It’s been some little time since we’ve featured a newly unearthed Arnold Schnabel poem; we thought that this sonnet would be suitable for the dog days. Published only once previously, in the Olney Times for August 10, 1962, in that troubled but artistically rich period preceding Arnold’s complete mental breakdown in January of the following year.
“August”
The streets shimmer as the old women stag- ger with their pendulant sacks filled with God knows what. “Potatoes mostly,” says the wag on the corner watching all the world’s odd- ness float past him, smiling indifferent- ly, even as the world evident- ly ignores him. “You see it’s for pota- to soup. They make it every single day. They think that we're all still in the Depress- ion. Oh, by the way, do you think that you --” I toss him a dime, and with the sun press- ing against my back, I walk on, home to Mother through these streets so bright; She's made some potato soup for tonight.
(Kindly look to the right hand column of this page to find a listing of links to many of the other fine poems of Arnold Schnabel, suitable for declamation at weddings, retirement parties, and funeral obsequies. This broadcast made possible thanks to the kind permission of the Arnold Schnabel Society of Philadelphia.)
Previously in this “hard-hitting bashment through the bohemian bowels of Hollywood’s Sin Set” (J.J. Hunsecker, syndicated columnist) Buddy Best, that b-movie Bergman, was having a shall we say interesting conversation with the mysterious Cordelia beneath the beachside deck of the Ancient mariner’s house when suddenly she ducks away into the darkness beneath the house just as no other than the Mariner himself appears at the top of the stairs...
(Go here to see the first chapter of this novel, soon to be serialized on the Dumont Television Network, starring Dick Powell as Buddy, William Powell as the Mariner, and Eleanor Powell as Joan.)
“Ah, Buddy, so there you are! Awaiting your cue, no doubt. Ha ha!” He clapped a hand on each rail post and leaned forward, looking like he was about to leap. “And is that a Cuban you’re so surreptitiously smoking?”
“Uh, no, actually it’s a --”
“There is no cigar like a Cuban cigar! I think it’s simply criminal this trade embargo, don’t you? When I come back from a civilized country like France I literally fill my pockets with Cubans!”
He was shouting, as if over the roar of a raging sea.
A decade later Buddy and Joan were finally getting ready to go when all of a sudden the Ancient Mariner’s gnarled claw thrust something into Buddy’s hand.
“Keep me in mind, Buddy,” said the Ancient.
Buddy looked at what was in his hand: the Mariner’s headshot-and-résumé. Headshot being at least twenty years old and on a good day at that.
“Uh, yeah, sure,” said Buddy.
****
On the drive back it was, “No, really, I thought you were great.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely.”
“Thanks, Buddy. I really worked hard on it. And Stephen helped a lot. He helped me to -- to open up to the character. You know?”
“Sure.”
Joan was driving, because Buddy had been drinking, and she had probably had only one glass of wine because wine was fattening and because the evening had not been torture for her. “What did you think of the boy who played Brick?”
“Oh, he was fine.”
“No, really.”
“He was pretty bad.”
“I know. He’s so dense. I just couldn’t get any energy from him.”
“Yeah, well --”
“What did you think of the rest of the show?”
“Well --” Buddy knew he had to be careful here.
“Come on, you can be honest.”
Yeah, they always said that.
“Okay,” he said.
“Well?”
He took a stab. Even if it did mean breaking his rule about mentioning to Joan any other woman between the ages of one and one hundred.
“Well, I kinda liked that French girl in the first piece.”
“The French girl?”
Joan did that thing where she took her eyes completely off the road so she could stare at him. Time to backtrack, and quick, before she wrapped the car around a fucking palm tree.
“Just kidding,” said Buddy. “She was way, way, too --”
Thank God she turned back to the road.
“French girl,” she said. “Ooh God damn la la.”
There you go, this was why you had rules. So Buddy pulled a Joan tactic -- except in her case it wasn’t always a tactic but a result of the nearly complete nonlinearity of her thought processes -- he changed the subject:
“So, is there a Mrs. --” he was going to say “Mrs. Mariner” but quickly subbed the less inflammatory -- “a Mrs. Stephen anywhere?”
Joan stared straight ahead, her lips tight. He’d fucked up. He’d gone and mentioned yet another woman, even if he never had laid eyes on her. But then Joan’s face softened.
“That was very tragic,” said Joan.
So maybe he hadn’t fucked up. But Buddy knew he had to give her her cue before she could go on.
“Tragic?”
“Yes,” she said. “She died in childbirth, or shortly after childbirth anyway.”
“Giving birth to uh --” what-the-fuck-was-her-name -- Lucretia?
“Yes.” Joan didn’t say the name, for whatever reason. “She’s his only child.”
“Wow, that’s uh --”
“Tragic,” said Joan.
“Yeah. You don’t hear about too many childbirth deaths these days.”
“No. It’s --”
Oh, his cue.
“Yes?”
“It’s been an issue he’s had to deal with.”
“Ah.”
Buddy looked out the window. He was hungry, and he started to think about food and what there was to eat at home. Oh yes. She’d made a batch of this homemade ravioli stuffed with something. And there was that thing of pesto she’d made, too. A fuckin’ tomato from the garden --
“A guilt issue,” said Joan.
“Mm-hm.”
“That’s all?”
“What?”
“Just -- you’re not even listening.”
“Yes I am.” Uh oh.
“What am I talking about?”
“Um, about, uh, Stephen, and, uh, his wife --”
If Buddy had been an actor he would have said, “Line!”
“Guilt,” said Joan. “Stephen’s issues of guilt.”
“Yeah, right.” Pause. “What’s he guilty about?”
“About his wife, dying in childbirth.”
“Ah. But -- why should he feel guilty? I mean, shit happens. He didn’t get drunk and forget to drive her to the hospital or something, did he?”
Joan took a beat here.
“She didn’t go to a hospital.”
“She didn’t? Why not?”
“Because they wanted a natural childbirth.”
“Oh. But can’t you have a natural childbirth in a hospital?”
“They chose not to. They chose to have the child at his cottage in Brittany.”
Buddy felt he knew where this was going, but all he said was:
“Really?”
“Of course they had a midwife on call --”
She glanced at him, but he kept his big mouth shut.
“They had a midwife on call, but she had another birthing that same night, and so she got there late. Too late.”
Pause.
“Why didn’t he just go get a doctor?”
“The local doctor was on vacation.”
Pause.
“Oh.”
“So Stephen had to deliver the baby himself. She was born with her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck.”
“Whoa.”
“Yeah. She almost died too. And then Stephen’s wife started hemorrhaging. He said the blood was just pouring out of her -- like a broken water main.”
“Okay, okay, I don’t want to hear it, thanks.”
“So -- he has issues. Or he’s had issues.”
“Well, I can see that, but -- you know, it takes two to tango, and if she was dumb enough to want to have her baby in some shack out in the sticks, with no doctor --”
“Well, Stephen feels guilty because he thinks he might have sort of talked her into it.”
“What?”
“I mean, she did agree.”
“Right. Right.”
“It’s something he’s had to deal with. In therapy. And in his art.”
“Right.”
So, the man was not only just a fool. He was a fucking damned idiotic fool.
(But who is really being made a fool of here, Buddy? At any rate: continued here. Please go to the right hand column of this page to find a listing of all other published chapters of Uncle Buddy’s House. A David Susskind Production.)
In our previous episode of this Gold View Award™-winning masterpiece (newcomers may go here for the first chapter) our hero Arnold Schnabel found himself about to be hijacked by four elderly degenerates in quaint old Cape May’s The Pilot House (“Featuring the “Swingin’ Sounds of Summer with ‘Freddy Ayres and Ursula’™!”) when suddenly his friend and so-called savior Josh emerges from the men’s room, somewhat under the weather, on this long hot night in August of 1963…
“Yes, do join us,” said Ursula to Josh. She had been clenching her cigarette holder in her teeth, but now she took it out between two stick-like fingers, while still holding onto my arm with her other hand. “Frankly,” she said to Josh, “you look as if you could use a little pick-me-up, my friend.”
Josh simply blinked at her, and then he addressed me.
“Why are these people pulling on your arms, Arnold?”
“We were not pulling,” said Ursula, and putting the stem of her cigarette holder back between her teeth, she began caressing the arm she had just been pulling.
“No, not pulling at all,” said Freddy, patting my other arm affectionately. His cigarette was between his perfect dentures, and a bit of ash fell onto my bare forearm.
“And why were you fellows pushing him?” said Josh to Mr. Jones and Mr. Arbuthnot.
“Pushing?” said Jones. He too had a cigarette between his leathery old lips. He took it out. “Who’s pushing?”
“Oh, certainly not pushing,” said Mr. Arbuthnot, puffing on his Meerschaum.
“Arnold’s friend,” said Freddy brightly to Josh.
“Yes? You can call me Josh by the way.”
“Josh it is then. Listen.”
Freddy finally, and seemingly with reluctance, relinquished my arm, then took a couple of graceful steps closer to Josh.
“Listen, Josh,” he said. And getting up on his tiptoes just as he had done with me (I noticed now that he wore pointy patent leather slip-on shoes) he cupped his little hand to the side of his mouth and whispered something in the direction of Josh’s ear.
“Oh, if it’s pot you want,” said Josh, “here, I’ve got one --”
“No no no,” said Freddy, waving his hands, and looking nervously around. “You fellows are so brazen!”
“Bold as brass,” said Ursula. “I like that in a man.”
“Come on up to our apartment,” said Freddy.
“Oh, no,” said Josh.
“Why not?’
“Look at me, I’ve just been puking my guts out.”
“Yes? And?” said Mr. Jones.
“Jonesie, be silent,” said Mr. Arbuthnot. “You know, Josh,” he said, “I have just the thing for you.” He patted his breast pocket. “A few drags of this special, uh, something I have in my pocket here and you’ll be ready in no time to leap up and dance the boogie-woogie. Or whatever it is you young people dance nowadays.”
“I believe it’s the watusi’s all the rage nowadays,” said Mr. Jones.
“A bowl of my borscht is what this boy needs,” said Ursula. “A nice cold bowl of borscht with a shot of vodka in it.”
For a moment Josh looked as if he were going to be sick again.
He took his Pall Malls out of his shirt pocket.
“Look, have a nice time, everyone,” he said.
He shook up a cigarette, and put it in his mouth. Freddy was right there with his thin gold lighter, and Josh allowed him to light his cigarette. Everyone was now smoking, except for me.
“You know, Josh,” said Freddy, “you really would feel better with a bowl of Ursula’s borscht inside you.”
“And a bowl of my opiated kif,” said Mr. Arbuthnot.
“What I do not understand, gentleman,” said Ursula to Josh (still caressing my arm, as if it were a small dog or a cat), “is that you say you have just puked your guts out, and indeed you look as if you have puked your guts out, and yet you smell like fresh gardenias.”
Josh slowly exhaled a good lungful of smoke, and then said, “I rinsed my mouth out before leaving the men’s room. Splashed a little cold water on my face and neck.”
“Oh, did you now,” said Ursula. She removed her cigarette holder from between those scarlet old lips and smiled. “Yes, my dear, I will fix you a nice bowl of borscht.”
“Some other time,” said Josh, and he started to walk past our little group, staggering just slightly.
Ursula pushed past me, almost knocking me over (fortunately Mr. Jones and Mr. Arbuthnot steadied me), and locked the talons of her right hand onto Josh’s forearm.
“I can tell you are a gentleman,” she said, speaking without removing her cigarette holder from her teeth.
He said nothing to this.
“You are dressed somewhat raffishly, but this is a handmade shirt, of the finest Egyptian cotton.” She fingered the damp cloth. “You dropped a double sawbuck into our jar as if it were a piece of tissue paper.”
“You’re quite welcome,” said Josh.
She removed her holder from her mouth with her left hand.
“May I ask if you are married, sir?”
“No,” said Josh, prying her hand away from his arm. “I mean, yes, you may ask, and, no, I’m not married.”
“I must introduce you to my granddaughter.”
“Someday,” said Josh.
“Why not right now? She is upstairs.”
“You have a granddaughter upstairs?”
“Is that so strange?”
“Well, I suppose not.”
“Her name is Magda,” said Ursula. “Very pretty girl.”
“I’m sure she is,” said Josh.
He put a knuckle to his lips, and looked as if he were fighting off a fresh wave of nausea. For some reason I remember that a new song was playing on the jukebox now, the one about it’s being Judy’’s turn to cry.
“What’s a matter, don’t you like pretty girls?” asked Ursula.
“Oh, no,” said Josh, “I mean, yes, of course I do.”
(I would like to interpolate a confession here, if I may stop the action, such as it is, for a moment, and my confession is that inwardly at this point I breathed a great sigh of relief that once again thanks to Josh I was no longer the center of attention. Perhaps escape was a possibility after all.)
“Come then,” said Ursula. “We will introduce you.”
“No, really,” said Josh -- “Mrs. Ayres is it?”
“Call me Ursula.”
“Ursula, I think really I should just --”
“Tomorrow we may all be dead,” said Ursula. “What are you going to do? Go home? Sleep?”
“I suppose so.”
“You have the rest of your life to sleep.”
“Look at me, I’m a mess.”
“Who cares? We are all bohemians here. Now come. A bowl of borscht. Something to smoke and to drink. A pretty girl.” She caressed Josh’s arm even more sensually than she had mine. I felt a slight twinge of jealousy, or perhaps I should say envy. “This is what life is about,” she said.
“Is it?” said Josh.
“What else would it be about, you foolish boy?”
“I don’t know. Raising children, helping other people, doing good?”
“You are joking, right?”
“Well, look, let’s head up, gang,” said Freddy.
“Not without Josh,” said Ursula. She hadn’t taken her eyes away from his. “Come, my darling,” she said.
“Look,” said Mr. Jones, “if you people are gonna stand here all night I’m going to go back and get our Manhattans.”
And off he went, and pretty quickly for such an old man.
“I don’t know,” said Josh. “Are you staying, Arnold?”
“Oh, no,” I said. “I’m going home.”
“Yes,” he said. “You’re probably right. You’re probably, uh --”
Suddenly his eyes rolled up into his head, he swayed back and forth, he attempted to lift his cigarette to his lips, dropped it, and then fell forward, collapsing into my arms.
(Will this night ever end? All we can say is: continued here. Kindly look to the right hand side of this page for a presumably current listing of links to all other extant chapters of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train to Heaven™, absolutely free for a limited time only. Offer void in states still possessing a shred of decency.)
In our previous chapter of this “Rabelaisian romp through the wacky world of Hollywood” {J.J. Hunsecker, noted columnist} our hero, that raffish middle-aged hack Buddy Best found himself trapped at an opening-night party at the beach house of the dreaded Ancient Mariner...
(Go here to see the first chapter of this serial, soon to be broadcast on Masterpiece Theatre, starring William Powell as Buddy, John Barrymore as The Ancient Mariner, and Miss Myrna Loy as Cordelia.)
Buddy held some little fish that oozed a brackish oil all over his fingers. He’d taken one bite and was waiting for a good opportunity to toss the remainder to a fat black cat staring at him from under the table when the Mariner loomed up again. A dose of pepper spray was what this fool needed.
“Butterfish,” he said. “Guess what the marinade is,” pronouncing it marinahd. “I adapted it ever so slightly from a Breton peasant recipe.”
And he bared his yellowed sea-dog teeth.
“Uh, I dunno --”
And I don’t give a fuck, you Bretonphiliac fool --
“Guess.”
Motor oil? Brylcreem? Used greasepaint?
“Beats me,” said Buddy.
“Olive oil, sea salt -- and it must be sea salt, coarsely-ground -- pepper -- fresh-ground pepper --” he tossed that in quickly because it went almost but not quite without saying, “and -- here’s the secret -- paprika.” His kohl-rimmed eyes widened and bulged and then relaxed. “Amazing, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” said Buddy.
“Go ahead, just eat the whole thing, bones and head and all. Delicious!”
What are you going to do?
Buddy shoved the whole fucking thing into his mouth.
The Mariner watched Buddy chew.
“Good, eh?”
Buddy nodded, chewing, forcing it down.
“Mmm. Yeah. Good.”
He noticed that the Mariner was wearing wooden clogs.
“Would you like the recipe?”
“Mmm, yeah. Sure,” said Buddy.
The Mariner produced a little leather notepad and a fountain pen from within his tweed jacket.
Buddy picked up a paper napkin and wiped his lips and his fingers while the Mariner wrote away.
It was true the fart had taken off the Ancient Mariner cap he’d worn during his performance, but on the other hand he’d put on a black beret. Which was worse? They were equally bad, but the fact that the Mariner had replaced a bad thing with an equally bad thing made the beret seem worse. Also he had an earring. No, it was a stud. And he was wearing one of those collarless dress shirts that had been all the rage about ten years ago.
Buddy took a good gulp of wine. One thing about that fish, it was so foul it made the wine taste almost not bad.
Finally the Mariner tore off the page and handed it to Buddy. Whatever he’d written was mostly illegible. Which was okay.
“Thanks, Stephen.”
“The peasants know,” said the Mariner, watching to make sure that Buddy folded up the recipe and put it in his pocket. (Later that night Buddy would rip up this recipe into tiny little pieces and flush them down the toilet.) “Simplicity. Every year I go to the same little fishing village in Bretagne. I love it there. I come back revitalized.”
“Really?”
“Really. You and Joan should come with me this summer. I rent the same little chaumière every year. Chaumière, a thatched cottage,” he translated. “No electricity. No gas.” Pronounced gazz. “No running water but for a well. And I adore it.”
“Sounds great.”
“You should come, really. I’ll be there the entirety of July. I’m quite serious, I want you to come. Both of you. You and Joan. Really.”
“No. Fuck you. Really,” thought Buddy, but what he said was:
“Well, thanks, Stephen, but July I’ll be pretty busy, pre-production for a movie --”
“Oh, more’s the pity --”
“Yeah, hey, Stephen, where are you from?”
“Originally?”
(“No, of course not originally, you dickwad, I meant where are you from last week, or yesterday, or tomorrow, you annoying fuck.”)
“Uh, yeah. Originally.”
“New Jersey, actually.”
“Oh.”
“But that was years ago.”
“Yeah.”
“Long ago and far away.”
Long ago and far enough to pick up that phony-ass accent anyway.
Then Joan was there with her two caballeros (And Buddy finally figured out that they were Vladimir and Estragon.) and the conversation turned to how really marvelous Nicole Kidman had been in The Hours even if she had won the Oscar, and Buddy went off to try to take a piss. He couldn’t find the bathroom, and wound up outside on a deck in back of the house. He went down some wooden steps. A forbidding greyish mass lay about ten yards away in the darkness; a dead baby whale most likely. Beyond that was the beach and the ocean. He could have gone and pissed behind the whale, but fuck it. So he stood his wine glass on one of the steps and pissed on one of the pilings holding up the Mariner’s deck, which he very much enjoyed doing. He zipped up and decided to light a cigar and hide out here for as long as possible. As he drew on the flame he saw the food-table chick standing or lurking in the darkness under the far corner of the deck.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hi,” said Buddy.
She glided over, silent as a cat on the sand. She held one of the peasant tumblers in her hand, half-filled with something dark.
“I took your advice,” she said. “Except I went for the red.”
“Red’s cool,” said Buddy. “How’d your cheese puffs turn out?”
“Burnt. But fortunately I’d prepped another batch so I stuck them in the oven. I just now took them in. He never even noticed one way or the other.”
“Great,” said Buddy. She stood there looking at him. “So, uh, you’re Stephen’s daughter?”
“Yeah.”
She looked down. She was about twenty-five, twenty-four. She didn’t seem to be wearing any make-up at all and her face was very white.
“I’m Buddy by the way.”
She looked up, sideways.
“I know.”
“And you’re -- uh -- um -- Lydia?”
“Cordelia.”
“Ah, right. Like in, what was it, Shakespeare --”
“King Lear.”
“Right, she was the, um --”
“The good daughter,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“It’s all for you, you know.”
“What?”
“The whole party. It’s all for you. Oh, I mean, my dad loves to throw parties anyway, but this time he got better food and more of it, and better wine.”
Better food? Better wine?
“So this Chantefleur’s the good stuff, huh?”
“It was on sale. He usually gets this really cheap Chilean wine. He likes to claim it’s better than any California. But he writes these parties off for his taxes anyway.”
She put her lower teeth over the lower right portion of her upper lip.
“Cordelia. Have we -- I get the feeling I’ve seen you before.”
“You mean before tonight?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, maybe --”
Up close like this in the light from the window she wasn’t too bad looking, in a first-Mrs. Rochester kind of way. Her eyes were big and dark and her brows were arched. Her mouth was slightly open, showing a lot of very white teeth that seemed to glow from some hidden source. Her hair was tied back but some of it had come loose and curled down along one side of her face. And come to think of it with the breeze blowing against her dress you could see her body wasn’t too --
“What did you think of the show tonight?” she asked.
“Well, uh --”
“You can be honest.”
“Okay,” said Buddy. “I really liked the French piece. I only understood about one tenth of it, but I really dug it. It was -- very moving. But the rest of the show -- at least the parts I didn’t sleep through -- I don’t know -- and just between you and me, I’m including my wife’s performance -- well, uh -- but then I did like the French thing, a lot.”
She stared at him, her mouth open. Then she said:
“I agree with you, except I thought the French piece sucked too.”
One of Buddy’s rules was never to disagree with a woman on the subject of another woman, so he said:
“Maybe you’re right. It was a little over the top.”
She pressed her lips together as if she’d just put on lipstick, then she cocked her head a bit to one side and stared at him. Okay. Buddy drew on his cigar and gazed out at the dead whale and the ocean.
“I saw you peeing,” she said. Buddy looked at her. Her head was upright now. “Not that I mind,” she said. “I pee outdoors sometimes.” She turned and peered at a trashcan a few feet away. “If you want to smoke your cigar upstairs my dad won’t mind,” she said to the trashcan. When it didn’t say anything she turned her head and looked at Buddy.
“Oh --” said Buddy, “I thought I’d chill out down here for a bit.”
“Aren’t you enjoying the party?”
“Well --”
“You were bored.”
“Yeah.”
She cocked her head to the other side now.
“You’re not like what I expected you to be,” she said, the “be” trailing off into a sort of growling in the back of her throat --
“Why did you expect anything at all?”
Her head straightened up again.
“Well, it’s just -- I know Joan, and -- and --”
Her eyes widened and her body stiffened.
“Excuse me,” she whispered, and she ducked off into the darkness under the house.
She was cuckoo.
Or maybe not -- Buddy heard the squeak of a screen door followed by a clumping on the deck above and then, sweeping aside an imaginary arras, the Mariner himself appeared at the top of the stairs.
(Continued here, and on, barring death, insanity or imprisonment. Kindly refer to the right hand column of this page for a listing of all other available chapters of Uncle Buddy’s House. A Jonathan Shields Production.)
