A Story a Week Page 3

  *

  He'd first met Joe Mono on the West End Line. Ernie had bunked off doing chores in the apartment, hopped on at Windsor Terrace, though it wasn't the nearest stop. A weedy, Hispanic-looking guy had hopped on himself at Coney Island Avenue, near the end of the line. He was chewing tobacco. Ernie stared.

  'Wha'?' the guinea had said.

  'You like that stuff?' It kinda slipped out.

  The chewing stopped, 'it's American, ain't it?'

  'In Brooklyn?' Ernie caught his breath. The guinea looked tough, maybe he had a knife?

  He laughed and held out his hand, 'Joe Mono; my father won't let me smoke.'

  'Ernie, Ernie Gantz.'

  They got off the streetcar at the end of the line.

  'Where ya goin'?' Mono looked up at Ernie.

  'Steeplechase. Damn' shame they closed Luna, though.'

  'Too many fires'll do that.' Joe said.

  They'd spent hours wandering round the park, but not much money. A couple of dollar bills, that was all. All Ernie's.  Still , the noise and the motion and, yeah the girls. 'Course they weren't interested in two 14-year old boys, but you could look. And they did.

  The draft came at the same time, Joe and Ernie reported to the same office, Joe learned to shoot real good, Ernie drove trucks, but they both survived. They both lucked into jobs in the Navy Yard, Joe got the better job working with the asbestos. Ernie worked on a production line, assembling metal parts.

  Gantz's bottle was almost finished. He looked down at the cheap urn beside him. Thought about the day Joe and he had been laid off, five years to the day after the Navy had sold the Brooklyn Yard. They'd taken a trip down to look at the Lady Liberty.

  'Never told you, did I?' Mono'd said, looking over at the verdigris statue.

  'What, Joe?'

  'What my name means. You told me what your mom useta say.'

  'What does it mean?' Ernie had taken a slug of wine. They'd shared a bottle of T-bird that day.

  'It means monkey,' Joe had said, before beginning a coughing fit that took a while to go.

  When they'd finished the bottle, Joe had pointed over the water at the Statue,

  'Look at her, she's reachin' up to heaven. Guess that's how I'd like to get there.' Mono had said, slurring a little and short of breath.

   

  Gans picked up the urn, two black girls were running along the dock side. He checked to avoid them and went down the stone steps to the little boat. Laying the wax-sealed urn in the bottom of the boat, he picked up the oars and began to row. He looked up at the dock side. The two girls were jumping rope, he could hear a chant as he pulled on the oars and moved out towards Liberty Island,

  '3-6-9

  The goose drank wine

  the monkey chew tobacco

  on the street-car line.'

  8. International Relations.

  Nada finished polishing the glass. Shook the cloth in Phil’s face. It would have been a playful gesture a week ago, before he’d met her daughter. Phil’s grin was glued in place by a gallon of Warsteiner beer and Yugoslavian schnapps. The lights were dim in Nada’s: the pink-lettered neon outside said ‘Treffpunkt’ at the front and ‘Meeting Point’ on the side. Nada’s could be found deep in the Ku’damm Eck, an indoor drinking precinct, with the odd shop. On the Kurfurstendamm; maybe it’s still there.

  It had been a funny night in Nada’s: Julischka, her daughter, was out of bounds for chit-chat now. No point in asking about Nada’s latest man. Her last romantic adventure was also a no-go area. There hadn’t been much else to talk about. As usual, all the other custom had been casual: people may have met here, but few stayed. Except us.

  It was after five: the last of the electro-pop had been played on the bar’s cheap stereo; Howard Jones had given way to reels and wailing from somewhere round Zagreb. It was the signal to drink up and leave, bat-blind in the dawn. Unless, of course, you were favoured guests, foot up on the rail at the Stammtisch.

  ‘Reckon we’d better go…’ I said jerking my head towards Phil.

  ‘Aye, he’s cocked it up alright… haha…’ Jock slurred a little.

  ‘Very funny: I’m surprised she let us use the table.’

  ‘ You’re no’ wrong. Phil’s awfy gubbed, eh?’

  ‘Feeling guilty, I bet’.

  I asked for the bill. Only in Berlin; a rootless Brit speaking fractured German to a Yugoslavian emigrée. She’d be a Bosnian Serb nowadays. Berlin was full of ‘Balkan’ restaurants, Yugoslav run bars -and clip-joints. Phil had complained one night in the Elephant Bar before the cabaret; a whore had hit him, he’d said, to a very large man with a shaven head and a silver-coloured front tooth.

  'What you do?' The man had asked, his English as good as his German.

  'Nothing, nothing,' Phil had protested, 'I only asked her what part of Balkania she was from.'

  Maybe the heavy’d just decided against beating up someone already brain-damaged; he’d given an angry growl and thrown all of us out.

  Nada offered one for the road; a Bismarck. A powerful schnapps she saved for special occasions. Like Phil’s birthday, six months ago.

  The big galoot had got comatose on it: Nada had taken him home. Next days off, in the early evening, I’d asked her what went on.

  -‘Nichevo, nichts, nothing’ the smile had spread across her face, making her look 30-ish – not forty something.

  -‘What? What’s the joke?’

  ‘First the British sink the Bismarck… then the Bismarck sink the British!’

  She’d exploded with laughter. Tears rolling; the years falling off her as they did.

  She was an attractive woman; twenty years older than all of us; me, Jock and Phil. The offer of a schnapps for the road seemed genuine.

  Maybe Phil hadn’t queered the pitch after all. Nada’s brown eyes were blackly unreadable in the crepuscular gloom of the bar. I accepted the drinks for all of us.

  ‘He’s had enough! Just you.’ She hissed.

  Phil didn’t notice. The grin stayed, but he wasn’t there. His body could have followed his mind and left us with the Cheshire teeth gleaming. Nada’s lips were taut, every movement was accompanied by a toss of her black hair. Glasses clattered onto the shelves. Her heels machine gunned across the tiles behind the bar. I knew where she was aiming.

  We should all have named Nada as a ‘foreign contact’. Any foreign national you met more than once had to be declared to the correct authorities. I’d never have had time to go to work. Anyway, checking up on us gave the men in the sports jackets and brogues something to do. While they missed the real spies in the next door office at the base headquarters.

  Jock eyed this one last drink warily, as if suspecting a mickey. That was ludicrous; we were on the Ku’damm not in Kreuzberg. I raised my glass.

  ‘Zdorovye, Nada!’ I tossed it off in the Slavic style, pretended to throw the glass, before carefully setting it on the copper bar-top. She didn’t return the toast. Unusual, but not unexpected in the circumstances.

  ‘Let us buy you something, Nada.’ I suggested.

  ‘You’ll take a whiskey, aye!’ said Jock, who never touched the stuff. ‘You’ve the Talisker away up there.’ Thereby proving he could read and bluff at the same time. Jock was always the most reluctant to leave this bar. After the night of Phil’s birthday Jock hadn’t spoken to him for a week. It had been quiet in Jock's car on the way to work. I’d felt like a SALT talks interpreter, a go-between for the irreconcilable.

  -‘Take him home,’ she couldn’t say his name.

  -‘Of course we will’. We chorused, anxious to placate.

  -‘Don’t come back, not with him.’

  She hawked, and spat with vigour on the gleaming copper, in front of the oblivious Phil.

  9. Café Chani

  Tuesdays and Thursdays I have a class at 9 a.m. I teach Ysabel. We shave an hour off her tour of duty in her parents’ bathroom and kitchen centre on a side-road into the town. She’s on her own in the sh
op all day. Like most Andalucians she has a flexible concept of punctuality.  I, typically, arrive more than 5 minutes earlier: taking into account Ysabel’s ten-minute tardiness, this means I have about  15 minutes to spare. Sometimes I use it to have coffee in Café Chani about 200 metres away.

  I take my place among the builders , bankers and bums lining the bar inside. The owner cocks an eyebrow  at me and nails my order, although  I come in for about 5 minutes a day 5 times a month maximum.  My poison is ‘una nube doble grande’ – milky coffee with two shots of expresso:  I don’t care what Starbucks’ call it. The Coínos to my left and right order un café solo – an expresso as black as the Devil’s heart – a shot of anis and a glass of tap water. This order repeats most of the way down the line. One old chap with a face as lined as an autumn leaf in the gutter orders ColaCao: a chocolatey drink that the Andalucian kids are reared on.  This man looks at the clear glasses of spirit in front of the men alongside him, while his ColaCao cools.

  The banter is difficult to follow, but I usually try. The owner is a woman, about 40 maybe, although I find it hard to tell with the Andalucians.  She gives better than she gets and I think she must have been doing this for a long time, because she always gets the last word and the customers keep coming back.

  There are women customers.  They sit outside and smoke if they are Spanish, or they sit at tables eating fry-ups and squawking if they are English.

  What I like best about this café are the packets of sugar. On the reverse side of each one there is a quotation, perhaps from Marquez, or Lorca or maybe Coelho. They are usually philosophical in tone, they might be anything from a quote from Cervantes’ Quixote to a snatch of obscure verse. I give a wry smile as I read them and watch the anis glasses being drained of their last drop.

  10. Weather Report

  I’d been sent up on the roof to do a weather recce. They did that to all the new people, ‘Get the keys, Airman – or Airwoman, it was 1982 – up on the roof, take a pencil and paper. We need a weather report. Are those Sovs going to fly today or not? Your stand-down depends on it.’ The officer handed me a pair of binos. I nodded and kept my smirk inside. I snatched a log-pad from one of the ‘live’ positions. Jock was just about to insert the carbons and fill in the headers, he shouted ‘Hey!’ and I told him to fuck off.

  It was a really beautiful day. The sky was as blue as the underside of a Mig-25. To the north I could see a faint contrail dissipating, ready to fool people into believing it was a mare’s tail cloud. From the rooftop, between the giant globes and the phallus which gave the listening station its nickname, you could see the whole of the city. East and West. All the tit-for-tat landmarks,like  the Funkturm and its Ostberliner counterpart. I fancied I could see the Brandenburg and the wide avenue of Unter den Linden on the other side. Perhaps I could, although I couldn’t foresee a time when I would ever walk down it.

  The wind was from the east, I was on the highest hill in the city. The Americans had bulldozed ruins into a big pile and put Teufelsberg listening post on it just after the war. A phallic salute to the Russians who had almost beaten the Allies to Berlin.  I looked down and saw the green, luscious Grünewald. My first trip up to work had been disrupted by a wild boar running in front of the shift bus. We’d just passed the Grunewald S-Bahn station when it ran out of the forest. I’d been thinking about Platform 17 and the hundreds and thousands who left for Auschwitz without a return ticket. I scanned for the S-Bahn with the binos. Then I did a 360, stopping at Wannsee, watching one of a cruise boat crew mopping and cleaning the decks for another day showing the tourists round beautiful Berlin. My boat trip had been 2 days after my arrival, since I’d taken my embarkation leave at the business end. The guide didn’t point out the beautiful building on Am Groβen Wannsee where the Final Solution had been dryly debated like some Pan-European economic policy.

  The binoculars swung to the Mercedes Building, over by the Blue Church and I felt a shiver not entirely due to the wind.

  Later, I took a seat on a concrete block. I filled 10 pages of the log pad with the longest weather reconnaissance report I could come up with. Eventually someone – a Corporal, just in case, I think – was sent up to bring me down.

  ‘Finished?’ He asked.

  ‘Yes, Corporal!’  I replied.

  He blushed,  he was no older than I was.

  We returned to the set room. Nothing much was going on. I gave the officer my report.

  He started to laugh, but stopped suddenly when he realised he couldn’t read the Russian.

  11. On the Roadkill, with Jack (and Bill and Neal)

  Got up this morning. Jottify for me. Checked out the writing, good stuff, cool stuff. Gonna lay down some curlicues and descenders on the paper, with my trusty Remington. Damn! Ain't I punctuated already?  No prize for this effort, says Mr Cassady! Maybe I'll make like Bill and take myself in hand until the Pure Electric O. Should've called them (and maybe me) the Beat-off Generation. Coffee. Walked the dogs after the getting up thing. Were those guys so domesticated?

  Idon'tthinkso.

  Gotta have coffee. The only thing the Beats and I have in common is the lizards. Still, Jack had the mojo, why not follow his advice?

  Spontane – spontay- spontai – spontaneous prose. How spontaneous is that, man?

  Okay, number one… “scribbled notebooks”, yup. Got them, can't read them though. “Wild typewritten pages”? Listen, Ghost of Jack – I lied about the Remington. I've got an obsolete computer. You'd have loved it… maybe. (Don't tell anyone, it kills the spont- spontan: the noun related to that word up there). Well, ok, it's for my (yr) own joy – nobody else likes it, anyway.

  Two: “Submissive to everything, open, listening”. Hell, Jack you sound like a goddamn swinger! Here in Southern Spain you don't want to contemplate that: Bingo wings and beer bellies. Uh-uh.

  "Never try to get drunk outside yr own house"? Whattahellya talkin' about Jack? Never try to get out of the house before you're drunk, maybe. All the same, gotta go out and meet (other) drunks, who you going to write about, else?

  “Be in love with yr life”. A misprint? Don't think so, after all Bill shot Joan, buddy. Hmm… in love with my life? Parts of it, maybe.

  “Something that you feel will find its own form”. Well, duh, this is just aping yours, Uncle Jack. Why'd I start this, this ain't a normal day for me. Except, of course, I'm wasting time writing crap.

  Six. “Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind”. Six is a lucky number, as in you'll be damn' lucky if you know what the hell that means, I sure don't. Be sane geniusdevil of the soul. Hell, I can make this up too, Jack.

  Next. “Blow as deep as you want to blow “. Mr K, you have genito-oral issues. You still anally retentive up there in writer heaven?

  “Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind.' Hell, I'm really glad you're dead, Jackie-O. We could fall out and I wouldn't trust ya with guns in the house. Reckon I'll just write what I want off the top of my head, if that's ok with you.

  Number nine: “The unspeakable visions of the individual”. Hey, you are a pervert. And I ain't writing mine, not even here on jottify, my man.

  This is a beauty, Mr Kerr-oooh-ack. “No time for poetry but exactly what is”. No idea what you talk about but roughly why do? That sounds like you chose the wrong door at reception, and nothing to do with something that rhymes with that, I gotta say.

  “Visionary tics shivering in the chest”. Hey Beat Boy! That's crazier than the lizards. What do you mean what lizards? You mean you didn't  see lizards? What kind of Junkies were you and Bill? Still, insect prophets in side a treasure-filled box, you da man!

  “In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you”. Aw.. c'mon. It's a cup of coffee in front of me, not Bill's Steely Dan. I'm gonna get famous writing about a java?

  Unlucky 13: “Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition” U-huh. Yep, sound advice Jottify-ers and I'll see you in the soup kitchens when we've spent the money we
earn from writing. Listen, Ghost of Jack, I like you and all, but y'know… I'd just like to get something  published.

  “Like Proust be an old  of time”. What's that smell? Sponge cake? Naww… hash brownies.

  Half way. Have you had enough yet? “Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog”. InthebeginningwasthewormandthewormwasGod. Pshaw!!! I like pshaw, I don't think you'll find it in On The Road.

  Downhill now, 16 hmm… glad we've reached 16, now it's legal! “The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye”. My eye! That's eyewash – reckon you boys were just interested in the Jap's eye, not the third, myself. 

  “Write in recollection and amazement for yourself”. Way to go, good for your friend Mr Old Bull Lee! Only, teensy-weensy itsy bitsy yellow polka-dot bikini-sized quibble. How about some amazement for the reader, huh?

  We're all grown-up now, we're at number 18: “Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea”. Are you taking the pith, Jacko?  Throw me a goddamn' lifebelt, Moondog!

  “Accept loss forever.” Okay, I'll do that, but less of the Hallmark, Jack-Be-Nimble, what the hell has that got to do with resolving the plothole in my novel, tellmethatwhydontcha?

  Saved a good one for 20, dincha? “Believe in the holy contour of life.”  Yeah, right. Did you join the Moonies, before you went?

  21 today. (It is still today, isn't it? I started writing today, but this stuff is mind-expanding, I now have no concept of time. Nor do you, if you're still reading). “Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind”. Now I don't want an argument J-fucking-K, but goddamn' if it don't seem to me,if it's a flow intact in mind, I won't need a struggle of any kind. There, look whatcha made me do! Man, I h a t e poetry.

  That majoun was strong stuff… hey! Only one letter more and we got majnoun… that's arabic for mad. I think one of Bill's Moroccan boys wrote this one. “Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better”. 

  “Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning”. I can't remember what year it is now. This was supposed to be about a typical day, I could follow all this advice but I don't think I'd ever write again. (“Good!” Ed.).

   

  “No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge”. Dignity? Dignity! Oh, man.

  “Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it.” Yr exact pictures. He'd have loved txtspk, Jacky-Boy, for sure. He's saved two key-strokes. Did he have a Remingtn, an Livetti, an Nderwd?

  “Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form”. That's high-concept thinking, that is.

  “In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness.” Mr Kerouac, I'm losing the will to live, and so are the people reading this. Did you do the cut-ups thing? Any codfish bolthole in the analysis, you know? 

  Nearly home. “Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better”. From under what? The influence? Yeah, the crazier the better, got that one “write”, brother.

  El penultimo, the last drink you buy in a Spanish bar. Never buy the last, no-one wants to invite Death to the party. Anyway, “You're a Genius all the time”. Thank you Mr K, but no, I'm not.

  30! Thank God. Shit, how appropriate. “Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven”. Not me, Jack. Thanks for the advice, but no thanks.

  But thanks for side-tracking me. Why would I write about a typical day? Who'd read it? Thanks for making me write something. There's a cold beer waiting for me on a copper-topped bar. Salud. 

  https://www.poetspath.com ransmissions/messages/kerouac.html

  12. Tug of War

  Jiddah seems closer. A yellow crescent in a damask sky, looming large. Khalil can't work this out: Azimov's Tug of War formula* clearly shows that Jiddah will one day escape Medina and head for Sol.  Any boy of 10 knows this. The Madrassahs teach this and other things that good Muslims need to know.  Today, Omar Bin Jadeed taught the boys about the Allah Particle. He wrote the other name in the air with his finger. The strange script moved in the wrong direction. From Shaitan to Allah, instead of the reverse. Khalil remembers the pain from the strap. Some questions are discouraged in the Madrassah Jafar Al Sadiq. Even so, Khalil thinks the word of Allah should travel from evil to good, left to right. The outcome is important, not the starting point, after all.

  Khalil wishes he could ask Jasmeen about such things, as he used to do. Jasmeen is in Purdah now. On the other side of the planet. She will only return when she is a mother. Khalil is no fool, he has heard whispers of old men, he knows that Purdah takes women away from men. How do they come back with babies?

  History is an unpopular class in the Madrassah. Teachers are careful to refer to the New Hijra. Words like exile and banishment are whispered far from the walls of the school. Only two scientists boarded the Spaceliner. 10,000 men, women and children were launched to a prison planet on the far side of the sky. Few mechanical skills accompanied the teachers and their families. The Spaceliner, 'Good Riddance' is  a site of interest out in the Empty Quarter. The planet's madrassah's make a trip annually to see the rusting hulk. Khalil was surprised so much remained after 250 years.

  Particle Physics are a waste of time, Khalil's friend Usama says. Astronomy is most important on Mecca. How else to ascertain Qibla? Maybe so, Khalil tells Usama in their not infrequent arguments, but what about knowledge for knowledge's sake? Usama calls this dangerous thinking. Thinking which caused the New Hijra. Usama stood below Abu Bakr's statue in the square only last week. About 20 boys from the school listening, rapt by the 12 year olds words. Khalil's other favourite subject at the Madrassah is English, that's why he knows that rapt is close to rapture. Only two boys take English now. Usama's father controls the Madrassah's Waqf. Khalil has heard that they won't teach it from next year. Or particle physics. Usama's father believes the time better spent on Qu'ranic studies.

  The teacher of Particle Physics has objected to this;  on the grounds that the faithful cannot return to Mecca if they do not master Space Travel. Khalil secretly agrees with the teacher, but then a boy should respect his father. It is a lucky boy who can admire him too.