“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode 76: epiphanies

Larry Winchester, never one to leave a plot thread untended for more than three or four months, now returns to the ongoing strange sagas of Lefty Schiessen -- living-legend minor-league fastballer and acid-head, still pitching a perfect game as it extends into the high double-digit innings -- and Doc Goldwasser, the sole general practitioner in a town called Disdain...

The word of Lefty’s game had spread throughout the district, and the sunbleached sagging stands were almost full with drunken shouting people.

Doc Goldwasser had seen the lights of the Pat Garrett Athletic Field glowing unusually late against the nighttime sky as he drove back into town, and he also had stopped by to watch the game.

He sat in the dugout next to the Skipper. The Doc knew all the Browns well. If he wasn’t stitching up somebody’s calf after a spiking, or pumping liquor and drugs out of another one’s stomach after an OD, then he was writing someone a prescription for delaudid or pantopon or demerol or eukuodal or some other addictive drug. Half the guys on this club were hooked on dope, and the Doc didn’t have the heart to turn them down. Besides, the way the Doc figured it, if they didn’t get their drugs through him then they would get it from the Motorpsychos, who were notorious for cutting their product with formaldehyde, bleach, rat poison, Drano, and even Agent Orange.


The Doc had to admit he was almost enjoying watching the game. In his younger days he had loved to go to sporting events, but, after the war, sport became just one more of the many things -- like sex, like food, like wine, like any sort of physical exercise -- that he just didn’t give a fuck about any more. But now, at least during the moments when Lefty was on the mound, he could feel a faint echo of a certain joy he had felt long ago, sitting high in the bleachers at Shibe Park or Baker Bowl with some other Penn Med students, eating hot dogs and soft pretzels and drinking warm Ortlieb’s beer out of paper cups amidst the smells of sweat and cheap perfume and cigars and cigarettes, with the car exhaust and the smoke from the factories drifting up over the cool damp brick walls of the stadium from the dirty brown city outside; and down below, like a glimpse into another and better world, the bright sundrenched vivid green of the field.

Another epiphanous moment in a day that had already had two or three of them, which was two or three more than his days usually held -- Enid’s moist breasts in the coffee shop, the tinkling of her bracelets as she stirred his coffee, and her kind eyes; and Hope’s eyes, her disturbingly knowing dark eyes; and something else, a feeling that seemed somehow retroactively to have run through this whole day, something he couldn’t name. But so what. In the Doc’s admittedly sparse personal experience with epiphanies, they came and then they went and they left you hanging there the same pathetic son of a bitch you were before, if not worse. Like sex, like opium, the spiritual epiphany, like the human body, like life, was not built to last. He had learned this simple fact a long time ago at Omaha Beach, after those few blissful moments of discorporation, floating serenely above the carnage, when he had somehow been dumped back into his body and into the shit again.

There was only one epiphany you could count on, and that was junk, that brief but reliable dose of sweet nothingness.


And here came Big Jake, that epiphany of the non-epiphany, walking along inside the third base line with two sixpacks of Tree Frog beer under each arm and a stogie in his mouth. He came on over, heaved himself down into the dugout, shambled past the indifferent players and squeezed his fat ass in between the Doc and the Skipper before the Doc could work up the energy to get up and escape.

****

(Click here for our next exciting chapter. And kindly turn to the right hand side of this page for an up-to-date listing of links to many other fine episodes of Larry Winchester’s A Town Called Disdain™, now certified by the Commissariat of Homeland Insecurity as an Approved Patriotic Historical Epic.)


Gimme that burger with some green onions, baby:

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part Eighty-One: “Okay, I’m ready, let’s go...”

Once upon a time there was a man called Arnold Schnabel. Born in 1921 of humble German immigrant parents in the Swampoodle section of North Philadelphia, he was raised in the strange neighborhood known as Olney. Arnold’s father died when the lad was only 13, and young Arnold quit school to go to work and help support his mother and three younger siblings. At the age of 17, with the help of an uncle, Arnold obtained employment with the Reading Railroad, for which he worked as a brakeman for many years, interrupted only by three years’ service with the army engineers in World War II.

Starting in 1938, Arnold began creating the poems for which he has become justly if posthumously famous, publishing one of these small masterpieces each week and every week in his local newspaper, the estimable Olney Times.

In January of 1963, Arnold, who had never married and had always lived with his loving mother in their Olney rowhome, suffered a severe mental breakdown, resulting in his hospitilization for over two months at the Byberry state mental hospital in Northeast Philadelphia. As grave as Arnold’s collapse was he nevertheless continued to keep to his schedule of one finely-chiseled poem a week, and indeed many scholars consider the poems he wrote from this point on to be his “golden period”.

After his release from the hospital he attempted to go back to work on the railroad, but was soon put on an indefinite leave of absence at half-pay.

That summer his mother took him to stay with her three maiden sisters at their boarding house in the quaint Victorian resort of Cape May, New Jersey.

Sometime in June of that summer Arnold began to compose the present sprawling memoir, in small copybooks which he bought at the local Kresge’s 5&10. Unpublished until now, these memoirs have become recognized as one of the great classics of world literature.

****

In the course of this summer Arnold finally begins to come out of himself. Despite occasional visitations from Jesus, episodes of levitation, and travel both astral and temporal, he acquires his first-ever girlfriend, the lovely bohemian jeweler Elektra (née Betsy Ross), and several other new friends, including the noted film-maker and novelist Larry Winchester, with whom Arnold has begun work on a screenplay.

We resume Arnold’s memoir as he sits in the kitchen of the imposing Mrs. Biddle. It should be mentioned that he has just that morning decided to try to quit smoking...

After a while it occurred to me to wash up our lunch plates and glasses, and I did so.

Then I sat down again and stared at that cigarette box. There it was, just sitting there. There was an ashtray on the table too, with some of the ash from Daphne’s cigarette in it.

I picked up the ashtray, took it over to the sink, washed and dried it, put it back on the table, sat down again.

I stared at the box.

My head began to throb, and my throat went dry. Here we go again. I grabbed the box and opened it. There they were, serried in all their lung-destroying wonderfulness. Filterless, just the way I liked them. I picked one up. Chesterfield Kings. Not my brand, but a good brand, an admirable brand. I looked around for a light. A box of wooden kitchen matches sat invitingly on a shelf by the stove, not six feet away. Six feet to ecstasy. Six feet to glory. Did I want to live forever? What was so bad about cancer after all? And was it worth it, another five or ten or twenty years of life if I couldn’t even enjoy a cigarette now and then? But then I recalled that awful coughing fit this morning.

I gnawed my dry lower lip and stared at the cigarette.

Where was Jesus now?

Nowhere. It was just me, me and this Chesterfield King.

What the heck, one wouldn’t kill me.

But then I heard a sound like an approaching small cantering pony. I dropped the cigarette back into the box and closed the lid just as Daphne burst into the kitchen, wearing a one-piece shiny green bathing suit, an unbuttoned flowered shirt, sandals and a sort of sombrero, and carrying a large straw bag with shoulder straps.

“Okay, I’m ready, let’s go,” she said.

I got up and followed her out of the kitchen.

I don’t think I’ve described Daphne yet, except to say that she is beautiful. She is tall, and slim, with dark hair, not very long dark hair, with bangs. Unlike most women’s hair these days her hair seems not to have been shaped into a simulacrum of a spaceman’s helmet with sprays and glues; it’s soft, like a child's, and she keeps it out of her face with barrettes or clips. She also seems to eschew make-up except for a rather deep and red lipstick.

She exudes an aura of physical strength, and her walk reminds me strikingly of the stride of the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson.

“We’re going swimming, Grandmom,” she said to Mrs. Biddle when we reached the living room.

“Oh are you? So you’re a swimmer, too, Mr. Schnabel?”

“He loves to swim,” said Daphne, coming around to look at Mrs. Biddle’s hand of cards.

“I used to swim,” said Tommy, “for miles. In the Philippines. One time I was attacked by a shark.”

“Did he bite you?” asked Daphne.

“No. I punched him in the nose and he swam away. After that I stopped swimming though.”

Daphne came around and peeked at Tommy’s cards.

“Who’s winning?” she asked.

There was a notepad on the table and a pencil. Tommy glanced at the pad.

“Mrs. Biddle is up by forty-seven cents.”

“Okay, ‘bye,” said Daphne.

“Mr. Schnabel,” said Mrs. Biddle.

“Yes?”

“I’ll see you at four.”

“Four o’clock, right.”

We went out, and as we were going down the steps into the bright heat of the day Daphne said, “My grandmother likes you. And like Dick she doesn’t like a lot of people.”

“Older women always like me,” I said.

“Yes, you’re very polite. Old ladies like that.”

She strode along beside me, and I fought the urge to stare at her sideways. I didn’t entirely succeed, and as we made the turn left onto North Street I almost fell off the curb, but Daphne didn’t seem to notice.

“I dislike nearly everyone also,” she said. “My mother and father however like all sorts of people, so perhaps misanthropy skips a generation. How do you like Tommy?”

“He seems nice,” I said.

“He’s very nice. Completely addicted to his laudanum, but he wears it well. When he gets too addicted to get out of bed my grandmother sends him to a drying-out place. Then he starts right up again a week or two after he gets out.”

“I hope your grandmother isn’t —”

“Oh no. She’ll have a glass of his special iced tea in the morning, especially if she’s hungover, but she has an iron will. Like me. I’m very iron-willed.”
In no time at all we were at my aunts’ house. My young cousin Kevin was sitting on the porch, reading or re-reading his Tom Swift book.

“Oh, boy,” he said, when he saw Daphne.

“And what is your name?” said Daphne when we came up the steps.

“Kevin Armstrong,” he said, his mouth agape and all but drooling. Don’t ask me how this kid will handle it when he reaches the age of puberty. He’ll probably have to be kept on a leash.

“Okay, I’ll be right down,” I said.

I went in through the screen door, and it could have been worse, this time it was only my mother and my Aunt Edith who were in the living room, standing and staring out the window at Daphne.

“Did you have lunch, Arnold?” asked my mom.

“Yep, I had lunch at Mrs. Biddle’s.”

“That lady on Windsor Avenue?”

“Yeah.”

“What were you doing there again?”

“I’m working on a screenplay with a fellow I met.”

“What’s a screenplay?”

“It’s a movie.”

“You’re writing a movie?”

“I guess I am.”

“Who’s the chickadee?” asked Aunt Edith, loud enough for Daphne to hear her out on the porch.

“She’s Mrs. Biddle’s granddaughter. We’re going swimming.”

“How many girlfriends do you have, Arnold?” asked Aunt Edith.

“She’s not my girlfriend.”

“She’s a little young for you, isn’t she?”

“Okay, I’m gonna go up and get into my bathing suit.”

“Aren’t you going to invite her in?” asked my mother.

“Oh. Okay.”

I went back to the screen door.

Daphne was reading Kevin’s book over his shoulder, with her hand on his shoulder. He looked as if he were melting.

“Excuse me, Daphne? Would you like to meet my mother and aunt?”

“Oh, I’d love to.”

I opened the screen and she came in, with Kevin right on her heels.

I introduced her, and then headed out of there and upstairs.

On the third floor I knew I had to be very careful. It seemed to be impossible these days, or these nights as well, to go by Miss Evans’s door and not have her pop out, so I went by on tiptoes.

I made it without incident up to my little attic room. I changed into my swimming trunks, put on a clean t-shirt, slipped on my flip-flops and grabbed a towel.

I opened the drawer under my night table. Sure enough, there was a pack and a half of Pall Malls in there. I picked up the opened pack. Then I put it back and shut the drawer.

I went down the steps and once again tiptoed down the hall toward the stairs.

This time I didn’t make it.

She opened her door just as I came abreast of it.

“I thought I heard your step, Arnold. You have the lightest footstep of any man I’ve ever known. Like a dancer. Oh, you’re going swimming. So also was I going to go.”

True enough, she was wearing a bathing suit. A two-piece this time. Red and black polka dots on a white background.

“But I suppose you’re not going alone, are you?” she asked.

“Uh, no,” I said.

“No, of course not. But wait. I’ll walk to the beach with you. Come in.”

What could I do?

I came in, leaving the door open behind me.

She busied herself gathering towels, suntan oil, a book, a notebook, pens, God knows what else, all the time chattering about how nice the party was last night. She seemed to be bending over quite a bit while doing this, and I tried to look away and think about baseball.

“Oh!” she said suddenly. “I took your advice and went to that nice Father Reilly. Look what he gave me when I told him I wasn’t Catholic.”

She picked up a paperback copy of the Baltimore Catechism and showed it to me.

“And this too.”

Next up was a paperback of The Lives of The Saints.

“And this.”

She held up a nice set of shiny black rosary beads.

“He gave you all that?”

“Yes, he was so nice.”

“He had all that stuff in the confessional?”

“No, silly. He invited me to chat with him, and we met for lunch at the Cape Coffee Shoppe.”

“Oh, great,” I said.

Possibly great for me, anyway, although I wasn’t so sure how great it was for Father Reilly.

(Go here for our next exciting chapter. And please turn to the right-hand side of this page for a listing of links to all other extant episodes of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train to Heaven™, second-place prize-winner of the Chesterfield King-Size Award for Autobiography or Memoir.)

A great big tip of the Leo lid to Dean for sending us this one: Dusty and Martha and the Vandellas. It doesn’t get much better than this:

“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode 75: "For he today that sheds his blood with me..."

Having recently had our literary license renewed for yet another year by the Commissariat of Homeland Insecurity, we continue our serialization of this first-ever publication of the complete “director’s cut” of Larry Winchester’s long-out of print masterpiece:

The time: a night in September in the alleged year of our Lord 1969.

The place: a foul cave in the wasted hills a dozen or so miles across the desert from a town called Disdain.

Moloch, the erudite leader of the outlaw Motorpsychos gang, has loaded five bullets into a six-shot Webley revolver, spun the cylinder twice, closed his one good eye, shoved the muzzle of the pistol voluptuously into his mouth, and pulled the trigger...

Pock.

Well fuck my bleeding arse.

Still alive. Still sodding bloody alive.

Oh well.

He slipped the muzzle gently out of his mouth, the knife-edged sight once again running teasingly along his acarified palate, and he opened his eye.

The world was still there and so was he, the both of them as vile as ever.


Moloch had got through a year in Korea without shooting this pistol or any other weapon at anyone. A year of war, and he never fired a shot. Never hurt a fly. What a waste of time. Why join the Royal Marines if you weren’t going to kill anyone?

Moloch had reviled all the peace-and-love nonsense of the last couple of years, but what really had any of that nonsense meant? People were still massacring one another wantonly, in Vietnam, in Biafra, in the houses of the rich and beautiful in the Hollywood hills, the letting of blood would never end, not until the last Cain killed the final Abel, and good riddance to bad rubbish.

Moloch had always wanted to go on a real rampage, and now, tonight, he and his worthless crew of scum would ride, and they would kill. And any of those wretches in his band who refused to kill he would shoot out of hand; but he sincerely hoped this would not prove necessary, at least not until he found Ridpath.

Ridpath must be the first.

And then, and then -- Moloch fully intended to make Attila the Hun look like a prancing wog poofter.

He broke the pistol open again and loaded the empty chamber.

“Men,” said Moloch, after he had kicked the motorcyclists awake and assembled them before him, the lot of them ugly, cross and fearful in the faltering half-light of the half-dead fires, “tonight we ride out to avenge the death of our dear departed comrade Crackle.”

A few halfhearted huzzahs croaked forth from the rabble. (Moloch’s actual thought was, To hell with bloody Crackle. Ridpath had shot him courageously in self-defense, and moreover Crackle had been monumentally boring and he stank like a sewer; when they had immolated him with gasoline the other night the stench had been so nauseating that even the most unhygienic of the band had shifted upwind.)

Moloch proceeded to extemporize a half-hour dithyramb, liberally sprinkled with quotations from Shakespeare, Milton, and Crabbe.

He closed with:

“Eventually no doubt we shall all be killed. But until that final moment we will live as men were meant to live. Riding and killing, taking, raping, destroying, devouring -- and wanking off into the face of eternity.

“Eventually, yes, death, as it must, will take us too into its stinking maw -- but not without a damned good cracking battle first!

“Gentlemen --” he swept a hand in the direction of the open sea chest full of firearms -- ”there are your weapons. Take them. Clean them well and then load them. Pack yourselves plenty of ammunition, and in the words of the immortal bard --

Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war.

“For tonight -- we few, we happy few, we band of brothers -- tonight we ride. Tonight we kill.”

The men were silent. Most of what Moloch had said had gone past most of them, some of them had even dozed off occasionally, but the general purport of his speech, that they were now officially at war with the rest of humanity, had by now penetrated into even the thickest of their skulls.

Moloch held the Webley across his chest, caressing the barrel with the gnarled fingers of his left hand.

“Huzzah,” croaked Testicle, his voice quiet and hollow in the shadowed cave, a thick tear like a drop of axle grease coursing slowly down his pitted cheek and into his beard.

Another stout fellow cleared his throat and then repeated the cry:

“Huzzah.”

And another man, louder now:

“Huzzah!”

And yet another yet louder still:

“Huzzah!”

And then a coarse ragged chorus:

“Huzzah! Huzzah!”

Moloch raised his weapon high like a sceptre and held it there.

“Gentlemen!” he cried. “To death!”

“To death!” his men cried as one.

Truth to tell, Moloch knew that if he had cried “To beer!” or even “To life!” these fools would have echoed him with the same enthusiasm. Like the vast majority of humanity they were born followers, and so they would die. To hell with them. Let them serve their purpose and then to bloody hell with the lot of them.

The narrow ends of Moloch’s scarred lips stretched briefly for a millimeter in each direction.

Tonight would be a good night.

*****

(Kindly go here for our next exciting adventure. And please turn to the right hand side of this page for an up-to-date listing of links to all extant episodes of Larry Winchester’s A Town Called Disdain™, Second Place Prize-Winner of the Turtle Wax Award for Excellence in Epic or Picaresque Literature.)

This one goes out to Manny:

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part Eighty: woo boy

 Previously in our serialization of this Third-Place Prize-Winner of the Walmart Award for Excellence in Confessional Literature, our hero Arnold Schnabel spent the morning hammering out a first act for the film Sidewalks of Blood with the noted auteur Larry Winchester. Retiring to the kitchen of Mrs. Biddle’s house for a modest lunch of ham, cheese, and beer, Arnold and Larry are joined by the dangerously lovely Daphne MacNamara...

Daphne sat down and took a good long gulp of the iced tea. She put the glass on the table, still holding it, staring pensively off at nothing in particular and probably gauging the tea’s effect. Her lips opened, she sighed.

“Well,” she said, “that’s an improvement. Now, Arnold, what did Dick say about me?”

“Um, uh —”

“Larry,” she said, commandingly.

“At your service, miss.”

“Will you be a darling and go get me some cigarettes. There should be a box on the big coffee table in the living room. I should have grabbed one myself but I forgot.”

“Of course.”

Larry got up and left and she watched him go.

She leaned across the table towards me. She smelled like a garden.

“Quickly now. What did Dick say?”

“He wants to marry you. He asked my advice.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I suggested he wait a few years.”

“So you think that’s best?”

“What’s the rush?” I said.

“Good question. I’m only nineteen after all. Did he go for your advice?”

“I think so.”

“Well, that’s a load off. Now I can relax.” She rattled the ice in her glass and took another but smaller drink. “What’s the deal with you and this Calliope person?”

“Elektra,” I said.

“Elektra,” she said. “Well?”

“Um, she, uh — she and I —”

“She is very pretty, isn’t she?”

“Uh, yes.”

“Intelligent, too.”

“Yes. More intelligent than I am.”

“Poof.”

“Poof?”

“You’re sleeping with her, right?”

“Well —” I realized that I was breaking out in a sweat again, for about the twelfth time that day — ”we haven’t exactly slept together –”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes,” I said, my sweat immediately turning cold.

“Does she like it?” she asked. Then, “Wow, you’re blushing.”

Her mouth blossomed into a great smile, her eyes flashed, the hot sweat streamed like a river down my back.

(And where was Larry? How long did it take to go to the living room and back?)

“Okay,” she said. “You don’t have to answer that. But I was watching how she looked at you. I think she likes it. I think she likes it very much. So, are you two going to get married?”

“I don’t — think so,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Wouldn’t a better question be ‘Why’?”

“Fair enough.” She rattled her ice cubes in the glass again. “Do you like to swim?”

“Very much,” I said. “I go for a long swim every day.”

“Come for a swim with me. I warn you I swim like a absolute seal.”

I wasn’t sure about this.

“I just had lunch,” I said.

“So go home and change into your bathing suit and we’ll take a little stroll or sit on the beach while you digest your lunch, and then we’ll take a nice long swim.”

My problem — or I should say one of my problems — is I don’t know how to say no to people.

“Okay,” I said.

“Good. Oh, here’s Larry.”

Larry came in with a carved wooden box; he opened it and held it out to Daphne, who picked out a cigarette and waited for Larry to put the box on the table and then take out his matches and give her a light.

“Thanks,” she said. “Arnold and I are going for a swim, Larry.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes. Want to come?”

“No. I think I’ll take a nap.”

She picked up her glass, rattled her ice one last time and then polished off the rest of her iced tea.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m just going up to get into my suit. I’ll be right down.”

And she flew gracefully out of the room, leaving behind only the trail of her cigarette smoke and the flowery scent of herself.

I had stood up as she left the table, and Larry had never sat down again.
He looked at me.

“Woo boy,” he said. “What did I tell you about women and maniacs?”

I looked at the box of cigarettes on the table. On the one hand I wanted to smoke two or three of them simultaneously while stuffing the rest of them in my various pockets. On the other hand I figured I had gone this long, why not keep moving and see if I could hold out till after my swim?

“All right, Arnie,” said Larry, and he grabbed my shoulder. “I’m gonna hit the hay. Good luck.”

“We’re only going for a swim.”

“Sure. Good luck anyway.” He pinched up the sodden material of my shirt from my shoulder. “You’re drenched with sweat.”

It was one of those statements to which no reply seemed necessary, or wise.

“Same time tomorrow?” said Larry. “We’ll dive into that second act.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Do what I do and try not to think about it till then.”

“Okay,” I said.

That would be easy for me. I barely think about my writing even when I'm doing it, let alone when I'm not doing it.

He patted my shoulder one last time.

“Enjoy your, uh, swim, Arnie,” he said.

“It’s just a swim, Larry,” I said.

“Sure, pal. See you tomorrow.”

He straightened out my shirt collar for me and then walked out of the kitchen. I sat down again and stared at the open cigarette box.

I reached over and closed the lid.

(Go here for our next thrilling chapter. And kindly turn to 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™, all rights reserved by the Arnold Schnabel Society; donations accepted.)

Swing it, Ronettes: