Alabaster Christ: A Mini-Novella
Breakfast With Paul Newman
“I had this weird dream this morning,” he said, spooning sugar into his coffee. “It was just before I woke up.”
She spoke through a mouthful of hot cereal. “What was it?” She wiped a dribble of oatmeal from the crack of her mouth with the hem of her cotton bath robe.
“It was about Paul Newman.” He stirred his coffee thoughtfully, staring at a small burn hole in the dining room tablecloth. “There was this thing on the CNN ticker last night that said his spokesman denied newspaper reports that he’s in ailing health. Did you know he’s 83?”
“Jesus Christ. I always liked him.” She bit into a small triangle of grapefruit. A rivulet of pale pink acidic juice dripped down her reconstructed chin. “I met him about, I don’t know, ten years ago at that charity auction thing. You remember. Marj was involved.”
His stomach rumbled. Toast would not be enough. “In the dream I’m in this airport and there’s Paul Newman with two other people. He’s looking all dapper in a brown suit and he has an overcoat over his arm, also brown, and he has on a hat and he’s got ths nicely trimmed goatee and mustache. Brown as well. Light brown.”
There’s a new box of Cap’n Crunch in the cupboard, he suddenly remembers, or he could fry himself an egg or two. Maybe scrambled? An omlette would be too complicated with tee time less than an hour from now.
“And in the dream,” he continues, ”I’m going around telling everyone I see, ‘I just saw Paul Newman and he’s looking great! There’s nothing wrong with him.’ I was so damn happy he looked so good.”
He took a sip of his coffee and busied himself buttering his toast. Bacon, he thought, might be a good idea, though he was already considering having the bacon cheeseburger at the golf course snack shack for lunch this afternoon. Is it possible to have too much pork? He wasn’t sure but he didn’t want to test the theory, not with his cholesterol and blood pressure problems.
“That’s it?” she said, picking grapefruit skin out of her teeth. “That’s the whole dream?”
“That’s it. What d’you think it means?” He ravenously considered her grapefruit.
“That you’re queer for Paul Newman?” she ventured.
Alabaster Christ
Poe was drunk again. The words wiggled and swam on the page like agitated tadpoles. He pinched the bridge of his nose and shut his rheumy eyes for a moment but when he opened them again the vowels, consonants, quotation marks, periods and commas, the principal carriers of meaning in a book, were reduced to ink-colored mud splattered on the yellowing page with a trowel.
Poe reached for the silver flask in the pocket of his raincoat but suddenly remembered that it was empty, drained of all of its delicious, amber-colored embalming fluid hours ago, shortly after eating an Egg McMuffin which he couldn’t keep down. “Embalming fluid” was how his old man used to refer to Kentucky bourbon. Sour mash.
“Gonna have a little after-dinner embalming fluid,” he would say, pushing his bulk away from the supper table and making his way to the china cabinet where the bourbon was stored. Never for long, though. Dad would go through a quart every other day, leaving the empty bottle in the cabinet until he replaced it with a fresh one. No one was surprised when he died of cirrhosis at the age of fifty-three. He was buried in the only suit he owned, a slate gray affair he purchased at the Mervyn’s in the mall so he would look properly solemn and respectful when he attended his mother’s funeral.
Poe closed the book and sadly returned it to its proper place on the shelf. He needed a refill on his embalming fluid and figured there must be a liquor store somewhere within a few blocks of the library. He shuffled past the front desk under the watchful eye of a security guard. When did they start needing guards in libraries? he wondered. Dangerous people don’t go to libraries. Or do they? Poe remembered a doctor in Fresno who once told him that he was a danger to himself. That doctor was the reason he fled from Fresno in such a damn hurry, leaving behind two cats, a Collie that was blind in one eye, and a mountain of debt that had threatened to crush him to death.
Poe staggered down the front steps of the library, patted the gray stone lion that rested at the foot of the stairs, and ambled along the rain-slickened sidewalk. He thought about Kerouac, the Collie he left behind, and he started to choke up. It felt like he had a stone wedged in his throat. Poe’s eyes were misty and his shoulders began to heave.
He sat down on the curb, his feet resting in the rain-swollen gutter. There were holes in the bottoms of his shoes. He didn’t care. He missed Kerouac and the weight of the sudden grief that swept over him was almost overpowering. Poe was not accustomed to experiencing emotional pain. His ex-wife, he firmly believed, took a rusty scalpel in the middle of the night and carved all of the emotion out of him, turning him into a witless drone with a two-car garage and a nine-to-five.
The hunk of curb that Poe rested on was in front of a church on California Avenue in Santa Monica. He turned to look at the architecture. It was ornate and Gothic. Roman Catholic. Poe liked Catholics. He got along with them and found them to be a worthy asset to have next to you in the foxholes of life because they had such strong spiritual conviction. He recalled a TV movie from when he was a boy. It had Martin Sheen in it and it was about a fringe order of Catholic priests in a monestary in Ireland who began saying Mass in Latin again, which really pissed off the Vatican. That was all he could recall of the movie. It was a long time ago.
In the vestibule of the church, Poe picked up a pamphlet without looking at it and slipped it into his wet pocket. He had nothing to drop in the charity box near the door. The nave of the large church was empty. No worshippers, no one with head or knee bent in penitent prayer asking God to take their cancer away or simply begging for another chance at forgiveness.
God, Poe knew, wasn’t in the forgiving business. Not his style, never has been.
Poe marveled at the beauty of the church. Fine mahogany pews. Elegant stained glass. He paused at the edge of the pulpit and gazed fixedly at the Communion table. The silver wine chalice was empty, of course. There was a ten-inch Christ on a crucifix in the middle of the table. It appeared to be alabaster. Definitely alabaster, Poe concluded after further consideration of the white and translucent sculpture, a finely granular variety of gympsum, if he remembered his Art Studies courses correctly.
“It’s Oriental alabaster,” a voice suddenly contributed. “A variety of calcite.”
The voice was small and weak, like the distant signals Poe used to get on his transistor radio when the battery was running down.
“Calcite, calcite/give me your answer/truuuuue,” the voice sang. “I’m half craaaaazy/all for the love of yooooooou!”
It was coming from the alabaster Christ on the Communion table. The small mouth was moving and one slim finger on a crucified hand was tapping to the tune it was singing.
“It won’t be a stylish marriage!” The statue sang. “We can’t afford a carriage/But you’ll look sweeeeet/Upon the seat/of a crucified Christ or two!”
Two small alabaster eyes rolled and considered Poe, whose skin was turning a shade as white as the alabaster Christ.
“Do me a favor, Poe. Do me a favor, Poe, my boy, my man, my homie, my undergraduate of misery and sole friend in the world. You just gots to do me a favor, Poe.”
“What do you want?” Poe whispered. He was shaking.
“Go out there and tell them the truth, Poe. The truth shall make them pee. You like that? A variation on ‘the truth shall set them free’? Poe, Poe, Poe, you have lost your sense of humor. You want to hear a secret, Poe? I’ll tell you something that nobody knows. Classified information, as they say. Top secret stuff. On the hush-hush. The Big Scoop. Jesus Christ Confidential.”
Poe backed away from the table. He held out a trembling hand in rejection.
“Here it is, Poe. Listen up. It wasn’t the Romans that killed me, Poe boy. Are you listening? It wasn’t the Romans. It was the CIA, Poe! It was a vast conspiracy, Poe! You’ve gotta listen to me, Poe!”
And then it began singing again in that small voice.
“Stop!/Oh yes/Wait a minute, Mr. Postmannnnnnn!”
Poe bolted down the aisle in his wet shoes. Just before he passed into the vestibule, Poe heard the alabaster Christ scream out, “You’re not alone, Poe! There’s a lot of people like you in the world! Good luck with that!”
Emily Writes Bad Poetry
Emily had no shortage of complaints about what L.A. had become.
“But what really gets me going,” she would tell anyone who would listen, which was usually bartenders, “What really pisses me off is anywhere you go in Southern California — well, I don’t know about South Central and East L.A. ’cause I don’t go there but I’m sure it’s no different — is the death, the absolute fucking death, of swanky little cocktail lounges and friendly neighborhood bars. I mean, what’s up with that? I’ll tell you what’s up with that. One word: Star-fucking-bucks. Starbucks! When I was a kid there were bars everywhere, all up and down the boulevards and kids could go in with their parents and sit at the bar and order a Shirley Temple or a Roy Rogers. Long gone, those days.”
Emily considered herself a serious reader. She liked to take a copy of the latest selection from Oprah’s Book Club and pass the hours away at the nice little bar in the Beverly Garland Hotel on Vineland. Emily loved living in Studio City. She rarely left the neighborhood for any reason.
“Everything is here,” she would say. “Vons, restaurants, Blockbuster, that chicken place I like on Ventura. Of course there’s not a book store anywhere in close proximity but these days I order everything online from Amazon anyway and usually only what Oprah’s top pick is. She chooses some long books, you know. Sometimes I don’t get any breathing room between the latest one and the next one.”
On an unusually chilly February afternoon, a Tuesday, Emily was found at the bar at the Beverly Garland after picking up her dry cleaning at “the place on Laurel Canyon” — she could never remember the name of the store — and grabbing a couple bags of Eukanuba at PetCo. Accompanying Emily at the bar this afternoon is a tattered paperback of John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden.” She has consumed two Bloody Marys and she’s only 32 pages into the 631 page novel. She is, naturally, frustrated. These aren’t the same characters from the movie she loved all her life. Where’s Cal and Aaron?
This thing is so fucking long, she thinks, studying the cover while she sips the remains of her Bloody Mary through a red plastic straw.
“I’ll have a Heineken,” a voice at her shoulder says pleasantly.
The bartender moves off to get the beer and Emily glances at the man. A young one. Maybe 25. Smart eyes. Sharp dresser. An intelligent gaze. She guesses he’s a TV writer. They grow ‘em here, she always says.
The young man glances at the cover of the book in her hands.
“‘East of Eden’,” he says with a shy smile. “Great book, overrated movie.”
She didn’t have to feign interest. “You really think so? About the movie?”
“Well, sure, it helped to cement James Dean’s legend but as a Hollywood adaptation of a book it’s a travesty. They only used the last third of the book.”
“The last third?” Emily’s eyebrows arched and practically leaped off her forehead.
“Yep.”
She decided then and there not to finish the book, not if it was going to take 400-some pages to get to the only part she was interested in. After the young man took his beer and joined a table of friends, Emily was suddenly seized by inspiration. She fumbled for a pen in her oversized handbag, Emily always carried a Pilot Precise Rolling Ball, and grabbing a cocktail napkin, she wrote the words as they came to her:
Knowing stares
Glowing glares
Embers in the fire
Of desire
She examined what she wrote. Not bad, she thought, a good start. When she got home tonight she would whip it into shape and have something good enough to post on the website of one of the internet poetry groups she belonged to. She also made a mental note to rethink the value of Oprah Winfrey’s influence on her life.
Poe Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
Dr. Miller was 72 years old and retired from psychiatry for half a decade. His life was simple in his golden years. Breakfast and dinner at home with Miriam, lunch at the clubhouse. He played golf five days a week. The other two days, Mondays and Wednesdays, were spent in volunteer service at the County Mental Health Services in Venice Beach.
Dr. Miller enjoyed the 16-mile drive from his modest but upscale home in woodsy Toluca Lake to the gritty little clinic on Venice Boulevard. He always took surface streets, the same route every Monday and Wednesday: Riverside Drive to Pass Avenue, checking out the new billboards on the exterior walls of the old Warner Brothers Studios, then up Barham Boulevard, skirting the western edge of the Universal Studios back lot, south through the Cahuenga Pass with the Hollywood Bowl on his right, then through Hollywood via Highland and LaBrea, right on Venice and LaBrea and he was almost there. At this point in his drive he always rolled down the window at a red light and inhaled the clean, soothing sea air of Venice Beach.
One foggy Wednesday morning Dr. Miller was perplexed and preoccupied in thought during his routine drive, so otherwise mentally absent that he almost caused three accidents. A teenager in a Hummer leaned out a window and shouted at him.
“Get off the road, old man!”
That simply compounded the issue that was troubling Dr. Miller. Paul Newman is an old man now, he thought, older than me. Perhaps that’s the answer. The problem was still gnawing at him, hammering away like a woodpecker in his skull, when he entered the clinic from the employees entrance in the rear of the squat concrete bunker with bars in the windows to prevent break-ins.
Louise, the retired welfare worker from Arizona who volunteered as intake nurse three days a week, could see that something was wrong right away. She had known and worked with Dr. Miller for three years and felt she knew him well. Dr. Miller agreed; in fact sometimes Louise knew him better than his own wife and that truth suddenly complicated the matter even more.
“I had the damndest dream this morning, Louise,” he began, shaking cheap powdered creamer into a styrofoam cup of lukewarm coffee. “It was about Paul Newman.”
“I hear he’s not doing well.” She sighed. “I always did like him.”
“Everybody likes Paul Newman,” Dr. Miller said impatiently. “That’s not the point, Louise. The point is I was unable to analyze my own dream. Me. A psychiatric specialist for forty years. I had to ask my own wife what my dream meant.”
“And?”
“She didn’t have a clue! And why should she? Miriam’s never been anything more than a housewife. The only intellectual stimulation she gets is at her bridge club and there all they talk about is who’s boning who in Ethiopia to provide Brad and Angelina with their next baby.”
Louise laughed. “Look, Doc, it was probably just a meaningless dream, whatever it was. I don’t really care to pry for details.”
“If it was meaningless,” he said emphatically, wagging a finger in front of her face, “why did I remember it when I woke? I never remember my dreams. Never.”
“Was it … homoerotic in nature?”
“No!” Dr. Miller bellowed, loud enough to cause a collective flinch among the junkies and psychotics dozing in the waiting room of the clinic. “And I thought you weren’t going to pry!”
Louise smiled and shook her head. Some days were like this but she was inwardly worried that episodes such as this were increasing in frequency. She directed the doctor to Exam Room One where she said “a most interesting case” awaited him. She provided no other details.
When Dr. Miller entered the exam room he found a wild hulk of a man pressed into a folding chair. Two hundred and fifty pounds, much of it muscle. Dirt-streaked, unkempt black hair. Eyes wild and excited and then suddenly fixated before going back to wild and excited again. Filthy clothing, mud-caked jeans, a torn T-shirt under a heavy green Army fatigue jacket. Dr. Miller placed him in his mid-forties.
“I’m Dr. Miller,” he said cautiously, keeping both hands clasped behind his back in a nonthreatening gesture. Psychotics, he once told Louise, “are usually easy to deal with if you just don’t show fear.” He noticed that there was no chart for this patient hanging in the plexiglass tray on the back of the door.
The patient simply glared at him through hooded lids.
“Is your first name Henry?” the patient suddenly said in a low, gravelly voice.
“No.” Dr. Miller chuckled.
“I like Henry Miller. I think. Tropical Something –”
Dr. Miller relaxed a little. “‘Tropic of Cancer’, I believe, is what you’re searching for.”
“And ‘Tropic of Capricorn’!” the patient blurted. “I was testing you. I wanted to see if you knew.”
“Well, I guess you got me. What seems to be the problem today?” He remembered the missing chart. “And why don’t we have any information on you?”
“Don’t have any. No ID or nothing like that.”
“No drivers license?” the doctor said.
“No drivers license, no ID, no wallet, no money.”
Dr. Miller settled his tired bones onto a metal chair.
“Do you have a name?”
“Poe.”
“Poe?”
“Poe. P-O-E. As in Edgar Allen.”
“Is that a first name or last name?”
Poe shrugged his shoulders. “It’s my name.”
“Are you experiencing feelings of amnesia?”
Poe smiled softly. “No. I remember what I want to.”
“Then you would certainly remember that Poe cannot be your full name.”
Poe folded his large hands into his lap. “If that was something I would choose to remember, yes. Are you going to help me?”
“You have to tell me what’s wrong first, Poe.” He laughed genially. “That’s how it works. You tell me what’s wrong and I see what I can do to help.”
Poe paused and studied the kind old doctor sitting across from him. The man was sitting, elbows resting on bony knees, relaxed. He was not afraid of Poe and Poe admired that.
“I have a mental illness,” Poe confessed.
“Have you been professionally diagnosed?”
“No. Yes. I mean, I don’t remember. Maybe. I was in the library yesterday morning. Trying to read.”
Dr. Miller could smell the alcohol seeping out of the man’s pores but he didn’t seem intoxicated.
“You wanna know what I was reading?”
“Is it important to your medical history?”
“No, it’s just funny. ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’. I wouldn’t know if it’s a good book because suddenly I couldn’t read. The words were a jumble, a big mess and I’d had some embalming fluid — that’s what my Dad used to call it — bourbon, I mean, but I wasn’t drunk. I swear to you I wasn’t drunk. It was like the words turned to liquid.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I left the library to get some more bourbon, okay? And then I started thinking about my old dog Kerouac and that got me really upset so I went into that church — the one over there, in Santa Monica, the Catholic deal on, I think, California Street. You know the one?”
Dr. Miller nodded.
“So I went in there and I was just standing there minding my own business and this statue of Jesus — this statue of Jesus starts talking to me. I mean, clear words, little statue lips moving and everything. It was so real, Dr. Miller, that I thought there was no way I could be hallucinating but, hell, statues of Jesus don’t talk, if you think about it logically, so I had to be hallucinating, right?”
“Do you use illegal narcotics, Poe?”
“No! A man in my condition? God. Keep it real, Henry.”
“What ‘condition’ are you referring to?”
“Who am I?” Poe said, locking eyes with the old psychiatrist. Dr. Miller didn’t like what he saw there. “No ID. No home. No money. Just the books in the library during the day and sleeping on the beach at night. So, who the fuck am I? I have some ideas. I have some memories. And, no, I don’t fucking have amnesia. You know what I’m like? Huh? Ever read Beckett, Doctor? Samuel Beckett? Have you?”
Dr. Miller had to think for a moment. “No, I don’t believe I have, Poe.”
“I’m like a character in search of a plot. I already have a little bit of backstory, what I care to remember, but I just need a plot to insert myself into. Does that make sense?”
“Poe,” Dr. Miller said evenly. “I don’t know what I can do for you. I can’t even dispense anti-anxiety meds to you if you don’t have any identification.”
“See, that’s the thing. We don’t know if my character even needs meds, do we? Is my character really mentally ill or is he someone lost looking for something — not something to go back to but something ahead. Out there. In the distance. Maybe? Perhaps?”
After Poe left the clinic, slouching his shoulders all the way to the front door, Louise entered the exam room and found Dr. Miller still in the chair, his gaze locked on the barred window with alarm sensors.
“What was his story?”
Dr. Miller drew a palm across his weary face. “Just another one whose wiring has come loose, Louise.”
“The world’s full of ‘em, ’specially here in Venice.”
Dr. Miller rose and pushed a palm against his hip bone as sciatic pain radiated down his leg. “Guys like this, they worry me, though. To be less than clinical about it, Louise, he was crazy as bat shit and he knew it but he’s totally imploded, completely surrendered to it. But there’s a part of him still reaching out for help.”
He walked over to the exam room sink, shrinking into the shadows.
“That takes courage,” Dr. Miller said. He poured water from the tap into a paper cup. “I’ve been reading a lot lately.”
“Yes, you mentioned that a few days ago,” Louise said in a halting voice. She was worried about him. He seemed distant, depressed, preoccupied.
“Been reading Updike,” he said after swallowing the water. “East coast guy. I avoided east coast authors most of my life, their disdain for L.A. leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but Updike, surpisingly, I like. Anyway, it was something he wrote in this book I was reading the other night. I copied it down in a looseleaf but I’ve committed it to memory now, guess I’m still a little sharp: ‘The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun’s just started’.”
“Sounds like you need some lighter reading fare,” Louise suggested.
“Yes,” Dr. Miller agreed, pressing a palm into the small of his back again. “And if I could just figure out what that damn Paul Newman dream means.”
West of Westport
”Who are you bringing to bed tonight?” Emily’s mother would ask every night at eleven o’clock sharp.Emily’s father would rise majestically from his Barcalounger in front of the TV set and almost always announce, “I believe I’ll bring Poe to bed tonight, dear.”
Mother and Father would then trundle off to the master bedroom in the back of the house — with a splendid view of the never-used swimming pool in the back yard — and she would settle in to watch The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson while he read his beloved Edgar Allan Poe until he fell asleep. Poe was the only author Fred Langstrom would read and he pored over the same dog-eared books repeatedly right up until the day he died.
“That’s called monomania,” Emily’s former analyst Dr. Miller, had explained to her once. “It’s an obsessive interest in a single thing or idea.
“Hmmm. That would make sense,” Emily said with her best profound grin. “Dad always was a sorta single-issue guy: a baloney sandwich every day for lunch — every day — and he would only buy Cadillacs, always voted Republican even when he didn’t care for the candidates. He went to the same barber for thirty years until that guy, Mr. Shapiro, died and then Dad took to cutting his own hair or he’d have Mom do it.”
Emily lay in bed one night pondering her father’s monomania, thoughts spurred on by a movie she was watching on Turner Classic Movies. It was an old one from the 60s, “The Pit and the Pendulum” with Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, and a very young Jack Nicholson. Emily thought the name of Nicholson’s character, Rexford Bedlo, was just about the dumbest name she had ever heard and was probably not a character in Poe’s story, she surmised, because Poe was a genius, Father never tired of telling her so, and a genius would’ve invented a better name than Rexford Bedlo.
She was thinking of using monomania as a theme for her offering at the monthly meeting of the Studio City Women’s Poetry Guild (SCWPG) the following Monday. She was still pissed off at Guild President Madeline Yamazaki for moving the February meeting to the Santa Monica Library. Didn’t the stupid Jap know what a long drive it is from Studio City to Santa Monica? But Japs invented fuel-efficient cars, she figured, so what the fuck did they care how long they sat in traffic? Hey, as long as we’re not burning up too much fossil fuel and we’re getting good mileage everything is cool in the world and we can all drive from Studio City to Santa Monica when booking a conference room at the Beverly Garland Hotel just down the street would have been as easy, if not easier. Emily directed the issue to the back of her mind by remembering what her Father always said: “The Japs don’t think like white people, honey.”
Emily pawed at the nightstand for the spiral-bound journal and the Pilot Precise Rolling Ball, clawed at the book until she found a blank page, and scribbled the first couple of lines in florid red ink:
Daddy loved his Poe
And I loved my pie
Not a bad start, she thought. Emily set the journal aside so she could meditate on the theme. She believed that all good poetry came from entering into a zen-like state where the only thing the mind fixates on is the matter at hand, which, of course, would be whatever you tell it to fixate on.
Emily found the clicker underneath the calico-colored bedspread and turned away from Turner Classic Movies. It was time for the late night repeat showing of “Showbiz Tonight” on CNN. She couldn’t remember what time Nancy Grace came on but the TV Guide was in the living room and she hated going into the living room at night. Too many shadows.
Paul Newman’s face came up on the TV screen. File footage, a little blurb in the upper right corner read. Emily turned up the volume because she loved Paul Newman and was alarmed that this story might be news of his passing.
The Westport County Playhouse in Westport, Connecticut, the guy on “Showbiz Tonight” was informing Emily, announced its lineup for the upcoming season last week and the roster of planned productions includes Paul Newman directing John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.”
Emily’s mouth dropped open. “Kismet,” she said aloud.
Paul Newman and John Steinbeck. How could it be anything but kismet? She had always been a huge Paul Newman fan. When she was a young girl she was a card-carrying member of the Paul Newman Fan Club, one of many worldwide, but this club, Emily recalled, was run by a plump girl in Des Moines who had some crippling form of diabetes or something like that so she had nothing better to do all day than stay home and mail out 8×10’s of Paul Newman along with the fan club newsletter.
And then there’s the Steinbeck connection. Earlier in the week Emily had embarked on an ill-advised journey inspired by Oprah Winfrey: She attempted to read Steinbeck’s way-too-long book, “East of Eden.” She couldn’t get through the novel to save her life, she readily admitted to Madeline Yamazaki two days prior over lattes at the Starbucks on Ventura Boulevard, but she saw a spark of talent there that she admired.
“You’ve never read Steinbeck?” Madeline accused with an arched eyebrow.
Very judgmental little Jap, Emily thought.
“No,” she replied icicly. “I know a lot about him, saw a fascinating A&E Biography, but I never read him.”
“You tried to start too big,” Madeline scolded. “Start smaller. Try reading ‘The Pearl’ or ‘Of Mice and Men’ first.”
“Are you trying to say ‘East of Eden’ is over my head?”
Madeline laughed. “Not big in that way, silly. Length-wise. ‘Of Mice and Men’ is just barely one hundred pages. You can read it in an hour or two.”
Just to make Madeline happy, Emily went home and ordered ‘Of Mice and Men’ from Amazon after agonizing for an hour over which copy to purchase: the Steinbeck Centennial Edition for thirteen dollars or the mass market paperback edition for a mere six bucks. In the end she reminded herself that she rarely spent the money that Father left her, so she splurged and bought the six-volume boxed set John Steinbeck Centennial Collection for fitfty-two dollars, even if it meant owning another copy of “East of Eden.” She could always give it to someone as a Christmas gift.
Emily shifted her meditation to thoughts of Steinbeck and Paul Newman as “Showbiz Tonight” droned on. It didn’t take long for inspiration to hit. She scooped up pen and journal and wrote:
There was a man from Monterey
She paused, pen over paper. What rhymes with Monterey? she wondered. Hey. Ray. Gay. Fey. Was Steinbeck gay? She didn’t think so. She scratched out what she wrote and started anew:
Paul Newman lived in Westport
Steinbeck died in New York
Far from home
She examined what she wrote and deemed it a pretty good start. The ladies at the Poetry Guild were really going to like this one, she thought, because she was going to totally immerse herself in the theme until a great poem came out the other side. Tomorrow she would get a bunch of Paul Newman DVDs from Blockbuster and when that John Steinbeck Centennial Collection arrived — which should be tomorrow, Emily figured, since she clicked the button for two-day shipping — she vowed to read every one of those books from cover to cover. Except “East of Eden.” She couldn’t go there again.
The Harlot in the Hallway
”You know what I am, Hap?” Poe said after the lingering silence when both men were baiting their lures with quaking hands and unrealiable fingers – ”Cheap wine epilepsy,” Old Hap always called it.“I am a shadow of a wound,” Poe continued, casting his fishing line from their perch at the end of the Santa Monica Pier. Poe and Hap were hoping to catch some jacksmelt or mackerel for their breakfast. How they would cook the fish once it was caught was always a troublesome matter.
“You know how a wound slowly fades away, Hap?”
“I’ve been cut before,” the wizened old man said lazily through lips parched and burned by continual exposure to the elements, particularly by the hot, sand-riddled wind that sometimes blows down at the beach. “Reckon I know what you mean by a shadow of a wound. Like a scab, you mean.”
“The wound is coming back to life, Hap. It’s reversing itself. In the last couple of days I’ve become less of a slowly-fading wound and more of a bleeding, freshly-drawn wound. Does that make sense?”
“What you’re saying,” Hap said paternally, “is that the Sero-whatchamacallit is working. Where the hell’d you get that stuff anyway? I thought the clinic doctor turned you away.”
Poe inhaled deep of the sea air. “It’s called Seroquel. I had a bottle of it stashed in a bag under that trash can, the one at the McDonald’s over on Third. I don’t know what made me remember it but I did. I was probably trying to hide it from someone.”
“Always a good idea to hide your medications when you’re living on the streets, Poe,” Hap lectured. “I’ve seen fools steal someone’s heart medication thinkin’ it would get them high. Aspirin, even.”
“Hap?” Poe said after a lingering silence. The fish were not biting today. “I think I know who I am.”
“You’re Poe!” Hap said irritably.
“I remembered last night,” Poe said dreamily. “Poe is my nickname. My name is Victor Potemkin. I think. I lived in Fresno and I had –”
Hap interjected. “Yeah, yeah. You had a dog named Kerouac and a coupla goldfish. We’ve rode this range before.”
“But my name,” Poe said excitedly. “I might’ve remembered my real name.”
“Prove it. You ain’t got no I.D.”
“You want proof?”
“I want proof, goddamnit. Just when I got used to callin’ you Poe all these months you’re now telling me I have to call you by some Russkie name. Poe suits you better.”
Poe could easily prove to Hap that he was indeed Victor Potemkin and prove it to himself at the same time. He walked briskly to the Main Library at Santa Monica Boulevard and Seventh Avenue, feeling a genuine bounce in his step for the first time in God-knows-how-long. How long had it been since he stopped taking his medications? How long had he been living on the street? Months, Hap said a few minutes ago. How many months? How did he even get here in the first place? Like many, he didn’t know the answer to those questions. But he was fairly certain that he was Victor Potemkin from Fresno, California.
*********************************
“P-O- …” His eyes nervously darted over the author’s names on the spines of the books.
Poe, Edgar Allan.
Pomidor, Bill.
Porter, Joyce.
Poe wondered who the hell Joyce Porter was, what with nineteen titles on the library shelf in the Mystery section.
Post, Melville Davisson.
And there, shouldering up to unknown Melville Davisson Post was Victor Potemkin, represented by no less than twenty slim volumes with titles like “The Sun-Drenched Suicide” and “City of Heaven, Streets of Hell.” An uncertain hand pulled one of the mystery novels off the shelf. It looked old but he didn’t think to check the copyright page; instead he flipped the book over in his hands and there, on the backcover, Poe stared at a picture of himself. A much younger man in this photo, that much was obvious, but Poe was indeed Victor Potemkin, formerly of Fresno, formerly the author of “Ripe As A Melon Gets” and “The Harlot in the Hallway.”
“I’ll be goddamned,” Poe said with a hushed gasp.
Poe looked up just as a familiar face drifted past the Mystery stacks. An old man. A worrisome look on his face. It was the doctor, Poe suddenly realized, the shrink from the Mental Health Clinic in Venice, the guy who couldn’t give Poe his meds even if Poe could remember what the meds were or what psychological malady he was being treated for. Before. Before he fled Fresno. Before he stopped being Victor Potemkin. He wanted to share this thrilling news with the doctor.
“I found my meds, I got back on them, and I know now who the hell I am!” he wanted to shout. Poe didn’t know how he was going to reclaim that life but that was another matter. Baby steps.
But when Poe caught up with the Doctor — Dr. Miller? — on the main floor of the library, the old man was listening with rapt attention outside the open door to a conference room. A sandwich board outside the door announced that within the room, the Studio City Women’s Poetry Guild was conducting some sort of shindig.
Poe leaned back in an aisle, unnoticed by Dr. Miller, and listened in on what had so captured the doctor’s attention. In the conference room, a middle-aged woman who, to Poe, looked totally insipid, stood at a lectern and announced that her name was Emily and enthusiastically told the group of twenty-or-so that she would be reading an original work titled “Paul Newman’s Eyes.” She took a long drink of water, cleared her throat, and began:
Paul Newman’s eyes
They are not a disguise
Hidden inside them is something so wise
Something so wise that causes the vanquished in me to rise
Like a river seeking its level
Or a lover meeting her devil
A quick scan of the faces in the conference room compelled Poe to dub them a lot of moronic imps, especially by the way they held on to this Emily’s every daft word, and the ladies proved his judgment sound when they wildly applauded the end of the alleged poem.
Poe shrunk into the shadows of the aisle he was loitering in and watched as Emily stood down from the lectern and headed for the exit. She looked flushed. Like she was overheated, needed some hydration, and indeed she was heading for the public drinking fountain when Dr. Miller gently grabbed her by the elbow.
“Emily?” the kind old man greeted her.
“Dr. Miller!” the bad poetess seemed genuinely pleased to see him. “My God! What’re you doing here?”
Poe fell further back into the shadows, preferring to remain unobserved, pretending to examine a book on marine biology while he listened stealthily.
“I stopped by to pick up a book after duty at the clinic,” Poe heard Dr. Miller explain.
“A biography on Paul Newman?” Emily squeaked. “How funnnnnnny. I was just reading a –”
“Yes, I know. I listened.” He smiled to conceal his lie: “It was a good poem.”
“You think? Really?”
“Funny timing, huh?” Dr. Miller said in a weak voice.
“God, I wish you were still my analyst. I can’t find anyone good since you retired. Honest to God. And I’ve shopped around. Trust me.”
Dr. Miller continued to pursue his point. “I say it’s funny because I’ve had this dream — more than once now, actually — about Paul Newman.” He chuckled nervously. “I thought that maybe reading a book about Paul Newman would help me understand the import –”
The Doctor, Poe noticed, was becoming unsure of his words.
“Symbolism,” Dr. Miller was saying as Poe picked up a book on sea mammals. “Dream symbolism. I think, though, I’ve broken it down to it’s most symbolic element. That would be brown. I just figured that out a few moments ago while I was searching for this book. In the dream Paul Newman is looking terrific for an old man, despite stories to the contrary that I heard on CNN — that’s when the dream began, you see — and I encounter him in an airport and he’s all in brown: a brown suit, brown beard with salt-and-pepper in it, and a brown overcoat and hat.”
Poe was intrigued.
“Brown?” Emily chirped. “Brown is symbolic of earth. I saw that on a History Channel special the other night! Oh, what a double coincidence this is!”
“Indeed. I guess I won’t be needing this silly book any longer.”
“No!” Emily said with an airy laugh. “Brown. Earth. Soil. It’s a death harbinger — oh my God, I finally found a use for that word; I came across it in a book a few weeks ago, looked it up and thought, ‘Emily, that’s a word you should use more often instead of saying things like ‘I had a hunch’, I mean, how stupid is that? — so, yeah, it’s a dream about death, about Paul Newman dying which, he’s 83 you know, is bound to happen sometime soon.”
Even through the books and the metal shelving, Poe could feel Dr. Miller’s discomfort growing; he bets that the doctor wishes he had never even broached the subject. With her. This woman. This bad poetess.
“Well, I really must be going,” the Doctor insisted after a momentary pause. Poe listened to their parting pleasantries. He wondered where he would sleep tonight. Tomorrow he would have to figure out how to get back to Fresno and, once there, how to reclaim what was his. Even if he didn’t want it. Anyone who could write a book with a title like “The Harlot in the Hallway”, he figured, and put his real name on the cover, must have an interesting life.
“Maybe I’m a mentally deranged alcoholic writer,” Poe said to himself with a smile as he descended the library steps. “That’s an identity that’s as good as any, maybe better than some, even.”
