Sunday, August 29, 2010

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Mucho Macho



The first letter I pulled from the stack was one I'd written to Richard on Sept. 26, 1967; it was mailed from Pontiac, Michigan, where I was working at Western Union Telegraph Company.  My job at the time was going from town to town, filling in for people who were on vacation, or were out on extended sick leave, and so forth; over the course of five or six years I worked in some fifty-or-so different towns and cities in Indiana and Michigan, for periods ranging anywhere from a few days to up to three months, but I often spent my weekends in Lansing where I had the most friends, and where I had a studio apartment ... Apartment C, as it were.


"Studio" sounds too grand ... it was a three story building on the busiest downtown street; three one room apartments on both the 2nd and 3rd floors, with tiny kitchens and Murphy beds; the first floor was home to various succeeding businesses, most memorably a karate studio -- boom, boom, boom all evening long.  One of my witty friends named the building "Tarantula Arms" ... the place did border on seedy ... and that name stuck.


My letter to Richard is an account of a weekend I'd just spent in Lansing.

"Here are highlights of the past weekend," my letter begins.  "Arrived Lansing sometime after midnight Friday.  Went to bed.  At 2 a.m. I heard Rodney [Apartment B] calling in the hallway:  'George!  George!  George!'  Then I heard Dan laughing.  Then I heard Bernard laughing.  They were just returned from an evening at the Rustic Bar.  I got up and we all went to a party at someone's apartment.  We left shortly after a dyke announced in sobbingly-screaming tones that she hated Troy Brockwell and was going to kill him.  Troy screamed, 'Do it!  Do it!  I don't care!  Do it!'  I really like Troy and wanted to stay around and perhaps help make sure he wasn't killed, but my friends and I didn't like the party anyway and we left.  We went to the apartment of a guy we'd just met at the party for coffee and awful music, all soundtracks from musicals.  Bernie, Dan, Rod and I got home about 6 a.m.


"Awoke at ten.  Bernard went to Michigan State football game.  Dan, Rod and I layed around and drank coffee.  


"Then I went to the library girls' place -- Maralyn, Marsha, and Jeannie [they all worked at the Michigan State Library with my friend Dennis, Apartment A].  Then I went to an office supply store and bought a brand new typewriter.  Then I met Dan in Knapp's coffee shop and had a grilled cheese and coffee.  Went back home, opened a six-pack, and began stream-of-consciousness typing.  The more I drank the more mistakes I was making so I stopped.  Dan made a good spaghetti supper.  Then we went out to bars.  Then to a one a.m. party at Rodney's -- it was a farewell party for a guy named Lem, who was Judy (Dood) Parker's boyfriend.  Lem left Sunday for San Francisco, where Dood now is.  Lot's of fun at Rod's.  Got home at 6 a.m. again.  Woke at 10:30 Sunday.  Dennis and I went over to Dorothy's for breakfast.  We stayed until almost 7 p.m. drinking beer.  Then to Dennis' apartment where we drank more beer.  The library girls came, so I fetched Bernie so they could meet him.  More beer.  Loud oldies on record player.  Lots more fun.  Then Jeannie and I went up on the roof.  When coming down we were accosted by a lady who lives on the 3rd floor and her boyfriend, both in their mid-thirties I'd say, who wondered what right we had to go up on the roof, et cetera.  A big argument erupted, and my tongue was at its best, lashing them and putting them down.  She asked what we had 'lost' on the roof.  I yelled, 'What makes you think we lost anything?  Perhaps we found something.  Perhaps we found love up there, why don't you go up there?  Maybe you'll find love.'    The argument was really stupid.  Finally she said she was going to call the police.  'Go to hell!' I said, 'Go call the law ... I couldn't care less.'


"Jeannie and I, holding hands and laughing our asses off, went back to Dennis' apartment and were laughing and relating our experience when a knock came at the door.  It was them!  'We were just wondering if this was where you came to so we'll know where to tell the police to find you.'  Another argument ensued, more yelling.  'You should just tend to your own fuckin' business,' I shouted.  At this the man stuck out his chest, came up to me, and pushed me backwards."


"He had barely pushed me, it was more of a gesture than a violent act -- anyway, I drew back my trusty right.  I remembered that back when I was a kid this guy named Ted Ward, who was a couple years older than me, was teaching me how to box, and the thing I'd always remembered him saying was that if you're aiming to hurt somebody don't just throw your fist and your arm but put your whole body behind the thrust.  So I let the guy have it with all the force I could muster, right in the mouth.  He flew backwards ... flat out in the air! ... and now lay on his back in the hall, his lip bleeding, his mouth beginning to swell.  Oh, my, now the lady was very upset; she would call the police she assured me.  I yelled, 'Go call them!  Please do!  There's a payphone just across the street.'  'I have my own private phone,' she haughtily informed me, 'and I'll call them on it.'  'Good!' I yelled, 'then you won't have to waste a dime.'  The guy was picking himself up.  She helped him.  'Let's go, honey, we're going to call the police.'  They headed up to the third floor.


We all went back into Dennis's apartment, and I was in laughing hysterics, laughing Ha!  Ha! Ha! at their stupidity and how surprisingly easily I'd layed the guy out flat.


Someone saw a police car pull up outside.  Jeanne and Maralyn went into the hall and saw three policemen coming up the stairs.  Jeanne and Maralyn explained things I guess, and two of the policemen left, leaving the one there alone to question me.  So Maralyn yelled from the hall to let her and Jeanne in.  When we did the policeman entered with them.  He took down all sorts of vital information on me.  I was still feeling very hysterically funny and was giving him misleading and inaccurate answers, which poor Bernard hastened to correct: i.e. I was born in 1940, not 1941; my name is George Vincent, not George Alan.  Fortunately, the policeman seemed to be on our side, even stating that he would probably have hit the guy too.  However, his 'too' needed qualification; it meant that he assumed that I had hit the guy, but when he'd asked earlier, 'Did you hit him?' I'd stated flatly, 'No.'  At that the policeman said sort of cutely, 'Gee, if you didn't hit him I wonder how he got his lip cut then?'


"After it was all over, the questioning, I asked him if he'd like some coffee.  He declined, and warned me that the one whom I'd attacked had plans to file a charge against me in the morning for Assault and Battery.


"So, my dear friend ..." my letter closed, "perhaps I'll get transferred out of the Pontiac office sooner than expected -- transferred to the Lansing City Jail."
***
There were no ramifications.  Nothing more was heard from the couple, and the woman moved out of the building shortly after the incident.  I've recalled that night often all these years since, and sometimes my conduct has seemed so outlandishly out of my usual character -- I've been meek, mild, even cowardly when it came to a fight --  as to not have actually happened, though I knew it did.  Still, sometimes ... even thirty, forty years later ... I have wanted to get on the phone to one or another of those three 'library girls' (though I've long been out of touch with them) and say, "Do you remember that time I punched that guy and he went flying?" and have her say, still in awe of my awesomeness, "Boy, did you ever!"


Now I don't need to wonder.  It happened.  My letter fills out my memory beautifully.  But I didn't remember Bernie being there!


I'm sitting here proudly thinking that once ... just once ... I was one bad-ass drunk that a guy shouldn't have tried to mess with.

Monday, August 23, 2010

Memories Galore

The other day my friend Richard gave me a thick bundle of letters -- a couple hundred at least -- which I'd written to him over the years, mostly in the sixties.  So I have a lot of unusual reading to do.  It cost four cents to mail a first class letter in 1962.


Sunday, August 15, 2010

Slower Than Molasses

(click to enlarge)

In Ireland in 1999 I was bitten by a dog name Holly.  This wasn't especially significant until a tremendous amount of drama surrounding the dog and its recently dead owner was revealed to me and Abby, who was traveling with me.  Back home I wrote it all up, adding things here and there, changing some things around -- such as having Abby, not me, bitten by the dog -- and it amounted to fifty-some pages; I named the story "Holly's Last Bite" -- yes, the dog, in strange circumstances, actually died shortly after biting me.  It had taken me about five years to accomplish this story because I don't stick to things; but once done, I sent it off to The Missouri Review.  I always like it when a form rejection comes with a personal note.  I decided, post-rejection, that I could shorten the story, change more things around, make it better.  I got all that about half-done before I took what has turned out to be a break of several years.

What's kind of weird to me is that when I happen to recall that incident now I tend to recall that it was, as in my fictionalization, Abby who was bitten by the dog; I tend to believe my fiction more than the fact.  I must remember: Holly didn't bite Abby.  Holly bit me.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Bad Girls


Susan Walsh, Divine, and Cookie Mueller:  Bad girls in the film "Female Trouble" by John Waters.  In real life, sweethearts.  One time outside Baltimore, when Waters was shooting that movie, a bunch of us were hanging out in a field, lounging on the grass, killing time while some scene was being set up.  Susan and I were chatting.  Divine came over and said that a friend of his was doing a photo-shoot for Playgirl magazine; would Susan and I like to go to Los Angeles to be photographed ... and would we mind being photographed nude?  Frankly, I didn't suppose that it would really happen, and I said thanks but no thanks.  Susan said she'd be glad to do it.  And then, months later, it really did happen ... some other guy was in the spread in what might have been my place.  Stupid of me perhaps to have passed on the offer -- that issue of that magazine would have been a nice show-and-tell all these years.

Sunday, August 8, 2010

Ivy Compton-Burnett

Just a few of my friends are serious readers, lovers of good literature.  One of these is John Waters.  In his recent book Role Models he highly commends the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett.  He writes that she "looked exactly like the illustration on the Old Maid card, never had sex even once, and wrote twenty dark, hilarious, evil little novels between the years 1911 and 1969."  Waters warns that they are difficult; he backs this up with a quote from Compton-Burnett herself:  "Once you pick up a Compton-Burnett it's hard not to put them down again."


I had heard the name forever but knew nothing about her.  I decided to start with Hillary Spurling's biography, gathering a good number of gems from it:




***
A friend of Ivy's, Dorothy Beresford, was "quick, sensitive, acutely observant, widely read but otherwise uneducated save for what she'd picked up from her father."  "She held out against 'the urge to write' with a determination for which she took credit, 'feeling all round me the fearful tyranny of the over-full ink-pot and the unwanted word'"  "Dorothy," writes Spurling, "was one of those people -- all too familiar in the novels of I. Compton-Burnett -- who have brains but no training and cannot for the life of them see why writers make such a fuss about writing."   She "had the advantage in looks and was Ivy's equal in wit (she told T.S. Eliot that the three tall, pale, long-fingered Sitwells put her in mind of 'a stained glass window, hands joined in admiration of one another'"
***
Ivy and her companion/housemate Margaret Jourdain had a friend named Frankie Birrell.  When he came to dinner he "disgraced himself ... by falling asleep ... and smashing the arm of his chair."  Birrell himself wrote self-deprecatingly of the incident:  "I can quite clearly remember the soup ... then, I suppose, we must have had fish, because when I woke up there was a plate of fish, uneaten, in front of me.  As a matter of fact, my left hand was in it, covered with sauce.  I was alone in the dining room; the lights were burning, and when I looked at my watch I saw that it was past midnight.  The ladies seemed to have gone to bed."
***
In Ivy's 1931 novel, Men and Wives, a character named Rachel says, "Well, a selfish life is lovely, darling.  It is awful to be of use."
***
Margaret Jourdain wrote books on decorating, and consulted clients on such matters.  One of her patrons, Nelly Levy, was "a prodigal source ... of gossip, company, entertainment, splendid parties and no less splendid stories like the one of her saying, when someone admired her necklace in the garden at Buxted Park, 'My dear, these are my gardening pearls.'"
***
"'I can't do collar work,' Margaret would say (meaning the work collar worn by plough or dray horses)."  Margaret, whose work in decorating did not earn her a good living, eventually obtained a position as a secondary sales room correspondent, "a post not unfairly summed up, in Ivy's phrase, as choosing 'to behave in an undignified manner for a pittance"


"That is the best definition of work I have heard," says a character named Felix Bacon in Ivy Compton-Burnett's novel More Women Than Men.
***
Mockery had early provided relief from a harsh and demanding home life for Margaret ... whose revolt against the moral opportunism of [her] vicarage upbringing made [her] despise religion as unequivocally as Ivy and her own two brothers [despised religion].


"'No good can come of it,' said Ivy long afterwards, discussing Christianity with the novelist Elizabeth Taylor.  'Its foundations are laid in fostering guilt in people -- well, that obviously makes it easier for our Pastors and Masters when we are young.'"  Ivy said that when Margaret was just a little girl she said to her governess, "I don't want to hear any more about that poor man [Jesus]," and walked out of the room."
***
Margaret's sister, Eleanor, wrote, with a Miss Moberly, a bestseller called An Adventure which was a suspicious account "describing their encounter with Marie Antoinette and her ghostly court at Versailles in 1901.'  Margaret referred to the book as 'My sister's folly.'"


Eleanor was also Principal of St. Hugh's at Oxford, a position which ended in trouble when there was "a public scandal that terminated her regime at St. Hugh's in 1924.  She had dismissed a young history tutor ... on charges of disloyalty which boiled down to the fact that the two had never got on, whereupon half the college council resigned, together with a number of dons.  Accusations of lying, spying, victimization and emotional blackmail were freely bandied about ... the matter was adjudicated by the Chancellor, Lord Curzon, who exonerated [the tutor].


"A friendly don, coming to warn Eleanor Jourdain of the news, is said to have been greeted with the words: 'We've won, haven't we?'


Not quite!  "Eleanor died of heart failure six days later.  It was 'maintained that she had been murdered and the Oxford Magazine reported her death with the tag from Tacitus, 'Felix opportunitate mortis' (which might be roughly translated: 'Lucky for her she is dead.'"
***
A homosexual friend of Ivy and Margaret's, one Herman Schrijver, was 'the mounting block' for Ivy's character Felix in More Men Than Women.  His "flippancy, shallowness and affectation, his vanity and showing off ... his fascination with his own and his friends' appearance, age, tastes and dress' were characteristics which Ivy and Margaret delighted in.  


"Shall we have a gossip about your staff?" Felix says to his friend Josephine. "No!" says the latter.  "When you have known me a little longer, you will know that my mistresses, in their presence and in their absence, are safe with me.  I hope I could say that of all my friends."


Felix's retort is priceless:  "I hoped you could not.  But it is interesting that they would not be safe, if we had the gossip ...."


"Felix," writes Spurling, "reproduces many of Herman's turns of phrase and mannerisms, his dancing gait, green eyes and penchants for formal Savile Row suits.  Herman also gave his gregariousness, social poise and sunny temper, his gallantry to older women (almost a professional qualification in the decorator's trade), the relaxed, teasing, flattering approach that goes so far to disarm Josephine, calming her inner turmoil as effectively as it thaws her external constraint by making her laugh, and let him off small things like going home to dress for dinner:


"'Stay by all means.  Your clothes to not matter at all.'


"'I noticed that you thought that about clothes; and I see that your clothes did not matter; but I don't think mine can be dismissed like that.'"
***
"Felix is less an individual portrait ('People are too flat in life to go straight into a book,' said Ivy) than a distillation of all that Herman, and people like him, stood for in Ivy's life by way of diversion, consolation, sympathy and understanding.  [Ivy] prized especially their captivating frankness, and the corresponding skill at side-stepping emotional entanglements .... he represents perhaps more directly than any other single character in Ivy's books the discreetly homosexual element among her friends and Margaret's, the shrewd, uncharitable, high camp contingent always to the fore among connoisseurs and collectors, dealers and decorators, people who attach the utmost importance to style and artifice.


"I never thing about people's age," said Josephine.


"I often think about it," said Felix; "and hope they show it more often than I do, and wonder if they can guess mine."
***
Ivy consistently believed that she had been treated badly by her various publishers: cheated on royalties; cheated by poor advertising campaigns for each of her twenty books.  Long after she'd left the publisher Heinemann, she "was accosted at a publisher's party by a man from Heinemann's who claimed that his firm had once had the honour of publishing her:  'Honour? said Ivy.  'No one would have known it at the time.'"
***
Another of Ivy's friends was Willie King, who was associated with the British Museum.  "He walked to work every day from Thurloe Square via Piccadilly Circus to Bloomsbury."  When a friend "proposed an alternative route" King responded:  "'Walk across Hyde Park?  My dear Soame, I hate the country.'"
***
Ivy, says Spurling "wore her delicate, Georgian diamond brooch and ear-rings with simplicity and distinction."  Robin Fedden, a friend, describing his first tea with Ivy in 1946, wrote: 'Her jewellery managed never to look like jewellery but, on her, seemed hieratic insignia.  I do not recall seeing her out of black.  She wore it like a uniform, with care but with the disregard for mode proper to uniform.  A sense positively of the Services attached to a black tricorne, vaguely reminiscent of an eighteenth-century quarter-deck.  There was also the long black umbrella.  This she would carry to dinner a mere two hundred yards from [Ivy's home] on a halcyon evening . . . for me, the physical impression was recurrently of a Roman head, a soldier-emperor, perhaps Galba.  The rolled hair and the ribbon sometimes seemed like a laurel wreath."


Fedden's "moral impression [of Compton-Burnett] was of sanity and principle.  Level-headed, in the best sense of the word, was an adjective that she evoked.  If I have met a human being whose values were not blurred, it was Miss Compton-Burnett."
***
Ivy's 1951 novel, Darkness and Day, has "a secondary theme of old age, infirmity and death.


"Could anyone be older than Grandma?" asks a grandchild.


"Yes, of course,' said Rose.  'She is only seventy-eight.  People can be ninety and a hundred."


"But their days are but labour and sorrow.  Are her days like that?"


"No, I shouldn't think so.  Other people's may be, when they are with her."
***
In 1957, T.S. Eliot, with his new wife, moved into a house around the corner from Ivy's home.  They seem to have enjoyed running into one another in the neighborhood.  "I don't see very much of him," Ivy said, "but I like to know he's there."  Their surface friendliness did not stop Ivy from speculating on his relationship with his wife; she said to that fellow British novelist Elizabeth Taylor:  "Apparently she's always adored him, although she was his secretary for years.  I am sure if I had been his secretary for a fortnight I should have wanted to poison him, not marry him."


Eliot and Ivy talked about trivial things -- "cake shops, fishmongers, greengrocers ... and where to go for the best fillet steak."  Of one meeting with Eliot Ivy said "there was a great deal of talk about" Eliot's previous flatmate, John Hayward.  Then she added, "No, I don't think there was really much talk.  I think I just asked a lot of impertinent questions.  People say that if you don't ask, you get told more, but I have never found that to be true.  I have found that one gets told nothing at all."
***
John Waters ends his mini-essay on Compton-Burnett:  "I have all twenty of her novels and I've read nineteen.  If I read the one that is left there will be no more Ivy Compton-Burnett for me and I will probably have to die myself."


As for me I have the thrill of thinking that any or all of the twenty await me -- even if it is almost a certainty that I won't get through all twenty before my own death.  I am, after all, slower than molasses.  Not a slow reader but slow at getting to things.



Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Produce

.

Thanks Jane, Jack, Lisa & Sandy for gifts from your gardens.

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Funny How Time Slips Away



In Ann Arbor back when the sixties were becoming the seventies, this guy and I hung out all of the days and all of the nights.  Then the times changed.  This guy went back home to Mexico.  I went to Cape Cod.  Lost touch.  Night before last I had a vivid dream.  Juan and I were hanging out.  It was beautiful.  In the words of the Gram Parsons song, it was "a dream too real to be leaned against too long."  I miss Juan.  I miss Ann Arbor.  I miss the counter-culture, people letting their freak flags fly.  I miss Juan playing the piano for me in his apartment.  I miss Grace Slick singing "Tear down the walls, motherfucker."  I miss laughing at the sky.  I miss trying to guess what real events Don McLean had in mind when he wrote the lyrics of "American Pie".  I miss the perfect little apartment I had at 801 East Huron.
----------------------------------------------------------
I came across a bit of dialogue that is apt to my mood above; it's from an Ivy Compton-Burnett novel: "It is the future we must look to," said Constance, "It is useless to pursue the past." "It is needless," said Anthony.  "It will pursue us."

Monday, August 2, 2010

Decorate Decorate

Sometimes I murder time by decorating a folder.
Occasionally I'll write a poem and put it in this folder.
I never look later to see what I've put in the folder.
Maybe someday when I'm older
I'll read the contents of the folder.

Sunday, August 1, 2010

Mathew & Naoma Luckenbill - Oak Lawn Cemetery - North Manchester, Indiana





When I was young I thought Luckenbill was an odd name, and that if sounds had looks then Luckenbill would be sort of homely.  I was glad I was a Fitzgerald.  Eventually -- it being the name of my maternal forebears -- I came to think of Luckenbill as a handsome name.  In Indiana last week I met a second cousin, David Luckenbill, who has tracked our Luckenbill line back to a Johan Eckel Luckenbill, a German from very near the Swiss border, who sailed out of Rotterdam on the Thistle of Glasgow, arriving in Philadelphia on August 29, 1730.  (There are variations in the spelling of all three of Johan Eckel Luckenbill's names, depending presumably on who did the various transcriptions of the Thistle of Glasgow's passenger list.)


That Johan Luckenbill begat an Abraham and Abraham begat another Johan and this Johan begat yet another Johan and this Johan begat my great-great-grandfather Mathew, whose grave I visited last Thursday.


Another of Mathew Luckenbill's great-great-grandsons (via Mathew's son Ray and then Ray's son, Rex) is named Ted.  He was born about five months before me.  In the late fifties Ted Luckenbill was a basketball star at Elkhart Central High School in Elkhart, Indiana; if I remember correctly he led his team to the Indiana state finals.  After a college career at the University of Houston, he was drafted by the Philadelphia Warriors and has gone down in sports history as a teammate of Wilt Chamberlain when, on March 2, 1962, the latter scored 100 points in a game against the Knicks.


Here's the last moment's play-by-play of that game:  With just under a minute to play Chamberlain had 98 points.  He took a pass from Guy Rodgers.  The Knicks, loathe to go down in history as the team that gave up 100 points to a single player, quintuple-teamed him.  Chamberlain still got a shot off but missed.  Ted Luckenbill pulled down the rebound and passed the ball to Chamberlain.  Again Chamberlain shot and missed.  Ted Luckenbill grabbed the rebound of this miss; this time he passed to his fellow forward Joe Ruklick.  Ruklick forewent an easy layup and alley-ooped the ball toward Chamberlain.  With 46 seconds to go, Wilt slam-dunked it.


There's your hundred points -- thanks to Ted Luckenbill's assist to Joe Ruklick who got the assist for the record books.