“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 173: subjunctive

Once again our hero Arnold Schnabel has done battle with and conquered the Dark Lord, AKA “Mr. Lucky”, on this historic night in August of 1963, in the quaint seaside resort of Cape May, New Jersey...

(Go here to go to read our previous chapter, or click here to return to the beginning of this Gold View Award©-winning memoir, which Harold Bloom has called “immensely long; would only that it were longer”.)

Well, Mr. Arbuthnot had said the ink was special.

I removed the cap from the barrel of the pen, replaced it onto the front section, put the pen back into my trouser pocket.

The back of my head hurt, my arms and chest ached from where Mr. Lucky had been respectively squeezing and shoving, my re-scraped knees throbbed, but I was breathing and alive, the soles of my Keds solidly upon the homely concrete of Cape May as opposed to the eternally burning coals of hell.

I heard Buddy groaning. Which was good. Dead men don’t groan.

He was lying on his stomach, on the pavement, his body moving slightly.

I went over to where he lay, and leaned over.

“Buddy?”

I reached down and tugged at his shoulder.

“What is it?” he said.

“Buddy, you okay?”

He pushed himself away from the concrete, and I helped to pull his body up into a sitting position.

He rubbed his crewcut head. He didn’t look so bad, considering. He probably looked a lot better than I did, I’ll tell you that much.

“What hit me? I feel like a f***ing bus run over me.”

“You were in a fight,” I said.

“Where’s the other guy?”

“He, uh, took off.”

“Did you kick his ass, I hope?”

“Well, let’s just say I got rid of him.”

“Good man, Arnold. Help me up.”

I did this, and he stayed on his feet.

“So you sent him packin’, huh?”

“Yeah, sort of.”

“Well, see ya later, Arnie.”

“Where do you live, Buddy?”

“Just right down the block here.”

“I’ll walk you.”

“All right, pal.”

By now I was more or less resigned never to get home, or at least not this night, which seemed more and more likely never to end.

At first Buddy staggered wildly as he walked, but pretty soon he settled down and only occasionally bumped into me.

We turned in through the front gate of one of the big old gabled houses on Hughes, and Buddy led me around to the back.

At the side rear of the house a set of wooden stairs led up to the second floor.

“I’m just right up there,” said Buddy.

“Well, good night then,” I said.

He put out his hand, I took it, he squeezed it with a grip only slightly less steely than Mr. Lucky’s.

He started up the stairs. He missed his footing on about the third step and almost fell, so I went up, took his arm, and helped him up the stairs.

We went in through a screen door, and, amazingly, nothing too weird happened, at least not right away. It’s true that Buddy’s one-room apartment was lined with instrument panels and television screens, the televisions showing various scenes, in black-and-white, from around the earth and even from what appeared to be other planets, a speaker next to each screen emitting its own separate sounds, the sum of which sounded like the humming of a great beehive, or that sound a crowd of people makes when leaving a sports stadium after the home team has been humiliatingly defeated.

“Okay, Buddy,” I said, “I guess I’ll be heading home now.”

“Look at them scrapes you got there,” he said. “They’re gonna get all infected and shit.”

“Oh, I’ll be fine,” I said, my hand on the handle of the screen door. “A little bit of iodine --”

“Iodine? What are we, in the 20th century?”

“Well, actually --”

“Stay right there. I got somethin'.”

I sighed, but I stayed, while Buddy went off into what appeared to be a bathroom.

I looked at the various TV screens. On one of them I saw my own bloodied and baleful self, standing by Buddy’s screen door. I looked around but I couldn’t see a TV camera. Well, no matter.

Through the open bathroom door I heard through the ambient hum the unmistakable sound of someone urinating, and then I heard Buddy singing: “Lady of Spain”.

Slightly bored, I looked at myself on the TV screen again.

Looking a little more carefully I saw beyond myself the image of myself on a smaller TV screen, looking in turn at the image of myself on a yet tinier screen, and so on.

Finally I heard the toilet flush. I heard no sounds of Buddy washing his hands however, and he came right out, still humming “Lady of Spain” and carrying a squat brown corked bottle and a hand towel.

“All right, Arnie,” he said, “Sit down and I’ll take care of ya.”

“Y’know, really, Buddy --”

“Sit down.”

There was an arm chair there, another wicker one, with a Racing Form on the seat. I picked up the paper and sat down. There was a small table with a lamp next to the chair, but it was cluttered with an overflowing ashtray, an opened half-full box of Dutch Masters Panetellas and five or six presumably empty pint cans of Schmidt’s beer.

“Just throw the paper on the floor, Arnie,” said Buddy.

I did as he said, dropping it onto a great pile of Racing Forms and Argosy and True and other more lewd and lurid men’s magazines of the sort I had always wanted to purchase but in my cowardice posing as virtue had not.

“All right,” he said, pulling the cork out of the bottle with his teeth, “let’s get to work.”

Laying the cork on the table, he upended the bottle onto the towel, which I could plainly see was not 100% clean to begin with. Nor even 50%.

“Buddy,” I said, “shouldn’t we maybe get a cleaner towel.”

“Nah, it don’t matter. This s**t will disinfect anything it touches.” The towel was turning blood red in his hand. “Besides, I ain’t got a clean towel. Lemme see them scrapes on your arms and hands.”

I held up my arms and he leaned closer.

“Christ, they already look like they’re infected. What did you do, roll around in a pile of dogs**t?”

“No,” I said. But then I remembered wiping my wounds with the water from that gladiolus vase in the Chalfonte’s Magnolia Room just as, simultaneously, I vaguely recalled something I had read in “Hints From Heloise” about the potential toxicity of such water.

“All right,” said Buddy, “let’s get to work,” and he started on the big scrape running from my right elbow down to my hand.

As he swabbed my wounds I gritted my teeth and looked away at those ubiquitous TV screens, including the one containing me gritting my teeth and looking at myself in the tinier screen and so on, and I listened, or pretended to listen, while Buddy babbled on about creatures from some other dimension and flying saucers and whatnot. I was in rather a lot of pain, and so I was paying even less attention than I normally do when someone else is talking. Also, that stuff he was swabbing my wounds with further distracted me by its intense odor, reminiscent of the smell of a recently bombed building in the rain.

“Needless to say, Arnie,” I became aware of Buddy saying to me, “alla shit I’m tellin’ ya is on the Q.T., strictly.”

“Oh, sure, Buddy,” I said.

He was squatting in front of me, holding the wadded up towel against my right knee. I had to admit that the pain had already lessened considerably in my arms and hands.

“So,” I said, just to bring the conversation back down to earth a bit, “where are your wife and kids, Buddy?”

I had often seen him and his family at mass, four or five apparently mentally-disturbed young scamps of both genders and a beleaguered-looking thin woman.

“Oh, they live in the house over on Broadway,” said Buddy. “But I usually sack out here. More privacy, ya know? My wife prefers it this way, too. Hey, get me out one of them Dutch Masters, will ya?”

I unwrapped one of the cigars, gave it to Buddy. There was a box of Sid’s Tavern matches on the table also, and I gave him a light as he continued to hold the towel against my knee.

“These screens are all set to present time of course,” he said. “If you like I can switch ‘em to the past. Anything you want to see? Anything ya want, Battle of Gettysburg, Columbus discovering America -- or maybe you want to see some episode in your past life?”

“No thanks,” I said. I'd had enough of this sort of thing for one day.

“The only thing they can’t do is show the future. We just ain’t got the technology yet. But I’m workin’ on it, believe you me.”

I was tempted to ask him for one of the cigars; his smelled pretty good.

“On the other hand --” He was working on my other knee now. “I could change the channel and show ya what might have been. Like, say one day in your past life you just decided to hop a freighter for Timbuktu instead of working on the railroad your whole life.”

Why was it that everyone in this town knew all about me? And I knew so little about them.

“Your whole life might have been different,” he said.

“That’s true,” I said.

“Not to say it would have been any better.”

“No, I suppose not --”

“What if your ship sunk. Or what if when you got to Timbuktu you got trampled by an elephant?”

“Yeah --”

“Ya want me to change the channel?”

“No, that's okay, Buddy, thanks,” I said.

He went back to humming, smoking all the while and occasionally singing a phrase of “Lady of Spain”, holding the scarlet towel against my knee.

Finally he stood up. He tossed the towel onto the floor, took the cork from the table top, and stoppered the bottle.

“Take a look,” he said.

I looked at my arms and hands, at my knees and shins. The affected areas were slightly pink, but the scrapes and cuts were gone, as was the pain. All that remained were slight tingling sensations as if those areas of my epidermis had been doused with witch hazel.

“Not bad, huh?” he said.

It certainly wasn’t bad. But I immediately wondered what I would tell Josh tomorrow. How would he feel knowing that an inebriated and apparently insane automobile mechanic was able to do what he could not? It must be quite disconcerting realizing that your own creations were more powerful than yourself.

I hauled myself up

“Well, thanks a lot, Buddy,” I said.

“Don’t mention it, pal.”

“I guess I really should be going.”

“Okay. You ever wanta stop by and watch the TVs, just come on by.”

“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”

“Not your cup of tea?”

“Well, I prefer other types of shows. You know --”

“Oh, like intellectual shows probably, huh?”

“Oh, no, just, you know, M Squad, Johnny Staccato. Naked City.”

“Yeah, intellectual type shows.”

“Well -- uh --”

“Stop by anyway. I don’t usually meet bums who got a brain. You know. A bum I can talk to.”

“Okay, Buddy.”

That seemed noncommittal enough.

Buddy was a nice guy and all, but I wasn’t so sure about his room full of televisions.

(Continued here; and don't worry, we still have 1,987 of Arnold’s notebooks to transcribe.)

(Please go to the right hand column of this page for what on many days is an up-to-date listing of links to all other published chapters of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train To Heaven©, absolutely free of charge, although donations will be accepted in aid of the Arnold Schnabel Society’s Literacy Project.)

“Uncle Buddy’s House”, Chapter 23: revelations

Our hero Buddy Best, that self-described “middle-aged Hollywood hack”, finds himself in the strange position of having dinner with the lovely Cordelia, daughter of the Ancient Mariner...

(Go here to see our previous thrilling chapter, or click here to return to the beginning of this “blatant and unashamed pot-boiler” -- (J.J. Hunsecker, in Daily Variety.)

So they started with what turned out to be very good artichoke croquettes and something that Buddy thought was going to be a shrimp paté but which turned out to be more like shrimp paté turnovers, but they were good too. The croquettes had truffles in them somewhere, which meant they were probably absurdly expensive, and they came with a bowl of some white sauce that was delicious and probably ninety percent butter, and so Buddy would probably die of a heart attack that night; on the other hand the turnover stuffing was only about fifty percent butter.

They had been talking in a free-associative way, about the Los Angeles public transport system and L.A.’s racial stratification, about SARS, about the war in Iraq, and terrorism, and the Palestinian question, and neither of them had said anything interesting. There was a pause in the conversation. Buddy was a little bored, and he could tell she was too. Of course from Buddy’s point of view all this blather was bearable because she was a good-looking girl with a rocking body; he had put up with hundreds of far more excruciating conversations in the past as part of the price he had to pay to have sex with bimbos -- and, hey, come to think of it -- oh, but wait, this chick with the body was the daughter of the asshole his wife had run away with, so just fucking forget about it.

She looked at the appetizer plates, which were both empty. A waiter came and took them away. Buddy took a sip of wine. Cordelia looked at him and cocked her head.

“So -- how are you holding up, anyway?” she asked. “I mean really.”

“Holding up?”

“Yeah.”

“You mean with Joan leaving me?”

“Uh-huh.”

“The million dollar question.”

“Oh. You don’t have to answer,” she said.

“I don’t mind.”

“Really?”

“Really,” he said, although he did mind a little.

“Okay,” she said. “So --”

“I’m holding up okay.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t -- miss her?”

Buddy paused here. He was thinking about his answer but he was also thinking about the way her question had dissolved into a watery growl. His first impulse had been to be glib, but --

“Do I miss Joan. At first I did. Which is kind of weird really, because Joan -- I don’t know how well you know her, but -- Joan is -- kind of a -- a --”

“A bitch?”

“Well, I wasn’t going to say that --”

“Sorry. What were you going to say?”

“I was going to say ‘piece of work’.”

“’Piece of work.’”

“Right.”

“But you missed her anyway.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah what?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“You said yeah in a funny way.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Funny how?”

“Funny like you weren’t so sure.”

“That I missed her?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” said Buddy.

“What?”

“Well -- I wonder now if -- oh, forget it, who gives a shit.”

“I do,” she said. “Tell me.”

“Okay,” said Buddy. “I wonder now if maybe the biggest thing that bothered me about her leaving was that, was that, was that it was with, uh --”

“My father,” she said.

“Yeah,” said Buddy.

Her face relaxed into a picture of complete understanding, her head nodding.

“I mean, it’s tough enough playing the cuckold,” said Buddy.

“Mm-hmm.”

“But when the one who’s cuckolding you is --”

“Someone like my father.”

“Uh, yeah.”

“That must have been really tough,” she said.

“Well --”

“So what about now?”

“What about about now?”

“How do you feel about it now?”

“Well --” Buddy was the sort of guy who didn’t like to talk about how he felt. But now for some reason he didn’t mind. Too much. “I guess the main thing that bothers me now is my stepdaughter. Deirdre.”

“Why does she bother you?”

“She doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is that Joan is no doubt going to take her. That bothers me.”

“So you’re -- fond of Deirdre?”

“Uh, yeah, sure.”

“That’s nice,” she said.

“Yeah, well.”

“So,” she said.

“So,” said Buddy.

“You’re probably wondering.”

“Am I?”

“Yes!”

“About what?”

“About why I needed to talk to you. Or wanted to talk to you.”

“Oh, right,” said Buddy. “I forgot. So, what’s up?”

She looked down at her wine.

All in good time, thought Buddy.

She looked up at him, then brought her face closer over the table.

“It’s about my father.”

“Yeah?”

Another pause. She was breathing deeply, and the way she leaned across the table Buddy couldn’t help but notice again the beauty of her breasts, that tiny dime-sized tattoo of Saturn that didn’t really look like Saturn --

“My father and Joan --” she stage-whispered.

“Yes?” Buddy tried to keep his eyes on her face.

“Well --”

She sat upright. The waiter was there with their main course, skinny spaghetti with vegetables for Buddy, fatter spaghetti with little meatballs for her.

“Oh, wow,” she said, “This looks great.”

And she dug in.

The meatballs did look good. But a year before Buddy had decided to cut out red meat, and he mostly had done this. Like an asshole, he thought, because now he really wanted some of those meatballs. He tasted his pasta. Surprisingly it was okay, they’d done something good with the sauce. Usually pasta with vegetables was incredibly boring, just something the chef tossed out to keep the veges happy and the women of course and pathetic middle-aged men who wanted not to be middle-aged. What was it about the sauce? Oh, right, butter. And garlic and pine nuts and whatnot. But butter, and lots of it. So he was definitely giving himself a heart attack anyway. He should’ve just lived it up and gone for the meatballs.

“What was I saying?” she asked after eating about a quarter of her dish.

Damned if Buddy could remember. He’d been thrown off by those meatballs. He could smell them across the table and they smelled damn good. But you couldn’t just tell someone you couldn’t remember what they were talking about just a few minutes ago. The thing to do was to stall.

“Well, let’s see, you were talking about, uh -- hey, how’s your food? Okay?“

“Oh my God, it’s great. Hey, you want some?”

Normally Buddy despised the American custom of everyone offering everyone else at the table a taste of every fucking dish -- it drove him crazy in fact, but he was a man full of contradictions among other things and so he said, “Uh, I wouldn’t mind trying one of those meatballs.”

“Help yourself,” and she held out her bowl, and he did. And --

“Wow, these are good,” he said.

She took a good drink of wine and smiled at him.

“You can’t remember what I was saying, can you?” she asked.

Fortunately the meatball had cleared his brain.

“Um, something about your dad?”

“Right, well --” She had popped a meatball into her own mouth, and was chewing. “God, these meatballs are good.”

“Yeah, they are.”

“Do you want another one?”

He did, but he said he didn’t.

She finished chewing and swallowing and then took a healthy drink of wine.

“My dad didn’t want Joan to leave you for him.”

“What?”

She leaned her face forward.

“He didn’t want her to leave you. That’s what I wanted to tell you over the phone. Why I asked you to meet with me.” She leaned back again, and said, ”He didn’t want her to move in because he was hoping he’d get more parts in your movies.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Nope.”

She went back to work on her pasta. Buddy had laid his fork down.

“He actually thought I would hire him again?”

“Well, obviously not after you found out about him and Joan. That’s why he didn’t want you to find out, why he didn’t want Joan to leave you.”

“Okay. Y’know, no offense, Cordelia, but I would’ve never hired his sorry ass again in a million years, not even as a fucking extra.”

“I love hearing that.”

“So your dad got more than he bargained for.”

“He sure did. You should have heard him the night Joan came over and told him she’d told you about them and that she’d left you. And then you should have heard her.”

“So -- you heard all this?”

“I was hiding in my room, my head under the covers.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He tried to tell her what he tells all his girlfriends, which is that he’s never gotten over my mother dying, which is bullshit, but women are such idiots they usually swallow it.”

“But not Joan.”

“No, she just told him that it was high time he fucking got over my mother and stopped acting like a little faggot pussy and made a commitment to a real living woman.”

Good old Joan. Even after fifteen years in California she was still a hard-nosed Nebraska girl when you got right down to it.

Buddy noticed his wineglass, with wine in it. He took a drink.

“So that’s what you wanted to tell me?”

“Yeah,” she said. “What?”

“Uh --”

“What?” she said.

“Well, I was just wondering -- why you wanted to tell me all this?”

“Why?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Well, um, because, like -- I don’t know -- maybe you would want to get back with her? And -- if you knew, like, that my father never really wanted her to leave you and move in with him, then, uh --”

“Oh, I see. But I don’t want to get back with her.”

“Oh.”

“He can have her.”

“Oh.”

“But, hey, thanks for the thought, Cordelia.”

“You’re welcome.”

She had stopped eating. She glanced at him and then looked down at her plate. She started to gnaw the lower right quadrant of her upper lip.

“Hey, eat your spaghetti,” said Buddy.

She picked up her fork and started eating again.

She seemed upset, and Buddy wanted to cheer her up. Flattery worked with women about a hundred percent of the time, so he said, “Y’know, Cordelia, at the risk of sounding like our mafia friend, you know you really are an unusually beautiful --”

“Oh, stop it,” she said, chewing.

“No, really, you really are a very, uh --”

“Please, stop.”

“Well, okay.”

“I mean,” still chewing, “thanks for the compliment. But I know what I look like.” She swallowed her food and took a drink of wine. “Men,” she said.

“Men what?”

“You know men what.”

“You mean we -- like women?”

“Women’s bodies.”

“Well -- sure.”

So, was she going to get all feminist on his ass now, and wearing that dress, with that fantastic décolletage, that little tattoo Saturn that really didn’t look like Saturn --

“See? Right now you’re looking at my boobs.”

Buddy looked up.

“No, I was -- just thinking,” he lied.

“Oh, I’ll bet. Is this thing too low-cut? I bought it when I was skinnier, but now I’m so fat the only way I could get it on was by lowering the straps --”

And she buttoned the top two buttons of her cardigan, damn her, and went back to work on what was left of her spaghetti-and-meatballs.

Buddy took a drink of the wine. It was good. But even better was the buzz.

“Y’know,” he said, “if I can say so -- and please don’t take this the wrong way --”

“What?”

“You -- you looked -- very -- different that night of your father’s party.”

She got that stricken look again.

“In what way? You mean I looked skinnier?”

“No --”

She looked conditionally relieved.

“So I was fatter then?”

“No!” And he very quickly added, “I mean, it had nothing to do with how fat or skinny you looked --”

“Well -- do you think I’m fatter now --?”

“Cordelia, I was talking about how you -- looked that night -- and it had nothing to do with your --”

“You mean I looked ugly.”

“No!”

“Plain?”

“No, not at all --” although she actually had looked kind of plain now that she mentioned it --

“Oh my God it really showed, didn’t it?”

“What?”

“I was miserable. I’d had this awful thing with my father. He accused me of fucking up his precious food somehow, of not following his precious recipes to the letter, God, I was in tears, I really didn’t want to be there. And the thing was I did follow his recipes.”

“Did you?”

“To the letter!”

“Well, you shouldn’t have. The food sucked.”

She smiled.

“I’m so glad you said that.”

She’d finished all her spaghetti and meatballs and now she broke off some bread and swished it around in the sauce.

“So,” said Buddy -- he felt the need somehow for a major subject-change -- “what do you do?” He got a fairly blank stare so he elaborated: “I mean, for a living, you know. Unless you’re still in school, or --”

“Oh, no, I’ve finished school. I mean I still take classes, but -- well, anyway, right now I’m working part-time in a coffee shop.”

“Ah.”

“And in the meantime I’ve been trying for a lot of jobs, but, well, you know what it’s like.”

She took a bite of the bread.

“Yeah,” said Buddy, ready to be bored again, but what the hell. “What kind of jobs?”

“Anything. I’ve even been going for industrials, radio voice-overs --”

Buddy felt his mind lurching toward some great revelation. And his expression must have showed this, because Cordelia said, seeming slightly alarmed:

“What?”

“You -- you’re an actress.”

“Well -- yeah --”

“Would -- you have been in anything I’ve -- anything I would have -- seen?”

He had a falling sensation.

“You’re kidding, right?” she said.

“I -- I don’t think so --”

“Mr. Best --”

“Buddy --” he said, weakly.

“Buddy, you’ve seen me act. You saw me in the showcase. In La Voix Humaine. God, was I that forgettable?”

“Oh Christ.”

“What?”

“Cordelia, don’t take this the wrong way --”

“What?”

“That was you?”

“Of course it was me. Who did you think it was?”

“I -- I -- shit.”

“Oh my God you didn’t recognize me.”

“Well, you had blond hair, and all that make-up, streaked down your face. And you were speaking French.”

“You are weird.”

“I didn’t know that was you.”

She looked at him.

“I’m going to take that as a compliment.”

“It is a compliment. I thought you were great. I thought you were French, and blond, and -- and -- and really sexy for one thing --”

“Really? Even in that slip? I was so worried about that slip.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because of my fat ass and fat thighs of course.”

“You didn’t have a fat ass and fat thighs. You looked great. And you were great in the piece. You were -- you were very authentic.”

“Really? I thought I overdid it a bit that night.”

“No, you were great.”

“Well, thank you.”

“Have you -- have you done much other work?”

“Mostly stage stuff. I went to school in New York and I did some Off-off Broadway and one Off, and I did one musical tour. The stage is what I really truly love, but I did have a pretty good part in this one low-budget movie that never went anywhere as far as I know, and then I had a recurring under-five on One Life to Live for a couple of months until my character got murdered, but then I had to move out of my apartment because my roommate got married, and I was offered a part on a sitcom here in L.A., so against my better judgment just to make money for a new apartment in New York I came back and moved back in with Papa, and then the sitcom got canceled after two weeks. That was last fall, and all I’ve done since is collect unemployment and work in the coffee shop and -- oh!”

“What?”

“Oh my God please don’t think I asked to have dinner with you just so I could ask you for a job!”

“I didn’t think that.”

“Oh my God!”

“Hey, Cordelia, it’s okay. I mean, I wouldn’t have minded anyway.”

“Really?”

“No. I mean, it’s hard to get acting jobs. Schmoozing is all part of the game. I do it all the time.”

“Really?”

“I’m fucking shameless.”

“But that wasn’t the reason I wanted to talk to you.”

“I didn’t think it was.”

She looked at her plate. It was empty and clean and the bread basket was empty. Then she looked at Buddy with a very serious expression.

“How was your pasta by the way?” she asked.

“Pretty good. I can’t eat any more if you want some.”

“Well -- maybe just a bite.”

Buddy picked up her spic-and-span plate and replaced it with his own one-third-full plate. And she dug in again. And he sat back and sipped his wine.

“But there was another reason,” she said after a minute.

“A reason? For what?”

“For why I asked you to meet with me.”

Twirling that spaghetti.

“Oh. I mean, ‘Oh’?”

And forking it in.

“It’s because when we met at that stupid party, you just -- impressed me.”

“Oh really?”

God this girl could eat.

“I thought you were really -- cool.”

“Thanks. I thought you were -- cool, too.”

“No you didn’t. You already said I was weird.”

“Well, I didn’t --”

“I wasn’t cool. I’m not a cool person.”

She’d cleaned the plate. She demurely patted her mouth with her napkin, and -- Buddy thanked his three drunken personal gods -- she absentmindedly unbuttoned those two top buttons of her cardigan and sat back. She looked around the restaurant with a satisfied air.

“I think you’re cool now,” said Buddy, making sure to look at her eyes and not at her breasts.

She met his gaze. Then she put her hand over her mouth and let out a little belch.

“Oh! Excuse me! That’s how cool I am.”

“That’s okay. In Arab countries belching is considered a compliment to the host.”

“Really?”

“Beats me, I heard it in some movie. Hey -- would you like some dessert --?”

There was a space in the last sentence because for an awful moment he forgot her name again. She picked up on this space but luckily for Buddy she misinterpreted it. A look of despair came over her face.

“Oh my God, you’re thinking, ‘How could she ever eat another morsel in her lifetime.’”

“No, not at all, I just thought maybe you would like
some --“

“No. I’m stuffed and I’m too fat.”

Fat, sprat, Jack, lean, David Lean, Lawrence, Arabia, labia, Lydia, la, la --

“Cordelia,” he said, triumphantly.

“Yes?”

And now having said her name he actually had to say something.

“Have some dessert.”

“No. I’m way too fat.”

“You’re not fat.”

“I shouldn’t have ordered those meatballs.”

“They were --”

“I could barely squeeze into this dress. I do look fat in it, don’t I?”

“No, you --”

“Okay, let me ask you a question. Mr. Best --”

“Please, Cordelia --” Ha, he’d remember that fucking name now if it killed him -- “call me Buddy. Buddy Buddy Buddy. Or Bud.”

“Okay, Bud -- but you have to promise to be absolutely honest with me.”

“Right.”

“I mean it.”

“Sure.”

“Okay, here’s my question. Buddy, if you saw me walking down the street -- and you didn’t know me -- would you say, ‘Hmm, she’s a little pudgy’?”

“Uh --”

“Or would you say, ‘She looks okay, but she’d look a lot better if she lost fifteen --”

“Cordelia?”

“Yes?”

“Uh --”

“Or -- would you say, ‘Okay, she’s all right, I mean she’s not absolutely hideous, but -- she could lose oh, say, ten --”

“Wait.”

“What?”

“Cordelia.”

“What?”

“Can we stop this?”

And suddenly she snapped out of it.

“Oh my God, I’m sorry -- I have these body-image --”

“Sure.”

“Issues.”

“Right. But look. You’re not fat and you do want dessert. Women always want dessert.”

“Do you know women all that well?”

“I know that they always want dessert. Other than that, well --”

“Go on.”

“They all think they’re too fat.”

“True. What else?”

“Well, I think that about sums it up, really.”

“That’s all you know about women? Or is that all there is to know about women?”

“Well, let me see --”

“Okay,” she said. “I think I’d like something chocolate.”

(Continued here, on the chance that something will actually happen.)

(Please go to the right hand column of this site for a listing of links to all other possible episodes of Uncle Buddy’s House™, serialized Monday through Friday at six PM {Eastern Standard Time} on the DuMont Radio Network, starring William Bendix as Buddy.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 172: altercation

It’s the weary butt-end of a strangely long and just plain strange Saturday night in August of 1963, and a man called Arnold Schnabel -- poet, brakeman and possible saint-- is finally wending his way home through the streets of the quaint seaside resort of Cape May, NJ, when he runs into the local inebriate Buddy Kelly, who, suddenly pointing past Arnold, indicates the approach of none other than the Dark Lord, also known as “Mr. Lucky”...

(Click here to go to our previous episode, or go here to return to the first chapter of this Gold View Award©-winning masterwork, which Harold Bloom has called “the closest thing we shall ever find to perfection in this hopelessly imperfect world".)

“Oh, no,” I groaned.

“Whatsa matter,” said Buddy. “You know that nut?”

“I’m afraid so,” I said.

“Schnabel!” yelled Mr. Lucky, shaking his fist, forging, limping steadily closer.

“Why’s he yellin’ at ya, Arnold?”

I couldn’t very well tell Buddy that I had marooned Mr. Lucky two days in the past.

“He’s mad at me,” I said.

Mr. Lucky, attempting to charge I suppose, tripped on his dragging leg and fell forward, cursing like a sailor -- no, to say that does an injustice to the maritime profession now that I think about it. I had never heard anyone curse the way Mr. Lucky now curse as he struggled to get up, not even my old army drill sergeant when I would intractably start daydreaming during close-order drill and poke some other poor recruit in the face with the barrel of my rifle.

“Guy’s got a mouth on him,” said Buddy. “He a friend of yours?”

“No,” I said. “We only met tonight.”

He was back on his feet now, and he continued hobbling forward, cursing and calling my name, that steam or smoke still drifting up from his body and from his head, as if he had just been dipped in acid.

“What’s his *****ng problem?” asked Buddy.

This question was more than I could answer, then, now, or ever.

“It’s hard to explain, Buddy,” I said. “You should go home. I’ll deal with him. He’s just had too much to drink.”

“He looks like a ****in’ nut to me. And what’s that smoke or whatever it is comin’ off him?”

“Well, I don’t really know,” I said. “There must be some, uh, rational explanation.”

“You are doomed!” yelled Mr. Lucky, who was now about twenty feet away.

“What the ****,” said Buddy. “Now he’s scaring me.”

“So, really, you head on home,” I said.

“F*** that noise. This guy is a f**king lunatic.”

“No, stay out of it, Buddy,” I said.

“F*ck that. You’re my pal, Arnold.” That was news to me. “Anybody fucks with you they fuck with me.”

(Sorry, Mother, I just got tired of all those asterisks. Forgive me if you’re reading this.)

“Let me take care of him,” said Buddy, and, tossing away his cigar stub, he strode forward like a small human tank, and I’m afraid I let him do so, not out of cowardice but because I had been thinking about asterisks and ignoring the problem at hand.

Although I am by nature a peace-loving man the vicissitudes of my part-time avocation of bar-fly have put me in the presence of many fights and brawls, and I will state that the one thing every one of these altercations has had in common is their resistance to verbal description. What happened next was no exception.

Buddy and Mr. Lucky collided with much shouting and cursing on both their parts, Mr. Lucky performing gestures that seemed at least reminiscent of those judo moves I had seen in the movies, whereas Buddy simply plowed right in head-down like a pint-sized Marciano with the old piston-like one-two, one-two.

Despite my boxing experience in the army, I lack the killer instinct, and so I’ve never been a good man in a real fight. Nevertheless, I stepped forward. The multifarious double-beast that was Mr. Lucky and Buddy bashed into me, I fell over into the gutter, re-scraping my scraped knees. I got up again, and attempted to grab Mr. Lucky’s arm, but he threw me off with the strength of ten men and this time I staggered back into a wooden telephone pole, striking the back of my head against it, I saw a flash like a flash bulb popping in my face, I lost consciousness.

It seemed like only a second or two later, maybe it was, and someone was lifting me to my feet by my armpits and shoving me back again against the pole. It was Mr. Lucky.

“Thought you could fool me,” he said.

Ink-black blood oozed and bubbled from his nostrils and mouth. His breath smelled of feces, his eyes were black as tar, as empty as the night. The smoke or mist rose up from his shoulders, from out of his ears, from his bloodied nostrils and mouth.

Behind him Buddy’s body lay crumpled on the pavement.

I tried to pull away but Mr. Lucky grabbed the upper parts of my arms in his hands and pushed me back, harder, against the pole.

“You humans,” he said, “You’ll never learn.”

“Well, uh, maybe we could sign one of those contracts now,” I said.

“Oh, you would like that, wouldn’t you?”

“Well, sure,” I said. (And believe me, I was willing. Damnation seven years from now seemed a far better alternative than damnation in seven seconds.) “No hard feelings --”

“Perhaps not on your part.” He squeezed my arms tighter. Vice-like would not be inaccurate in describing his grip, cliché or not. “But do you know how I’ve spent the last half hour of your earthling time?”

“No,” I said, quite frankly.

“Crawling and scrabbling my way through the uncountable dimensions of time, through the lives and deaths of galaxies, through unending black holes, through exploding supernovas, through the chill silent endless reaches of universes not born and never to be born.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“But now I’m back, and I am taking you, Arnold, taking you down to the deepest and most foul burning pit of hell.”

“So we can’t make a bargain?”

“You’re joking, surely.”

“I could become one of your, uh, servants.”

“You coward.”

“I could do better than Jack Scratch,” I said.

“You probably could at that.”

“And I do have an inside track with Josh.”

“You mean Je-”

“He likes to be called Josh down here. Just like you like to be called Mr. Lucky.”

“Simply Lucky will do.”

“Why don’t we try a seven-year contract,” I said. “Then we’ll see how it works out. Maybe you could give me an extension if --”

“Don’t try to trick me, Arnold.”

“I won’t. I just don’t want to be dragged to hell.”

“Not yet, you mean.”

“Right. Not yet. Do you have any of those contracts on you?”

“I suppose I might.”

“Go ahead, bring one out. I’ll sign it.”


Keeping one hand firmly on my chest he reached into his inside coat pocket and pulled out a scroll. It looked just like the other ones that he and Jack Scratch had tried to get me to sign. I suppose they all came from the same factory or workshop.

“All right. Seven years,” he said. “But I expect you to work for me.”

“Sure. But I get good luck during those seven years, don’t I?”

“You never give up, do you?”

“Well, I’m only human,” I said.

“This is our standard contract. You’ll get your seven years good luck, but only if you recruit me at least one victim a month during that time.”

“I can do that,” I said.

“You know," he said, “I think you can.”

Finally he took that hand of steel off my chest, and I was able to breathe a bit more freely.

He patted his pockets.

“Damn, I’ve lost my quill. Probably lost it when I was escaping the fire demons of Alpha Centauri.”

“Who?”

“Don’t ask,” he said. “Don’t even ask.”

“I have a pen,” I said.

“Get it out, then.”

I reached into my pocket and took out the fountain pen that Mr. Arbuthnot had given me.*

“You’ll need to draw some of your blood with that,” he said.

“Oh, sure,” I said, taking the cap off the pen. Its silvery nib sparkled in the streetlamp light.

“And no funny business.”

“No funny business,” I said, putting the cap back onto the shank of the pen.

He gave the scroll a flick, and it unfurled, revealing that now-familiar incomprehensible handwriting.

“Did you want to add that codicil about me bringing in one recruit a month?” I asked.

“Don’t worry about that. Just sign the damned thing.”

“Okay. Could you turn around?”

“I’m serious, Arnold, none of your tricks this time.”

“Of course not. Just turn around so I --”

“I will not turn around. Use the goddam telephone pole.”

“It’s awfully rough.”

“I don’t give a damn. Use it, before I change my mind.”

“Well, okay, give me the contract.”

“Here.”

He gave it to me. Again, it had that feel and even the dry warmth of an old person’s skin.

I turned and put the parchment against the coarse wood of the pole.

“Hurry it up,” said Mr. Lucky, over my shoulder. “Poke your wrist there and get some blood in the pen.”

“Right,” I said, but instead of poking my skin I quickly turned the paper around to its blank side and scrawled the words:

“Go to hell.”

“No, damn you!” howled Mr. Lucky as just as quickly I signed my name.

I turned.

He was gone, leaving only a whiff of foul smoke, the faint stench of burning compost, of backed-up sewers, of death.

He wasn’t so smart.

I tossed the parchment up into the air, it burst into flame, and its ashes and its sparks drifted away on the soft ocean breeze.


* See Chapter 127.

(Continued here, because it’s not up to us.)

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“Uncle Buddy’s House”, Chapter 22: raging fury

In our previous chapter our hero Buddy Best, having agreed over the telephone to dine with Cordelia -- offspring of the ham actor who has absconded with Buddy’s wife -- is gobsmacked with the revelation that the dowdy young woman he has met only once before has been transformed into a shimmering beauty...

(Click here to read the first chapter of this “steamy soap opera swarming with enough sin and snideness to make Jackie Collins swoon” -- (J.J. Hunsecker, in the Cape May Herald.)

“So,” said Buddy, an octave too high -- bring it down -- “how about a drink?”

She almost seemed puzzled by the question, but then she said:

“Okay.”

“What would you like?”

“A Diet Coke?”

“No,” said Buddy, before he could stop himself. “Come on, you don’t drink Diet Coke in a joint like this. Right Lou?”

“I don’t serve that shit,” said Lou.

“Well, okay --” she said.

“Uh --” Buddy suddenly realized he was spacing on her name -- Olivia? Rosalind? -- “what would you like?”

“Wine?”

“Great. What color?”

“Red?”

“Okay, Lou, bring us a bottle of Barolo, something good, something under a thousand bucks, okay?”

“Of course a.”

Lou smiled and went away.

She was wide-eyed. And opened-mouthed, showing a lot of very white teeth.

“A thousand?”

“I was kidding.”

“Oh. I’m so stupid. I’m sorry, I don’t get out much.”

Her eyes remained wide open, just as her mouth remained partially open, and it occurred to Buddy that this was perhaps their normal state, making her look more nutty than she really was. Or, maybe she really was just nutty and that was why her eyes and her mouth --

“So, you took a bus?”

“Yeah. I either ride my bike or take buses everywhere. I have a license but my father won’t let me drive his car. I don’t mind. I hate to drive. It’s dangerous, you know?”

“It sure is.”

“Do you think I could smoke here?”

“Why not? We’re outside, and besides, they’re Italian, they don’t give a shit.”

“What if someone complains?”

“Then we’ll deal with it.”

The waiter who had been so hard to find a minute before now stood with his tongue hanging out about three feet away. Buddy made a smoking gesture and pointed at the table.

Funny-name-girl already had her enormous shiny black purse open on her lap and she came up with a semi-crushed box of Marlboros. The waiter was there in two seconds with an ashtray, helping himself to a look at her breasts as he put it down. She got out a cigarette, and waiter-boy dashingly pulled a lighter out of his pants, bowed over her with his butt jutting out, begging to be kicked, and gave her a light.

“Thank you.” She exhaled luxuriously and then gave a start, staring at Buddy -- “Oh! would you like one?”

She thrust the box to within a few inches of Buddy’s nose.

“No thanks.”

She dropped the box into her purse, clicked it shut and put it on the floor, door, snore, core -- Cordelia --

“I just smoke one a day usually,” she said, Cordelia, that was her fucking name, “which means they’re usually pretty stale. And which also means I spend the entire day thinking about that one cigarette.”

The waiter was still standing there.

“Thanks,” Buddy told him, “we’re good now.” And finally, after just one more quick fond glance at Cordelia’s bosom, the guy went away.

Buddy wondered if she’d had sense enough to keep her sweater buttoned up on the bus, even if this was L.A., and because this was L.A. And he was trying not to be as obvious as Lou or the waiter, but just above and to the left of her left breast there was a tiny odd tattoo, about the size of a dime. It was green, red, blue...

“What is your tattoo there?”

“It’s Saturn.”

“Oh, of course.”

“It’s kind of weird ‘cause I did it myself.”

“Ah. I see.”

She pulled the edge of her cardigan over it. Too bad.

Lou came over with the Barolo, no five-minute wait this time. He jabbered on about the vintner and the vineyard and about how the wine was a little young but still drinkable (and thank God it was only a ‘97, with any luck it’d be under a hundred bucks). Finally he opened it and poured a little into Buddy’s glass, but Buddy waved him on. “That’s all right, Lou, pour away, I trust your judgment.”

Lou filled the glass, then sidled over next to Cordelia so as to appreciate the aerial view of her cleavage again while he filled her glass; as he lifted up the bottle with a show-bizzy little turn of the wrist he gave Buddy a nod of approval. He held onto the bottle.

“Where you meet such a beautiful young lady, Mr. Best?”

“Um -- well --”

“You very beautiful,” he said to Cordelia. “You Italian?”

“No.”

“You got such beautiful dark hair. You must have some Italian blood.”

“Well -- maybe -- I mean --”

“Italian or not, you beautiful anyway.”

“Thanks.”

“You make sure he treat you right.”

“Okay.”

“He treat you bad I get my friends to break his legs.”

“All right.”

“I mean it.”

“Okay,” she said. “Thanks.”

Lou finally put down the bottle and went off. Cordelia carefully stubbed out her cigarette, pushed aside the ashtray, and then leaned forward to whisper.

“He’s weird.”

“Yeah, he’s into this whole leg-breaking thing.”

“He’s like a character in some old movie. Do you think he’s always that Italian or is he just that way in his restaurant?”

“I’m not even sure he exists outside of this restaurant.”

She lifted her glass and tasted the wine. Her eyes expanded.

“Wow, that’s good.”

Buddy tasted his.

“Yeah, it’s okay.”

She looked slightly stricken, so Buddy amended:

“I mean, it’s really okay. Okay okay.”

“Okey-dokey,” she said, and she opened her menu.

“Oh my God, Mr. Best --”

“Buddy --”

“Buddy, it is expensive. I thought --”

“Yeah, I know, I’m an asshole.”

“But, I wouldn’t’ve minded a cheap place -- really --”

“Well, what the hell -- it’s pretty good here --”

“But I thought you preferred cheap places.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“So why --”

“I don’t know. I’m nuts.”

“You wanted to impress me.”

“Well -- I figured you probably don’t get much of a chance to, you know --”

“I don’t, really. Ever. Get a chance to. All I practically ever eat at are like pathetic greasy taco joints.”

“Yeah, so, what the hell --”

“Well, I think you’re really nice. It’s -- nice here.”

“Good.”

She was looking around with those eyes.

“It’s really nice,” she said.

(Buddy had a theory about expensive restaurants, which was that women actually liked them. A lot of men convinced themselves that they liked all this bullshit, but what they really liked was validating themselves by proving they had the money to spend on it; but women really did like these joints, it was in their genes. There were exceptions of course, like good old Madge or Shakira, she didn’t give a damn, give her some raw groats and turnips and she was happy, but Joan -- Christ, Joan and her restaurants -- how was the Mariner going to afford that bullshit? How many thousands of dollars had Buddy spent taking Joan to trendy restaurants? And it was all bullshit. But, here he was, like an asshole --)

“Hey,” she leaned forward over her menu and spoke low. “Don’t look, but who is that older guy at that table to your left. ‘Cause he’s been looking at us.”

Buddy glanced to his left.

“Don’t look!”

“It’s okay. That’s William Shatner.”

“Who is he?”

“Uh, he’s an actor. Star Trek? Captain Kirk?”

“Oh. I never saw that show.”

“Ah.”

“Is he still like a big star?”

“Well -- he’s -- sort of an icon.”

“Oh,” she said. “So why’s he looking at us?”

“He’s probably not looking at us, he’s looking at you.”

“Oh right. All the pretty women in here? Do you know him? Has he been in your movies?”

“Yeah, we did a picture once.”

“What was it called?”

“Um, Raging Fury.”

“Ah.”

“Y’know, Richard Gere’s over there to your left if you want to see a really big star.”

She glanced over. She didn’t seem too impressed. Or maybe she didn’t know who Gere was either.

“Have you made movies with him?”

“Uh, no. He’s a little out of my league. Or I’m out of his league.”

She turned to her menu again, with a grave expression.

“Oh my God, It is all so expensive though. Maybe I’ll just have a salad --”

“Oh, no, none of that,” said Buddy. “That’s not allowed. Here, give me your menu.”

She did this, and Buddy folded up both menus and laid them on the table.

“Okay, now we’re going to order like real Hollywood assholes.”

“How do you do that?”

“I got it from an Elmore Leonard book. The trick is not to look at the menu and just to torture the waiter with questions. Then he tells you stuff you could have learned just by looking at the menu in the first place. Then you ask him to ask the chef to make all sorts of adjustments on dishes that the chef has spent decades perfecting.”

“Oh, okay. But why?”

“It’s fun.”

She gnawed her lower left lip for a moment.

“Actually you just want me to order food I really want instead of just ordering the most inexpensive meal possible.”

“Well, yeah.”

“Okay. I usually order your way anyway,” she said.

“Good. Now I want you to hold your own here.”

“I will. I can be really weird about food.”

As can any woman worth her salt, thought Buddy.

(Fear not, fans of tortuous dialogue: continued here.)

(Kindly refer to the right hand column of this site to find an up-to-date listing of links to all other published episodes of Uncle Buddy’s House™, a Danny Thomas Production for the DuMont Network.)