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.)
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...
It so 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 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 that for a while, but at last 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 simpático enough to write a movie together.
“Why do you want to write a movie?” said Mrs. Biddle. “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.”
At long last 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 sailor man, 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 ten minutes later we were all milling about outside the Mug, and 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 all 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 sea-weedy 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 lessened 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.)
Larry Winchester, film-maker extraordinaire (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 discharged from 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.)
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.
When we got to the second floor I realized I had to urinate again, so I excused myself and went down the hall while Dick went through the doorway that led out to the porch. I came to the bathroom in which I had surprised Shirley on the toilet, but this time I took no chances. The door was slightly ajar, and the light was off, but I knocked anyway and called “Hello?”
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 thick 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, i.e., 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 even 1963. Part of me always felt as if it were still the 1930s, the time of my boyhood and young manhood. Since then a world 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 only small 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, in a low voice, “Lover boy.”
“Hello,” I said, in my own quiet voice.
“You ready to blow this popsicle stand?”
“Sure.” Her eyes were dark and deep. “But let’s wait till Frank’s finished,” I whispered.
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 we’re simpático 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. Apparently I was agreeing – or almost agreeing – to write a movie with Larry. This didn’t bother me. It wasn’t as if I didn’t have loads of free time anyway, and two thousand dollars was nothing to sniff at.
(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.)
