"Enter Araminta"

It was Monday, “open mike” night at Bob’s Bowery Bar, and as usual Gerry “the Brain” Goldsmith acted as compère. Bob paid him in free basement-brewed bocks for the night, and, come to think of it, this was the closest Gerry had ever come in his life to holding an actual job, unless you counted the book of “philosophical observations” he had been working on for well over two decades (his latest title: Word Is Just a Four-Letter Word}.

“Thank you, ‘Hobo Brucie’,” Gerry spoke into the mike, “for that really stirring rendition of –” Gerry glanced at the sheet of paper in his hand, “’A Flatcar Is My Only Home’, that was really, uh, strangely moving…”

A smattering of applause from the usual Monday night mob.

“Next up we have a newcomer to our little stage, a Miss (I hope I’m pronouncing this correctly) Araminta Sauvage!”

A small young woman dressed entirely in black hopped down from a stool at the bar and walked over to the microphone, neither slowly nor quickly.

“Hi, there,” said Gerry. “Did I pronounce your name correctly?”

“I’ve heard worse,” she said.

“Here, let me just adjust the microphone for you, dear.”

Gerry was not very handy generally speaking, but after a few years of these shindigs he had gotten fairly proficient at adjusting the microphone stand, and so after only a minute or two he finally got the microphone down to the level of the young lady’s lips, which were a very dark red, offset by her paper pale skin, dark eye makeup and dark hair and a jauntily cocked black beret.

“Would you be requiring musical accompaniment?” asked Gerry, gesturing to Tony Winston, who sat at the upright piano with a cigarette in his mouth and a bock in his hand (he too was paid in bocks, for performing the duties of ‘musical director’). “If there’s a song Tony doesn’t know, he’ll fake it, right, Tony?”

“You got it, brother,” said Tony. He played with his combo (the Winstonians) at the Prince Hal Room over at the Hotel St Crispian six nights a week, and this is what he did on his seventh night. Hey, it was free beer, right?

The young woman turned to Tony.

“Can you play something dark?”

“Can I?” said Tony. “How’s this?”

With his left hand he knocked out a ripple of deep dark notes.

“How’s that?” he asked.

“Good,” said the young woman.

“Okay,” said Gerry, leaning down into the microphone, “let’s give it up, ladies and gentlemen, for Miss Araminta Sauvage!”

Another ripple of applause, a few drunken hoots, Gerry made one more slight adjustment to the mike and stepped aside with a bow.

Tony knocked out a few dark chords and another ripple of coal dark notes summoning mental visions of deserted wet city streets at night, and the young woman spoke into the microphone.

Because my soul is black
I am always on the attack.
Because my flesh is weak
my soul is hard as teak.
Because my life is unreal
my mind is made of steel.
Because my womb is a tomb
I give birth to death.
Can you dig it, daddy-o?
Let me kiss you to death.
Let me ride that big bronco
in that last big rodeo
at midnight when the bleachers
are all as empty as my heart
when all the thrice damned preachers
cry to gods who laugh at them,
yea, even Krishna and fat Buddha
and even my man the Nazz
gives them the razzmatazz.
And looky here, 
I know this don’t all rhyme,
but book it, man,
‘cause I ain’t got time
for none of that jazz!
Hey, daddy-o,
don’t cramp my free style!
Hey, mama dear,
crack a smile
for your gone, gone daughter
who won’t do what she oughta
even though she knows
someday she’ll be a weird old lady
feeding pigeons in the park,
at this moment now
in this bar so smoky and dark
reeking of piss and cheap beer
she sings this song of freedom,
even though
no one hears
and no one cares,
but she doesn’t care
no, she just don’t care,
daddy-o,
because she dares to dare,
and that is why –

And now, whereas before she had been speaking, albeit in a sort of recitativo, she now began to sing, her words oddly matching the dark chords Tony was striking..

I sing this merry air,
because I dare to dare,
I sing,
I sing this dark air,
because, 
because 
I just don’t care.

She stepped back from the microphone, her face expressionless, Tony struck one last discordant but purely fitting chord, for a space of half a minute there was only silence in the bar, not even a single tubercular cough, and then in a great sudden wave came a deluge of applause and cheers and shouts of bravissima. 

“Wow,” said Scaramanga, the leftist poet, “we gotta invite that girl to our table!”

“A dame at our table?” said Howard Paul Studebaker, the western poet.

“Why not a dame?” said Lucius Pierrepont St. Clair III, the Negro poet. “You got something against dames, Howard?”

“We ain’t never had a dame at our table, that’s all I meant,” said Howard.

“That don’t mean we can’t never have a dame at our table,” said Frank X Fagan, the nature poet.

“Especially a good lookin’ little filly like that one,” said Seamas McSeamas, the Irish poet.

“By gum, why not?” said Howard, who even though he was from Hackensack slipped into a western accent when he was deep in his cups. “Let’s invite her over, dag nab it!”

“Maybe she won’t want to come over,” said Hector Phillips Stone, the doomed romantic poet. “Didn’t you guys hear what she was saying? She hates people. And with good reason, too, I might add.”

“Hey.”

The poets all turned in the direction of the person who had spoken.

It was the lady poet, Araminta Sauvage, smoking a cigarette in a black holder.

“Hey,” all six of the poets said, almost in unison.

“You fellas mind if I sit with you?” said the dark young woman.

Suddenly all of the poets stood up, each of them offering her a seat.

And so, for the first time ever, a woman joined the poets’ table at Bob’s Bowery Bar, and none of their lives was ever the same again, not the poets’, not the lady poet’s, not anyone’s. 




{Kindly go here to read the “adult comix” version in A Flophouse Is Not a Home, illustrated by my esteemed colleague rhoda penmarq.}

"Until They Teach Monkeys"

“The only sure way not to say something stupid,” typed Gerry “the Brain” Goldsmith, revising the sentence for the sixteenth time, “is to say nothing at all.”



Whew!

Only one sentence to show for a whole afternoon’s work, but it was a good one!  

As usual, Gerry left the sheet of paper in his old Royal portable, all ready for another assault on immortality on the morrow.

But now, the day’s honest toil was done, and it was time for his reward: an imperial pint of the basement-brewed bock just around the corner at Bob’s Bowery Bar.

It was early May, and cool for the time of year, but not cool enough to warrant a topcoat, and so, dressed only in his “new” Donegal tweed suit (new to Gerry, he had bought it at Goodwill when his twenty-seven-years-old Brooks Brothers Harris tweed had finally become too tight to button, either the coat or the trousers) and his trusty old fedora (once an opalescent grey, now the color of mud), he went out the door of his tiny sixth-floor “efficiency” (quite literally a converted storage closet).

On the landing between the third and fourth floors he encountered his landlady, young Mrs. Morgenstern, washing the window with its view of the underside of the “el” tracks.

“Good day, Mrs. Morgenstern.”

“Hey, Mr. Goldsmith, how’s the masterwork coming?”

“Swimmingly, Mrs. Morgenstern,” said Gerry, just as he always did. “And I am happy to say that I now have forty-three pages completed.”

“Not bad, Mr. Goldsmith,” said Mrs. Morgenstern. “That’s about forty-three more pages than I could ever write.”

Suddenly – was it the smell of ammonia combined with the propinquity of Mrs. Morgenstern’s young healthy body in the cramped space of the landing, the smooth skin of her muscular bare forearms, the tendril of dark curling hair that had escaped from under the flowered kerchief on her head, was it spring itself, the month of May, the season of rebirth, was it her deep brown eyes? – Gerry felt the urge to say something. But what? Certainly nothing “fresh” – he wouldn’t dream of it! She was, after all, a married woman, and he, Gerry, despite a lifetime of dissipation, was still a gentleman. And yet he felt this compulsion to say something more than the usual pleasantries.

In later years, when he remembered this moment, as he often did, he recalled, as he did now, that sentence which had been the sole fruit of his labors that day:



“The one sure way not to say something stupid is to say nothing at all.”

But still he felt he must say something and so he said:

“Well, we all do what we can, Mrs. Morgenstern – even if it is just washing windows.”

“Yeah,” she said, “at least until they can teach monkeys to wash windows,” and she dipped the rag she was holding into her bucket.

“Heh heh, yes,” said Gerry. “Well, see you later, Mrs. Morgenstern.”

“See ya, Mr. Goldsmith,” she said, and her strong hands wrung out the rag.

Quickly Gerry went down the stairs, before he could say something else stupid.

{Kindly go here to read the “adult comix” version in A Flophouse Is Not a Home, illustrated by the illustrious rhoda penmarq.}

"Nature's Way"

Frank X Fagen the nature poet had had a particularly boisterous night with his fellow poets Hector Phillips Stone (the doomed romantic poet), Seamas McSeamas (the Irish poet), Howard Paul Studebaker (the western poet), Scaramanga (the leftist poet), and Lucius Pierrepont St. Clair III (the Negro poet). Hector had just sold his first book of poems (Love Songs of the Damned) to Smythe & Sons, Publishers, and he had treated his friends generously with his advance money. Normally the poets stuck with the basement-brewed bock, but on this heroic night the Cream of Kentucky bourbon whiskey had flowed like a great flooded river of inebriation, and so when Frank staggered into Bob’s Bowery Bar the next afternoon at around two o’clock all he wanted was a hair of the dog, maybe two or even three.

“A glass of the bock, Bob,” he said, by way of greeting, “and a shot of Cream of Kentucky, but don’t let me order a second shot.”

“What about a second glass of the bock?”

“You can keep the bocks coming.”

After the shot and two glasses of the bock Frank felt the malaise subside, replaced by revived drunkenness and only his usual sense of being just nominally alive. When Bob brought him his third glass he knew he could now relax and take his time. Maybe he would even eat something. The blackboard behind the bar read

TRY TODAY’S SPECIAL
BOB’S MOM’S S.O.S.
ONLY ¢.35

Creamed chipped beef on toast, the perfect day-after meal! But first to drink this glass of bock, and maybe another…

“Jesus Christ, Frank, look at you.”

It was the waitress, Janet.

“My dear Janet,” said Frank, “I assure you the last thing I would want to look at is myself.”

“You were throwing up on the pavement outside last night, and now here you are again, getting your load on again.”

“What else am I supposed to do?”

“It’s a beautiful May day outside and you’re sitting here in this smelly dark bar. Ain’t you supposed to be a nature poet?”

“Well, yes –”

“Then whyn’t you go out and take a nice healthy walk in nature?”

“Go outside?”

“Yeah, go outside.”

“Gee, but –”

“No gee buts. Go outside.”

“Outside.”

“Yeah, outside. What kind of nature poet are you when you spend every day and night sitting getting plastered in a bar?”

Janet had struck close to home.

“Y’know, Janet,” said Frank, “you’re right, you’re absolutely right.”

He lifted up his bock, drank it down in one go, and then, heaving a great belch of satisfaction, he put the thick stubby glass down with a hollow clunking sound.

“Another one, Frank?” said Bob, looking up from his Federal Democrat.

“No, thank you, Bob. I have decided, at Janet’s urging, to go for a walk.”

“You what?”

“I’m going for a walk.”

“Now I’ve seen everything,” said Bob. “And I’ve seen a lot.”

Frank left a quarter tip, almost fell off his stool, and staggered out.

“I hope he don’t walk in front of a garbage truck,” said Bob.

“He might be doing himself a favor if he did,” said Janet.

Outside the bright warm sunlight attacked Frank at once and without mercy, but he couldn’t turn back now. Janet was right, goddammit! When was the last time he had been out in nature? Five years ago? Six? Seven?

He headed right on the Bowery, and again right at the nearby corner on Bleecker. He passed Morgenstern’s cobbler shop and right there next door was the entrance to his tenement building, also owned by Mr. Morgenstern. Should he just go up to his room and take a nap? But no, he knew himself, he would only lie in his narrow bed, unable to sleep, fighting a losing war with the heebie jeebies and longing for a bock – best to keep to his plan! On he walked along Bleecker in the blazing sunlight, breathing the harsh thick smells of this poor quarter of the city. But this asphalt, the dirty concrete and stained bricks, the garbage, the leavings of dogs – was not all this part of nature?

Suddenly Frank realized he had to urinate, and so he ducked into the first alley he saw, the one between Moe’s pawn shop and Fat Chow’s chop suey joint. He unbuttoned the fly of his old tweed trousers, and with a sigh returned some of the bock and bourbon he had drunk to the world.

“Hey, buddy, whatcha doin’?”

The piece of cardboard Frank had been going on lifted up, revealing the face of no other than his friend Howard Paul Studebaker, the western poet.

“Oh, my God,” said Frank, turning his stream away, “I’m so sorry, old man, I didn’t see you there.”

“Oh, well, no hard feelings,” said Howard, sitting up and tossing the wet cardboard aside. “An honest mistake. Buy me a bock and all is forgiven.”

“But I’m taking a walk,” said Frank, buttoning his fly.

“You’re what?”

“Taking a walk.”

“Since when do you take walks?”

“Well, I was sitting at Bob’s having a hair of the dog and Janet shamed me, pointing out that I am a nature poet who spends fine spring days sitting in a bar.”

“You gonna let a woman tell you what to do?”

“But don’t you think it’s a good idea to take a walk now and then, especially on such a beautiful day?”

“What’s so beautiful about it?”

“Um, sunlight, warmth, fresh air?”

“Help me up.”

Frank helped Howard up.

“Did you not make it home last night?” asked Frank.

“What does it look like?” said Howard. “And anyway, a flophouse is not a home.”

“Yes, I suppose you could say that,” said Frank.

“Besides, this alley ain’t so bad,” said Howard. “Until somebody uses you for a urinal, that is.”

“I’m so sorry about that, Howard.”

“All is forgiven, for the price of one imperial pint of bock.”

“Well, that seems fair,” said Frank.

Together the two poets staggered their way back to Bob’s.

“Jesus Christ,” said Janet, when she saw them come through the door. “How long was that walk, Frank? Five minutes?”

“There were unforeseen circumstances,” said Frank.

“In other words you ran into this drunk and he talked you into coming back here to get your loads back on.”

“There was more to it than that, Janet,” said Howard.

“There’s always more to it with you guys,” said Janet.

Over at the poets’ usual table sat Hector, Scaramanga, Seamas, and Lucius, all of them looking ashen and chastened. Frank and Howard went over and joined them.

It was nature’s way.

{Please go here to read the “adult comix” version, illustrated by the illustrious rhoda penmarq…}

"Little Ray in Heaven"

Many readers have written letters and postcards asking and wondering, “What ever became of Little Ray the chronic complainer? Did he ever stop complaining?” Well, our motto has always been “Give the People What They Want”, and so, dear reader, read on…

The days and the nights and the years passed, slowly, and yet, in retrospect, all too quickly, and the lugubrious fellow they called Little Ray continued to work at his despised job as a shipping clerk at a fabric factory on Seventh Avenue, and every evening after work he went to Bob’s Bowery Bar and ate whatever the special was and drank Bob’s basement-brewed house bock and complained about his life to anyone he could get to listen to him.

Let’s face it, Little Ray (who wasn’t little, and whose real name wasn’t Ray) didn’t bring much to the great party of life, and nobody knew why Bob didn’t just flag him. Did Bob feel sorry for him? No one knew, but Bob tolerated Little Ray’s baleful presence, and Little Ray knew well enough not to try to complain to Bob himself.

Yes, the days and the nights and the years passed, slowly and quickly, and suddenly it was the future, and flying cars flew down the boulevards and streets, and people in jet packs zoomed up to their offices in the skyscrapers that reached miles into the sky, but still Little Ray worked at the fabric factory (which now manufactured material for space suits) and went to Bob’s Bowery Bar each evening to drink his bock beer and complain to anyone who would listen…

One wet Tuesday evening in April, a tiny old man tapped Little Ray on the shoulder as he sat at the bar hoping that someone would sit next to him so that he would have someone to complain to, and the tiny old man said, “It’s time, Little Ray. Come with me.”

“Can I at least finish my beer?” said Little Ray.

“I am afraid not,” said the little man, “because you’re already dead.”

And Little Ray looked down and saw himself slumped forward over the bar, a victim of a massive fatal thrombosis.

“This ain’t fair,” complained Little Ray.

“Life is not fair,” said the tiny old man, who was an angel named Bowery Bert, “and neither is death. Let’s go, Little Ray.”

“But I’ve never even gone up in one of them flying cars, or flown around in one of them jet packs. I’d like to take one of them excursions to the Moon Colony too. I been saving my money to do that after I retire.”

“Too late now,” said the little man, and suddenly they were both standing at the base of a hill at the top of which was God’s enormous turreted and gabled house.

“Just walk right up there,” said Bowery Bert.

“Do I gotta? I don’t really wanta. What if they send me to hell?”

“Yes, you got to, whether you want to or not. Now be a man and get up there.”

Reluctantly Little Ray walked up the winding stone path through the gardens and shrubbery and went up the steps of the porch to where St. Peter sat at a little table with a big leather book.

St. Peter, a grey-bearded man in a plaid hunter’s cap and a faded yellow canvas work coat, took his pipe from his mouth and said, simply:

“Name?”

“Well, for years they been calling me Little Ray, but –”

“Why ‘Little’ Ray? You look pretty big and fat to me.”

“Um, it’s a shortened version of Little Ray of Sunshine, actually, but my real name is –”

“And why did everybody call you a shortened version of ‘Little Ray of Sunshine?”

“Do we really gotta go into all this?”

“I’ll ask the questions, you answer them. So answer me.”

“Awright, awright, they called me Little Ray short for Little Ray of Sunshine on accounta they thought I complained all the time.”

“And did you?”

“Complain all the time?”

“Yes. Did you complain all the time?”

“Not all the time.”

St. Peter had been turning the pages of his great book, and now he stopped, and put the stem of his pipe on the page.

“Here we go,” he said. “'Little Ray.'”

“They got me listed in there as Little Ray?”

“That’s what everybody called you, wasn’t it?”

“Well, yeah, but –”

“So that’s what you’re listed as.”

“That don’t seem fair to me. That don’t seem very fair at all,” complained Little Ray.

“Quiet,” said St. Peter. “I’m reading. You can complain about how unfair it all is when I’m finished.”

“I wasn’t complaining, I was just saying, I was just making a like observation –”

“I said quiet.”

“Sorry.”

It really wasn’t fair, thought Little Ray. Even in the afterlife he had to be stuck with that awful nickname. Was it his fault that life had been so hard on him? But he kept his trap shut, while St. Peter read the great book, mumbling under his breath and taking occasional puffs on his pipe.

Finally St. Peter closed the big book.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “You lived sixty-three years and all you did was bitch and moan and complain.”

“It wasn’t all I did. It ain’t fair to say that was all I did.”

“What, because you also slept sometimes? Because the only reason you weren’t complaining every waking hour was because you couldn’t find somebody masochistic enough to listen to your whining?”

“I had a tough life.”

“What about the starving children in China and Africa. You think their lives are easy?”

“I guess not. But still –”

“Never mind. It kills me to do this, but here –” St. Peter scribbled something on a notepad, then tore the note off, folded it once, and held it out to Little Ray. “Take this, go through that door behind you, give it to the person inside.”

“Am I going to hell? Because if I am, I really don’t think it’s fair –”

“Take the paper, go through the door, hand the paper over. Now get out of my sight before I change my mind.”

Little Ray took the folded paper, turned and went through the door, handed it over, and he was led through many vaulted rooms and long corridors until finally the docent brought him to the entrance of what looked like a crowded bar much like Bob’s Bowery Bar.

“Take a seat anywhere, table or bar, and a server will be right with you.”

Little Ray always preferred to sit at the bar, because who could you talk to if you were all alone at a table? Just the waitress, and waitresses never wanted to talk to him.

He made his way through the crowd, and there at the bar he saw many of the old Bob’s Bowery Bar crew who had pre-deceased him: Fat Angie the retired whore, Gerry “the Brain” Goldsmith, Philip the uptown swell, Willie the Weeper, Mushmouth Joe, George the Gimp, Gilbey the Geek, the old guy they called Wine, Tom the Bomb, and a bunch of the poets who never let him sit with them. There was an empty stool between Angie and the Brain and so Little Ray went over and sat on it.

“Oh, my God,” said Angie. “I thought this was heaven, but now look who they let in.”

Little Ray chose to ignore this remark, and the bartender was right there. It was Paddy, the philosophical Irish bartender from Bob’s who had died right around the time when they sent up the first expedition to explore Mars.

“What’ll it be, Little Ray?”

“Can I drink anything I want?”

“Anything you want, as long as we carry it.”

“You got Cream of Kentucky bourbon?”

“No, sorry, that we don’t carry.”

“What about Cyrus Noble?”

“No.”

“What do you got?”

“Heaven Hill?”

“Okay. Give me a Heaven Hill, although I’m not a fan. Can I get a glass of the basement-brewed bock, too?”

“We don’t got a basement-brewed, but we carry a good genuine German bock.”

“I’d prefer Bob’s old basement-brewed bock.”

“Well, we ain’t got that. And anyways, didn’t you drink enough of that stuff back on earth?”

“I liked it.”

“You liked it ‘cause it was cheap. Drink the German bock, Little Ray, and stop your complaining, you just got here.”

“I ain’t complaining, Paddy, I was just saying, just making a observation.”

“Heaven Hill and a German bock,” said Paddy, and he went to fetch Little Ray’s collation.

Angie had turned away from him, so Little Ray turned to the Brain, on his right, who was also turned away, pretending he hadn’t seen Little Ray.

“Hi, Brain,” said Little Ray, loudly.

The Brain turned to face Little Ray, feigning surprise.

“Oh, Little Ray, didn’t see you there, what a pleasant surprise.”

“What,” said Little Ray. “Like you’re surprised they let me in? Let me tell you something, Brain. I wasn’t a bad guy.”

“No one said you were, Little Ray,” said the Brain, already planning to pretend to go to the men’s room and not come back to this seat.

“I wasn’t the worst guy in the world, Brain,” said Little Ray.

“Oh, far from it, I’m sure,” said the Brain.


Little Ray paused for a moment, looking around at the crowded, smoky and noisy barroom filled with chattering and laughing people.

“And you know what else?” said Little Ray.

“Uh, no, what, Ray?”

“This place ain’t so great.”

“No?”

“No. Now don’t get me wrong, Brain, I ain’t complaining.”

“No, of course not.”

“I ain’t complaining, but this joint don’t look that great to me. Again, I ain’t complaining. But I woulda expected something just a little bit more classy, y’know?. But hey, that’s just me. I ain’t complaining. But.”

“But?”

“I’m just saying, just making a, you know, a observation.”

“I see, yes,” said the Brain. “Hey, listen, will you excuse me, Little Ray? I just have to go to the men’s room.”

The Brain had a nearly full glass of what looked like Bob’s old basement-brewed bock, and he lifted the glass, polished it off in three gulps, got off his stool and hurried away.

Meanwhile Little Ray was still waiting for his Heaven Hill and German bock. What, did Paddy have to go all the way to Kentucky for the Heaven Hill and to Germany for the bock? It was busy in here, but it wasn’t that busy, and if Paddy couldn’t handle the crowd they should have another bartender on back there.

Little Ray didn’t want to complain, but still. 


{Kindly go here to read the “adult comix” version in A Flophouse Is Not a Home, profusely illustrated by the illustrious rhoda penmarq…}