The first draft of this stunning and technically intricate Arnold Schnabel sonnet appears to have been written on the very night described in our previous installment (Part Six) of his memoir, Railroad Train to Heaven. It first saw light of day in theOlney Timesof July 13, 1963, and once again one must wonder what the editor of that august publication (Silas Willingham III) thought of Arnold’s increasingly challenging verses, if indeed he thought about them at all. (Brought to you thanks to the very good ladies and gentlemen of the Arnold Schnabel Society.)
(Note; the phrase “antic hay” comes from Christopher Marlowe’s play Edward II {1593}, Act One, Scene One: "My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawn, shall with their goat feet dance an antic hay". A “hay” was a playful, joyous dance. Antic Hay is also the title of a novel by Aldous Huxley.)
“Alone”
Alone is not so bad; I breathe the air
And it’s my air; I look at the sky
And it’s my sky; I go for a walk
And this is my world. And now I stare
At things seen clearly with my mind’s eye,
At dark thrashing trees who whisper and talk
Among themselves in a gas lamp’s glare,
As the singing ocean six blocks away
Asks to join the party; it will bring wine
And music, and fishes and loaves, and rare
And precious sweets, and dance an antic hay
Amidst five million stars: all this is mine.
Alone is not alone; I sit in this chair,
Alive at long last, and ready to dare.
(For links to many other Arnold Schnabel poems, and for entrée into his previously unpublished memoir Railroad Train to Heaven, go to the right hand column of this page.)
This episode of Arnold Schnabel’s memoir picks up right where the last one left off. He is still in Cape May, NJ, with his mother, on an indefinite leave of absence from the railroad following his complete mental collapse the previous winter. Enjoy. (Brought to you courtesy of the continuing benevolence of the Arnold Schnabel Society.)
July, 1963...
It’s occurred to me that I started writing this nonsense with the idea of a memoir and yet so far I’ve only written about my present state.
No matter.
It’s all the same, past, present, the future, if there is a future.
When I was a child I knew just barely more than nothing, teetering my tiny steps forward into this massive incomprehensible universe.
Now my poor brain is a universe itself, filled with absurd memories, and still I teeter willy nilly forward through time, the universe no less incomprehensible than when I was three years old.
No matter.
Even sitting still I teeter forward through time, through this universe. These scribblings are my tiny evanescent footprints…
I went to meet her at the Pilot House. I was dressed in my only summer suit, from Krass Brothers, a shimmering dark grey conservative suit, suitable for a Catholic usher.
Supposedly I’ve sworn off drinking again, but I ordered a beer as I waited for her. A beer seems hardly to count as drinking.
She arrived, stepping in from the still-bright but dying summer daylight. I suppose she felt she looked radiant. Her hair was like some modernistic light fixture with a hundred-watt bulb turned on inside it. She wore a flowery dress of what looked and eventually felt like wallpaper, and she reeled towards me on high heels. I arose from my barstool, the gentleman as always. She kissed my cheek, suffusing me in a miasma of warm perfume, and I only wanted to go home, or to my aunts’ home, to get out of this suit and sit on the porch with a paperback thriller or a nice stack of my young cousin Kevin’s comic books. I felt a great boredom descending upon me already and for the ten thousandth time I thanked God (silently) for the blessing of alcohol.
After a couple of Mai-Tais (her suggestion) we walked over to the Merion Inn. I’d never been there before. I’ve never seen the point of these allegedly fancy restaurants, but it was her idea. A burger at the Pilot House or the Ugly Mug would have been fine with me, or as fine as things could be expected to be since I didn’t want to have dinner with her in the first place, but I have always been a good boy and done what was asked of me.
It could have been worse. Maybe it was the dim lighting and the desperate-looking waiters in their iridescent black vests and choking bow-ties, but there was very little of the shrieking of the previous day. Apparently she could turn that off and on.
I ordered a steak, she ordered Surf ‘n’ Turf. When the food came she suggested we drink wine, and I said okay. (We'd each had another Mai-Tai while waiting for the food). The waiter handed me a wine list. All I knew was you were supposed to drink red wine with meat and white with fish. But she had ordered lobster and meat, making the choice impossible. I settled on a bottle of Mateus rosé. She did shriek at this, declaring Mateus to be her favorite wine.
It’s all too tedious to recount so I’ll hurry to the climax and dénouement. We were sitting on a bench on the promenade, near Frank’s Playland, the pale beach and the dark living enormity of the ocean spread out before us. She snuggled against me. She told me she really liked me. I realized it was now or never. Either come up with something quick or I was going to marry this boring woman, I would become stepfather to her nameless child, she would hurry and become pregnant again with a child of mine, which would prove incontrovertibly that she was almost as mentally unstable as I.
No.
I was a poet, albeit a mediocre one. I had written a poem a week for almost twenty-five years, somehow wresting a grouping of rhymed and at least semi-coherent words from my brain when often I had no idea for a poem at all when I sat down to write one. I could do this.
“Mona,” I said, for that was her name, and this time I remembered it. “I must tell you something. I’m in love with another woman.”
She drew her hard bristly head from my shoulder.
“You are? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because — because I thought that perhaps I could make myself forget her. You see, we — she and I — had a quarrel — that’s why I came to Cape May, to, to, to try to —”
“To forget her.”
Good, now she was helping me.
“Yes, to forget her. But I can’t. I just —”
“You can’t.”
“Yes. I tried. But I can’t. I think I’m going to have to resign myself, to the fact that that I’m just hopelessly —”
“In love with her.”
“Yes.”
“I thought it might be something like that. Why you were so distant. What’s her name?”
Name.
“Uh, Rhonda,” I said.
“Oh,” she smiled, “that makes sense. That’s what you thought my name was.”
“Yeah. Sorry,” I said.
“So she lives back in Philadelphia?”
“Yes,” I said, in a comfortable improvisational mode now. “In my neighborhood. We — we grew up together.”
“That’s so sweet. But how come you never married.”
“She —” That was a good question. “She became a nun,” I said.
“She’s a nun?”
“Yes.”
“You’re in love with a nun?”
“Yes.”
“Arnold, that’s insane.”
“But she quit the convent.”
“Oh, that’s different.”
“Yes. She moved back to the neighborhood, back in with her parents. We met again, and — well —”
“Sparks ignited.”
“Yes.”
“What did you quarrel about?”
“Quarrel?”
“Yes, you said you had a quarrel.”
“Right. It was about —”
I had no ideas, nothing.
“You wanted to marry her,” said Mona.
“Yes,” I said, almost as a question.
“But she wasn’t ready yet,” she said.
“Right,” I said, “she didn’t want to rush it.”
“But you did, because you’d waited so long.”
“Yeah,” I said. To tell the truth I was getting a little bored with it all.
“Go back to her,” she said. “Go back to her, Arnold, and tell her, you’ve waited this long for her, you can wait a little longer. But not forever.”
“Right,” I said.
So I walked her home. She gave me a chaste kiss on the cheek. She told me she was leaving Cape May the next day, which was good. That meant I wouldn’t have to hide from her.
“Y’know,” she said, “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I was probably going to sleep with you tonight, Arnold.”
I let that go by without comment. She went inside and the screen door made a gentle flopping sound behind her.
I headed toward the Pilot House for a nightcap.
I decided just to have a beer this time, and the bartender brought me a chilled mug of Schaefer.
“So, pal, how’d it go tonight?”
He grinned lewdly.
“Good,” I said. I exhaled Pall Mall smoke, lifted the mug and drank.
“Get your end wet?”
“A gentleman never tells,” I said.
“Ah, you bastard, ya.”
I turned on my stool. Freddy Ayres and his alleged wife Ursula were performing on the tiny stage.
“Oh, there’s a lull in my life,” sang Freddy. “It’s just a void and empty space when you are not in my embrace.”
I have to say, life in that moment was good, very good.
(Go here for Part Seven of Arnold's Railroad Train to Heaven. Check the right hand side of this page for links to many of Arnold's classic poems, and to a few of his not-quite-classic ones.)
Previously in the “director’s cut” of A Town Called Disdain, famed filmmaker Larry Winchester’s long-lost epic of the golden West: September, 1969. The young soldier Harvey has returned to Disdain, NM, and shortly after his arrival shoots the nasty bully Bull Thorndyke in self-defense at Burt’s Hideyway, the roadhouse where Harvey’s mom Doris works. The local rancher Big Jake Johnstone then offers Harvey a job: serving as a sort of guide to the two mysterious and glamorous strangers Dick and Daphne “Smith”.
After a while most of the guys from the local minor league team, the Browns, drifted in after their day game. They were a grizzled, sad and lost looking bunch. The Browns’ ownership had been in complicated litigation since 1963 and in consequence since that time not a single player had either been sent up or sent down or traded or sold or released or in any other way actively removed from the roster. And neither also had anyone been added to the roster. The team had however been winnowed by extra-managerial forces; two men had committed suicide; one had been killed in a barfight involving a local motorcycle gang called the Motorpsychos; one man had died of dysentery after a game down in Agua Negra; one man had gone hopelessly insane and was now in the state mental hospital up at Las Vegas; and one man was in prison after attempting to murder one of the putative owners of the team, Mr. Big Jake Johnstone. Oddly enough in all that time not one man had simply up and quit. Their status in the minors was wispy at best. They were no longer considered part of any actual league, but a scattering of teams across the Southwest and Northern Mexico played them occasionally out of pity or for laughs or for the opportunity to test their mettle against the legendary Lefty Schiessen.
Lefty Schiessen had been a star prospect just coming into his own in his rookie season with Philadelphia when he sprained his ankle sliding into the second base bag on a Texas League double to right. After the sprain had partially healed he had been sent down to Disdain for what was intended to be a short rehabilitation assignment. The first court papers in the team’s litigation were served the next day, and Lefty was trapped. Right now he was twenty-eight years old and in the prime of his powers. Those in the know considered him to be one of the premier lefthanders in the game. Generally speaking the only games the Browns won were the games Lefty pitched. In his nearly six full seasons with the Browns he had won twenty or more games each year. He had thrown eleven no-hitters, and in one game he had struck out twenty-three batters in eleven innings (a game which the Browns lost on a throwing error in the twelfth, 1-0). When he lost it was invariably because his own team had failed miserably both in offense and defense.
Over the past summer Lefty had discovered LSD and it amused him now to trip on his pitching days (and many of his off days as well). He pitched even better on acid, although he did take a lot longer between pitches and often lost track of the count and how many outs there were. But when he was really on he could make that ball do whatever he wanted it to. He’d stand there on the mound rubbing the ball into his glove, feeling his energy flow into the ball, warming the ball, and he’d wind up and let it rip and watch the ball fly, pulling a long white drug-induced comet’s tail behind it, and the batter would swing, his bat fanning out a yellow translucent screen, and thwap the ball sank into the catcher’s glove and the comet trail sucked itself into the ball and the umpire called the strike. Oh yes.
He hit a lot better on acid too, the incoming ball’s flight painting that white opalescent line in the air just to the spot where he would slam the meat of his bat into it and send it flying out there again, although sometimes as he ran down to first after cracking the ball and still feeling the thwack in his hands and wrists it seemed that the base was rushing toward him, and as his foot hit the bag the thud sent a jolt up his leg and into his spine and up into his brain and as he rounded the bag he felt he was taking off, off, out of there, out past the empty grandstands, out of that grubby hot little park and out over the desert and over the mountains beyond and away, away from Disdain forever, but he wasn’t.
****
(Click here for Episode Four. And kindly turn to the right hand side of this page to find a listing of links to all other chapters of Larry Winchester's A Town Called Disdain, a Dick Clark Production.)
