who’s not quite right in the head?”

“Well, you’re not going to completely flip out on me, are you?”

“I hope not.”

“Because if this is as crazy as you’re going to get, believe me, I’ve worked with lots crazier out in Hollywood.”

“Oh, okay,” I said.

“Let me tell you about this stupid script.”

“Okay.”

So a young soldier is on leave in Paris. He meets a girl. They have a wild night on the town. They go to her room. Her ex-boyfriend, who has been following them, breaks in. A fight ensues. The soldier gets knocked out. When he wakes up the girl is lying on the floor dead. Someone knocks on the door. He runs out to the balcony, drops down to the pavement...Communist agents. The Corsican Mafia. A band of Gypsy thieves. An attractive Gypsy dancing girl...

“What do ya think?”

“Um, about the story?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s okay I guess. I read these sorts of novels all the time.”

“But it’s stupid.”

“Oh.”

“I want to make it non-stupid, Arnold.”

“Well, does the story matter?”

He paused.

“I think you’re on to something. What’s a story? Just one damn thing leading to another.”

“Yes.”

“Who cares what happens?”

“Not me,” I said.

“You’re brilliant. It’s all about -- what’s happening while the stuff is happening.”

“Or not,” I ventured.

“Right. Sometimes nothing’s happening while stuff is happening. And sometimes nothing’s happening in the first place.”

“I find that’s quite often the case in my own life.”

“But, Arnold, we gotta have something happening. Don’t we?”

“I think so. Otherwise --”

“It’s boring.”

“Right,” I said.

“Like real life.”

“Yeah.”

“We don’t want that,” said Larry.

“No,” I said.

“So, uh, what do we do?”

“Okay,” I said. I felt as if my brain were bubbling over slightly, but it was not an unpleasant feeling. “We keep the soldier meeting the girl, and the fight, and him waking up and finding the girl dead.”

“That stuff is good.”

“Sure. I don’t know about the Communist agents though.”

“Lose the Commies. What about the Mafia? And the Gypsies?”

"Well, I don't know, Larry. As long as he meets the other girl, the dancer girl."

“Right. We gotta have the other dame. That's essential."

“Sure. You always need a dame,” I said.

“Brilliant. Okay.”

He grabbed a blank sheet of paper and rolled it into the typewriter.

(Go here for our next stunning chapter. And kindly turn to the right hand side of this page for an allegedly up-to-date listing of links to other episodes of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train to Heaven™, a Joe Meek Production.)

The Cryin’ Shames:

“A Town Called Disdain”, Epidode 72: le moribond

Previously in our Walgreen’s Award-winning serialization of this sprawling masterwork from the trusty Remington Portable of Larry Winchester:

Harvey, Dick and Daphne leave the quaint Quonset hut of the Native American medicine man Paco (where they had been partaking of the sacred peyote ceremony) in the company of a small grey creature in a sailor suit, and board his 60-foot saucer. Inside they discover that the evil international killers Hans Grupler and Marlene have murdered two other little grey men; a gunfight ensues, resulting in the deaths of the little sailor man and of Hans and Marlene; Dick and Harvey have both caught lead as well, but they are not quite dead yet.

Once again, Larry turns the microphone over to Dick:

So I lie there, and I’ll tell you, you kind of get accepting at this point. No use kicking and screaming. There wasn’t any pain really. Just this feeling of the life just draining out of me, like the air leaking out of a slow puncture in a tire. Daphne was leaning over me, and I sort of wanted to make some kind of farewell to her. Don’t know what I would’ve said. Nothing she didn’t know already. You know. But while I’m thinking this I just kind of slipped under. And then I saw this light and I’m thinking, Oh, right, the famous Light. How cliché, but I guess I really am getting ready to bite the big one now. And then the light starts dimming out, and I feel myself dimming out with it. And I’m thinking, Okay. Here goes nothing.

And then it was nothing.

But then I start to wake up and I see a vague light again and things clear up a bit and I see it’s only this purplish light inside the spaceship, this odd light that didn’t seem to have any source, and the little sailor guy is crouching over me and he’s got one long finger from each hand in each of my wounds, and he’s slowly pulling his fingers out, and the wounds close up behind his fingertips. I swear to God and I’ll show you the scars if you don’t believe me. Look. And look at these exit-wound scars. Like silver dollars.

But it’s sad because Daphne is holding the little guy up and he’s been shot like four or five times in his torso and in his head, and this thick green gloop is slowly oozing out of his wounds, and in the holes in his head I could see what I suppose were his brains, like a dark green caviar.

I’m still very weak, I mean like I’ve taken a couple of body shots from Muhammed Ali, and I lie back again and Daphne sort of helps the little guy over to Harvey who’s bleeding from his thigh and his side, and the little sailor does the same operation on Harvey’s wounds. Funny thing to watch, I’ll tell you.

Then I dozed off again.

And then Daphne is touching my arm and saying she’s going to find a ladies’ room. She’s got that absurd newsboy’s cap on again, but the lights are switched off now. I say okay, and she goes off. I’m lying there in a daze and I look over at Harvey. He seemed to be sleeping peacefully.

The sailor boy was lying over by the other dead spacemen. He was dead too. You could tell. Poor little fucker.

*****

(Go here for our next thrilling chapter. And kindly turn to the right hand side of this page to find an allegedly up-to-date listing of links to many other episodes of Larry Winchester’s A Town Called Disdain™, a Jay Ward Production.)

And now, a word from Jacques Brel:

The Legend of "Gooney" McFarland

Gooney McFarland, cutting a caper at his wedding reception.

By special request we re-broadcast this tale of Olney, first published here a year ago. Enjoy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 77: & Tommy, too

Previously in this lauded (“does for literature what Babe Ruth did for baseball” -- Harold Bloom) memoir our spiritual astronaut Arnold Schnabel suffered a rather intense fit of nicotine withdrawal but got a grip on himself and decided to head at once for an appointment with that other giant, the film-maker and novelist Larry Winchester.

Scene: the quaint seaside resort of Cape May, New Jersey.

Time: 10:28 AM, The first Saturday of August, 1963...

When I came to Jackson Street I felt a longing in my heart. Right up the block was the pretty little jewelry shop in which Elektra worked with her charming Bohemian friends. I paused at the crossing, letting the sundazed vacationers walk all around me. How nice it would be to go visit her there, where she would be working either behind the counter or in that cool back room, twisting her metals and setting her soothing cool Cape May diamonds.

I wouldn’t mind smoking a reefer now in that pleasant back room smelling of warm solder. And perhaps Elektra and I could --

But duty called. I crossed Jackson, headed down to Perry Street and then up Perry. When I came abreast of my aunts’ house I halted again. Should I go in and get my cigarettes?

“I would if I were you."

It was him again. Or Him, as the case may be. He looked more like a raffish beach bum than ever, leaning against a streetlight pole and smoking a cigarette in the leaf-dappled sunlight.

“I really am trying to quit,” I said.

“I know that. I’d quit too if I were human.”

He wasn’t wearing his robes, just loose trousers, an old t-shirt, sandals.

“I can probably bum a couple from Larry,” I said.

“What if he only smokes cigars?”

“Oh.”

“Tell ya what, take a couple of mine,” he said.

He reached into his pocket and took out an open pack of Pall Malls. He gave them a shake and held them out to me.

I took one.

He gave the pack another slight shake.

“Let’s be real, Arnold. You’re gonna need more than one to get you through the afternoon.”

“No,” I said. “I’ll just take one for after lunch. If I take two the second one will only drive me crazy thinking about it.”

“Suit yourself,” he said.

I stuck the cigarette behind my ear.

“Mind if I walk with you?” he said.

“I’d prefer you didn’t.”

“Lighten up, Arnold.”

“All right,” I sighed. And we walked off down the shady street together.

“So how’d it go with Father Reilly?” he asked.

“You don’t know?”

“Arnold, I may be the Son of God, but even I have my limitations.”

“That’s not what I was taught.”

“Church doctrine has changed continuously ever since they pulled me down from that cross a couple of thousand years ago, Arnold. It’s changed constantly and it will continue to change and it will also be, until the end of time, more or less full of baloney.”

“If you say so.”

“I say so. So how’d it go with Reilly?”

“I think I bugged him.”

“I’m sure you did. He give you absolution?”

“Yeah,” I said, “but he was a little grudging about it.”

“Asshole.”

“He’s just doing his job.”

“I know. but I’ll tell ya, Arnold, it’s not easy getting good priests these days.” We walked a few more paces and then he added, “But then it never has been easy.”

“Oh,” I said, “while I have you here. A question.”

“Fire away, my friend.”

“Something Father Reilly and I were talking about, regarding these visits I have from you.”

“Please, go on.”

“Am I -- and I know this sounds egotistic, but I’m just curious --”

“What?”

“Am I a saint?”

He glanced over at me, and smiled.

“That’s entirely up to you, Arnold.”

“But --”

“Okay, here we are, pal.”

We were at the sidewalk gate to Mrs. Biddle’s house on Windsor Avenue.

“You’re not coming in, are you?” I asked him.

“No.” He smiled. “Why? Do you want me to?”

I looked at him, then gave him a little wave and opened the gate.

I went up the slate path to the porch and up the steps.

At the front door I looked back down the path. He was gone.

I touched my ear. The cigarette was there. Could this be adduced as proof of a divine visitation? I took the cigarette and looked at it. Just an ordinary Pall Mall. It wouldn’t even get me through the front door of the Vatican. I stuck it back behind my ear and pressed the doorbell button.

After half a minute the old fellow whom I had seen in the dining room last night -- the one who looked like Edward Everett Horton -- opened the inner door and looked at me through the screen door.

“Oh! Mr. Schnabel! You’re here bright and early.” He pushed open the screen door. “Do come in. I’ll fetch Mrs. Biddle.”

“No, please don’t bother her,” I said, coming in. “I’m having tea with her later today, but I’m here now to meet Mr. Winchester.”

“Larry! Lovely fellow.”

The old guy was wearing an off-white suit, with white buck shoes and a blue-and-red paisley tie. He was smoking a strong fragrant cigarette, and his skin looked like old paper. His eyes seemed ancient, like pale amethysts, but his hair was a shiny dark brown. I think it might have been dyed. He led me from the foyer into the living room.

The room was cool, both sunlit and soothingly dark at the same time. No one else was around.

“Larry’s out back I think. Shall I tell him you’re here?”

“Don’t bother,” I said. “I’ll just go back there myself if I may.”

“Of course. I’m Tommy by the way, how rude of me.”

He extended a slender and blue-veined hand.

“Hi, Tommy,” I said.

“I’m a friend of Mrs. Biddle’s.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

“Arnold -- may I call you Arnold?”

“Sure,” I said.

“May I say you don’t look very well.”

“I don’t feel very well,” I said.

“You look like you’ve been ridden quite hard and put up wet.”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Too much partaken last night?”

“A little,” I said. “But the real problem is I’ve decided to give up smoking.”

“Then what’s that cigarette doing behind your ear?”

“I told myself I wouldn’t smoke it till after lunch.”

“Good God, smoke it, man.”

“I’d rather wait.”

He took a drag of his own cigarette, seeming to appraise me through the smoke.

“Wait here,” he said. “Sit down. I’m going to get you something that will help.”

He went away, seeming barely to touch the floor.

I sat down on the couch. On the end table was an ashtray with four or five butts in it, and a large bowl containing an inch or so of tan liquid. There was a book lying open face-down on the coffee table. Had Tommy just been reading it?

I picked up the book. It was an enormous volume, Remembrance of Things Past, Volume One. By that Marcel Proust guy. Tommy seemed to be about four-fifths of the way through it, which a cursory perusal convinced me was about four-fifths further than I would ever get. I put the book back down the way I had found it.

Tommy came back into the room, carrying a very tall glass of something dark and icy on an engraved metal tray. He sat down weightlessly next to me and put the tray on the coffee table.

He picked up the beaded glass and proffered it to me.

“Put yourself outside of that,” he said. “I guarantee you’ll feel better.”

“Thanks,” I said.

I took the glass and drank a little. It was iced tea of some sort, but with a peculiar thick taste to it.

“Drink some more,” he said.

I took a good gulp this time and felt it go down, seeming to wash a metropolitan sewage-drain full of nastiness into my capillaries and out through the pores of my skin. I had started to sweat again during my walk over here, but now it felt as if all the accumulated toxins and tars of twenty years were oozing out of me and seeping down into the brocaded wool of the couch.

“Go on,” he said.

I did so, and with each gulp I felt fresh life coursing through me, fresh life and pleasure and wisdom.

“Go ahead, finish it now, Arnold.”

I did, and put the empty glass back down on the tray.

“Feel better?” he asked.

“Yes. Thank you very much,” I said. Almost at once the sweating stopped. “What was in that?”

“Just strong black Assam tea, with honey, ginger and lemon juice. And ginseng root. And just the tiniest modicum of laudanum.”

“Laudanum?”

“Tincture of opium.”

“Oh.”

I picked up the glass and rattled the cubes, took one last sip of what was left.

“Want some more?” he asked.

“Isn’t this addictive?”

“Well, yes.”

“I’d better not then. No point replacing one habit with another one.”

“No, I suppose not.”

He took a gold cigarette case from his jacket pocket. I hadn’t noticed that his previous cigarette had disappeared. He took one out, put it in his mouth, lighted himself up with a gold lighter from his other jacket pocket, exhaled dreamily.

I passed the ashtray over to in front of him, and he nodded.

“Oh, hope you don’t mind,” he said. “If I smoke.”

“Not at all.”

“I doubt I’ll ever quit.”

I sat there. I thought that perhaps he was was going to say more, but all he did was stare into space, or into his memories. After a while he sighed and tapped his ash into the tray.

In my life I’ve found that if you are left alone with any human being for more than two minutes they start telling you their entire life story in excruciating detail. But apparently Tommy wasn’t like most people. Who was he? Why was he here?

I’m afraid I was rather blatantly staring at him. He turned his head slightly my way, and smiled.

“Oh, but you wanted to see Larry.”

“Oh, right,” I said.

“It’s probably easier just to go out the front again and circle round the house. You’ll see him back there.”

“Okay,” I said. I stood up. I felt an inch or two taller than normal.

“I’ll see you out,” he said.

He floated up and we walked out of the room, back to the foyer and to the door.

I turned and extended my hand.

“Thanks for the iced tea, Tommy.”

His wizened bird-boned hand wafted into mine.

“Just come back in if you want more,” he said. “I have plenty. And I can always make more of the tea.”

“Okay, thanks,” I said, and I went out the door.

I felt as if my body were floating inside of me.

(Click here for our next thrilling chapter. And please turn to the right hand side of this page for a scrupulously updated list of links to all extant episodes of Arnold Shnabel’s James Frey Award-winning Railroad Train to Heaven™, a Dick Powell Theatre Production.)

The Nashville Teens:

“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode 71: auf wiedersehen, Hans und Marlene

Larry Winchester, the acclaimed (“makes Hemingway look effete” -- Harold Bloom) author of this Costco Award-winning masterpiece, now switches back once again to the inimitable voice of that suave adventurer Dick Ridpath:

The weird thing about the insides of these saucers -- and, yes, it’s true, they really are shaped kind of like upside-down saucers, or like frisbees rather -- well, I should say one of the many weird things about these saucers is that they’re a hell of a lot bigger on the inside than they seem to be on the outside. Don’t ask me how this is.

So, we go up this ramp, following the sailor boy -- never did catch his real name (if they have real names), me, then Daphne, then, hustling up behind us, Harvey. He had changed his mind about coming, and this felt right to me somehow.

So we’re in this small sort of anteroom, bathed in this soft purple light, and the sailor presses a couple of buttons on the wall and the ramp slides back up into the ship and the port door slides shut, and then he presses another button and this door in front of us starts sliding slowly up into the ceiling, just like in a science fiction movie; and I noticed this odd smell I remembered from somewhere before, kind of like an old attic filled with moldy old Saturday Evening Posts, but there was a new smell, like scorched mercury, and a smell of gunshot and then -- uh-oh --

There’s Hans and Marlene crouched in front of us in the hallway on the other side of this doorway, covering us with automatic pistols.

Hans of course goes “Halt!”

And there off to the the side we see these two little outer space guys, lying there stone dead in this purplish illumination which seemed to glow from the curving walls themselves. The little fellows were wearing dungaree overalls, and they had holes through their heads. You could see this phosphorescent green blood pooled all around their heads, and bits of greenish-grey glowing brain matter splattered across the deck.

Fucking Hans and Marlene.

Well, the little sailor guy freaks totally out. He just leaps through the air at Hans making this eerie sort of high-pitched peeping sound, and as he’s leaping Hans is shooting his pistol at him and so is Marlene and I yank out my Browning and as I rack the slide I see Marlene swinging over at me now just as the sailor’s bullet-riddled body hits the deck in between her and Hans, and I cock the hammer and fire just as she fires and she gets me below the right shoulder but I hit her in the side and she falls back on her ass and I do too and I hear more shots and I’ve dropped my gun and it’s skidded away and bullets are ricocheting all over the damn walls and I’m trying to reach my gun but it’s like one of those dreams where you’re trying to do something but you just can’t do it. And then I almost reach the gun and someone shoves it away with his foot, and I look up and it’s Hans and he’s pointing his pistol at my face, and everything is quiet now.

I sit up. I look around and Daphne’s just standing there to my left, goggle-eyed, white in the face. The sailor guy’s lying on the deck in his own puddle of green blood. Poor Harvey’s lying there near Daphne in a pool of red blood, his pistol on the deck a few feet away from him. But, as I later learned, Harvey had gotten Marlene all right, she was sprawled out there in the hall with a hole in her forehead and her brains and blood all mingled with that of the two little guys in overalls.

“Mrs. Ridpath,” says Hans, and he swings his gun over at her, “would you step this way, please.”

Daphne comes over and Hans goes, “Now, please to sit down next to Commander Ridpath where I can keep the eye on the both of you.”

“But it’s all bloody down there,” says Daphne. “I’m not going to sit in all that blood.”

Hans sighs.

“But it is your husband’s blood.”

“I don’t care whose blood it is, I’m not sitting in it.”

You could tell Hans wasn’t used to dealing with someone of the Daphne’s calibre.

“Please then, to -- to -- duck? -- how you say?”

The bastard glances at me for help.

“He wants you to crouch down,” I said, teeth gritted needless to add.

“Yes, to crouch down,” he says.

“Well, all right,” says Daphne, and she kind of delicately hunkers down near me, but not so near that her shoes are in this ever-growing pool of blood spreading out all around me.

“Right, then,” says Hans. “Now. Mr. Ridpath, please do not force me to kill your lovely and fastidious wife in some particularly slow and painful fashion.”

Yeah, sure. As if either of us was going to walk out of there if this creep had any say in the matter.

“All you need do is answer some few questions for me,” he said.

So predictable this guy.

“Can I get a cigarette, Hans?”

“Oh, certainly, as you Americans say, smoke them if you have them.”

Retard.

Here’s the thing. I had grabbed that little .38 Airweight to give to Daphne but I had forgotten to give it to her. It was still in the left side pocket of my peacoat. Now on the one hand I knew there was no way I was going to get it out and plug this asshole before he shot me again at least once, but on the other hand maybe I could get him, too. And then at least Daphne might get away. I wasn’t trying to be a hero especially. It was just I knew we were both dead meat anyway if I didn’t try some damn thing.

If only there were some way to distract this motherfucker for one second.

I patted my inside shirt pocket as if I weren’t sure where my cigarettes were. He puts the muzzle of his nine-millimetre practically right up against my forehead.

I pull out the little transistor radio with the bullet hole through it.

“What is that?”

“It’s a radio, Hans. You want it?”

Now would be a good time for it to start speaking that incomprehensible space language, but no dice.

“Put it on the floor, please, Mr. Ridpath.”

I did what he said to do.

“Now take out your cigarettes before I lose my patience and shoot your wife in the knee.”

“Stay cool, Hans.”

Actually my cigarette case was in my inside coat pocket. But I slowly dipped my hand into the left pocket, the one where the gun was, glancing at Daphne as I did so. She nodded ever so slightly.

Sometimes time slows down, or bends, or stops, or moves at the speed of light. Other times time explodes, and this is what happened now. Daphne had on this big goofy black plastic newsboy’s cap from Mary Quant’s on Carnaby Street. It had these little tiny flashing light bulbs all over it, the batteries were inserted at the base of the bill, and you turned the lights on with a little button on one side. So what she did now was she touched the button and of course all the little multi-colored lights came on, twinkling off and on, and Hans looks at it like “What the fuck!” and I fire the Airweight right through the cloth of my coat, and I get Hans in the belly but he fires almost at the same time, getting me in the left lung, and I fall back, the gun flying out of my hand, and I’m waiting for the next shot, he’s standing over me, one hand on his belly with blood burbling through his fingers, looking very pissed off, and he’s about to give me the coup de grâce when bang, a burst of scarlet blood blossoms out from the side of his head and he takes one step forward and then falls on top of me like the sack of shit he was.

I push him off and I look over and there’s Daphne on her knees by Harvey with his smoking pistol in her hand, that wacky hat now on the floor over there still just blinking away.

I’ve said it a thousand times but this woman is worth her weight in gold.

The only problem being this second hole in me now making this really disconcerting sucking noise, and blood just gushing out of me.

(Go here for our next sanguinary chapter. And please turn to the right hand side of this page for a nearly complete listing of links to all extant episodes of Larry Winchester’s A Town Called Disdain™, a Danny Thomas Production.)

“Down through all eternity, the crying of humanity...”

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 76: smoked

When last we saw Arnold Schnabel he had just brightened up the day of one Father James Reilly by allowing this good priest the privilege of hearing his confession. Freshly shrived and at least for the moment aglow once again with sanctifying grace, Arnold marches out into the sunlight of Cape May, New Jersey on an August morning in the year of our Lord 1963.

Another beautiful day lay glittering and pulsing before me as I paused at the top of the church steps; happy or presumably happy vacationers walked up and down the sidewalks of Washington Street, going to the beach or wandering into and out of the shops, and even though I no longer really believed in Catholicism I still felt that old feeling of accomplishment on leaving confession, that feeling of starting anew, of attempting to get through at least the next hour before falling into a state of black sin all over again.

Contentedly I patted my pockets for my cigarettes.

Then I remembered that I had decided to try to start quitting today, that I had told myself I wouldn’t have another cigarette till after lunch, and that, even more horrifying, in my insanity of good intentions I hadn’t brought my cigarettes with me.

At once a tidal wave of nausea rose up from my stomach into my throat. I choked it back down and then I felt an overweight mouse inside my skull chewing greedily at my brain cells.

My spit tasted like used motor oil. I swallowed it down and at once was racked with another brutal surge of nausea.

I grabbed the cast iron rail and staggered down the steps, barely keeping in what had so recently been a quite enjoyable breakfast of scrapple and eggs, home-fries and breaded fried tomatoes washed down with my usual copious cups of strong black Chock Full o’ Nuts coffee. My legs felt as if they were made of Silly Putty, and my bermuda shorts and polo shirt had become soaked with icy sweat in a matter of seconds.

I found myself sitting on a wooden bench on the corner by the church, bent over, staring down at the shimmering sidewalk. Many wonderful cigarette butts lay like precious little tubes of ecstasy upon the concrete, jetsam of another beer-drenched summer Friday night at the shore. I saw one fat unfiltered butt, only half smoked at best, perhaps even my own brand, Pall Mall, although my eyes were so clouded I could not be sure. I reached down, almost vomiting again, and picked it up. Breathing heavily, licking my parched lips with my swollen leathery tongue, with trembling fingers I smoothed out the butt. It would do. It would do just fine, thank you very much. Just two or three drags, that sharp strong tarry smoke filling my mendicant ravaged lungs, and I would be whole again, human again, or at least as human as I could reasonably expect to be.

I patted my pockets again. But no, no, of course not, I had had to be a tough guy. I had left my lighter at home with my cigarettes.

The aforementioned vacationers marched to and fro before me, dressed in their hideous seaside attire of flaming dacrons and polyesters, strutting men with murderous scowls and frightened eyes, women with stiff sprayed hair like the headdresses of pagan priestesses, and screaming feral children veering dangerously off the curb, apparently intent on throwing themselves underneath the burning tires of an endless stream of enormous dirty belching automobiles packed with yet more family groups of Nazis, carnival hucksters, thieves, murderers, and maniacs.

All I had to do was bum a light.

Half the people going by me were smoking. Happily, contentedly smoking in the shining hot sunlight, the pale smoke swirling up and disappearing into the bright blue indifferent sky, into that great bottomless maw of a universe without meaning.

But then I sat up a little straighter and I thought: is it really true I can’t go more than two hours without a cigarette? That I would stoop so low as to fish a butt from the sidewalk?

Then of course I remembered some other occasions when I had done just that, usually when stumbling home drunk, the only other passersby my fellow wretched inebriates wandering the haunted night-time streets like some exiled race of the damned.

I took a deep breath, and coughed only a little bit. My mouth had gone bone dry over the past few minutes, but now I could actually feel a drop of moisture in there, and it did not even taste of death and ashes.

The corpulent mouse was still ensconced in my head, but he had stopped chewing. I supposed he was full, and taking a post-prandial nap.

My breakfast had receded from my chest to a defensive position just below my solar plexus, nervously awaiting instructions from HQ.

I looked at the butt. It was a Camel, not my brand. I flicked it away.

I took another deep breath, and stood up. The world rocked and moaned but did not fly apart or implode.

I felt my soaked shirt drying on my shoulders and back.

I launched myself forth into the stream of ambulatory humanity, my legs once again feeling if not quite like legs then at least not like something you would find sticking out of a beached octopus or squid, and the pavement unfolded obediently under the soles of my Keds, with only the occasional slight ripple or tilt.

I thought it best to head straightaway for Mrs. Biddle’s house and my appointment with Larry Winchester.

(Click here for our next earth-shaking chapter. Please check out the right hand side of this page for an up-to-date listing of links to all extant episodes of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train to Heaven™, an Irwin Allen Production.)

“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode 70: embarkation

In our previous episode of this Tony Rome Award-winning masterwork, a small grey fellow dressed in a sailor suit appeared at the height of a peyote ceremony and invited Dick, Daphne and Harvey to come with him. Harvey declined...

September, 1969, southeastern New Mexico, just on the other side of the borderline to nowhere...

Dick and Daphne had put on their coats and gone with the sailor out the door. They had left the door open a little bit and Harvey, sitting on the floor, could lean over and see them walking toward the green thing and a ramp that ran up into a bright purple opening in the thing’s sloping side.

His cigarette ash dropped onto his jeans and he brushed it off.

Ah, shit, he thought, and he grabbed his hat and his field jacket and got up.

“Where are you going, Harvey?” asked Enid.

He put on his hat and shrugged himself into the jacket, its pockets heavy with the revolver and the two packed speedloaders.

“With them,” he said.

“Oh, Harvey, don’t.”

“Fuckin’ ‘ell,” said Derek. You got more bottle ‘n I ‘ave, mate.”

Paco had returned to watching On the Waterfront.

“Paco,” said Enid. “Tell him no.”

“Boy wants to go with Peyotito,” said Paco. He’ll come back. Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

Paco shrugged.

“Boy wants to be a man. He gotta take a chance. Gotta make journey. Vision quest.”

Harvey stopped in the doorway and turned to Enid.

“Later, Miss Enid.”

And he went out.

"Fuckin’ ‘ell,” said Derek. Fuckin’ bloody ‘ell.”

They were already going up the ramp and Harvey double-timed on over there. He watched the little sailor and then Dick in his pea coat and Daphne in her shiny red trench coat disappear into the purple light of the thing’s inside.

What the fuck.

He tossed away his cigarette and went on up.

****

Enid sat on the floor feeling the weight of a billion mad worlds on her shoulders.

Harvey had closed the door behind him but you could still see that emerald glow through the front windows. The only sound from the outside was the furious howling of a coyote, the wistful barking of a dog, the disturbingly humanoid wailing of a bobcat.

Paco got up and turned the TV’s sound on.

Marlon Brando said to Eva Marie Saint:

“There’s too many guys around here with only one thing on their mind.”

Paco sat back down and Derek took up his guitar again and strummed an E-minor chord.

Christ, thought Enid, I’m going. With them.

She got up, the inside of her head swaying around inside her skull.

“Oy,” said Derek.

“I’m going,” said Enid. “With them. And please don’t say ‘bloody fucking hell’ again.”

Derek stared up at her.

“Well, I think I’ll stay with the chief, love. Watch the telly.”

“All right.”

Paco glanced up at her and then turned back to the TV.


The saucer sat there in the dirt, solid and green and glowing. It looked about sixty feet in diameter and it sloped up to a height of maybe twenty feet. She couldn’t see an opening into it. She walked slowly all the way around it. Then she reached over and touched the surface of the thing. It was warm and it felt like birch bark. It smelled like a toy electric railroad set. She saw no sign of a doorway or hatch opening.

“Hello?” she called.

No one answered.

****

(Kindly go here for our next mind-bending chapter. And please refer to the right hand side of this page for an up-to-date listing of links to all other extant episodes of a Town Called Disdain by Larry Winchester, the man whom Harold Bloom called “the only American writer equal to Arnold Schnabel”.)


Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Donovan Phillips Leitch:

“Railroad Train to Heaven,” Part 75: I confess

(Go here for our previous chapter.)

In the summer of 1963, Arnold Schnabel, a forty-two year-old bachelor brakeman and poet from the Olney section of Philadelphia, after suffering a mental breakdown the previous winter, and on a mandatory leave-of-absence from the Reading Railroad, comes with his mother to convalesce in the quaint seaside resort of Cape May, New Jersey.

This is his story, in his own inimitable words. Harold Bloom has called it “a noble, sprawling monument”. Noble? Perhaps. Sprawling? Absolutely.

Read it and weep:

Luckily I got to the church shortly after confessions started at ten, and hardly anyone was there.

For a moment I considered not going to Father Reilly. It’s true he was the most lenient and broad-minded priest here, but on the other hand, did he really deserve to have to deal with my nonsense two weeks in a row?

But, on another other hand, perhaps he, having been exposed to my madness in full flower last Saturday, would perforce be better able than one of his unblooded colleagues to give me spiritual guidance.

What the heck, I decided, this is what he gets paid for.

So I marched right up to his confessional and went in.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, it has been one week since my --”

“Oh, no, it’s you.”

“Yes, Father.”

He sighed.

“Should I go on, Father?”

He sighed again.

“I can leave,” I offered. “I really don’t mind. I can go to Father Schwartz, or --”

“No, no,” he said. “Stay.”

“Okay.”

I settled down. I realized I wanted a cigarette. I had denied myself my usual luxurious post-breakfast smoke. Not to mention my briskly bracing post-shower smoke. Or my walk-to-church smoke, savoring that last good drag before flicking it into the always butt-littered gutter beneath the church steps.

“Did you hear me?” his voice said, from the other side of that black screen.

“Pardon me?”

“I asked you if you would tell me your first name.”

“Oh, sorry, Father --”

“You certainly don’t have to.”

“Oh, I don’t mind. It’s Arnold. Arnold Schna-”

“Just your first name.”

“Okay. Arnold.”

“Arnold. Good. My name’s Jim.”

“I know. Father Reilly. Hi, Father.”

“Call me Jim.”

“Okay. Father Jim.”

“Just Jim.”

“Just Jim?”

“Just Jim. I’m just a man. Just like you, Arnold.”

I doubted this very much. But just to move things along I ceded the point. I did have an appointment with Larry Winchester after all. So:

“Okay, Jim,” I said.

“I remember you well from last week, Arnold. I felt bad about -- about dismissing you so abruptly.”

“I didn’t mind, Father.”

As indeed I had not. I’m always happy to be dismissed, abruptly or not, it’s all the same to me, as long as I get to leave.

“Yes, but still. I feel I was shirking my duty. I apologize.”

“Okay.” I shrugged, but of course he couldn’t see that. “Should I start my confession now?”

“Okay. Go ahead.”

“Well, first off, I’m afraid I had sexual intercourse again. Outside the sacrament of marriage, that is.”

“Oh. Uh, more than once?”

“Uh, yeah, I’m afraid so. It was, what? Three times? Four? Wait. Let me see --”

“Don’t worry about the number, Arnold.”

“Okay, and also we did some other things that weren’t exactly intercourse I guess, but --”

“You touched each other impurely.”

“Uh, yeah, you could say that, you see I --”

“That’s okay. I don’t need all the details.”

“Oh, good.”

“So, was this all with the same woman, Arnold?”

“Yeah. And actually that’s another thing I wanted to ask you about, Father, because she’s Jewish, and, well, not a practicing Jew, but, anyway, she doesn’t think sexual intercourse outside of marriage is a sin.”

“Uh-huh --”

“So I’m wondering if that makes it less of a sin for me. Since I’m not making another person commit a mortal sin.”

“Arnold, according to Church doctrine it’s a mortal sin either way. And it’s a mortal sin for her even if she doesn’t think it is.”

“Well that doesn’t seem fair. I mean, what about some -- I don’t know -- headhunters in the Amazon -- who never knew about Christianity? It’s a sin for them too?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“But they can’t even get properly married in the first place because they don’t have any priests to marry them.”

“Oh. I see your point.”

“I mean --”

“But forget about the headhunters, Arnold. The fact is, Arnold, that you, Arnold, are in a state of mortal sin.”

“Okay. So, uh, I guess I didn’t have too many other sins this week, no mortal ones anyway. Oh, I guess I masturbated a few times. That’s mortal,” I said. “Which is weird.”

“What’s weird, Arnold?”

“That you can get sent to hell for masturbating and it’s the same punishment for extra-marital intercourse.”

“Well, that’s the way it is.”

“Yeah. Okay. Uh, I got drunk two or three times.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“Oh, yeah, I forgot, the sin of doubt. I have to tell you, for this whole past week or more I’ve really had my doubts about religion. So, yeah, a lot of doubt. But what do I know?”

“Did you --”

“Yes?”

“Last week you said Jesus had appeared to you.”

“Oh, right.”

“Has he, have you, did you --”

“Yeah, I’m afraid so. He’s appeared to me, uh, several times.”

“And is he still telling you to go ahead and have extra-marital intercourse?”

“Well -- uh -- he’s -- uh --”

“Don’t you think this Jesus could just be a figment of your imagination, Arnold?”

“Oh, yeah, definitely, but --”

“What?”

“I mean who’s to say Bernadette of Lourdes wasn’t just seeing things? Or those kids at Fatima?”

“Those were certified miracles, Arnold.”

“Okay, but what if my Jesus sightings got certified? I mean, who’s to say?”

He didn’t say anything.

“Like what if I brought proof of a miracle.”

“What kind of proof?”

I was thinking of that cigarette from 1890s France. But that miracle didn’t have anything to do with Jesus. Or did it?

“Answer me this, Arnold. Has anyone else seen this Jesus of yours?”

“No. But, like, all these other saints that Jesus or Mary appeared to -- Jesus or Mary always only appeared just to the saints, right? Not to everybody, but. Just. To the saints. That’s why the saints are saints. Because they’re the only ones who can see Jesus. Or Mary. Or whomever. Right?”

“So you think you’re a saint.”

“Hey, I don’t know. That’s not for me to say, Father.”

“Jim.”

“Jim.”

“Listen. You’re not a saint, Arnold.”

“Well, okay, if you say so.”

“But -- what do I know, right?”

“Hey, that’s your opinion. You’re entitled to it, Father.”

“Jim.”

“Jim.”

“So --” I said.

“So,” he said.

Somebody started knocking on the wall of the booth on the other side of Father Reilly.

A muffled voice said, “Hey, Father Reilly, what’s goin’ on?”

“Wait your turn!” yelled Father Reilly.

“Sorry, Father.”

“Kneel there and examine your conscience and I’ll be with you when I’m ready.”

“Sorry,” said the voice.

“Now,” said Father Reilly, to me, “where were we?”

“Well --” I did have that appointment with Larry, and I hate to keep people waiting -- “I guess that’s about it, Father. I mean Jim. I mean, that’s about it for my sins.”

“Okay. Are you going to try not to have sexual intercourse with this woman again, Arnold? This -- Jewish girl?”

“Um, I don’t know, Father. I really doubt that I’ll try not to.”

“I can’t give you absolution unless you at the very least intend to try.”

“Well, what about all those other weeks I came in and confessed to the sin of self-abuse? We both knew I was going to do it again, and you always gave me absolution for that.”

“That’s different.”

“How’s it different? They’re both mortal sins.”

There was silence. I could hear Father Reilly breathing. I almost fancied I could hear that other poor guy in the other booth breathing, or sighing.

“Is she pretty, this girl?” Father Jim asked, in a low voice.

“Uh, yes, Father. Very. Dark hair. Deep dark eyes. Smooth skin. And she smells -- she smells like --” I tried to remember, but she had various smells, all of them good. “She smells like pound cake sometimes. Like, right from the oven --”

“Okay, look, I absolve you,” he said abruptly. “Ego te absolvo ab omnibus censuris, et peccatis, in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.”

“Oh. Thanks, Father.”

“Three Hail Marys, three Our Fathers.”

“Okay.”

“Now go. Go now. Go and sin.”

“Go and sin?”

“As I’m sure you will.”

He slid the little shutter shut.

I got up and went out. Poor guy. And he still had Miss Evans to deal with.

I grabbed a pew, said my penance, crossed myself, and got out of there.

(Go here for our next deeply spiritual chapter. And kindly refer to the right hand side of this page to find an up-to-date listing of links to all extant episodes of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train to Heaven, a Selmur Production. Nihil Obstat: Bishop John J. "Big Jack" Graham.)

Since you gotta go:

“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode 69: invitation

Larry Winchester (“America’s answer to Tolstoy” -- Harold Bloom) now cuts away from Dick Ridpath and his apparent achievement of samãdhi (hat-tip to Kathleen Maher) and back to the nefarious Grupler and Marlene, last seen dispatching four US Government agents on a hill overlooking a small Native American reservation just several miles of dangerous road outside of a town called Disdain...

Grupler and Marlene, crouching behind a resiny-smelling creosote bush at the foot of the hill, had watched the big green luminous beret-shaped thing land and then the door sliding open and the ramp sliding down and the little sailor gliding lightly down the ramp and going over to the Quonset hut. He had entered the hut without bothering to knock, and a minute or so later the door seemed to close of its own volition behind him.

Somewhere a coyote howled, a dog barked shyly, a bobcat cried like a human infant with colic. The cool dry breeze smelled of electricity.

“So,” whispered Grupler. “The US Navy has a part in this as well.”

“That was the strangest-looking sailor I have ever seen,” whispered Marlene.

“Probably the victim of nuclear experimentation,” said Grupler.

“No matter,” said Marlene.

They looked at the beautiful glowing green thing in the yard, surrounded by junked automobiles and mechanical parts, baby carriages, 1930s iceboxes, and an old Dr Pepper vending machine lying on its side, this vision of industrial detritus made somehow beautiful and serene and whole by the soft emerald glow emanating from the thing.

“Let’s take that sucker,” said Marlene in English.

“Right on, baby,” said Hans, and they cocked the hammers of their pistols simultaneously.

“Bang bang,” said Hans, his eyes full of the green light.

“Shoot shoot,” said Marlene.

****

Dick braced himself to land with a thud if not a splat -- he had after all just been whooshing in, just sailing in at way, oh, way beyond the speed of light -- but then after all here he still stood in Paco’s hut, shaking hands with this expressionless little sailorman.

“Dick, I think you can stop shaking his hand now,” said Daphne.

“Oh.” He withdrew his hand. It felt like someone else’s hand. “Sorry, fella,” he said.

“Don’t mention it,” said the little being, through the transistor.

Dick glanced around at the others, who were all looking alternately at him and at the creature.

“Do, uh, do you want us to come with you?” asked Dick.

“That’s why I’m here, fella,” said the little guy.

Daphne had picked up the talking transistor radio.

“Go where?” she asked, speaking directly at the radio.

“Ha ha,” said the radio.

“What?”

Dick held out his hand for the transistor, and she handed it to him.

“I believe he’s got a craft of some sort.” Dick sighed. “Out there.”

“You mean like a flying saucer?” she asked.

“Well, yes, actually.”

Dick slipped the little radio into his shirt pocket.

“Oh my God, we have to go up in it, Dick! I’ve always wanted to go up in one.”

“Now wait a bleedin’ minute,” said Derek.

“Yeah,” said Harvey. “Let’s just hold the fuck on.”

“We have to go,” said Daphne.

“Oh my fucking God,” said Enid, lighting a cigarette.

Paco said nothing. He had never before seen Peyotito behave in such a fashion. Well, this is what you might expect if you introduced white people to Peyotito.

“Mister,” said Daphne. “Mister sailor?”

“Yes, sweety,” said the sailor.

“Dick and I would just love to go up in your saucer.”

“Fabulous,” said the little guy.

Oh, boy, thought Dick. Here we go again.

“And the young fella, too,” said the sailor. “We can swing by the ranch and pick Hope up on the way.”

“Hope?” said Dick.

“Yeah,” said the sailor. “By the way, how come she’s not here?”

“Well,” said Dick, “we’re hardly going to take an emotionally-disturbed seventeen-year-old to a peyote ceremony.”

“Why not? That girl was born tripping.”

“Well --”

“Look,” said the little guy, “it’s really no problem. Like I said, we’ll swoop by the ranch, hover by her window, I slide through. Boom --”

“Excuse me, sir?” Daphne raised her finger. “Um, why are we picking Hope up?”

“Frank said to bring her too. I just do what I’m told.”

“Frank,” said Daphne. “And who is Frank?”

“Frank’s the boss. And he said to bring you and Mr. Ridpath and Hope and Harvey. I’m just following orders --”

“Now wait just a minute,” said Harvey.

“Sure, fella.”

The little guy stood there, staring at Harvey, waiting.

“Okay, look,” said Harvey. “I ain’t goin’.”

“But it’s your karma, fella.”

“Fuck that,” said Harvey. “No way. No fucking way in the world.

The little sailor just stood there.

****

(Please click here to go to our next mind-bending chapter.  And kindly turn to the right hand side of this page for an allegedly up-to-date listing of links to any and all other episodes of Larry Winchester’s Miller High Life Award-winning A Town Called Disdain™, all contents inspected and passed by the Commissariat of Homeland Insecurity.)


A word from Jack Nicholson:

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 74: the end of the longest day and the beginning of a possibly even longer day...

Return with us now to that sultry August night in 1963, to the seaside resort of Cape May, New Jersey, and to the inimitable memoirs of that saint, that poet, that madman, Arnold Schnabel...

Suffice it to say we bade each other a fond goodnight, and I went my way. Elektra didn’t ask me to stay the night, but I’ve been feeling so wild these days I think I might actually have done so had she asked. What did it matter after all? If God was going to strike me dead he would already have done it by now.

But still I must admit I preferred just going home to my little attic room. This had been by far the longest day of my life, and I was ready for some quiet solitude. Speaking of which I decided to take an indirect route home; if the battle royal was still in progress and had spread farther down Washington Street I had no desire to get involved. Let them fight on without me until they dropped one by one. Henceforth Arnold Schnabel would be the Switzerland of human beings. So I walked down to the beach and turned right on Beach Drive. The ocean crashed obliviously and darkly and, tired as I was, for two cents I would have stripped down on the other side of Frank’s Playland and gone in for a swim. But I remembered the promise I had made to Elektra, no more solitary night-time swims, and I couldn’t bring myself to go against my word to her.

As I walked past Sid’s Tavern I noticed it was still open and thriving, its front doors open and beckoning, the lights inside twinkling on a happy bar full of people, the jukebox playing a song about let’s dance, let’s dance, let’s do the twist, the stomp, the mashed potato, too.

Again I was tempted. The siren call of oblivion, how often had I obeyed its summons, marching like a zombie into how many low dives? But I walked on and turned up at Perry Street and back to home.

After climbing the side stairs as quietly as I could I stopped on the third floor and stood by Miss Evans’s door. If she was still out at the bars then that probably meant she would be all the more likely to stage an all-out assault on my room at three in the morning. If she were in and please God already asleep then maybe I wouldn’t have to nail my door shut with railroad ties.

Fortunately I heard deep female snoring. Good.

I went up to my room, but you may be sure, dear reader, that I did lock my door, although after thinking it over a minute I decided not to prop a wooden chair against the knob.

I got undressed and into bed and picked up The Waste Land, trying to find where I left off, not that it seemed to matter a whole lot. At the end of one passage was this:

'You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!'

-- the last two phrases of which Miss Evans had quoted when she inscribed her book to me.

I read the footnote and saw that T.S. Eliot was quoting Charles Baudelaire; yet another famous poet I suppose I’ll have to read some day. So Miss Evans might have been quoting Baudelaire directly. Or she could have been quoting Eliot quoting Baudelaire. Or both. This too did not matter, really; what mattered was that she was nutcase. Contrary to what might seem logical, nutcases do not necessarily like to associate with other nutcases. I suppose I should only speak for myself, but I find my own insanity to be more than sufficient unto the day. I don’t need any help.

I put The Wasteland aside for some other time and picked up Miss Evans’s novel, Ye Cannot Quench. At least this I was able to understand. In the sense that I knew what was going on. On the other hand, after finding my place and reading about three lines I realized that although I could follow what the characters were doing I couldn’t really understand the characters themselves because they behaved and talked so oddly, which is saying something coming from me. They seemed like characters in a movie, and it occurred to me that maybe I would enjoy the book more, or at all, if I tried to imagine the characters as movie stars. So I decided that the Rock Hudson-like guy would be Rock Hudson and that the Montgomery Clift-like guy would be Clift, the younger Montgomery Clift, like from around A Place in the Sun. The girl, Emily, I had to think about for a minute. Debbie Reynolds? No, she was not quite that innocent. Definitely not Doris Day either, even if it was a Rock Hudson movie. I settled on Natalie Wood, and that seemed to work. I also made the movie black-and-white, although some of the Rock Hudson parts seemed like they should be in Technicolor.

I still hadn’t read more than a few lines while I was working all this out. I was mostly just lying there thinking about what I’d already read, or what I could remember of it, as it was already rapidly disappearing from my brainscape.

The Clift guy, Porter Walker, was still making out with the Natalie Wood girl, Emily. Boy, in the old days I wouldn’t even let myself read these kinds of scenes. At least not ones that went on for so long. But then the sort of books I tended to read usually kept it to the basics. “He drew her scarlet mouth roughly to his. She did not resist. Far from it.” “She took the cigarette from my lips and flicked it out the window. I wondered if it landed on anybody. But I didn’t wonder for long.” “She turned and locked the door. She put the key in the top of her dress. I wondered if she was locking everyone else out or locking me in. I wondered but I didn’t care.” That sort of thing. But Miss Evans’s scene really went on and on. I decided to save it for later and picked up the murder story I’m reading, This Sweet Sickness.

I woke up around my usual time, eight or so, and all in all I didn’t feel too much like squeezing myself through my small window and hurling myself from the roof. Fortunately I had had only the one Manhattan. In fact if I hadn’t had that ale in 1890s France I would probably feel much better than I did. It’s always that one extra that pushes you over the borderline, even if you did have it in a different century.

My jaw ached from where the coast guard guy had socked me, but I didn't seem to have any teeth loose.

I threw my legs resignedly over the side of the bed and as usual reached for my cigarettes and lighter.

And here something really unusual happened. First off, after lighting up I went into a coughing fit, but this wasn’t the unusual part. Well, maybe slightly unusual in that this fit was a bit more severe than usual, perhaps due to that powerful French stinkweed I’d duly consumed the night before only because it was the only cigarette around.

What was unusual was that I finally decided that smoking was stupid unless you were really planning to commit suicide in the very near future, and that I was quitting cigarettes now, after going through a minimum of a pack a day ever since I was overseas in the army. Amazingly I had never smoked regularly before going into the service. But there I was in England going through all this boring training, the cigarettes were free, everybody else smoked, I had lots of free time, so I started smoking. It was something to do. And here I was eighteen years after the war, still puffing away.

The only thing was, I was just about to stub out this last cigarette forever when I was already missing it. So I took another small drag, and this time I only coughed a little bit. Well, all right, I’d start cutting down today. This would be my last one till after lunch. Then I’d take it from there.

I got dressed and went out, taking Miss Evans’s book with me. It wouldn’t do to be seen with another novel until I managed to get through hers, if I could get through it.

I stopped again outside her door and pricked up my ears. She was no longer snoring, but at least there were no other and alarming sounds, no keening or wailing or gnashing of teeth that I could hear.

Breakfast passed pleasantly enough. My bruised jaw went unmentioned and perhaps unnoticed, possible proof that I was not the center of the universe after all. Kevin kept his nose in his Tom Swift book, and I read Ye Cannot Quench while my mother and my aunts sat and drank their coffee. They probably knew I was hungover. They were talking gardening and I remembered that I was supposed to pass on Mrs. Biddle's compliments on their garden, but I was not quite ready for such polite conversation. The ladies must have heard about Frank Sinatra being at the party I had gone to, but none of them asked me about him. If it were Bishop Sheen or President Kennedy or Lawrence Welk or Arthur Godfrey I think they would be impressed, but I don’t think Sinatra means much to them.

Finally Emily and Porter finished making love, and now, as Porter slept a “deep, poet’s sleep”, Emily picked up his epic poem again:

Slam bang goes the drummer slackjawed above his traps
Wang wang wang wails the sax man arching his back like a snake
Bwah bwah bwah goes the trumpeter straight up
At that smoky Heaven where churn the dreams of the damned
And the screams of the saved propelled by the
Boomp boomp boomp of the bassman, and the
Chinkle tinkle pinkle of the piano fellow
As I pound my beersopping table in glorious time,
Hearken! Hearken ye fools, and dig
This crazy sound...

Suddenly I remembered my appointment with Larry Winchester. I checked my watch. He had said ten or ten-thirty. I didn’t know how long he wanted to work (or whatever it was we were going to do) and I had to meet Mrs. Biddle for tea at four; so, as this was Saturday, I figured as soon as I'd had my shower I’d better head right over to church and go to confession. For some reason this seemed to be another habit I wasn’t quite ready to quit.

I managed to take my shower successfully, and I was coming down the third-floor hall after changing when, you guessed it, I ran into Miss Evans coming out of her doorway.

“Oh, Arnold,” she said.

She was wearing a bathrobe, and nothing else apparent except for rubber flip-flops.

“Hello, Miss Evans.”

“Gertrude, please, Arnold, for the last time.”

“Gertrude.”

She held some bottles of unguents and lotions, and she had a towel over her arm, even though my aunts provide clean towels.

“Where are you off to, Arnold?”

“Confession.”

“How nice.”

I didn’t really know what to say to this. I said nothing.

“I wish I were Catholic,” she said. “It would be nice to tell someone my sins and then to be cleansed. To start again. Anew.”

She reached over and touched my polo shirt.

“Are you allowed to go to confession wearing a sport shirt and bermudas?” she asked.

“The rules are relaxed in the summer, at the seashore anyway,” I said.

“Perhaps I should go.”

“Sure, give it a try,” I said, and I started to pass.

“Will you wait for me? I don’t know how to do it.”

“Well, I can’t go in with you, Miss Evans, I mean Gertrude.”

“No, of course not. But what do I say? To the priest.”

“Say, ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been such-and-such a time since my last confession.'”

“But I’ve never been to confession.”

“Oh, well, tell him it’s your first time then.”

“He won’t think it’s odd?”

“Priests are trained to deal with oddness.”

“I’ll tell him it’s been a year.”

“Okay.”

“He won’t be cross with me?”

“Probably not. Go to Father Reilly, he’s pretty easy-going.”

“Okay, I will. Goodbye, Arnold. Perhaps I’ll see you later in the day.”

And the way things were going she undoubtedly would see me. Unless I was kidnapped by Communist agents or creatures from outer space.

I headed downstairs and out and out into the beautiful warm day, off to the Star of the Sea. Off to see Father Reilly with my own boatload of sins. It occurred to me that his easy-goingness was surely to be challenged today.

(Click here for our next deeply spiritual chapter. Kindly turn to the right hand side of this page for a complete listing of links to all other legally available episodes of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train to Heaven™, soon to be a major mini-series event on the Lifetime Channel, starring Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor and Shelley Winters. A Larry Winchester/Dick Powell Production.)


We give you Chris Montez:

“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode 68: alone?

A brief recap of this unexpurgated sprawling masterwork by the man Harold Bloom called “the American Shakespeare”, Larry Winchester:

A recently discharged young soldier named Harvey returns to his depressed hometown of Disdain, NM, in early September 1969. The dodgy local rancher Big Jake Johnstone hires Harvey as a guide for his mysterious and glamorous guests Dick and Daphne Ridpath. A couple of nights later, Dick, Harvey and Daphne, accompanied by the local sculptress Enid and the English rock star Derek Squitters, attend a peyote ceremony in the Quonset hut of Paco, a Native American brujo, or medicine man.

A strange grey little creature in a sailor suit appears in Paco’s doorway. He greets Dick by name and offers his hand. Dick takes it...

Here he was, in the thick of it this time, in the thick of nothingness, blackness, emptiness -- this was it. His own body was nowhere in sight, he could feel nothing, see nothing, hear nothing, he couldn’t even smell a damn thing.

Just this empty awful blackness.

And he thought, Okay, this is it, here’s where I finally go insane, and he braced himself for it, thinking at the same time, How can you brace yourself for going insane?

But oddly enough he felt himself not panicking, not going insane.

For one thing he was remembering everything now, especially the six days he had spent with the little sailor and the little sailor’s friends in some sort of aircraft, back in January of ‘65, those six days which had resulted in his being kidnapped a week later and tortured, drugged and interrogated for another week by persons unknown, and he remembered last night being in this strange aircraft again, and Hope being there, and their being urged to have sex in that bright room, and their not being afraid for some reason.

And he remembered everything else in his life, every moment of his life both waking and dreaming, every moment when he’d sat staring into space waiting for the next moment to come and go. He remembered sitting in the Clef Club down in South Philly listening to Coleman Hawkins with Daphne’s father Mac and Mac saying he would have a word with his old friend Admiral Quigley about getting Dick into naval intelligence. He remembered every time he had ever had sex and the smell and feel of every girl or woman he had ever been with and all their names except for the names of the ones he hadn’t quite caught in the first place. He remembered going back in time to Belle Époque France with his friend Arnold Schnabel. He remembered being born, the bright lights and the smell of his mother’s blood. And before that the womb, the warm wet darkness, the sound of his mother’s heart, those mysterious muffled sounds from outside. He remembered each moment of his life all at once as though his life were one long moment including this present endless moment of darkness and silence.

He realized he felt oddly phlegmatic about it all.

Well, and now what?

Was he dead? Was he insane?

No, he was going somewhere, and, oddly enough, he wasn’t afraid.

****

(Click here for our next spine-tingling chapter. And please check out the right hand side of this page for an up-to-date listing of links to all other extant episodes of Larry Winchester’s A Town Called Disdain™, an Irwin Allen production.)

A word from Scott Walker:

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 73: summer nights

Return with us now to a warm August night in 1963, and to the quaint seaside resort of Cape May, NJ, to which Arnold Schnabel, the author of this Pabst Blue Ribbon Award-winning memoir, has gone with his mother to convalesce after suffering a mental breakdown the previous winter...

Somehow it happened while we were going through the laborious procedure of saying goodnight to everyone that Miss Rathbone and Steve got up to go also, and, sure enough, Miss Evans too.

So now for some mysterious reason we had to wait until this latter group said goodnight to everyone. I lit up another cigarette, one of my Pall Malls this time, even though my lungs and throat were still scorched and befogged from that French cigarette.

Frank came over to me.

“You got my card, right?”

“Got it, Frank.”

“I appreciated how you didn’t walk out in the middle of my song.”

“My pleasure.”

(Although it did occur to me that if we had slipped out quietly then we would have been a half hour gone by now.)

“I could see that your lady friend -- what’s her name, Ariadne?”

“Elektra.”

“I could see Elektra was ready to go. She’s got the hots for you, boy.”

“Oh, I don’t know --”

“Arnold, if there’s one thing I know it’s dames.” Elektra was kissing Sammy goodnight on the cheek. “And believe me, that kid’s got it bad for you. She reminds me of Ava.”

“Ava?”

“Gardner. My second wife. Third wife? Whatever. She reminds me of Ava. God how we used to fight. And God how we used to --" He finished his sentence with a sigh. "So, Arnold, you gonna call me?”

“Well, I don’t know, Frank.”

“Call me any time. I want a lyric from you.”

“Well, I can’t promise anything.”

“Yeah, I know. So I hear you’re gonna work with Larry?”

“Um, maybe --”

“Good man, Larry. He could be an A-list director, but he’s got a bad habit of telling studio heads to go fuck themselves, you should pardon my French. I’ve wanted to work with him for years. Maybe you could write me a part. What’s the movie about?”

“Something about a young soldier on leave in Paris who gets involved in a murder, I think.”

“Maybe it could be an older soldier.”

“Well, I don’t know --”

“Okay, I don’t wanta be pushy. Oh, here she is.”

Elektra came over.

“Take care of this girl, Arnold.”

“Okay,” I said.

It went on like this for a while, but finally we made it downstairs, with Steve and the Misses Rathbone and Evans in tow.

So now we just had to make it through the dining room and the valley of the old people and we were free. But even this maneuver took at least another twenty minutes. I assured Mrs. Biddle that I would indeed be there for tea the next day, and that in fact I had an appointment there tomorrow morning to get together with Larry Winchester to find out if we were simpatico enough to write a movie together.

“Why do you want to write a movie? They’re such drivel. You should stick to your poetry.”

“He’s offering me two thousand dollars upfront,” I said.

“Oh, that’s different then I suppose. All right, I can see you’re chafing at the bit, and your girlfriend is eyeing you ravenously, so go.”

Finally we all made it out of the house. We went down the walk to Windsor and made the left on North Street, Elektra and I in front. I felt a tap on my shoulder.

“Arnold,” said Steve, “I want to thank you! That’s the most fabulous party I’ve ever been to!”

“Glad you liked it, Steve.”

I noticed that he was swaying a bit, sort of like Popeye the sailorman, even though he had Miss Rathbone on one arm and Miss Evans on the other. Then I noticed that all three of them were swaying, although not in unison.

“Oh, by the way, who wants to go to the Ugly Mug for a nightcap?” said Steve.

Not me, that was sure, but about eight or nine minutes later we were all milling about outside the Mug, and somehow Steve and Miss Evans and Miss Rathbone seemed to have gotten even drunker on the way.

Elektra said she wanted to go home, she had to work in the morning. Me, I just wanted to be no more hungover than I was already fated to be. Steve was pulling on my right arm. Miss Evans grabbed my other arm. Elektra pulled her arm away. Miss Evans then yanked her own arm away from Elektra’s grasp, accidentally hitting Miss Rathbone in the nose. Miss Rathbone sat down on the pavement. Miss Evans grabbed my arm again. Elektra told her to leave me alone. Steve went around to help up Miss Rathbone, but he tripped on the curb and fell. Miss Evans called Elektra a floozy. Elektra slapped Miss Evans, and then things got so chaotic that it wearies me even thinking of how to recount it all.

But another interesting thing happened during the ensuing brawl, which soon included several young coast guardsmen who had apparently just been thrown out of the bar, plus the bouncers and bartenders who had thrown them out.

What happened was I began to float up, slowly, to about twenty feet off the ground. I looked down on it all, at the tumbling and stumbling bodies, and as I did the shouts and screams faded away as if someone had turned the volume down on God’s television set, or rather switched the sound to another channel, because what I could hear and very clearly was the gentle rushing and hushing of the ocean several blocks away. I rose myself up just a little higher so that I could see the ocean, enormous and dark and alive. And then I looked down again at the humans swirling all around and against each other, not like animals, not like insects, no, but like human beings, and one of them was me. I was trying to pull one of the coast guard boys off of Steve, and then one of the other coast guard guys socked me on the jaw.

I came down, and rejoined my body, sitting on the pavement, next to Miss Rathbone, who had still not gotten up.

She put her arms around me and kissed me.

Next thing I knew Elektra was pulling me to my feet and dragging me down Decatur Street. Then Miss Evans came running up and grabbed my arm for what seemed the eleventh time that night. Elektra hit her on the shoulder with her handbag, and now Miss Evans sat down, holding her shoulder and looking bewildered.

Soon enough, but not soon enough for me, we were at Elektra’s house, at the rear entrance behind her shop.

She turned her back to the door and pulled me to her.

We were both out of breath, both sweating. My jaw was numb where the coast guardsman had punched me, but it didn’t hurt, at least not yet. Elektra’s warm butterscotch smell mingled with the moist scents of honeysuckle and ivy and roses and the clean seaweedy smell of the ocean.

“My hero,” she said.

I suppose modesty forbids me to go into what happened next. I could go ahead and write it out; after all it was interesting, and included some things I had never done before, not to mention some things that had never before been done to me, but what’s the point, I know I’ll only end up crossing it all out. God forbid my mother should find it. But now that I think about it, even if I could be absolutely sure my mother would never see it, it seems to me perhaps that some things become less once I put them into words. And I wouldn’t want that to happen.

(Click here for our next PG-rated chapter. And please consult the right hand side of this page for an up-to-date listing of links to all other extant episodes of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train to Heaven™, a Sheldon Leonard Production.)

And now a word from Miss Marianne Faithfull:

“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode 67: spaced

Larry Winchester, film-maker extraodinaire (Sidewalks of Terre Haute; They Came to Sioux City; The Return of Ben-Hur; The Airplane Glue Mob) as well as master novelist, now returns the harsh truth of his camera-like eye to our heroes in the tin shack of the Native American brujo Paco, where they are approaching the peak stage of a peyote ceremony.

In attendance besides Paco:

Harvey -- a young fellow recently returned discharged the army.
Dick Ridpath -- international man of mystery.
Daphne -- Dick’s charming and lovely wife.
Enid -- a local sculptress and café owner.
Derek Squitters -- English rock musician, former lover of Enid’s.

The time is almost midnight in early September of the last year of the 1960s, perhaps a half-hour’s drive on a rough road from a town called Disdain...

No getting around it, Daphne was solidly bored now. Derek was still singing, in that annoying species of a high nasal voice which only Englishmen who thought they were poets sang in:

Madame Bovary
are you lonely tonight?
Madame Bovary
are you feeling uptight?

Maybe when you came right down to it the problem was that both she and Dick were so used to military/industrial-strength LSD that the few gnarly peyote buttons they’d forced down weren’t really having that terrific an effect comparatively speaking. She had waited for that exciting trip if you should pardon the expression which you got with really good acid, but sorry, it just hadn’t happened. There had been some odd lighting effects there a few minutes ago, spooky sorts of flashings coming through the opened windows, probably distant passing cars or trucks, their darting shaky beams heightened and distorted by the peyote, and come to think of it there had been some odd keening sounds as well, the shiftings and grindings of gearshifts or camshafts no doubt. Certainly not terrific enough to warrant sitting here watching this bewildering stevedore movie with the sound off (even if it did have a rather dangerously attractive Marlon Brando in it) while this Derek person loudly strummed his guitar and warbled like an absolute loon.

To tell the truth Daphne wouldn’t turn down a proper drink at this point. I mean honestly, Tang? She wondered if she could possibly broach the subject of a modest cocktail, or at the very least a can of cold beer would do in a pinch, she was no snob in the drinks department, God knew, oh how He knew.

Her right leg, folded over her left leg and extended at a not really comfortable angle across the floor, was thumping up and down spasmodically. As if it had a mind of its own. Thump-thwumping away, and not even in time to Derek’s stupid song. Perhaps she should uncross it. The leg. But that seemed like so much trouble.

God she was bored.

But then, finally, something.

The door opened and everyone turned and there in the doorway was this small little creature, lit up by the flickering bluish-white light from the TV set and backlit by an emerald glow from outside. It was a very strange creature. Quite small, about four-and-a-half feet tall, wearing a little white sailor suit and a round white sailor’s cap, but its head was large and shaped like an upside-down teardrop and seemingly bald and its eyes were almond-shaped and slanted and completely dark except for the reflected flickering light from the TV. Its skin was a flat light-greyish color and its hands were thin and the fingers long and tapered, all eight of them.

The Derek person stopped singing.

Daphne’s leg stopped thwumping.

A coyote or a dog or a wolf was howling somewhere.

“Peyotito,” said Paco.

“Fuckin’ ‘ell,” said Derek.

“Wow,” said Enid.

The little man saluted and kept his fingers rigidly at the side of his cap. He seemed to be looking at Dick.

“Shee-it,” said Harvey.

“Bloody fuckin’ ‘ell,” said Derek.

“Darling, I think he wants you to return his salute.”

Dick looked at Daphne.

“Are you seeing what I’m seeing then?”

“If you’re seeing a little grey man in a sailor suit saluting you, yes.”

“It’s Peyotito,” said Paco.

“Fuckin’ Peyotito,” said Derek, reverently. “So me singin’ like summoned him, eh, Chief?”

“This is wild,” said Daphne.

“Sir,” said Harvey, “return the fucker’s salute. He’s gonna stand there all night otherways.”

“You think so?” said Dick. He looked at Paco.

Paco shrugged.

“I think he likes you. So salute him.”

“Well, okay,” said Dick.

He had been leaning on his right hand for a long time and it was a little numb. He shook it out, looked around at everyone else all looking at him, and then he shot up a crisp salute and shot it back down again.

Sure enough the little fellow finally brought down his hand not very crisply at all and then said, “Good evening, Commander Ridpath,” but the only thing was his lips didn’t move.

Everyone looked at Dick.

In fact the little man’s words had come from Daphne’s shot transistor radio which Dick had laid on the floor at his side. It was the same voice he had first heard in their room at the Palm Grove in Singapore -- only a week ago but it felt like a lifetime. The sound was a little scratchy, not as clear as before the radio was drilled with a rifle bullet, but certainly a long ways away from that shit-awful Basque-Swahili nonsense from earlier in the evening.

“Peyotito knows you,” said Paco.

“Oh my God,” said Enid.

“Damn,” said Harvey.

“Fuckin’ ‘ell,” said Derek. “Bloody fuckin’ ‘ell. Oy, Chief, is he always in a fuckin’ sailor suit?”

Everyone looked at Paco.

“No,” said Paco. “This is a first all right.”

It just goes to show, thought Paco. You could meet Peyotito a hundred times and he could look different each time. But a sailor suit. A sailor suit was something new all right.

The little man came forward softly and quickly and smoothly and stood right before Dick. The door seemed to close by itself behind him. Daphne noticed that the little fellow was shoeless and that he only had eight toes.

“God, he really likes you,” she said. “Say hello to him.”

“Um, hello,” said Dick.

Everyone chuckled, albeit nervously. Everyone chuckled that is except for the little man. He remained quite impassive. Rather inscrutable actually.

Then he smoothly swiveled his head one way and then the other, looking at everyone.

“Bonjour tout le monde,” said the little man. Or rather these words came from Daphne’s little radio.

Dick felt very odd now. True, he was used to feeling odd, very used to it, so used to it in fact that he felt odd if he didn’t feel odd, but now he felt really odd, and embarrassed, and he wished to hell that upon his returns to the warren he had customarily said something not quite so debonair. Like, “Hi, everybody!” That would have sufficed. Bonjour tout le monde, Christ. Not for the first time in his life he wondered if he really wasn’t a bit of a horse’s ass after all.

“Should we all say hello, Paco?” asked Enid.

Paco nodded, and everyone said hello.

Then the little guy just stood there looking at Dick.

This really felt too odd. And then the guy held out his hand, that long thin tapering hand.

“Go on, sir,” said Harvey.

Oh Christ, thought Dick.

Daphne gave him a nudge.

Ah jeeze, thought Dick. Why me?

“Because you’re the one,” said the guy.

“Oh, wow,” said Enid.

“Dick,” said Daphne, tugging gently at his sleeve. “You’re the one, darling.”

“Oh, yeah, fabulous,” said Dick.

“Go on, mate, take ‘is ‘and,” said Derek.

Oh well.

Dick wiped his hand on his trousers and then he raised it and took the creature’s hand.

The little guy’s hand gave off a cooler variant of the same energy Dick had felt coming from Hope’s hand earlier that evening. He looked into those black almond eyes in which he could see the doubled rounded reflections of Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint, and then -- oh Christ --

(Please click here to go to our next enigmatic chapter. And kindly consult the right hand side of this page for an up-to-date listing of links to all other extant episodes of Larry Winchester’s A Town Called Disdain, the budget-priced DVD of which -- starring David Hasselhoff and Heather Locklear -- should be coming soon to better K-Marts everywhere.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 72: angel eyes

Our last installment of this sprawling memoir (available here exclusively in all its unexpurgated glory) found our hero Arnold Schnabel just returned from a brief excursion into Belle Époque France with his friend the mysterious naval officer Dick Ridpath.

And so, at least for the moment, we return to Cape May, New Jersey, on an August night in 1963...

Coming up the stairs we could hear the voices of people talking and laughing, the sounds of a guitar strumming.

Dick went right on through and out to the porch, but I had to use the bathroom, and so I went down the hall. This was the bathroom in which I had surprised Shirley on the toilet, so this time I took no chances. The door was slightly ajar, and the light was off, but I knocked anyway, and when no one answered I said, “Hello?” (talking to myself, as usual).

Silence only responded, and so I went in, and after I clicked on the light I quickly made sure to turn the thumb-switch on the deadbolt. I really had to pee. Besides the drinks I had had on the porch and in the kitchen, and the half-bottle of Schmidt’s I carried with me, there had been that large bottle of excellent ale I had drunk with Dick in France.

I thought about it all as I urinated, the fat French cigarette still burning slowly between my lips.

Dick had said nothing about our little adventure through time and space. But then I had said nothing about it either. What if his reasons for keeping mum on the subject were the same as mine, viz., not wishing to seem like a lunatic? Perhaps I should sound him out gently. Or, on second thought, perhaps not. If he wanted to talk about it -- if indeed he had experienced it -- then let him. Right then and there I just didn’t feel like exposing yet another facet of my lunacy.

I finished, zipped up, washed my hands. I looked at my face in the mirror. Yes, that was definitely a foreign cigarette hanging out of my mouth.

Basically, what little world-view I could be said to possess was crashing to the earth. But at least I was back in my own time, or at least the time I was used to being in.

But how odd that it was 1963. Part of me always felt as if it were still the 1930s, the time of my boyhood and young manhood. Since then a massive war had happened in which I was the tiniest cog, the trains had gone electric, the airplanes had become jets, television had replaced radio, oil had replaced coal in our furnaces, and the world had changed even in the way it smelled.

I had just returned from an excursion into the past but in a sense I walked around every day feeling as if I had been transported into the future, a minor character in an impossibly long and plotless episode of The Jetsons. It occurred to me that perhaps only children lived in the present. The rest of us live in the past, our physical selves stumbling through a future that grows more unrecognizable with each passing day.

I dried my hands and went back out into the hall. I still had the not quite-finished bottle of Schmidt’s and my staunchly glowing strong French cigarette. I could hear Frank singing again now:

Try to think that love´s not around
But it´s uncomfortably near
My old heart ain´t gaining no ground
Because my angel eyes ain´t here

I went back down the hall, through the doorway into the connecting bedroom, and back out to the porch. They were all still out there: Dick of course, and Mr. MacNamara; Frank and Sammy (who was accompanying Frank on the guitar), Dean, Shirley, Larry Winchester, Miss Evans, Steve, Miss Rathbone; and Elektra, whom it seemed as if I hadn’t seen in hours, although in human time I suppose it had been less than half an hour. But this whole day seemed less like a day than a long season. And it wasn’t over yet.

Elektra got up from the glider (she had been sitting next to Miss Evans, who was eyeing me as if I were some fascinating visitor from another planet). She put both her hands on my upper arms and said, “Lover boy.”

“Hello.”

“You ready to blow this popsicle stand?”

“Sure,” I whispered. Her eyes were dark and deep. “But let’s wait till Frank’s finished,” I said.

It seemed rude to leave him in mid-song. We stood near the doorway and listened as he sang and as Sammy played the guitar. I noticed that Dick, who was standing over near where Frank sat, was gazing pensively at his cigarette, now burned down almost to the end. I couldn't tell if it was one of the French ones. As casually as I could I leaned over to an overflowing ashtray on a table near the door and stubbed out my own seventy-year-old cigarette.

Pardon me but I got to run
The fact´s uncommonly clear
Got to find who´s now number one
And why my angel eyes ain't here

Excuse me while I disappear

There was a pause after Sammy strummed the final sad chord, then everyone clapped.

Frank, who seemed to have been staring intently into himself as he sang, now smiled, took a gold cigarette case from his bermuda shorts pocket and said, “How’d all these people get in my room?”

Elektra and I said our goodbyes.

As I shook hands with Larry Winchester he said, “So, whaddaya say, kid?”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Um, I don’t know, Larry.”

“I can let you have a grand upfront.”

“A grand?”

Did he think I was in financial difficulties, what with being put on leave of absence by the railroad?

“Larry,” I said, “really, I couldn’t.”

“I knew you were tough. All right, two grand. But that’s for a finished treatment.”

Treatment? I looked around for help, but Elektra was saying good night to Sammy, and no one else seemed to be paying attention to us.

“Larry,” I said, as definitively as I could, “really, I just couldn’t.”

Larry was smoking a cigar, and he drew contemplatively on it now.

“I have a feeling it’s not just the money for you, is it?” he said.

“Uh, no,” I said.

“So you wanta see if it we’re simpatico first?”

“I don’t know what that means, Larry.”

“Like if we get along, if we click.”

“Oh.”

“So we’ll get together and see if we click. But I can’t let you do it on spec, Arnold.”

Spec?

“Look, come by tomorrow. We’ll kick around some ideas.”

“Kick around ideas?” I was grasping at straws. “You mean, like a bull session?”

“Yeah, like a bull session.”

“Well, I guess I could do that. You’re staying here?”

“I have that honor, sir.”

“Well, okay.”

“I like to start early, but the way tonight’s going, maybe we better sleep late just a little. Whaddaya say you drop by tomorrow around ten, ten-thirty.”

This seemed quite early in the day for a bull session, but what did I know?

“Well, okay, Larry, sure.”

“Great, I’ll see ya tomorrow then.”

Elektra had joined us.

“Good news, sweetheart,” said Larry. “Your boyfriend’s getting into the picture business.”

“Wow, that’s great, Arnold. So you’re gonna help Larry write his screenplay?”

“Damn straight he is,” said Larry.

It was all starting to come together now.

(Go here for Arnold's next thrilling adventure. And kindly go to the right hand side of this page for an up-to-date listing of links to all possible episodes of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train to Heaven, the opening portions of which are soon to be adapted into a 97-part television series presented by PBS, the BBC, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Desilu Productions in conjunction with the Arnold Schnabel Society of Philadelphia PA.)

Yeah, it’s Frank:

“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode 66: unloved

Previously in this Kresge’s Award-nominated epic, that charming spiritual adventurer Dick Ridpath found himself drugged, kidnapped, “harshly interrogated” for a week and then unceremoniously dumped off in Philadelphia’s Skid Row. Who would do such a thing to this decorated naval officer and friend of Frank Sinatra, Albert Schweitzer, the Dalai Lama and Arnold Schnabel?

Who indeed...

Vice Admiral Hackington had haltingly reprimanded Pym for “excessive zeal” in the interrogation. The Vice Admiral claimed that he never intended for Ridpath to be tortured. Well, what exactly did he mean by “Make him talk” then? At any rate Pym had failed. At the end of that week of torture they knew no more about Ridpath’s “missing” six days in New Mexico than they did before. Which was nothing. Or did they not?

Ridpath had lied and lied and lied. And then he had fantasized out loud. Saying he had disappeared into his own brain, traveled into other dimensions, nonsense like that. Or so Pym had thought at the time. Torture, fear, drugs, the deprivation of sleep -- even the strongest man’s psyche would eventually split open like a rotten cantaloupe, and out would vomit forth all the fetid and chaotic horror of the unconscious. The subject would be nominally awake but still enmired the dream state, or, more accurately put, the nightmare state. Sometimes useful material could be extracted from this mental garbage of a lifetime, sometimes not. In Ridpath’s case there had indeed been certain trails, certain themes which might have led somewhere useful in time, but all that was moot after Hackington put a stop to the interrogation. The mad old fart.

Of course plausible deniability had been maintained throughout the “process”. Ridpath’s eyes had been taped shut from the moment he was picked up, and all the questioning had been done with spliced-up tape recordings of Yul Brynner’s voice. There was no way that Ridpath could prove that he had been kidnapped and brutally tortured by his own countrymen. And so it was nor surprise when Dick soon decided to resign his commission (even though that driveling ass Hackington had put him up for the Purple Heart -- the official story being that Ridpath had been kidnapped by “foreign elements”).

The whole business was the only real failure on Pym’s record, and it rankled, he had to admit it. Of course Ridpath’s resignation did clear the way for Pym’s consolidation of his virtual command of Q Section, but still the failure rankled. And so Pym continued to keep tabs on Ridpath. He would get him someday.

Something big was up. Ridpath and Grupler. This Johnstone character. The killing of this motorcycle gang member. Those two CIA clowns, Philips and Adams. The intercepted radio messages. These odd activities at that air force base near Disdain. Ridpath was onto something big all right. Pym felt in his bones that it all went back to Ridpath’s famous “missing” six days in New Mexico back in January of ‘65. Perhaps some of the things he had said under torture were not mere ravings. Perhaps he was indeed in touch with (or even in league with) extraterrestrial beings. Or perhaps the extraterrestrial angle was a cover-up for something else.

So much was hidden, so much disguised in this wretched world. Countless agencies, factions, cults, organizations. No one knew the big picture and no one knew all the details. It was all chaos.


But Ridpath was the key to something, something big. Perhaps even Ridpath did not know what he was the key to. That blithe, handsome, talented, charmingly eccentric bon vivant Dick Ridpath. And Pym, yes, Pym, Alexis J.Pym, supremely neurotic, loathed and self-loathing, unloved and unloving, uncharming Pym, he, detested Pym, he would turn this key.

In a couple of hours Pym would be in New Mexico. He would rendezvous with Schotzbarger and Putcheko (undercover as a nice young couple named Baxter) and he would stick with Ridpath until the Ridpath enigma was resolved, once and for all.

What the hell, perhaps mad Hackington was right. Maybe Dick was indeed the advance man for some race of demons preparing to take over the world, or perhaps it was the Illuminati, or the Bilderbergers, the Lemurians, the Melchizedeks, Thoth, the Sirians, whatever. Pym didn’t really give a damn when you got right down to it. What did he care about the fate of the world? This was personal. This was a question of nailing Dick Ridpath, and then as far as Pym was concerned the world could go fuck itself, which it was constantly doing anyway as far as he could see.

****

(Kindly go here for our next exciting chapter. And please feel free to turn to the right hand side of this page for an up-to-date listing of links to all extant episodes of this unexpurgated serialization of Larry Winchester’s A Town Called Disdain™, a Joe Meek Production.)


Jackie DeShannon now sings about the way that Pym feels about Dick:

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 71: the bluff

Previously in this critically-lauded memoir (“Does for diaries of madmen what the Beatles did for popular music” -- Harold Bloom) Arnold Schnabel and his friend the enigmatic naval officer Dick Ridpath found themselves in a seaside resort in 1890s France...

“Go back?” said Dick. “But we just got here.” He patted his pockets and came up with a smart silver cigarette case. He popped it open. “Oh, look, we even have cigarettes. Care for one?”

“Okay,” I said. I picked one out. It was as thick as my little finger and as long as my ring finger. I patted my own pockets, looking for something to light it with. My trusty Zippo lighter was gone, but I found a rather ornate box of wooden matches.

I lit up Dick and then myself. The tobacco was strong and harsh, and both of us coughed a bit. But I had to admit there was something about it I liked. You knew you were smoking something when you smoked one of these babies. You could almost feel the cancer cells popping up merrily inside your freshly blackened lungs.

We stared out at this pleasant seaside scene, Dick and I, for all the world two gentlemen in straw hats who actually belonged in this particular universe.

“You might have a point though,” said Dick, picking a dark and horsefly-sized shred of tobacco off his lip and flicking it away. “About getting back, that is.”

“Right,” I said.

“Your girlfriend -- Jocasta?”

“Elektra. Her name’s Elektra,” I said wearily.

“Right, Elektra,” said Dick. “She’ll be wondering where you are.”

“And Daphne will be wondering about you,” I said, thinking this might give him a nudge.

“Arnold, as long as there’s someone willing to be trounced by her at badminton I assure you I’m the furthest thing from her mind.”

“Yeah, well, anyway, we should probably be moving along.”

“Right," he said. "But look at these women. Fantastic.”

In the day’s waning light even more of the ladies had come out to sit or stroll on the terrace or to stand by the trelliswork fence gazing out at the sea which was now blazing up in the setting sun, and it’s true that with their delicate parasols and their hats blossoming like mad flowers and their voluminous dresses of rich reds and blues and greens and purples and with their light singing voices on the breeze they seemed like a garden that had somehow become human.

“Don’t you just sort of want to meet a couple of these babes, Arnold? I mean, you know, just to chat a bit?”

“I don’t speak French well enough, Dick, and we really should get back.”

“Yeah, I suppose you’re right,” he said, wistfully, probably wishing his companion wasn’t a tight-assed old confirmed- bachelor usher from St. Helena’s. “So, how do we get back?”

I almost dropped my fat French cigarette.

“Dick, don’t you know?”

“Not really. It’s not as if I drop into Belle Époque France on a regular basis.”

“Oh, no.”

I just wanted to sit down. I wanted to go back to that table with Marcel and the little guy and start guzzling absinthe hand over fist.

“Now, don’t get upset, Arnold. We got here. There must be a way to get back.”

“Oh, no.”

I thought: This is going to be just like when I first went nuts, except this time I won’t come back from it.

“All right,” said Dick. “Leave it to me. Here’s what we do.”

“What?”

“Um, uh --” He was looking around, looking up, looking back down. “Um --”

Great. He had no idea.

I looked out at that sea and at the blotchy orange sun sinking down into it. I started walking across the terrace and over toward the fence.

“Hey, Arnold, wait up.”

I kept walking and Dick hop-skipped up until he was in step with me.

“Gonna check out the sunset, Arnold?”

I kept going. We reached the fence. Below it was a high, rocky bluff, a beach, the sea. There was a gate over to the right, and it led to some stone steps going down the side of the bluff to the beach. I went over, opened the gate and went through. Dick followed me. We stood there on the other side of the fence, about four feet away from the verge of the bluff. I walked over and looked down. It was about a fifty foot drop to the beach and almost straight down.

“Are you thinking of doing what I think you’re thinking of doing?” asked Dick.

“Yeah,” I said.

Well, Miss Evans had been bugging me about taking a great leap.

“All right, then,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

We both backed up to the fence.

“Count of three?” said Dick.

“No, let’s just do it,” I said.

“Okay then.”

We ran forward and leaped off the bluff, swooping down at first but then levelling off above the beach and the surf and the ships and boats and then up into the purple sky.

Next thing I knew I was back standing on the first floor landing in Mrs. Biddle’s house, and Dick was standing next to me, still staring at the painting of the old-fashioned people, the sea and the boats.

“So, shall we go up?” he said.

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

Dick picked his beer bottle up off the little table and headed up the stairs, and I followed him with my beer bottle and my cigarette.

It was a fat cigarette, with dark brown strong tobacco, neither one of Dick’s Chesterfields nor one of my own Pall Malls.

(Kindly go here for our next thrilling chapter. And please consult the right hand side of this page for an up-to-date listing of links to all currently recovered episodes of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train to Heaven™, an ongoing project of the Arnold Schnabel Society of Philadelphia, PA. Donations accepted.)

Yeah, that Arnold, he's a rebel: