SMILEY’S DICE ON THE JAMMERS

 

 

 

PIPER JO AT ROCERS

 

 Free your

 

 

mind and the rest will follow; the words from EnVogue’s latest release played all day on the radio. Every time I got in the car to hunt up listings, I heard that song.       

PIPER JO AT ROCKERS

  

  I worked in an industrial building along an industrial highway in San Diego. I shared a warehouse with twelve men, eleven of them tall, weight trained football on Sunday guys, who ate at expensive restaurants amongst a club of commercial real estate agents. They were pretty decent guys, except the partners who each had a severe case of ego malnutrition and competed for attention like two tottlers. Greg was the only short one in the bunch, and he wore a rug, manicured his nails, and surfed on the weekends. He was always talking about his Karate black belt, and how he knocked guys out. He rarely laughed and when he did he sounded like a chirping bird. Greg used to give me his wife’s unworn clothes and waited in my living room while I tried them on. It was sort of strange, but he never played the trump card and asked for anything in return.

One day in the summer of 1992 I called the office secretary.

“Gail, I’m not coming in for awhile. Will you forward my calls to my home?”

     “Are you all-right?”

     “Oh yea. I’m fine.”

“What should I tell them?”

“Tell them I’m on leave of absence.”

I lived in a little cottage house in North Park. It was all white with a picket fence and a squared grass yard where my dog played. The front room was small but the carpeting was new, so I could curl up on the rug and watch the clouds from the windows.

  

I threw my nylons and navy pumps in the garbage, and folded the business suits into boxes. I knew I wasn’t going back, but where I was headed was a throw of the dice. Mornings I ran through Balboa Park before the crowds arrived, and got to see the zoo keepers feeding the animals, and the actors going into The Old Globe Theater. I filled my senses with virgin light and morning silence; unfamiliar sensations to office workers living with florescent lighting and partition walls.  In the afternoon I lounged around in sweats watching music videos, reading magazines and dancing. A few days later, I watched some new music videos, maybe EnVogue or Bobby Brown, and tried to imitate the hip-hop moves on the carpet. It was like watching a cat in the snow. I called all the dance schools, and no one was teaching hip-hop. I didn’t know back then my mother was dancer; so this impulsive and implausible scheme to start a dance troupe startled me as much as everyone I told.

  

The last lease deal I closed was for a group of soccer players from Jamaica. They needed a space to open a reggae dance club. I found a disheveled warehouse and struck a deal for them. They fixed up the place themselves; with colored lights, and some tables, but Rockers was really about the dancing. I walked into the club one night, and they were all doing their part; greeting customers, spinning vinyl, and serving drinks. I danced with Leroy, the leader of the group, and watched him unfold from the waist down. He danced so low to the floor, he appeared boneless.        

 “Leroy, I’m going to start a dance troupe. You guys inspired me.”

     “What kind of dance?’

     “Hip-Hop and jazz funk.”

Leroy covered his mouth with one hand and laughed.

     “What’s so funny?”

     “You’re a business woman; I didn’t know you was a dancer.”

     “Well, I took lessons a long time ago.”

     “Hip Hop?”

     “No, Jazz. I’m going to find the dancers to teach. I know they’re out there.”

     “Yea, they out there all right; lots of them.”

     “We’ll see! I’d like to use your space, pay rent of course, when you’re not open.” 

     “Well that’s all right. You don’t need to pay me.”

     I hugged him, and he shook his head. “I don’t think there’s much money in teaching hip-hop.”   

  

 At the community college I posted a sign for dancers, and observed some classes.   When I got the call from Piper, he asked me to come see him teach at the Church. I drove over  and found Piper in a little room upstairs, teaching Jazz-funk to one woman. He was tall and lanky with a smile that creased his whole jaw. He came over, shook my hand, and said, ‘How you doing?  I’m Piper.’ He wore an immaculate shield of confidence that defied his nineteen years. He moved at the intersection of Michael Jackson and James Brown. The groove spiraled through his body.

Piper Jo at Rockers.

  

“I’ll help you get it started; if you’re not a trained dancer you need help.” So Piper and I met every week and finally landed on a group that incorporated Jazz-funk, Hip-hop and Afro-Cuban. I named it United Steps Dance Productions, and the Jammers.

  

I’ll never forget the look on the partner’s faces when I told them I was starting a multicultural dance troupe. They just stared at me blankly.  Then within weeks all five of my unclosed lease deals were signed at the same time.  I walked out with enough money to live three months. That was real security in my mind. 

  

Piper and I held our first audition at Rockers.  When I opened the doors that morning, dancers were already lined up outside. They came dressed in street clothes;  wearing scarves, baseball caps, loose pants, and tank tops.  I watched them leap, kick, split, and turn inside out for the job. I knew that I was in the right spot. One dancer walked out, stood still for a moment, and then leaped into a break-dance pop-lock routine that silenced the crowd.

     “Him Piper, definitely him.” 

     ”He’s bad, yea he’s real bad.”  At the end of the auditions, Piper mocked me.  

“Lue, we can’t sign every dancer just cause they hip-hop. Anyone can do that.”

I can’t hip hop and it’s my company.”

“Yea, and you’re crazy. I swear, Lue you’re crazy.”

We agreed on pop-locker Vince-MasterJam, and Monique, a young Afro-Cuban dancer. That was the beginning. 

 

When Vince and I met, he told me he lived in Escondido.

“But that’s an hour away.”

“It’s cool, I’ll be here. Just give me the chance.”

Vince showed up twice a week at night for his class. Many times, we sat in the cold damp club, listening to music and Vince tried to teach me to pop-lock. I apologized for not having students and he looked at me, and said, “ Don’t worry Lue, will get it going on.”

  

 Our first performance was at the Red Lion Hotel. I hired a video tech to record the performance. We got a free dinner and a hundred dollars. We had a good crowd, and everyone loved them.  Afterwards in the dining room, they were talking, laughing and elbowing each other. Piper was ranting about Monique taking too much time, and Vince was telling Piper to chill because she was so talented. I sat there just listening, with a big smile on my face.

  

 The Jammers belonged to the no smoking, no drinking, no drugs group.  For the first few months, they taught on tiled floors under a leaky roof, without any heat.  But they kept coming back to teach and their dedication moved me to find a better location.  We relocated to a well-heeled Health Club downtown San Diego and the classes filled up with students, dancers, and office workers searching for a new lunch.  They came from all different races and ages. I danced with the classes and promoted our troupe. The Jammers laughed at my attempt to be a soul sister, and I laughed with them.  We were reviewed by KPBS magazine, and a photographer took pictures of us and featured us in the magazine.

  

Searching for gigs proved to be an exasperating struggle. I called department stores, festival producers, shopping centers, nightclubs, hotels and everyone had the same line, “I don’t think hip-hop is right for our clientele.”

  

When I ran out of money I took a job managing a condominium project, where I lived rent free. After a time of observing the Jammers self expression, I asked myself, what is mine?  I still refused to get on stage.  Vince used to bawl me out because I made Piper introduce the group.

 

After two years Piper moved to Los Angeles to launch his dancing career, and I let Vince take the troupe where he wanted it to go. He turned it around, adding twelve dancers and broke more ground in San Diego. Monique developed into a serious stage actress and  we all lost touch. They were the sparklers in my life; like that star you think you’ll never hold.  I left the Jammers a different woman. They put the rhythm back in my spirit and soul.  

  

 When I recently located Vincent on an Actors website, I called him right away. He is a missing link in the chain of my life. Without that adventure, I might still be imitating the kind of business woman I wasn’t. We met in Los Angeles, and watched Vince perform in a club. He kept his vision and now acts on television and video. “ Lue, now you have to find Piper.”     

It was Piper, who said to me one day after reading some of my poetry, “ Lue, you’re not a dancer. You’re a writer.”  

Any dice to throw Email: folliesls@aol.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE HURT LOCKER

For all of us that claim we honor support and appreciate the troops, take a look at what your supporting. For someone like me, who has never experienced combat, and known very few who did, I bow my head. This film is a book, a documentary, a closeup photograph and everything that it takes to get the point across. 

Katherine Bigalow is right-on.

The

JAMMERS PART TWO

ME AND MASTER JAM, AND RUDY IN LA

 San Diego was still into rage and rock and roll. The people I was calling for gigs didn’t know Hip-Hop yet.   That was too bad, because we were  having the greatest experience of our  life.  When I ran out of money I took a job managing a condominium project, where I lived rent free and had weekends and evenings for Jammers.  After a time of observing their self expression, I asked myself, where is mine?  I still refused to get on stage, Vince used to bawl me out because I made Piper introduce the group. We were good for each other, the three of us. After two years Piper moved to Los Angeles to launch his career, he had showmanship in the way he held his hands.  Vince took over the troupe and added twelve more dancers.  These two young men, they were the sparklers in my life, like that star you think you’ll never hold.  When I left the Jammers I was a different woman. They put the rhythm back in my spirit, and faith into my soul. I mean there are things a business career will never offer, you have to go into the arts for this kind of stuff.

THE JAMMERS LAUNCH

Free your mind and the rest will follow, the words from EnVogue’s latest release became a sort of mantra.

 It was a decision that came at a moment when everything else stopped making sense, except my happiness.  I tossed out the two-piece suits, and turned off the world outside. Insulated in my tiny North Park bungalow, I merged into  music and dance. During the hottest of summer days I was seated cross legged on the worn carpeting  watching MTV and flipping through magazines. 

       Imploded with music videos, magazines, and dancing;   Hip-Hop was the most exhilarating choreography around.  I watched the music videos over and over. When I searched the yellow pages for dance classes; no one was offering Hip-Hop.  With that, I thought why can’t I be the founder of a dance troupe?  

  I needed to find the  dancers to suit my concept of integrating  jazz funk, hip-hop, and Afro-Cuban  into a collage workshop.   

      Piper Jo was the first dancer to join. He came at me with everything he had; talent, faith, intelligence, and belief in this crazy white chick who wanted to hip-hop.  Piper played Miles Davis, emulated jazz-funk, and moved like Michael Jackson.  He was twenty years old and this was his first teaching job. When I asked him who taught him to dance he answered;

“Michael Jackson and James Brown. I danced in my living room every day. My mother couldn’t get me out of the house. God blessed me with this gift, and I want to share it. So if you put me in your dance troupe I guarantee, you won’t be sorry. NO, you won’t.”  

 At our first audition Piper said,  “How you expect to pick dancers, if you don’t know what to look for.  I swear Lue, you are crazy.  But don’t worry,  I’ll show you. And don’t be picking every guy out there cause he can Hip-Hop, there’s nothing to that. We want dancers with classical training.”  He was right.

“Vince Master Jam”  was a former break-dancer and studied classical dance. Vince was the coolest; he sat back and waited for his chance, unhurried, relaxed, but when the music came on, he flipped everyone out. He was thirty. Both of them belonged to the no smoking, no drinking, no drugs, group

At that first audition  I wanted to select half of the thirty some dancers that showed up.  They came dressed in street clothes, wearing scarves and bandannas.  I watched them leap, kick, split and turn inside out for the job.  I knew that I was in the right spot. Then we added Monique, a startling beauty with Afro-Cuban dance training, and a perpetual attitude of carefreeness. 

For the first few months, the Jammers taught classes under a leaky roof, on a tiled floor, without any heat.  Piper rode a bus from the other side of town to get to the building.  Vince drove an hour each way to teach one class at night. The first few months no one showed up for Vince’s Hip-Hop class.  But he kept coming back every week.  When I apologized, he said, “ That’s okay Lue. We get it going on,  they’ll show up soon– I’m sure.” 

They did show up and we moved into a well positioned Health Club downtown San Diego. The classes filled up with students, dancers, and working women looking for a new challenge. They came from all different races;  Asian, White, Hispanic and Black.  I danced with the classes and promoted our troupe. They laughed at my attempt to be a soul sister, and I laughed with them.  We were reviewed by KPBS magazine, and a photographer took photographs of us and featured the Jammers  in the magazine. People began to think I knew what I was doing. The Jammers thought I could take them places.  I pictured them on the front page of Variety, the problem was I was too early. 

THE JAMMERS KICK

In the fall of 1993, I was working for a king-sized jerk in his commercial real estate office.  Dirksen used every opportunity to remind me that I was not as successful as he was.

I was the only female in an office of twelve better suited men. My Chanel 5 was used sparingly and I dressed in navy-blue two piece suits and low-heeled pumps.  With a leather briefcase slung over my shoulder, and a HP calculator that I refused to master, I was a shrimp swimming with the sharks. On hot blue sky days I drove around San Diego searching for new listings, meeting prospects, and showing space. One eye was always drifting; scanning the horizon, museums, artists hang-outs.

I tossed out the two-piece suits, and turned off the world outside. In the next weeks my attention was drawn to music and dance. During the hottest of summer days I was seated cross legged on the worn carpeting of my little bungalow, watching MTV and flipping through magazines.

TO BE CONTINUED

 

MOON OVER A BRICK HOUSE

The throw of the dice falls this week falls on a full paper white  moon shimmering  behind a few sketchy clouds. A few million miles away, a wedding party is thumping to the music of the eighties, I think it is Lionel Richie they are playing.  A man from the party has wandered off and is stumbling down the street, waving his hands to the music. I look down from my window, and five young adults, are leaning up against the wall to the front garden, and staring up at the house. Mark, the restaurant manager is pacing back and forth on the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette, his head bent to the ground, thinking of things that matter at that moment.  The television is on, only to obstruct the music, You’re a brick house.

 The Letter, with Bette Davis plays on the old 21” fat screen, that we put in the closet, and I can refer to it, a satisfying intermission to modern living. The convergence of events, under this full moon, of discordant sounds, activity, and physical sensations, has not  shattered my composure. Just minutes before the music started, I was musing notes about my column. It is about this full moon, and how it resembles at this moment, a kinship to a full life.

It began a month ago when I decided to rearrange my life style, the abject attitude and waking to the hymn of self-defeat.  Now, sunlight spreads shadows of light across the lime green leaves and adobe walls of the neighbor. Sage Bakery has dropped off trays of flaky warm croissants to the hotel, and former body building champion, Deneilo is pushing his garden cart and planters around the corner.  He waves, “Go morning,” and I wave back. His gestures are Americanized but he does not speak English. He gestures with fingers spread wide apart, and grins as if he is about to be photographed. I am across the street, drinking my coffee, wondering how the day will unfold, as I direct it’s flow, or think I do.

That evening I was seated at a bistro bar, about to order and the woman next to me turned to me, “ Haven’t we met?”

“Yes, at La Posada. I remember.” I answered.

“I’m Kathy.”

“I’m LouLou, well, really Luellen. Taos named me LouLou.”

“I love that name, it’s so cheerful, makes you want to laugh,”

“I know. No one takes you seriously when you say, I’m LouLou.”

She laughs. “That’s good, it’s give you an edge.”

“Maybe.”

She then recalled a past evening at La Posada. One of Santa Fe’s most haughty and entertaining locals, who some know as St. Francis, started to shout at Kathy, and told her to shut up. He pounded the bar with both fists, and Kathy recoiled under the pressure of good breeding. Raul, the bartender, who had already warned St. Francis to drink his scotch not use it as artillery, raised his arms, and shouted, “OUT, AND DON’T COME BACK.YOU ARE NOT WELCOME IN MY BAR.”

I was not surprised. In a small city as Santa Fe, the watering holes are numbered, and all the horse-asses’ are talked about, even though we try not to be village idiots.

“I’m so relieved he’s not coming back. He was always groping me at the bar, using his thick tongued European poetry.” I said.

“ I know! He was such an arrogant guy.”

“ I think he was worse than what we imagined.”

“ What do you mean?”

“ Well, he said he was Swiss, and his father fought the Nazi’s, and they lost everything. I think his father was a Nazi, and they never had anything to start with.”

“ OH so do I!”

Kathy had traveled the world, and was married to a diplomat. She met the jugglers, jack-asses, and honored government officials.

We found common ground right under our fingernails. Kathy is a composer, and she likes night life as much as I do.

“ Have you been to Curazon?” I asked.

“ No.  I haven’t even heard of it. Do you want to go?”

“ Now?”

“Yes, why not? It’s still early.” 

“ Right toe.” I agreed.

We met at the entrance of the club, crammed in a body sandwich,  of what I later found out was the film group. Two men intercepted us, “Hi where are you from”? She said to the long haired European.

“Switzverland.”

“Oh, I’ve been there, I loved it,” she said.

“ I’ve been there too.” I added. Never mind that it was twenty-five years ago. 

Tied together by limited space and a slow crawl to the bar, we both hopped up on bar stools.  It was old school, old bar, old everything, except that I banished my inhibitions, and made a lot of fuss on the dance floor. 

Turned out Mr. Dave-the director-is working on a documentary  about Murder, Inc, and has a distant relative that was in the mob-or is in the mob, or something. I have a story about that, and when I opened my mouth, he turned to greet a low-cut blonde in high heels. 

I stumbled out of the party around one in the morning. The next day Kathy and I emailed. She mentioned her deceased husband, something about New Jersey, his family’s bakery, and I thought of Uncle Myron.

I  emailed Myron, and asked him if he had heard of Schachtel’s Bakery. He replied.

“ONE OF MY OLDEST AND STILL
VERY CLOSE FRIENDS IS BOB SCHACHTEL, HE IS ABE SCHACHTEL´S SON AND HIS FATHER WAS VERY CLOSE TO ABE ZWILLMAN.”  Bob is her deceased husband’s brother. Abe Zwillman was the honored leader of the New Jersey Jewish population.

You can read about him in  “Nazis of Newark,” among other history books. Kathy came by the next day with a bottle of Champagne and we talked for several hours. The next few weeks, turned around more unprecedented encounters and emancipated me from destructive mumbo-jumbo.

Last night around midnight, I picked up a black clog and tossed it down the stairs. Then I opened the window and yelled, “Shut-Up,” to the hollow vacant space between me and the rappin DJ.

The full moon is kin to my life; it is bright, and shaded by sketchy clouds of uncertainty. One day, I too shall be a million lights years from the rhapsody of rap, gangsters, fresh baked croissants, and maybe Bette Davis will be my friend. 

Any dice to throw Email: folliesls@aol.com     

 

    It began a month ago when I decided to rearrange my life style, the abject attitude and waking to the hymn of self-defeat.

Now, sunlight spreads shadows of light across the lime green leaves and adobe walls of the neighbor. Sage Bakery has dropped off trays of flaky warm croissants to the hotel, and former body building champion, Deneilo is pushing his garden cart and planters around the corner.  He waves, “Go morning,” and I wave back. His gestures are Americanized but he does not speak English. He gestures with fingers spread wide apart, and grins as if he is about to be photographed. I am across the street, drinking my coffee, wondering how the day will unfold, as I direct it’s flow, or think I do.

 

That evening I was seated at a bistro bar, about to order and the woman next to me turned to me, “ Haven’t we met?”

 

“Yes, at La Posada. I remember.” I answered.

“I’m Kathy.”

“I’m LouLou, well, really Luellen. Taos named me LouLou.”

“I love that name, it’s so cheerful, makes you want to laugh,”

“I know. No one takes you seriously when you say, I’m LouLou.”

She laughs. “That’s good, it’s give you an edge.”

“Maybe.”

She then recalled a past evening at La Posada. One of Santa Fe’s most haughty and entertaining locals, who some know as St. Francis, started to shout at Kathy, and told her to shut up. He pounded the bar with both fists, and Kathy recoiled under the pressure of good breeding. Raul, the bartender, who had already warned St. Francis to drink his scotch not use it as artillery, raised his arms, and shouted, “OUT, AND DON’T COME BACK.YOU ARE NOT WELCOME IN MY BAR.”

I was not surprised. In a small city as Santa Fe, the watering holes are numbered, and all the horse-asses’ are talked about, even though we try not to be village idiots.

“I’m so relieved he’s not coming back. He was always groping me at the bar, using his thick tongued European poetry.” I said.

“ I know! He was such an arrogant guy.”

“ I think he was worse than what we imagined.”

“ What do you mean?”

“ Well, he said he was Swiss, and his father fought the Nazi’s, and they lost everything. I think his father was a Nazi, and they never had anything to start with.”

“ OH so do I!”

Kathy had traveled the world, and was married to a diplomat. She met the jugglers, jack-asses, and honored government officials.

We found common ground right under our fingernails. Kathy is a composer, and she likes night life as much as I do.

“ Have you been to Curazon?” I asked.

“ No.  I haven’t even heard of it. Do you want to go?”

“ Now?”

“Yes, why not? It’s still early.” 

“ Right toe.” I agreed.

We met at the entrance of the club, crammed in a body sandwich,  of what I later found out was the film group. Two men intercepted us, “Hi where are you from”? She said to the long haired European.

“Switzverland.”

“Oh, I’ve been there, I loved it,” she said.

“ I’ve been there too.” I added. Never mind that it was twenty-five years ago. 

Tied together by limited space and a slow crawl to the bar, we both hopped up on bar stools.  It was old school, old bar, old everything, except that I banished my inhibitions, and made a lot of fuss on the dance floor. 

Turned out Mr. Dave-the director-is working on a documentary  about Murder, Inc, and has a distant relative that was in the mob-or is in the mob, or something. I have a story about that, and when I opened my mouth, he turned to greet a low-cut blonde in high heels. 

I stumbled out of the party around one in the morning. The next day Kathy and I emailed. She mentioned her deceased husband, something about New Jersey, his family’s bakery, and I thought of Uncle Myron.

I  emailed Myron, and asked him if he had heard of Schachtel’s Bakery. He replied.

“ONE OF MY OLDEST AND STILL
VERY CLOSE FRIENDS IS BOB SCHACHTEL, HE IS ABE SCHACHTEL´S SON AND HIS FATHER WAS VERY CLOSE TO ABE ZWILLMAN.”  Bob is her deceased husband’s brother. Abe Zwillman was the honored leader of the New Jersey Jewish population.

You can read about him in  “Nazis of Newark,” among other history books. Kathy came by the next day with a bottle of Champagne and we talked for several hours. The next few weeks, turned around more unprecedented encounters and emancipated me from destructive mumbo-jumbo.

Last night around midnight, I picked up a black clog and tossed it down the stairs. Then I opened the window and yelled, “Shut-Up,” to the hollow vacant space between me and the rappin DJ.

The full moon is kin to my life; it is bright, and shaded by sketchy clouds of uncertainty. One day, I too shall be a million lights years from the rhapsody of rap, gangsters, fresh baked croissants, and maybe Bette Davis will be my friend. 

Any dice to throw Email: folliesls@aol.com     

 

 

 

THE BIG HOUSE BY THE TAOS PUEBL0

             I fell in love with Taos on a two month retreat. I arrived in April; when the hills were  sugar coated with powdery snow.  For days I sat in a lump on the bed. I burned incense, and stared like a cat into the fluid magenta skin of land, tattooed with sagebrush and cottonwood trees.  Taos has many lovers, thousands actually, and many of them live inside her/him. But none like the native Indians that made Taos.   Some people say Taos is a vortex, all the spiritual senses are cracked wide open.

            Locals tell you many things when you arrive. If you last more than six months, you’re considered a local.  Most of the funny stuff happens within six months.   Someone who came to Taos before you will draw your attention. Mine was drawn by Mabel Dodge Luhan.  In 1917, Mabel was a well heeled avant-garde patron of the arts living in Greenwich Village. She had lived in a villa in Florence, a mansion in New York, and acquired the material possessions people envy.  One day an admittance of emptiness poked her soul. She abandoned the animated literary and artistic roundtable discussions, and journeyed to Taos.  Within a few months she stripped off her cerebral persona and possessions and fell in love with Tony Luhan.   Tony lived on the Taos Pueblo and gave her the moon, stars, and the sun.   She never returned to New York.  Funny things happen to people in Taos.   

        My yearning to discover Mabel, was discarded during the years I tried to forget Taos. Like a former lover, my photographs and journals reminded me how much we shared.  The first retreat manifested into a two-year residency. I left when the romance went belly-up in the bank. That was 1999.

            Three years passed before I could face Taos again. I had butterflies in my stomach thinking about the Gorge: how we hiked into the groin of the canyon where nature expels anything unnatural, and Wheeler Peak at the moment the sun parallels the mountain, and the Taos Inn on a cold winter evening listening to the Spanish Guitars and drinking cheap red wine. I made reservations to stay where I felt my love affair would go into full bloom, The Mabel Dodge Luhan House. 

           There are no phones in the room, no radio or television; the natural sounds of Taos are symphonic.  Mabel and Tony built one of the only two-story adobes in Taos, with a screened in porch to use for sleeping.  Inside this house, the elements of nature are molded, carved and bonded in away that you feel like you are inside a true pueblo dwelling. The dining area could be used for a yoga class if you removed the tables and chairs. The senses are opened to explore freedom of movement rather than precious objects of art. From every angle, there is a window with the Taos light spying on you, reminding you nothing can compare to warm sunshine caressing your back.  To be continued.

PART TWO OF ON THE ROAD

 

Smiley’s Dice-Adventures in Livingness

 

The throw of the dice this week lands on Part Two of On the Road.  

When we returned to Pagosa Springs later that day, the town’s harshness was shaded in the drapery of dusk. I looked up the hillside, to a blur of bathers still lingering around the pools.

In television transition speed we showered, dressed, and raced back to our Keyah Grande. Driving up the entrance in the darkness, a spotty moon webbed into a triangle of clouds, a blackened forest on both sides, and a death like silence surrounded us. The lights of the house beamed onto the parking lot, and the door opened.   

We were seated in the intimate empty dining room, and given time to look over the menu.  The room was decorated with candlelight, soft cushioned high back chairs, chandeliers, a big picture window, and beautiful crystal. For this evening, I am to forget all the financial uncertainty, and the menacing drip of anxiousness about the future. 

   “There’s a lot of meat on this menu.” I said. I noticed Elk, Duck and Moose. When the waitress returned, I stopped her.

  “You have a very carnivorous menu.”

  “Um. We do.”

   “I noticed all the elk on the property.” She squirmed and tightened her lips in an abashing manner.

   “The owners raise elk. They are world class hunters.”

   “Oh I see. Then what happens to them?”

   “They–hunt them.” She winced.

   “They kill them?” 

   “Yes.” She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, like a child waiting to be given directions. I placed the menu down, and tried to reassure her I wasn’t making any judgment which of course I was.

   “It’s all right. I don’t care for beef too much.” I looked at SC. He was silently examining the menu.  

  “We’re not the hunting type. I suppose most of your guests are.” 

  “Almost all of them.” She answered apologetically. She was only in her twenties; a local gal with sufficient education and class to understand precisely what was going on.

  “So we’re a novelty?” I asked.

  “Yes.” 

  “Well, I’ll have the salmon.”

  “I’ll have the same.” SC added.     

Jen backed away politely and I faced SC.

  “How can you raise an animal, shoot it, and then eat it.”

  “It’s called hunting.” He answered while taking steps to devour the entire basket of homemade breads. 

  “No. Hunting is when you go after wild game; it’s a test of power and masculinity and all of that–if you ever saw the movie Deer Hunter.  But to raise the baby elk, from the time they’re born, and then one day, marinate them in the oven. I find that distasteful.”

  “I knew people like that. My school buddy Covel Sneed came from the back woods of West Virginia. He and his dad went hunting all the time.”  

I objected to the thought of well-fed sportsmen killing those doe eyed elk grazing on the property. I hated the whole lodge for about two minutes, until Jen arrived with my appetizer. “I hope you’re pleased with everything?” She eyed me cautiously. 

   “Jen, tell me about the owners.”

   “They’re such great people to work for and really easy going.  She’s got great style and taste as you can see, but she isn’t fussy.”    

   “Where are they from?”

   “They live in Manhattan.”

   “Really?”

   “Yes, they built all of this over about ten years.”

I imagined Lady X a cross between Carole Lombard and Maureen O’ Hara; a woman who hunts and rides, and then sets the table with Versace flatware, and dresses in Black Label Ralph Lauren.  

Just then a woman in riding pants passed through with two kids in tow.  “She’s here for Easter. They come every year.  She hides the eggs all over and the kids hunt for them.”  

  “They learn to hunt at a young age?”

  “Not everyone here is a hunter. We have a huge riding clientele, and the fishing and hiking are excellent too.” 

It was plain as white toast; this was a sub-culture I’d not mingled with; not ever. I grew up in movie theaters, night clubs, and amusement parks. By the time I got to my dessert, one of the best flans I’ve ever tasted in my life, my objections weakened. These folks would be equally un-charmed with the staged and superficial life style that I understood. 

We drifted outside onto the palatial landing and caught one last glimpse of the sleeping scenery before getting on the wide open highway back to town. Suddenly, SC turned off the road.

   “Why are you pulling over?”

   “Cop.”

I turned around. The officer slowly and mechanically moved towards us.

   “Your tail lights are out, and you’re doing 45 in a 35 mph zone. Can I see your license and registration?”

   “We’re visiting for the night. I didn’t see any signs. It’s so dark, we must have missed them.” I said with a big smile.  

   “Yup, posted right on the road Mam.”

The wine sentiment was thick on my tongue, but if he noticed it he didn’t reveal his suspicion because he was as friendly as the spa attendant at the hotel.       

   “Okay you folks have a good night, and keep the speed down. You have to watch out for the elk.”

After he left I turned to SC, “Watch out for the elk? Does he mean don’t run them over because we shoot them?

The next morning I felt this ping of awareness, of who I am and I was happy with it. It’s very unusual, I don’t wake up singing, I’m so happy I’m me.

   “I’ll go into the baths if you want me to.” SC said as I took the toothbrush out of my mouth.

   “You will?”

   “Yea. If it will make you happy.”

I doused in the shower, wrapped up in the scratchy bleached robe and we scurried outside. The pools were empty. We dipped inside the hot mineral springs, waving the steam as it rose up and formed little clouds. I felt like a leaping lotus flower, and then I understood why the guests floated all day. It was heavenly; until the gate opened and a couple appeared in startling realism. I rose up and SC followed. My body felt like cotton.

We checked out of the hotel and drove down the road to High Mountain Café, the place Jen recommended. The hillsides were blushing with sunlight, and bikers were on the road.

  “Stop!” I said.

  “What!” SC answered annoyed.

  “I saw a bald eagle back there–eating something.”

SC drove in reverse, and we stopped in front of a brown spotted eagle.

  “He’s huge!” I’d never seen one so close, his claws looked almost human.  

   “He’s eating the carcass of an elk.”

   “Oh God, why am I not surprised.”

The next few miles, the scenery unfolded into piercing sharp mountain tops, narrow curves in the road and dramatic drops, that made looking out the window more like hanging over the edge. We’d decided, just that morning, we’d go to Durango. 

Durango is lined with brick buildings, store front awnings, and a cooperative symmetry exists from one end of town to the other. It has the look of a Main Street award winner on the National Historic Preservation website. It was Easter Sunday.

   “Do you want to stay over?” SC asked.

   “Not really, I’m ready to go home now. You know it’s only been twenty-four hours.”

   “Yea, amazing. It feels like three days.”

The twenty-four getaway is better than none at all.    

Any dice to throw email: folliesls@aol.com

 

CONFESSIONS OF A MOB KID

SOME children are silenced. The pretense is protection against people and events more powerful than them. As the daughter of Allen Smiley, associate and friend to Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, I was raised in a family of secrets.

My father is not a household name like Siegel, partly because he wore a disguise, a veneer of respectability that fooled most.

It did not fool the government. My father came into the public eye the night of June 20, 1947, when Benjamin Siegel was murdered in his home in Beverly Hills. My dad was seated inches away from Siegel, on the sofa, and took three bullets through the sleeve of his jacket.

He was brought in as a suspect. His photograph was in all the newspapers. He was the only nonfamily member who had the guts to go to the funeral.

When I was exposed to the truth by way of a book, I kept the secret, too. I was 13. My parents divorced, and five years later, my mother died. In 1966, I went to live with my father in Hollywood.

I was forbidden to talk about our life: “Don’t discuss our family business with anyone, and listen very carefully to what I say from now on!”

But one night, he asked me to come into his room and he told me the story of the night Ben was murdered.

“When I was spared death, I made a vow to do everything in my power to reform, so that I could one day marry your mother.

“Ben was the best friend I ever had. You’re going to hear a lot of things about him in your life. Just remember what I am telling you; he’d take a bullet for a friend.”

After my father died, I remained silent, to avoid shame, embarrassment and questions. But 10 years later, in 1994, when I turned 40, I cracked the silence.

I read every book in print – and out of print – about the Mafia. Allen Smiley was in dozens. He was a Russian Jew, a criminal, Bugsy’s right-hand man, a dope peddler, pimp, a racetrack tout. I held close the memory of a benevolent father, wise counselor, and a man who worshipped me.

I made a Freedom of Information Act request and obtained his government files. The Immigration and Naturalization Service claimed he was one of the most dangerous criminals in the country. They said he was Benjamin Siegel’s assistant. They said he was poised to take over the rackets in Los Angeles. He didn’t; he sold out his interest in the Flamingo, and he went to Houston to strike oil.

I put the file away, and looked into the window of truth. How much more could I bear to hear?

Born in Kiev, Ukraine, my dad’s family immigrated to Canada. He stowed away to America at 16, and was eventually doggedly pursued for never having registered as an alien. He had multiple arrests – including one for bookmaking in 1944, and another for slicing off part of the actor John Hall’s nose in a fracas at Tommy Dorsey’s apartment.

He met my mother, Lucille Casey, at the Copacabana nightclub in 1943. She was onstage dancing (for $75 a week), and my father was in the audience, seated with Copa owner and mob boss Frank Costello.

“I took one look, and I knew it was her,” was all he had told me on many occasions.

On a trip to the Museum of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles, I was handed a large perfectly pristine manila envelope, and a pair of latex gloves with which to handle the file.

Inside were black and white glossy MGM studio photographs, press releases, and biographies of my mother’s career in film, including roles in “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” “Ziegfeld Follies of 1946,” “Meet Me in St. Louis” and “Harvey Girls.” She was written up in the columns, where later my father was identified as a “sportsman.”

The woman who pressed my clothes, washed my hair, and made my tuna sandwiches was an actress dancing in Judy Garland musicals, while her own life was draped with film noir drama.

My father wooed her, and after an MGM producer gave her an audition, he helped arrange for her and her family to move to Beverly Hills, where she had steady film work for five years. He was busy helping Siegel expand the Western Front of the Costello crime family and opening the Flamingo casino in Las Vegas.

They were engaged in 1946.

Still, the blank pages of my mother’s life did not begin to fill in until I met R.J. Gray. He found me through my newspaper column, “Smiley’s Dice.”

One day last year, R.J. sent me a book, “Images of America: The Copacabana,” by Kristin Baggelaar. There was my mother, captioned a “Copa-beauty.”

Kristin organized a Copa reunion in New York last September. I went in place of my mother, but all day I felt as if she was seated next to me. I fell asleep that night staring out the hotel window, feeling a part of Manhattan history.

Now, the silence is over.

I don’t hesitate to answer questions about my family. I have photographs of Ben Siegel in my home in Santa Fe, NM, just as my father did. Every few months I get e-mails from distant friends, or people who knew my dad.

It seems there is no end to the stories surrounding Ben and Al. I am not looking for closure. I’ve become too attached to the story.

 

Smiley’s Dice on the Road

THE Throw of the dice this week is on the road.

Scenery racing by at 60 mph, on a two lane highway, saddled between fresh morning pastures, and broken down double-wides. A New Mexican patchwork of serenity and simplicity. On Highway 84 out of Santa Fe, we pass through the one-blink town of Chama. During the summer tourists flock here to ride the Tupeltec Train through the mountains and fish in the Rio Grande.  The window sign of the coffee house advertises Espresso, but the paint is worn thin, and the letters breaking up. The sidewalk flower pots are filled with cigarette butts, and the newspaper stands are empty. There is an old fashioned gas station, closed for the winter, and just beyond are the train tracks, and a stationary train. That’s where I got the idea of living on a train. I could settle down in a train, like Jim West in the television program from the sixties, The Wild Wild West. Movement is what gives me comfort. Some of us just cannot sit still. We try to cushion ourselves in with big windows and heaps of scenery: fireplaces, and fresh flowers, music, books, and home theater.  What lies beyond home organization is a world of surprises and that’s what we keep reaching for.

Outside of Chama the road grows narrower, and signs of life diminish with the exception of the crows, and the solitary underfed horse staring at a fence, looking like the loneliest creature on the face of the earth. The scenery transforms into a sketch of poetry as the sky suddenly turns white, and the hillsides are caked in snow frosting.  We were on our way to Pagaosa Springs; a small town just across the continental divide into Colorado. The Springs Spa & Salon boasts of having European fashioned mineral springs.

 “That’s it?” SC asked. 

 “Yes, I guess so. What’s it doing IN A PARKING LOT? The website made it look like we were in the mountains.”

“ Good marketing.” He said.

“ Oh no, this is awful.” I snapped.  But I caught myself. You know how words come back at you with meaning, and you have to adjust yourself. I looked the place over and thought, I’ll make this an adventure. I will not complain or snub my nose because I’m here, in the cup of Colorado and it’s beautiful. 

“ The springs are public?” SC denounced.

I looked over at the three-tiered sculpted hillside; pools of water connected by walkways, waterfalls, and this wake of steam rising. It was the lusciousness of a European spa, except, the bather’s were beer-bellied rednecks and saloon sloppy women, wearing stretched out bathing suits that hung from their skin. Children were running back and forth, and Soaring Crow didn’t look too happy.  

“ I’m not going into those baths.” He snapped. 

“ The hotel has its own private area; it will be better.”

“ It’s like getting into a bathtub with a bunch of strangers.”

“ Well, I’ll throw some bleach in before. ” 

We headed into the reception area of the Springs Spa & Salon. A man dressed in Spa-white was gnawing on a chewy nutrition bar. Before he finished swallowing, he said, “ What I do for yer folks?”  

He leaned over the counter and chewed, while SC explained we were checking into the Spa. The Spa smelled of chlorine, and I started to laugh.  What I had imagined, was the Sonoma Mission Inn, or Roosevelt Spa in Saratoga Springs.

“I can’t wait to see the room.”  I said.

There are two types of getaways; first class and adventurous, this was less than adventurous, it was shoddy. We unloaded and went for a drive through town. The shop with the Antiques sign drew us in first. It smelled like acerbic spring water was oozing out of the walls. I looked around; drawing my breath in, to avoid a dust storm. Cowboy mugs, saddles, fiesta flatware, mantelpiece trinkets and dusty smudged books were stacked on shabby boxes and wooden carts. Not much to capture the eye, except the saleswoman. She was built like an old door. I imagined she was young once, and had a softer edge, now she moved in wooden strides, and her eyes were plucked of sentimentality. Maybe she came from a mining family, and they were hardened at an early age. I imagined what she was thinking of me. It sort of slipped out when I opened the door. She hadn’t expected me to say thank you, and when she met my eyes, hers were raising heck with my attire.  Outside, the snow continued to dust the town with a bit of whitened cleanliness.

“ Where are we eating tonight.” SC asked.

“ Oh I found a place that sounds interesting, The Old Miner’s Lodge.”

“ It sounds like we should drive by first.”

We drove down the main road, and I looked through the dining guide. The short list was the kind you’d expect in an old mining town, that Robert Redford hadn’t discovered.

“ It’s a steakhouse with a salad bar.” I assured SC.

“ Let’s find something else. I don’t want to bathe and eat with the same people.” 

“There isn’t anything else but what the receptionist suggested, Eddie’s Grill, it’s her favorite place.”

“ Because her father-in-law, or half-sister owns it.” 

We went looking for Eddie’s and along the way I noticed a sign for Keyah Grande. It was the kind of sign that eluded, exclusive, so I suggested we drive up. Outside a large menacing iron gate, we rang the digital keyboard and the Chef answered the phone. He said to come up. We passed through the gate and slowly eased the car up an unpaved road, and entered what looked like safari country. There were elk and deer wandering inside gated pastures, fat and sleek-coated, without visible fear or alarm, they just seemed to nod at us.

We drove past a sign for horses, and I thought, I’d wished we stayed here. At the top of the mountain, a plateau surfaced and a two story Spanish colonial building jolted out of the ground. We were surrounded by mountains, three cars, and a clubhouse attached to a suspended deck that looked like the wing of an airplane. SC immediately dashed for the edge. I lingered back closer to center. We were raised to new euphoric vistas, set above the San Juan Mountains with streaks of snow edged between pine trees and shafts of light. A cold breeze that John Cage would have recorded brushed through the trees.

We went inside the hotel and discovered a palatial home-museum. A woman greeted us.

“ Hi com’on in. We’re just taking these folks through the rooms; would you like to join us.”

“Yes,” SC said.

“ No.” I answered, and whispered to SC,“I’m still catching my breath.    

We followed another young friendly woman to the cocktail lounge. It was the sort of place you’d curl your legs under and hold the glass as if you owned the house. Darkened cherry-wood paneling and leather wrapped a room with built-in everything, and made it feel gracefully masculine. We sat on the sofa sipping wine and forgot about Pagosa Springs.   

   “Can we have dinner here tonight?” I asked without willing to accept anything less. 

  “You bet we can. I’m not leaving until they throw me out.”

  “Will you be joining us for dinner?” The cocktail waitress asked.

 “Yes, we’d love to.” 

 “I’ll show you the dining room.”

 “How many rooms are there in the hotel?” I asked.

“ We call it a guest house. There are eight rooms.”

“ Are they all booked?” I asked.

“ I’d have to check; we may have one.”

  SC looked at me expectantly.

“ First I’ll show you the dining room,” and she took us through the main parlor, a salon of European taste dignified with a gold trimmed piano, original oil paintings, tapestries, and enough natural light to take a sunbath. 

“ How many acres go with the guest house?” I asked.

“ Four thousand.”

“ Eight rooms and four thousand acres.” I repeated. That makes some kind of statement. 

We found out the rooms were $500.00 a night and it was better to go with the package deal; $800.00 including all meals. It reminded me of what I read in the WSJ; about executive holidays, and the kind of money that passes from one pocket to the next.

 After a peek at the menu, and finding the prices comparable to any fine dining, we finished our wine, and drifted outside like two beggars who’d just found a gracious host. We decided to go back to Pagosa and shower.

“ I can’t wait to go back and use the scratchy towels and cheap soap.”

 “It’s more fun this way, it’s an adventure.” I said. The funny thing is; I wasn’t fibbing or pretending. The adventure in me felt atrophied and I was thankful I was out of town and on the road. Even if it was a tiny stiff room without mints on the pillow, I knew we’d be laughing ourselves to sleep. To be continued.  Any dice to throw: Email: folliesls@aol.com  

 

I AM DOW- TODAY I’M UP TOMORROW I’M DOWN.

A GREAT CAUSE

SEE JIM MARSHALL’S OFFICIAL WEBSITE FOR ICONIC ROCK & ROLL COLLECTIBLES AND PHOTOGRAPHY AT AUCTION.

JIM’S A GREAT FRIEND.

ALL PROCEEDS GO TO THE ROCK FOR MS FRIENDS BENEFIT.

Uncategorized « Galleryloulou’s Weblog

Uncategorized « Galleryloulou’s Weblog

LOST ANGELES PART 3

THE THROW of the dice this week falls on part three of adventures in moving.  Marietta Hayes and I were just seated in a booth at the far end of the Grill, “ We won’t disturb anyone here. Let’s order and then we’ll talk.”

I’m not at all hungry.” I said.

“ Neither am I,” she declared. ”I’ll order an English Muffin; that way they won’t make us leave.” 

We had only to look at one another; and the friendship blossomed. She’d discovered a likeness to my mother, and I recognized in her, a woman associated with the era of gangsters, glamour, and subtlety. Her poise was what struck me; today we’re not refined and self contained. Today we are=2 0still admonishing the residue of restrictive behavior and thought.  

We started talking about the kinds of things that have changed in Los Angeles, like Laurel Canyon.”

“Oh those homes used to be so beautiful. It’s such a shame they are not maintained any longer.”  She said.

“It must have been really different in the thirties.”

“Oh it was! I don’t want to sound conceited. No–it’s not even that.  I was fortunate to have lived during the most glamorous of times in Los Angeles.”

“You definitely were. The whole city seemed to be night-clubbing.”

0We had our tragedies too. My husband was a musical lyricist, and worked for the studios. He was black listed because he associated with some of the questionable characters. After that he couldn’t get any work, and we left the country.”

“For how long?”

“Several years. I think I was with Fox Studios then.”

Much later, I thought, what would a woman thirty years younger want to know about me. She might ask if I was a hippie, a feminist, or a protester. What could I impart about my twenties that would stand the test of time?

Marietta didn’t ask what I used to be, she wanted to know who I was now, and how I ended up in Santa Fe. All I could think about, was what she knew about my mother.

“ I knew your father too.” She interjected.

“ You did? Tell me about it.”   

“ Well, I was dancing at Earl Carroll’s Night Club. Your dad used to come in quite a bit; he was in the movie business at the time. One night he asked me to introduce him to a girlfriend that he liked. So I introduced them, and they went out. A little while later, he came up to me and said,” I want to return the favor, and introduce you to a friend of mine.”

She paused. I asked who it was.

“It was Bugsy.” She giggled.   

“ Did you go out with him?”

“ Yes. He had impeccable manners, you couldn’t help liking him. I didn’t know what he did, that hadn’t come out yet. We all thought he was a businessman. I went to his house, I think it was the one on Linden Drive, and I noticed there were guns all over the place. She leaned ov er and whispered. “It was exciting, I was so young, only nineteen or twenty. Well, we went together for awhile. Until I told my father.” 

“What did your father say?”

“Oh he was furious. He had information about Ben I didn’t. Oh, he went into a rage. He was a policeman.”

“Then what happened?”   

“I think Ben left town, and we just drifted apart. It wasn’t serious or anything.” 

 “ Dad used to mention Earl Carroll’s. He loved to watch but I never saw him dance. Was Johnny Roselli there too?”

“Oh yes. I remember him. He went with a gal at Fox, and she got paid three times the rest of us!“

“ You had a great time of it didn’t you?”  Earl’s later became the Moulin Rouge, where I used to go with Uncle Doc’s daughter and see musicals.  Then it was renamed the Hullabaloo, and the Doors played there.   

“ Earl had a great sense of style and perfection. He made us practice all day. It was a beautiful dinner club, and we performed all night. I was too tired to tell you what happened in the club. All the stars went there.”

“ Did you know Clark Gable?”

“ Yes, like all of us knew him. Not very close, but we crossed paths a lot. He was so easy to like.”

“ I could watch him act all day.” I added.

“ Oh he wasn’t acting. He was just himself. He used to say, if he acted or tried to act, he wouldn’t be any good. He was just na tural.”

“ Dad went out with Carole Lombard before she met Clark.”

“ I’m sure he did. He was tremendously good looking. I can see why your mother fell for him.”

“ How did you meet her?”  

“ Norma. She was a very good friend of your mothers. She introduced us.”

I remembered Norma. Mom talked about her so often.

“ Where did Norma live.”

“ Chicago. But she moved to Los Angeles later. ”

“ My mother was in Chicago when she toured with a Broadway show, I think it called High-Kickers. May be that’s where they met. ”

“ It could have been. Norma danced in the Latin Quarter.  Well, Norma was very close to your mother. I wish you had a chance to meet her. She could have told you so much more. She was a lovely generous woman.  She ended up with millions from one of her husbands.”

“ When did you meet my mother?” 

“ She was already sick. I didn’t know it. Norma told me. We all went out to lunch and your mother never said a word about it. I remember thinking how beautiful she was; I couldn’t believe she had cancer. You were living in Westwood at the time.”

“ Yes.”

“ She died shortly after.”

“ I’m happy you came to see her.”

We sat for a minute like you do when you remember someone whose gone, and you can’t quite harmonize with reality. We were still sipping coffee three hours later. I’d found out Marietta lives a few blocks from where my grandmother lived, she has some family in Los Angeles, she prefers night to day, rents movies, and watches the Academy Awards.

She was sixteen years old the first time she went to the Awards ceremony. She went with Alfred Newman; a legendary composer and music director in Hollywood.

“He kept winning awards, and he handed them to me. They were plastic records. I had to carry that load around all night.” She laughed, and her eyes glistened into the memory.  

I left Marietta with promises of another trip to Los Angeles, and an invitation to our place in Santa Fe. I believe she will take me up on it. Afterward we drove through

Rueben, who’s been the Matri D’ since they opened in 1966 was fast–footing his way across the room, shooting praise and adulation in every direction.  I waited until he stopped to take a breath, and told him I was Al Smiley’s daughter. He nodded hurriedly and bowed. “I have a plaque upstairs with your Dad’s name on it. All the big shots; Johnny Roselli, Frank Sinatra.” He went on name dropping. I didn’t remember the plaques.

I looked over the menu.

Rudy! I had no idea it was this expensive.”

He put his glasses on, “The appetizers are twenty-two dollars. How much are the entrees?”

“Forty–five. Don’t worry; we’ll share something.”

 When the waiter returned, we ordered.

“The split fee is twenty-five dollars. You might as well order an entrée.”  We discussed the matter, and then Rueben returned.

“May I suggest something?” He said in indignation.     

“Well, I’m not sure I want an entire entrée.” I uttered.

“You must have one. It’s Valentine’s Day.”

=0 D

“Okay.” I acquiesced. The food was sensational; if you don’t mind spending that much on one meal. I really went to feast on the memories, and those were free.

On the last day; I stopped at Nate n’ Al’s for a dozen bagels. I stood at the deli counter and noshed on all the times I’d been there, and all the hours spent waiting for Dad to stop telling jokes, so we could get on with the day. Nate’s is a sort of Jewish sanctuary, where every Jew is as good as the next, unless you happen to have more money. 

I took one look at Los Angeles before getting on the 405 freeway.  The city is like an old dresser drawer filled with garments I’ve outgrown, but I just can’t throw them away. When I returned to Santa Fe, I brought home a caption from these encounters; approach the next move with a big welcome sign. Whether it be Los Angeles or New York, make it a story I’ll want to tell one day.    

GALLERY LOULOU
WILD WILD WEST VACATION RENTAL
343 E. Palace Avenue
Santa Fe, NM 87501
Ph : 505-989-3426
Cell: 518-859-7828
www.galleryloulou.com

Laurel Canyon to watch the sun squatting down on a metallic horizon. It seemed strange to go to a hotel and not my own apartment. By now the Parrot and I were bobbing hello, and the little room by the pool felt familiar. We dressed and drove to Beverly Hills where I’d made a reservation at La Dolca Vita. It was another childhood landmark. Like a child from the country has a favorite place by the river, or tree, my places were ocean bluff parks, canyon roads and restaurants. I hadn’t been to La Dolca Vita since the seventies. Like so many early memories, it was not as sensational; until I looked at the menu.

LOST ANGELES PART 2

The throw of the dice this week lands on the continuation of last weeks, adventures in moving again.

I’d just walked into Jack Taylor’s haberdashery. Jack was looking at me from behind his big signature black eye-glass frames; one of the largest frames I’ve ever seen.  He didn’t recognize me right off.

“Jack–it’s Luellen.”  I kissed him on the lips and he smiled.

“How are you?” he said softly.

“I’m good. I was just driving by, and saw your sign. What a place you got here, it’s beautiful.”

“What? I can’t hear you. Speak up.”

“I SAID IT’S A BEAUTIFUL SPACE YOU HAVE HERE!”

“You know how many customers come in off the street?” he     asked.     

“How many?”

“One.In a whole year, one customer.”

“Oh Jack, that’s awful.”

“What? I can’t hear?”

“IT’S AWFUL TO HEAR THAT.”  

“ Look out the window.”  He said. I turned to look, and a young man was passing by. He was hunched over, plugged into an Ipod,  dressed in crotch hugging jeans, a sweatshirt, and lace-up shoes.

“Look at that-no one dresses. They all look like that,” he said.  

“ Jack, they look like that everywhere.”

“Call Bonnie,(his wife)and ask her to come down to the shop.”

I wondered why he didn’t have a hearing aid; knowing Jack, it wasn’t stylish enough. Bonnie got on the phone with me, while Jack sat, staring into his memory through floor to ceiling glass windows.  What separates Jack from all the others is that Jack’s continental suits are custom fit to the customer by Jack, and no one else. His tailors hand stitch each item; with custom lining, handmade bottom holes, and your name woven into the pinstripes.

I remembered back to the summer of 94, when Jack used to fancy-foot around the shop on Camden Drive; calling out orders, answering phones, greeting customers, and yelling at me,

” Luellen, don’t just stand there. For crying out loud, count the suits or something!”  Whenever I went to do something, he shouted, “For crying out loud Luellen, don’t do it like that!” He repeated the same script to me every day for three months. He had a similar script for everyone in the shop. His tailors, some of whom have been there thirty years, shake their heads in frustration and sew. Behind all that shouting and hollering is one of the good guys, a guy who would give you the shirt off his back, a guy from Brooklyn. 

Bonnie, his wife for some fifty years, speaks with a flare born from the genes of an actress. She’s theatrical without being in the business. “Oh Luellen darling–it’s so good to hear your voice. How are you? Did Jack recognize you?”

“Oh yes, right away.” I fibbed.

“I’m surprised. He can’t hear, his eyes are bad, but he won’t leave the shop.”

“Bonny, he said he has no customers. Is that true?”

“Unfortunately, it is. We both thought new customers would come from the second generation, but it didn’t happen, so what can you do? All the old ones are failing or dead. Tell me about you. Are you married?”

Bonnie and I chatted while Jack talked with Soaring Crow. I was looking at Jack the whole time I was on the phone. I noticed the way he raised his brows, and shut-tight smile that resonates a New York edgy resignation. His expressions were so familiar to me from working with him that summer.

“How’s your daughter?” I asked Bonnie.

“She died four years ago.”

I was watching Jack, “Oh Bonnie, I’m so sorry.” Jack’s eyes darted back to me. I promised Bonnie I’d come back and we’d all have dinner. I told her about the memoir and she remarked, “I have lots of stories about your father. He was a character.”   

After I hung up the phone, Jack yelled, “Is Bonnie coming down?”

“No. She’s not up to it right now,” I answered. He pressed his lips into a thin disappointedly accepting line. For twenty years Bonnie worked side by side with Jack. She knew every customer, and made them feel like family. As a young teenager dad used to bring us in the shop. Bonnie always made an effort to be our friend.     

“Look out the window, there’s another one. See what I mean?” Jack said.

“Yes Jack. I do. Listen, I want to thank you for giving me a job that summer. I never had a chance to thank you. It really meant a lot to me.”

He smiled. “I can’t sit here all day and count the birds. What am I gonna do?”

“What do you want to do?” I answered.

 He shrugged his shoulders.

“Do you have any hobbies, anything else you like besides suits?”

“I love to paint.”

“Paint?” Well that’s what you should do.”

“Look over there,” he gestured with a heavy arm. On the wall behind me, half a dozen oil paintings were hanging. I noticed one of a young sailor standing next to his ship.

“I really like that one Jack. I think you should paint.”

 “What?”

 “I said, RETIRE AND PAINT.”

He shrugged his shoulders. I kissed him again and he didn’t move from the chair. He needed me to raise him up, close the shop, and lock the door. I would have done it if he was all alone. I wanted to take him back to Santa Fe and place him at the Audubon, and let him paint the swallows.

 I walked out and looked back once. He was staring out the window. I thought about the stories he used to tell, like the time Mickey Cohen came rushing through the shop and dropped a suitcase at Jack’s feet, “Hold onto this until I get back.” Mickey had commanded.

“What was in it Jack?”

“Whatta ya think? Stolen loot. They all used to come through the shop on the way out of Ducker’s Barber Shop.  I couldn’t stop them–they did what they did–I don’t even know what they did, but use my phone all day.”  

After I left Jack, Soaring Crow drove me over Laurel Canyon to meet Marietta, my mother’s friend.  We had just passed Lookout Mountain when I recalled being there. It was painted right before my eyes. Lizzie, one of the wild ones in high school, and I used to drive up there in her British racing green Volvo. She loved going to mountain tops. We’d get high, and lean into the flickering spray of lights imagining all we were missing by beings so darn young. We didn’t know then we weren’t missing anything. We had it all; a big bubbling hot city filled with mysteries, puzzles, romance, and opportunities. Neither one of us had dreams of college and marriage. Lizzie wanted a baby, and I wanted to runaway to a distant splendor in the grass. As Soaring Crow descended the canyon and inched towards Studio city, I glanced over, and noticed a street sign, Sunshine Terrace.

“That’s where Kenny used to live with his parents. I bet his mother is still there.  I’m going to call her.” Kenny was an irreplaceable boyfriend at eighteen, who later became the man who guided me towards writing. He used to shout out loud about how f—g good my poetry was, and how I should be published. Who can let go of a guy like that.  

Kenny’s dad, Bernie the big shot, who everyone tolerated because he was a WWII Nazi military prosecutor, had died years before. You couldn’t butter your bread without Bernie finding something fishy about it. Soaring Crow met Kenny back in the nineties, when Kenny dropped by his house on his way to living in a campsite in Escondido. He stayed a month.      

“Kenny! What a case that one is. You gotta love him. I understand him now. I know why he bailed out of society. I thought he was weird back then.” Soaring Crow chuckled thinking about Ken. He always had a neatly organized backpack, a cigar in his mouth, and carried a little black book with all his notes and phone numbers. He was an herbal tea importer and an inventor of gadgets.    

We drove into the strip center on Ventura Boulevard fifteen minutes early. I called information and got the phone number for Ken’s mother, Anna Marie.

“Hello Anna Maria, it’s Luellen.”

 “Oh Luellen how are you? It’s been a long time.” That was an understatement. It had been thirty years or more.”  Her voice revealed so much. She spoke in long unwavering sentences, and it reminded me of how long-winded Ken could be when he got on his philosophical podium.  She was Austrian and her accent smoothed out the awkward moments.   

“I’ll be 84 this week.”

“Really? Well Happy Birthday.”

“ Oh thank you. I’ve been in this house fifty years.”

“ Wow, that’s amazing. It’s a beautiful house. I always admired your cooking and gardening.”

“ I don’t do much of that anymore.” 

“ How is Ken doing?” I asked.

“ He moved to Guatemala.”

“ Really? When was that?”

“ Five years ago.”

“ Have you seen him lately?”

“Five years ago was the last time.”

“Is he all right?”

“He says he is. But I don’t know. We email, and sometimes he’ll call. I wish he would visit.”

“He couldn’t stand living in Los Angeles, or anywhere in the US.”  I added.

“He lived in Ensenada for years; then he decided to go to Guatemala. It’s so far. He loves the Latin culture. It’s too hot for me. He should come back and visit. I need a little help.”

“What about the other brothers?”

“Rick has cancer.”  

I rolled the rental-car window down and looked through people as they walked by. I didn’t tell her I was around the corner; I couldn’t just stop in and leave five minutes later.   

“I’m so happy you called. I’ll tell Ken when I write to him next time. Are you married?”

“No.”

“Oh well. So nice to hear from you. Come and visit sometime.”

“I will, I promise you I will.” 

As I left the car and headed upstairs to meet Marietta I felt a peck of familiarity with my surroundings. I was standing in front of the Starbucks, where Ken used to call me from when he was in town.

“ I’m over here at Starbucks, what a nightmare, I can’t even find a set a teeth in the place, nobody smiles. I’m telling you Lou, this isn’t the way it’s supposed to me. I got a headache and nothing even happened yet.” I wished he was sitting there, he could bring hours of non-stop laughter.     

Soaring Crow opened the door to the Daily Grill. Seated on a high stool, next to the hostess, was a strikingly beautiful woman. Her hair was pulled back in a bandana, and fell to her shoulders. Her skin was snow white, with a frosty pink glow and her china blue eyes glistened when she smiled.

 

 

 

 

 

“Oh you must be Luellen.  I knew it right away; you look like your mother.”  To be continued next week.

Any dice to throw: Email: folliesls@aol.com

 

LOST ANGELES

 

The throw of the dice this week lands on adventures in moving….again. What precipitated my even considering this next move an adventure is the weekend I spent in Los Angeles. I was going to meet two women; one who had known my mother, and one whose career paralleled hers. It was a meeting any daughter  who buried their mother before turning sixteen would wish for. A secondary and subconscious motive was to explore the idea of moving back to Los Angeles.

 

The day I arrived it was raining; a Saturday painted with big strokes of gray and patches of blue between a steady but non-threatening shower. The rain breaks Los Angeles down, and spreads an even glossy finish across the faded facades of buildings along Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. This is where I lived with Dad, just north on Doheny Drive, and where almost anything could happen to a teenager walking her father’s poodle. I was invited to parties, met strangers, hitch-hiked and observed adults that didn’t want to be noticed. West Hollywood was a reclusive neighborhood in the late 1960s.

 

As I strolled south on Doheny forty years later, I discovered a jigsaw scenery.  It was a bizarre surrealistic shadow, between deteriorating shops, abandoned buildings, and modernized residential neighborhoods. I stopped into Bristol Market for a snack. The lofty concrete warehouse was filled with gourmet packages and imported delicacies. It’s a grotesque replacement of the former Chasen’s restaurant;where Lionel Barrymore and Errol Flynn sipped the off-camera hours, before heading upstairs to a private steam bath. It was where I first laid eyes on Paul Newman and my father scolded me for staring.” Dad everyone stares at Paul Newman!” 

  “Well, stop being everyone!”  Paul’s eyes were blue headlights that radiated in every direction. You had to be blind not to see him. Dad was right, Paul squirmed at the attention.

  

When I got back to the hotel, the lobby-house parrot was my first detour. I needed to settle my nerves, going home is unsettling.  You may find the whole city unrecognizable.  The longer I remain detached from Los Angeles, the more intensely attached I need to feel when I return. Doheny Drive is the street that distinguishes Beverly Hills from Hollywood. Dad lived on the Hollywood side. If you served time, you have to register with the local Beverly Hills police department as an ex-con. After dad was released from prison, they arrested him for not registering as an ex-convict. He swore he’d never live in Beverly Hills again. However, he made his presence very well known by spending the better part of each day and night meeting with associates, girlfriends, and shopping. Almost every day he walked from Doheny to Linden Drive; the street where his best friend lived and was murdered.

 

The next day I wandered around Melrose and watched the 90212 cliff-dwellers at work in the cafes.  Café Figueroa was the first real coffee house on Melrose; it was where I discovered lattes during high school, and how well they went with obscure magazines and classical music.

 

The first day in LA was an amusement ride. It was jostling, humorous and frightening, like riding my former self through a time capsule. The parrot made me laugh, and the staff at the Beverly Terrace was old school Los Angeles, even though they immigrated here very recently. They all seem to be Russian; in fact all the guests appear to be Russians, and my room overlooking the unused pool, was where I observed these Russians don’t sit by a pool.

 

The second and last day of the trip began with a sublime  umbrellas of Los Angeles walk up to Urth Caffe on Melrose. I stood in a chaotic line of young readymade bohemians; friendly and insincere, a remarkable warm up exercise for any dweller in LA. Everyone in the café was on the phone so I opened mine.  

   “Hi Marietta, it’s Luellen.”

   “Oh hi Luellen. Edna cannot make it today; she’s not feeling well enough.”

   “That’s too bad, I wish I could stay longer, I’m always rushing in and out of Los Angeles.”

    She laughed, “Well, I’m okay. Do you want to meet at one o’clock at the Daily Grill on Ventura; it’s very easy to find?”

    “Sure, that’s perfect. I’ll see you then.”

    “I’m an old lady with gray hair.” She laughed again. I decided to drive through downtown Beverly Hills. As I was about to turn onto Canon Drive, I noticed a big store-front sign ahead. I parked the car in front of Jack Taylors. Jack was Dad’s pal since the 1960’s when he opened his opulent men’s custom-suit salon. He had a pool table, green marble floors, and a bar in the lounge. In the back room a circle of tailors hand-cut suits for men who dressed for work. Dad was one of them.  I worked for Jack, one disjointed summer back in 1993, and I hadn’t seen him since. He was the man who made the Rat Pack look like rat royalty.

Jack was in the shop, seated at a big circular desk in a dark blue suit with a day old carnation in his breast pocket. I recognized the same smile of tolerance, the Jewish brand of tolerance that evokes historical overtones he’ll never speak about. Jack is 92 years old. To be continued next week.

NO DICE NO LUCK

The throw of the dice this week falls on adventures in livingness when the luck runs out. I was inside Borders drinking a raspberry latte, and browsing the new non-fiction titles.  Borders in Santa Fe is a cross between a library, a day-care center, and a time filler for truly retired people who love books.  On this particular Saturday, the aisles were jammed; kids sprawled on the floor kicking their legs, and mother’s rummaging through big plastic bags filled with snacks and toys.  Contented unshaven men were seated in leather chairs reading books off the shelves, and the multitasketeers’ read, paced, and talked on the cell-phone while circulating the magazine racks.  The café was cluttered with dutiful students posed at their laptops, and young teenagers ordered paragraph drinks they paid for with credit cards. 

 I’d just left the Cocteau Theater where loyal readers of Michael McGarrity’s mystery novels were seated listening to him talk about his next book, “Dead or Alive.” I’ve never read his books; I wanted to hear him speak, just to see if I could imagine one day I might stand in front of an audience and talk about my book.  Michael was effortlessly engaging. No, I have a long long journey before I speak like that.  

“ This is the last stop of my three-month tour. I’m happy to be back home. And even more happy because on Friday I signed a new two-year contract for my next book. Believe me, today it takes more than luck, you have to have a track record.”  

That got me thinking; how people use to say; ‘it was good luck, or good fortune that I got published.’ If Michael McGarrity is right, then what we need is a lot more people buying books.  Our economy isn’t going to recover because of good luck, and all those people who lost their jobs, aren’t going to depend on luck to get a new job.

In fact luck is sort of passé. 

What was most interesting about that Saturday is that of all the little boutiques in Sanbusco Center, Borders had the crowd.  Books, even if they are hard as heck to get written, published and printed are the cheapest form of entertainment that I’ve found. Lately, I’ve drifted into an adventure in  Santa Fe history, so I picked up two books.  It has to do with my own stimulus package; how to balance the scathing news with something more rousing.  The first book, “Walks in Literary Santa Fe,” by Barbara Harrelson is a companion to a spontaneous walk through town. Just about every building used to be something more appealing: La Fonda Hotel was a Harvey House until 1969. The resplendent Fred Harvey made waitressing a fashion statement, with his Harvey Girls, and then Arthur Freed turned it into a MGM musical. My mother was in the film, a singing and dancing Harvey Girl.

 The Palace of the Governors, “the oldest public building still in use in the United States,” and built around 1610 is a museum today. Once it was home to Santa Fe governors, two of whom were writers. In 1943 the Palace became the meeting place for the Atom Bomb Quartet, aka as the Manhattan Project. Santa Fe’s first bookstore,Villagra, opened in 1927 inside the classical Spanish Sena Plaza.  “The owner served tea and gossip every day, and martinis at 4:00 every afternoon.” In that bookstore, Willa Cather was seen making notes, for her book, “Death Comes to The Archbishop,” about Santa Fe.

 Even my house, The Elliott Barker House, is historic because it was occupied by the man who gave Smokey Bear a career, when he took the cub to the White House and coined the phrase, ‘Only you can prevent forest fires.’ Mr. Barker was the state’s first Game Warden, and a zealous conservationist, when there was more land than building in Santa Fe. The Elliott Barker Trail north of Taos is one I hiked, before I knew I’d be living in his house, and feeding the sparrows.  He wrote half a dozen books about wilderness living in New Mexico.   

I mean it’s not New York, which could eat up an entire lifetime tracing the former famous residents of brownstones.  Santa Fe will be 400 years old this summer and I want to know who I should be celebrating.  For the price of $12.95, I have this great book, the references to other great Santa Fe literature, and a sort of walking tool to take with me when I’m on the streets.  

If you live in San Diego and remember my arts column every month, then you know how much I love to dwell in the house of the artist. As Black Monday’s get darker, I find solace in treading history in books, museums and film.

Any dice to throw: Email folliesls@aol.com

MARIETTA AND ME

 

  ADVENTURES IN LIVINGNESS

   The throw of the dice this week lands on the continuation of last weeks, adventures in moving again.

I’d just walked into Jack Taylor’s haberdashery. Jack was looking at from behind his big signature black eye-glass frames; one of the largest frames I’ve ever seen.  He didn’t recognize me right off.

“Jack–it’s Luellen.”  I kissed him on the lips and he smiled.

“How are you?” he said softly.

“I’m good. I was just driving by, and saw your sign. What a place you got here, it’s beautiful.”

“What? I can’t hear you. Speak up.”

“I SAID IT’S A BEAUTIFUL SPACE YOU HAVE HERE!”

“You know how many customers come in off the street?” he     asked.     

“How many?”

“One.In a whole year, one customer.”

“Oh Jack, that’s awful.”

“What? I can’t hear?”

“IT’S AWFUL TO HEAR THAT.”  

“ Look out the window.”  He said. I turned to look, and a young man was passing by. He was hunched over, plugged into an Ipod,  dressed in crotch hugging jeans, a sweatshirt, and lace-up shoes.

“Look at that-no one dresses. They all look like that,” he said.  

“ Jack, they look like that everywhere.”

“Call Bonnie,(his wife)and ask her to come down to the shop.”

I wondered why he didn’t have a hearing aid; knowing Jack, it wasn’t stylish enough. Bonnie got on the phone with me, while Jack sat, staring into his memory through floor to ceiling glass windows.  What separates Jack from all the others is that Jack’s continental suits are custom fit to the customer by Jack, and no one else. His tailors hand stitch each item; with custom lining, handmade bottom holes, and your name woven into the pinstripes.

I remembered back to the summer of 94, when Jack used to fancy-foot around the shop on Camden Drive; calling out orders, answering phones, greeting customers, and yelling at me,

” Luellen, don’t just stand there. For crying out loud, count the suits or something!”  Whenever I went to do something, he shouted, “For crying out loud Luellen, don’t do it like that!” He repeated the same script to me every day for three months. He had a similar script for everyone in the shop. His tailors, some of whom have been there thirty years, shake their heads in frustration and sew. Behind all that shouting and hollering is one of the good guys, a guy who would give you the shirt off his back, a guy from Brooklyn. 

Bonnie, his wife for some fifty years, speaks with a flare born from the genes of an actress. She’s theatrical without being in the business. “Oh Luellen darling–it’s so good to hear your voice. How are you? Did Jack recognize you?”

“Oh yes, right away.” I fibbed.

“I’m surprised. He can’t hear, his eyes are bad, but he won’t leave the shop.”

“Bonny, he said he has no customers. Is that true?”

“Unfortunately, it is. We both thought new customers would come from the second generation, but it didn’t happen, so what can you do? All the old ones are failing or dead. Tell me about you. Are you married?”

Bonnie and I chatted while Jack talked with Soaring Crow. I was looking at Jack the whole time I was on the phone. I noticed the way he raised his brows, and shut-tight smile that resonates a New York edgy resignation. His expressions were so familiar to me from working with him that summer.

“How’s your daughter?” I asked Bonnie.

“She died four years ago.”

I was watching Jack, “Oh Bonnie, I’m so sorry.” Jack’s eyes darted back to me. I promised Bonnie I’d come back and we’d all have dinner. I told her about the memoir and she remarked, “I have lots of stories about your father. He was a character.”   

After I hung up the phone, Jack yelled, “Is Bonnie coming down?”

“No. She’s not up to it right now,” I answered. He pressed his lips into a thin disappointedly accepting line. For twenty years Bonnie worked side by side with Jack. She knew every customer, and made them feel like family. As a young teenager dad used to bring us in the shop. Bonnie always made an effort to be our friend.     

“Look out the window, there’s another one. See what I mean?” Jack said.

“Yes Jack. I do. Listen, I want to thank you for giving me a job that summer. I never had a chance to thank you. It really meant a lot to me.”

He smiled. “I can’t sit here all day and count the birds. What am I gonna do?”

“What do you want to do?” I answered.

 He shrugged his shoulders.

“Do you have any hobbies, anything else you like besides suits?”

“I love to paint.”

“Paint?” Well that’s what you should do.”

“Look over there,” he gestured with a heavy arm. On the wall behind me, half a dozen oil paintings were hanging. I noticed one of a young sailor standing next to his ship.

“I really like that one Jack. I think you should paint.”

 “What?”

 “I said, RETIRE AND PAINT.”

He shrugged his shoulders. I kissed him again and he didn’t move from the chair. He needed me to raise him up, close the shop, and lock the door. I would have done it if he was all alone. I wanted to take him back to Santa Fe and place him at the Audubon, and let him paint the swallows.

 I walked out and looked back once. He was staring out the window. I thought about the stories he used to tell, like the time Mickey Cohen came rushing through the shop and dropped a suitcase at Jack’s feet, “Hold onto this until I get back.” Mickey had commanded.

“What was in it Jack?”

“Whatta ya think? Stolen loot. They all used to come through the shop on the way out of Ducker’s Barber Shop.  I couldn’t stop them–they did what they did–I don’t even know what they did, but use my phone all day.”  

After I left Jack, Soaring Crow drove me over Laurel Canyon to meet Marietta, my mother’s friend.  We had just passed Lookout Mountain when I recalled being there. It was painted right before my eyes. Lizzie, one of the wild ones in high school, and I used to drive up there in her British racing green Volvo. She loved going to mountain tops. We’d get high, and lean into the flickering spray of lights imagining all we were missing by beings so darn young. We didn’t know then we weren’t missing anything. We had it all; a big bubbling hot city filled with mysteries, puzzles, romance, and opportunities. Neither one of us had dreams of college and marriage. Lizzie wanted a baby, and I wanted to runaway to a distant splendor in the grass. As Soaring Crow descended the canyon and inched towards Studio city, I glanced over, and noticed a street sign, Sunshine Terrace.

“That’s where Kenny used to live with his parents. I bet his mother is still there.  I’m going to call her.” Kenny was an irreplaceable boyfriend at eighteen, who later became the man who guided me towards writing. He used to shout out loud about how f—g good my poetry was, and how I should be published. Who can let go of a guy like that.  

Kenny’s dad, Bernie the big shot, who everyone tolerated because he was a WWII Nazi military prosecutor, had died years before. You couldn’t butter your bread without Bernie finding something fishy about it. Soaring Crow met Kenny back in the nineties, when Kenny dropped by his house on his way to living in a campsite in Escondido. He stayed a month.      

“Kenny! What a case that one is. You gotta love him. I understand him now. I know why he bailed out of society. I thought he was weird back then.” Soaring Crow chuckled thinking about Ken. He always had a neatly organized backpack, a cigar in his mouth, and carried a little black book with all his notes and phone numbers. He was an herbal tea importer and an inventor of gadgets.    

We drove into the strip center on Ventura Boulevard fifteen minutes early. I called information and got the phone number for Ken’s mother, Anna Marie.

“Hello Anna Maria, it’s Luellen.”

 “Oh Luellen how are you? It’s been a long time.” That was an understatement. It had been thirty years or more.”  Her voice revealed so much. She spoke in long unwavering sentences, and it reminded me of how long-winded Ken could be when he got on his philosophical podium.  She was Austrian and her accent smoothed out the awkward moments.   

“I’ll be 84 this week.”

“Really? Well Happy Birthday.”

“ Oh thank you. I’ve been in this house fifty years.”

“ Wow, that’s amazing. It’s a beautiful house. I always admired your cooking and gardening.”

“ I don’t do much of that anymore.” 

“ How is Ken doing?” I asked.

“ He moved to Guatemala.”

“ Really? When was that?”

“ Five years ago.”

“ Have you seen him lately?”

“Five years ago was the last time.”

“Is he all right?”

“He says he is. But I don’t know. We email, and sometimes he’ll call. I wish he would visit.”

“He couldn’t stand living in Los Angeles, or anywhere in the US.”  I added.

“He lived in Ensenada for years; then he decided to go to Guatemala. It’s so far. He loves the Latin culture. It’s too hot for me. He should come back and visit. I need a little help.”

“What about the other brothers?”

“Rick has cancer.”  

I rolled the rental-car window down and looked through people as they walked by. I didn’t tell her I was around the corner; I couldn’t just stop in and leave five minutes later.   

“I’m so happy you called. I’ll tell Ken when I write to him next time. Are you married?”

“No.”

“Oh well. So nice to hear from you. Come and visit sometime.”

“I will, I promise you I will.” 

As I left the car and headed upstairs to meet Marietta I felt a peck of familiarity with my surroundings. I was standing in front of the Starbucks, where Ken used to call me from when he was in town.

“ I’m over here at Starbucks, what a nightmare, I can’t even find a set a teeth in the place, nobody smiles. I’m telling you Lou, this isn’t the way it’s supposed to me. I got a headache and nothing even happened yet.” I wished he was sitting there, he could make bring hours of non-stop laughter.     

Soaring Crow opened the door to the Daily Grill. Seated on a high stool, next to the hostess, was a strikingly beautiful woman. Her hair was pulled back in a bandana, and fell to her shoulders. Her skin was snow white, with a frosty pink glow and her china blue eyes glistened when she smiled.

“Oh you must be Luellen.  I knew it right away; you look like your mother.”  To be continued next week.

Any dice to throw: Email: folliesls@aol.com

 

 

The throw of the dice this week lands on adventures in waiting.   As children, our waiting depended on how long it took Mom and Dad to finish what ever they were doing, and pay attention to our needs.  Waiting wrestled with us, like a high-fever, and we resorted to nudging them, whining, even sobbing, if we were made to wait longer than we expected. During those formative school years, I waited all semester for the summer.   In Los Angeles that meant it was hot enough to go swimming in the ocean.   

When I lived in Hollywood, I rode two buses to get to Santa Monica.  The second bus dropped me off on Ocean Avenue, the parallel street to Palisades Park, and above Santa Monica Beach.   I ran down the ramp that connects to Pacific Coast Highway, and headed north to Sorrento Beach, another long block away, and when I reached the wide flat sands I stumbled in my tennis shoes trying to run in sand so thick it filled my shoes. I slowed down when I found my schoolmates clustered in a caravan of towels, beach chairs, radios, and brown bag lunches. I didn’t just take off to the ocean, I had to sit and talk and have something cold to drink.   The wait lasted until my hair started to frizz, and then when I couldn’t stand it any longer, I ran down to the shore. Limb by limb I let the embrace of the waves, inch higher and higher until I was tumbling inside their grasp, and floating into abandonment.   

        After I moved to New Mexico, I stopped thinking about the ocean.  I had to remove the memories from my thoughts, so I could continue to experience this spark of the world. The dry sage ocean of pink soil, and radiant blue sky that pinches your eyes when you’re driving through sunlight, the warmth of a desert night,  and the white snow on pink adobe.  It has a postcard perfection, even now, with curly brown leaves spread like trash in the streets,  and the trees almost naked, and the dead plants in the garden.  I try not to think of the ocean, the look of the sea from watery suntanned eye lids, or from the bluff at Del Mar, or the splashing of waves around my shoulders as I sink beneath the surface. I waited, like I did as a teenager, for that summer to come, so I could return to the sea. 

            Last week, I stood at the Del Mar seashore; it was like a summer day in August.  Except there were no kids playing ball and screaming, no boom boxes, or the running of the dogs, and no lifeguards  thrashing this part of the beach in their jeeps shouting, ‘ no swimming, no dogs off the leashes, no glassware,  and no surfing.’  They were missing, so were the beach runners, surfers, and wind surfers.  In fact, I was the only one swimming, on that first day at the beach.   Before I went into the water, I reclined on a big black boulder facing the sea, and let my eyes wander the scenes on a Tuesday afternoon. In front of me was an older man with graying hair, reading in a canvas beach chair.   He must be retired, he looked adapt to his spot about five feet from the shoreline.   I thought about that Dennis Hopper commercial, the one on retirement, and how I still cannot come to grips with the idea of spending my days on park benches or in cafes watching younger men and women live. 

            I noticed there was one swimmer on a boogie board. He was far out, and floating along, and I wished I’d brought mine with me, but it was in SC’s van. The last time I used it was when I lived in Solana Beach.  I also wished I had a new bathing suit, because the one I was wearing was busted and the neck straps were tied together in a knot so I could swim without losing my top.   The sun baked my body, and I let it without abeyance, without shading my skin, or wearing a hat, just enough sunscreen to keep the rays from invasion.  I closed my eyes and I opened them, and this is when the waiting business suddenly felt so important, so much so that I began to think about waiting as an aphrodisiac or something, that you have to make last while you wait for that moment that makes you feel immortal, childlike, and senses sharp as a wild animal.   

 I felt the beach flies, and the tang of salt on my lips, and when the seagulls swarmed above the water’s surface, like so many beads of a necklace, I thought,  this is more beautiful, because I WAITED. I didn’t give up on the ocean, or my place in it, or believing that I would have my day in the sand, under a faded denim blue sky, with cotton ball clouds floating above me.  I baked until the sweat drenched my pores, and then I raised myself up, and walked slowly to the edge of the water. It was a flat glassy day, and I felt the first sting of the chilly water on my feet, and then my knees, and then all at once I submerged. I discovered the best way to celebrate the day was to keep flopping backward on top of each wave as it crashed, and I did this for a dozen rounds, until I felt silly and weak, and dented with the surf.   I found that waiting thing again, meant something that I should write about, because all of us were waiting for the election, and the economy to recover, and our real estate to be worth something again, and for me, to be published in hard back with at least three hundred pages.  We are all waiting for this big change so we can feel secure and optimistic about the future.  There is something useful about waiting, something predisposed, that gives us the support and substance we need, so when the waiting is over, and we are all flush with success again, it will feel like the first time, it will overwhelm us with bitter joy, like the ocean.  

 When I left the beach I had enough jubilation bouncing through my body to take the risk of driving by Maurice’s house, the one he left three years ago, when he died under his favorite orange tree.  To be continued next week. Any dice to throw Email: folliesls@aol.com 

 

 

My responsibility as a writer is to assure people taking a chance in life is the only way to live, and so … I throw the dice.

THE WIND AND THE CHIME   

  

 

The throw of the dice this week lands on the wind and the chime.

At three in the morning the walls of reality merge with dreams, namelessness, restlessness, and an alertness of unspoken needs.    

 

What I think of at three in the morning is never the same at ten o’ clock in the morning.  The labyrinth of safety, colliding with the unknown, seems to be the most innocent of emotions. It is also a time that  springs bright eyed realizations, recognitions, and a time when our mirrors move toward us.  I see my looks fading. All I ever wanted was to see myself as pretty as my mother was.   

 

The wind is sudden as it whips through the spruce tree outside my window.   

I get up and wander downstairs, listening to the wood floors crackle at my footstep.  I walk outdoors onto the back porch.  The wind is like a mirror to me. This sound, so clear and unmixed in Santa Fe,  brings me back to the years in Hollywood. The nights my father went out allowing me the freedom to explore outside. I would run down Doheny Drive to Santa Monica Boulevard and just keep running.  It was on those windy Santa Ana nights that I’d run the longest. 

I was running because the need to express something was bulging through my body.   Back then I didn’t keep a journal at home. My father had discovered it and then questioned me about everything I’d written. 

This night is like that, only I don’t feel like running, I am listening to the sound of the chime and the wind. I am thinking of the music of Charles Lloyd, and the shadows that look like people, and the clouds that appear to have message,  and how everything is different when you are alone.

 

I dine without pause and usually finish before I’ve even wiped my mouth. I have extended conversations with the cats, Bugsy and Alice,  and moments are elongated.  I sit down at the counter and this wind and chime continues to circulate the house. It is an announcement- it is expectant of spring.  I jotted down some notes and knew what I wished to write about today.

 

April is expectant- there is expectancy everywhere you look. The buds on the stark tree limbs are about to bloom, the birds have evacuated their nests and begin singing early in the morning, and insects eject themselves from their hidden corners. I don’t know what spring is like for a man, I’ve never asked any man, but I am going to tell you what spring is like for one woman. 

The essence of spring is sensuous, and for a woman it is an overture.

We strip down the layers of clothing; replacing socks with sandals, and sweaters with t-shirts.  When I hear birds and watch them in the trees, I think of babies, and innocence. There are flowers about to shoot through the heavy clasp of winter dormancy, and when they do, the colors remind me to replace all the black pants and turtlenecks with pastel shades of peach and blue.    

 

The sunlight radiates through my skin and warms every thing. My heart  feels like it has been through a tune up.  My body wants to dowse in sea  water, and to eat less, and to run up canyon road, and listen to music, and dine al fresco, and get pedicures. Men, do notice your woman’s new pedicure, it will make her very happy.  All of this preparation is to tune up the romantic notes,  and to get YOUR ATTENTION. It is time to bring you out of the garage, or wherever you go in spring, and to notice that we are blooming. This is what I felt the night I heard the Charles Lloyd Quartet;  I heard him blooming. 

 

 Surprise us with flowers, a new hat, or a picnic on the banks of the Rio Grande.  Spring is time to redirect your attention to woman because we are at our best in spring.  Our attention is on our surroundings; we will want to buy flowers, and baskets and new cushions for the patio furniture.   We change our lipstick color, comb our hair different, and we look for new ways of expressing how good we feel. 

 

Today I see cherry blossoms in my neighbors’ yard.  They remind me of

a day in April at Golden Gate Park.  Then I feel young again, like I was in the park that day, when I was in love with a man who would prove to be one of the great adventures of my life. 

If you live in Santa Fe then you understand when I say-hurry up spring and start undressing.   

 

“Is there any feeling in a woman stronger than curiosity? Fancy seeing, knowing, touching what one has dreamed about. What would a woman not do for that? Once a woman’s eager curiosity is aroused, she will be guilty of any folly, commit any imprudence, venture upon anything, and recoil from nothing.”

Guy De Maupassant, “An Adventure in Paris.”

 

 

 

  

THE SUN RISES ON HARDSHIP

 The throw of the dice this week falls on the sunrise of hardship.

     In my home there is one staircase window that faces east. Each morning before I descend the stairs I stop at the landing, to watch the day begin. The sun must rise above an assortment of tree limbs and trunks, and up over the mountains. By the time I’ve had my coffee, the sun has risen above these obstructions. I am now jerked awake, like a slight nudge a parent might give you, ‘Come on–wake up! You have school.”  

I begin writing, but that shameless sunlight in my eyes and the dance of the birds are tempting me to step outdoors.  When you live in seasonal climate, summer days and nights lure you out of your wits; why stay inside when there’s moonlight, a sage brush breeze, and merriment across the street.

The gradual awakening unfolds layers of thoughts, beginning with the anxiety of the times. The impending hardship of thousands, my friends, and neighbors, oozes out like a bad smell. Everyone seems to be slanting in new directions; some are going home where they came from, others take on another job, or moving out and leasing their homes.    

 

Some mornings I can’t even look at the newspaper. The headlines read like Sunday’s promotional movie advertisements: BANKRUPT, FORECLOSURE, and SUICIDE. The shocking prick of national disaster is a surgical awakening of a disease untreated.  There’s no time to waste, no money to squander, it is a time of reduction and refusal.

     As minor calamities knock on my door, and creditors calling from India, I turn my head to the sunlight and resume what I have to do, and that is write. If you know me, then you know I’ve vanished. It’s the only way I can work, and I’m standing on my head happy that I have the solitude to do it. 

 Last week while I was upstairs, prone on the sofa figuring out a transition between two scenes, someone knocked at the door. Then they fiercely rang the bell. Oh what it is now I thought.   

     “Yes,” I asked the man standing outside. He stared at me while twilling a toothpick in his mouth.

“Are you all right? I’m from Safeguard Security we haven’t had any signal on your alarm.  We came to check on you.”

I stood there expressionless. I assured him I wasn’t held captive or about to throw myself out the window, but he didn’t seem convinced, he lingered and kept looking over my shoulder.  I hastily sent him on his way, and returned to the desk.  I’d been rude; I didn’t even thank the guy.  This is some kind of message, next time he’ll slam the door in my face.      

Later in the day, if I haven’t ventured outdoors yet, I take a walk around the Plaza, and muse over the herds of tourists. I look for revealing expressions and conversations.  I didn’t see panic and anxiety, I observed relief. Couples shuffled together, maybe holding hands, dragging shopping bags, and aiming directionless for a new snapshot. They stand gaping at the churches and shoot photographs while standing in the middle of the street. Vacation is bliss in the middle of discontent. 

When I return to my desk, it is time to print the days work. This is always a ritual of great expectation, filled with disappointments, surprise, and sometimes a whiff of elation.

 By now the sun has made its journey to the other side of the house. The back porch is like starched light, it burns the eyes and flesh, the immediate effect is callous. Now is the time to slouch in the chair, close my eyes, and rewind a few scenes back.

Hardship is like the sun, unmerciful when it is met face to face, and transforming when we are protected. The sunlight is absorbed into our bodies; the effect is invigorating when taken in increments. The light changes the color of the world, we see things differently, and so it is with hardship, we feel intensely, our senses are sharpened, and we appreciate the treats more so than in times of prosperity.

It all translates into less spending and more creating. 

While I lounge in this old house, one track of time keeps re-appearing. It was when my living space was limited to one tiny room, finances on a string as long as my finger and uncertainty a nightmare that turned into a lullaby. It is that time again; and what we all must do is keep the adventures above the circumstances. Any dice to throw:

Folliesls@aol.com 

WRITING IN THE RIPPLES

 

Smiley’s Dice Adventures in Livingness

 By: Louellen  Smiley

 

The throw of the dice this week falls on chapter one of the memoir.   Like any creative endeavor, the work is organic and has a life of its own.   A garden doesn’t always grow with your plans; there are seeds that fall outside of the planter. There are disasters that drift though our arrangements and cause chaos. I am beginning to believe nothing ends how we visualize it will.   A beautiful day is hijacked by a tornado, a child is murdered while taking a walk with a girlfriend, and a chapter runs away from the author.     

The desk where I sit and write is engulfed with books, files, index cards, note pads, FBI files, and outlines. Period photographs are scattered through-out the room to further sedate any intrusion of the present. I live in a cubicle of my parent’s and famous gangsters. 

I was writing a lengthy portrayal of Ben Siegel one day, and it occurred to me that he had become a major character in my life.  He played a role that someone else should have; a noted author,  journalist, or poet.  Ben Siegel changed my history because I had to learn to love him.  Learning to love him meant erasing everything I had read or heard.    It is said he was a ruthless killer, a savage, violent, and that he loved to kill.    I turned my head to look at a photograph of my mother.  I was told that she loved Ben too. 

Where once I believed my mother was naïve and uninformed about Ben; now I know this wasn’t the case. She knew from the beginning. I‘ve read the news articles of the day, the columns, and I’ve spoken to people who were there.  The volumes of truth surfaced because of a club of researchers that have rallied around my book. These people, who gain insightful and intimate details of your life, form a friendship that is unlike any other.     Alice Syman, who has dug into the archives of every newspaper in the country found some disturbing articles. She wrote to me beforehand, and asked if I wanted to read the slanderous headlines.    RJ has an alert button built into his computer. Every time someone writes about my family, his button goes off. This week he sent me sent me a column he’d found in the Los Angeles Times about my father’s fracas with Tommy Dorsey.   Kristin Baggelaar, who authored , “Images of America, The Copacabana,” introduced me to women who knew my mother.   

What I’ve learned and accepted, is that she knew who Ben Siegel was and what he did.  My mother fit into this strangely singular and controversial group of criminally engaged people.  An Irish Catholic, convent raised,  John Robert Powers Model, with a future on stage and in film, was very close friends with my father’s associates.   I see her in the full frame of who she was; and not the puritan I had imagined.   I like her this way because it blends with the outrageousness of my former years. 

While writing about my father I questioned my prolonged interest in his choices, his behavior, and his secrecy. I asked Uncle Myron who shares the same history as my father.   Myron reaffirmed that my father was a true to the code gangster. No one ever got him to talk about what he knew or had seen. He assured me that descendants of men like my father suffer a similar disassociation with society, and share the same struggles to fit in as I have.    

Why I continue to seek answers and probe into their lives is  because they never told me anything. Children feel the repression of truth as clearly as they do the pain of bruise.  The more you hide the more they seek.  I more so than my sister,  because at my root is the inclination to question the world around me, and to mend the breaks in our lives. 

Along the way of writing the first chapter, I discovered that people like to know how I work in a state of solitude and selfishness.  It seems unnatural until you pick up a book you love and read.  While a story is moving through the author, they– or at least I — refrain from answering the phone, checking email, or listening to the voices downstairs. A story or any work of art lives inside the artist. It sounds sort of portentous but that is how it feels to me.  So when intrusions come, the disturbances are exaggerated into surrealistic proportions.  

A  knock on the door followed by a question unrelated resembles the feeling of being flung out of my chair and into mid-air.   Grating truck noise, loading and unloading of hotel uniforms and supplies is part of the landscape of my writing stage;   as is the occasional worker singing Mexican love songs.   I could easily write about the life of the hotel across the street; the many characters that take care of the guests and the grounds.  It would be an easy writing assignment because I am not related to the hotel.  Writing about your parent’s, the people who introduced you to the world,  is like grinding down your memories into sand,  and sifting through the grains for meaning. 

I write through the day starting at noon and finish around six.  Not all that time is writing; a great portion is lifting one pile of notes, to find another pile, indexing, reading, and just stretching out on the sofa and listening to the voices.  When I feel the prick of defeat rising from the page, I take a break outdoors, and watch my bird family dipping in the fountain or munching in the bird feeder.  I dream of diving into the Mediterranean, and take an imaginary plunge into the clear water where facts and fiction merge together.

 At the end of the day, as other lives intersect with mine, I see people engaged in human activity, the stimulation of common interest from living people and their needs. In writing you interact with your head.   The narrative is like water; it can run smooth like a river over all the rocks and debris, or it can break into a million bubbles and lose everything.    When it breaks apart like a wave on the beach, you begin again, and the erosion of impatience allows you to continue.  

It is what we all face collectively, the strength to return to a flawed or broken piece of our lives ,and make it work for us.  Any dice to throw email: folliesls@aol.com

If you interested in writing and are looking for an editor or a researcher. I have two recommendations:

David Bowman
Precise Edit 
PH:  505-603-3411 (cell)
PH:  888-474-4393 (toll-free)
FX:  505-474-4393
dbowman@PreciseEdit.com
http://www.PreciseEdit.com 

 Expert research: Genealogy, Newspaper archives, Internet articles

Alice Syman

P.O. Box 5495

St. Augustine, FL 32085

904-810-5596

Email: asyman@earthlink.net

 

 

JOCKEYS

 

 

     After spending several summers in Saratoga Springs, I discovered I loved thoroughbred horseracing. All my life I’ve been a performing arts spectator. I never watch any sports on television and only attended baseball games when my father needed a companion. The art of performance is what led me to experience the racetrack as live theater.

     The racetrack is a stage, the jockeys are the actors, and the men and women that fill the bleachers, the picnic grounds, the Turf Club, and the private boxes are the audience. The racehorse is the star celebrity.

     The tickets for admission, like any show, are based on your seating. You can walk through the gates for $3.00, or you can buy a box for $100,000 a year. The collage of human emotions, drama, suspense, and danger, are key components to good theater.

     Gambling personifies the Shakespearean twist of the racetrack. High rollers and drugstore cowboys wager to win. Some men walk out with a grocery cart of recycled cans; some walk out with enough money to buy a racehorse. They leave by the same gate, and the next day they come back for

more. But why, I ask, is thoroughbred racing not considered an all-around American sport? Why don’t jockeys get athletic respect? These two spheres of lightning truth struck me while I trampled through the mud one rainy August day at Saratoga Racetrack.

I asked around for opinions. The Governor’s bodyguard remarked that it was a good question. He did not think gambling was the reason because people bet on sports all the time. He thought maybe that it was because as kids we don’t learn to race horses, like baseball and football. The public is naïve about jockeys because they have never raced. Another answer I heard was that 200,000 fans fill a ballgame on any given day, and that those numbers don’t compare with horseracing.

     I’m not a bettor, and I don’t ride very well, but I am a drama whore. I took my notebook to the jocks’ room to ask the jockeys what they thought about this irregularity in sports. Jose Santos had a few minutes to spare.

     “Jose, do you feel like America thinks of you as an athlete?”

     “We don’t get the respect that we should. I think it’s the gambling. This is the greatest racetrack in America, and there is gambling in every sport, but when you come to the track, you see it right there, and people cannot avoid it. Pound for pound, we are more fit than most athletes.”

     I asked Jose what he does aside from riding. He jogs three miles every day and walks for a mile. He reminded me that if he goes down with the horse, his strength is what gets him back up again. Another misconception is that jockeys only ride for 2 minutes. Well, the race is 2 minutes, but they ride every day of the year. They do not take breaks.

     “How does the public perceive you?” I asked.

     “In Europe they are treated like movie stars. Over here the jockey is just another person, and in sports, the jockey is low. I wish we had more respect, but we don’t get the publicity.”

     This feels like the guts of the truth; our little minds like to align with other like minds. The leaders of the pack go to football and baseball, and the media follows behind.

     Jose remarked that the only time he felt real enthusiasm and support was when he won the Triple Crown. Otherwise, they get a little column in the paper with the results. “The Racing Form is 100 pages, and nothing is written about us.”

     “What if there was a Jockey Magazine?”

     “Well, that would be great. Then the companies would be interested, and we’d get sponsors. When I go out to the park and run, I wear Nikes too.” He chuckled.

    “Have they ever approached you for sponsorship?”

    “No, I don’t expect they will.”

 A few days later I found Jerry Bailey before a race. It was a cinch to get into the jocks’ room in those days. That was before Elliott Spitzer sipped all the fizz out of Saratoga Race Track. These days the Press can’t walk inside the jocks’ room.  Jerry hopped onto a counter and extended his hand.

“How are you?”

“Great Jerry, thank you for meeting me.”

“Sure.”

“Jerry, I’m very interested in the lack of sports sponsorship offered jockeys. Why do you think that is?

“Because no one is promoting us.  If you don’t do anything to promote us, how does anyone know? They have bobble heads and gimmicks like that, but there isn’t even a Jockey Calendar. Excuse me now; I’ve got to ride a race.”

 Of all the risk takers and entrepreneurs in the world, horse racing is the champion in all categories. If I made a decision to understand the business and attend every race, meet every owner, jockey and trainer, there’s no chance I’d really understand anything more, because I do not love the horse the way a jockey does, and you can’t fool the horse!

   During the Hall of Fame Induction presentation at Saratoga a few years back, D. Wayne Lucas made a speech that drew a full house of gregarious applause. This is an excerpt:

 “You ride a great horse, and the owner wakes up the next day and decides to switch to Bailey. The adversity is unbelievable, it is a gut wrenching, bring you to your knees humbling business, whether you’re a rider, trainer, owner, or breeder. There’s one thing that will keep you going, and that is simply your attitude. Attitude is the most important decision you make everyday. Make it early, and make sure you make the right one. You will have a very full and very peaceful life.”

 Maybe it’s time for a Jocks Nike, call it the Two Minute Nike. 

  

 

ZIGZAGGIN WITH D.H. LAWRENCE

The throw of the dice this week lands on an adventure with D.H. Lawrence. 

Our affair began in the winter of 1970, when the film “Women in Love” was released. 

            “ Let’s go see this movie, Alan Bates is in it.” Lizzie,  and I were madly in love with Alan Bates.  Neither one of us had read the book, or had much knowledge of D.H. It was a film that explored sexual relations that interested us, and it was filmed in England.  Back in Junior High Lizzie sang musical songs while I taped her on a recorder.  Now in High School, she was singing Hey Jude, and I was reading the words from the record album.     

 

I remember sitting in the balcony of the Beverly Wilshire Theater, leaning forward in my seat  as I longed, with adolescent fixation, to be inside the story. I wanted to live in a studio like Gudren’s( the part played by Glenda Jackson) and toast my bread in front of fireplace and paint all day.  Gudren was the artist terrified of being tamed.  Her sister Ursula, who personified Lawrence’s wife Frieda, wished to make her life within a man’s.    

 “Your Gudren, and I’m Ursula,”  Lizzie claimed with clairvoyant assurance.  

 ”  No, I’m not all Gudren.” I protested.

 ” You are– you’ll see.”   Within  a year, Lizzie would be in-love in London, creating a life around a man, and I would be an art student at Sonoma State College.  

  

But on that lazy matinee afternoon,  we gasped, and squeezed each other’s hands, during particular erotic scenes that shocked our sensibility. It was an  awakening, of the abstraction of relationships. We’d discovered that friendships  were not as they seemed, and that love did not always have a happy ending.   It woke me to what possibilities lay ahead, and turned a defining fold in my growth.  Would I end up like Gudren?  At times the thought haunted me.

 

Over the last thirty years, I’ve  watched the film every time it screened on television.  It was the benchmark of my youth,   just before I wandered off into relationships with artists and bohemian living.  Several years ago I purchased a copy.  I was convinced there  was something I’d missed.   

 

Summer 2006 Taos, NM

 I move to Taos and Rudy gives me “Birds, Beast’s & Flowers” a collection of poems written by D.H. during his stay in Taos.   I journey out to Del Monte Ranch where D.H. and Frieda lived on and off for several years.  The ranch keepers took us on a private tour; oral and on foot.  I yearned to learn more.  Several days later I walked down the portal of Ranchos Plaza to see what new treasure books Robert had in his shop. 

   “What do you have by D.H. Robert?” 

   “Kangaroo, and Lorenzo in Search of The Sun,” it’s a biography about DH.

   “I’ll take them.” 

They were placed on the bookshelf in the bedroom and remained there unread.  By now,  I’d seen the famous stained glass window D.H.  painted in Mabel Dodge’s bathroom in Taos, and the sketchings on display at the La Fonda Hotel.  Still, I had not read any of his novels.  

 

Winter  2008. Santa Fe.

The down blanket is wrapped tightly around my shoulders on a snowy night.   I take “Lorenzo in Search of the Sun”  off the shelf and begin to read.  The book begins with his adventure in Taormina.     

    “I am so thankful to be back in the South, beyond the Straits of Messina, in the shadow of Etna, and with Ionian Sea in front: the lovely, lovely dawn-sea where the sun does nothing but rise toward Greece.”

 

 This first excerpt  leads me to chisel the cobwebs of memory to the  summer of 1972.  I left my sister in Barcelona, with a Spanish- lover, and took  a solo journey to Sicily. I don’t recall what precipitated my quest;  but the warnings and discouragement from my sister, and fellow travelers didn’t obstruct my vision. I had to go to Sicily. It turned out to be the bittersweet part of my European summer.  An  Italian hotelier rescued me, and put me up for a few weeks in his Taormina hotel; like he did with all the lost American hippie girls. 

 

Every night this winter, I huddled inside and read a few pages of the book, savoring them as I would a chocolate souffle. These descriptions of Italy, Mexico, and Taos infiltrated that clamping cold.   D.H mentions the Model T Lizzie in his chapters on the El Monte Ranch in  Taos.  I am reminded of my trip to the ranch.

 

This is an excerpt of the column I wrote about my visit to ranch in 2006.        

 

D.H and his wife Frieda moved to the Ranch in 1924.   Imagine that journey–there was no road to the Ranch, that came much later. They must have hiked up the hill or gone on horseback.  The ranch includes a small barn, and two cabins; they chose the larger Homesteader’s Cabin. It is so organic, as if spun together by weeds and timber chips, but actually is a mixture of pine logs, mud, straw and water.  The Homesteader was a man named John Craig. He claimed this property in the 1880’s, and built the cabins with the surrounding Ponderosa pine.  The pueblo Indians helped D.H restore the cabin and he moved in during the summer of 1924. 

 

I thought about this man sitting under the majestic beauty of the pines, and writing all day long.  The plateau of silence that envelopes this ranch is every writer’s dream.  Here he wrote some of his Taos poetry, “Birds, Beast’s & Flowers” he finished “St. Mawr,” a short novel, the novel “David,” and parts of  “The Plumed Serpent.”    D.H didn’t know how to type;   he left that task to Dorothy Brett, the artist that accompanied D.H and Frieda.  D.H invited Dorothy and several other friends to join him in Taos after his first visit in early 1924.  He was creating a Utopian society, he named Rananim.  Brett was the only artist to accept the offer.

 

I took a few photographs and then we trotted back to the entrance. Just as we were getting into the Van, a car pulled up. A woman got out, and called out a hello from across the way.   I yelled back that we were just leaving, and she yelled even louder, “I can’t hear you – I’m almost deaf.”  I got out of the car and went to meet her halfway.  Immediately taken with her pioneering eyes, and up at dawn spirit, I yelled to Rudy to get out of the car.  

            “ I’m Mary and that’s Al over there, we’re the caretakers.  Al’s been here 50 years.”   I nodded to Al, standing a few feet behind her, watching us with a tinge of curiosity. I noticed his eyes, the color of faded denim, squirming with stories.  I tried not to ask too many questions too quickly;  Al was tired from a long journey so he took a seat on the porch.   

            “ Open up the cabin for them Mary.” He called out.

            Mary nodded and led us up the path to the D.H. cabin. 

Along the way, she talked about the ranch. There is a society named the Friend’s of D.H. Lawrence in Taos, and they want to build a big commercial visitor center on the ranch. Mary and Al think this is a bad idea, because the pines and silence are so happy, why mess up a beautiful memorial.  If you saw the ranch, you’d agree that a visitor center will look like a spaceship in this territory of natural beauty.  Mary opened the door to the cabin and showed us around. The first thing I noticed was the typewriter. 

            “ Is that where he typed? ” (She gave me printed literature that fills in the information I know now.)

            “ Nope,– but that’s the typewriter Dorothy typed on.”  The cabin is well maintained, simple and authentic.  After we examined everything Mary led us back to Al. We gathered around the porch and Al talked about the road that he cleared to the ranch, the typewriter he dug out of the dump, and the time he drove out from Chicago in his Tin Lizzie.  Rudy turned to the Model T in the parking lot.

      ” You drove that out here?”  He asked. 

      ”  Naw, that’s my brother’s. We‘re going to get it workin’ soon.  Go on in and take a look.”    Rudy jogged over and got inside.  I took photographs of him, and Al watched. 

    ” That’s how D.H. and Frieda got around Taos, they’s was great cars.”  

   

 Mary took me aside and told me that she was throwing a party for Al in a few weeks, and that we’d be welcome. It would be Al’s  90^th birthday. I glanced over at him, petting his dog and looking very content.  I didn’t think he heard us, but he did.  “ I’ll be here until I’m 100.”   We exchanged good wishes, and many waves before leaving that afternoon.  

 

Was Al’s brother Gotzsche, who D.H. writes about and who toured them around in his Lizzie?   Further in my reading,  I discovered that Gudren, personified the author Katherine Mansfield.   I became more keenly acquainted with Katherine  in Saratoga Springs, when I attended a reading of her short stories at Yaddo Arts Colony. 

 

D.H.  is a puzzle that continues to zigzag around my  “adventures in livingness.”  He is also the author of that slogan.  I found the saying in Anais Nin writings, but in fact I think its origin is with Lawrence. 

Any dice to throw Email: folliesls@aol.com

 

SPRING & WOMAN

Smiley’s Dice  Adventures in Livingness

                                                 Luellen Smiley 

 The throw of the dice this week lands on the wind and the chime. At three in the morning the walls of reality merge with dreams, namelessness, restlessness, and an alertness of unspoken needs.     What I think of at three in the morning is never the same at ten o’ clock in the morning.  The labyrinth of safety, colliding with the unknown, seems to be the most innocent of emotions. It is also a time that  springs bright eyed realizations, recognitions, and a time when our mirrors move toward us.  I see my looks fading. All I ever wanted was to be as pretty as my mother was.      The wind is sudden as it whips through the spruce tree outside my window.   

I get up and wander downstairs, listening to the wood floors crackle at my footstep.  I walk outdoors onto the back porch.  The wind is like a mirror to me. This sound, so clear and unmixed in Santa Fe,  brings me back to my adolescent years in Hollywood. The nights my father went out,  allowing me the freedom to explore outside. I would run down Doheny Drive to Santa Monica Boulevard and just keep running.  It was on those windy Santa Ana nights that I’d run the longest.  I was running because the need to express something was bulging through my soul.  Back then I didn’t keep a journal at home. My father had discovered it and then questioned me about everything I’d written. 

 This night is like that, only I don’t feel like running, I am listening to the sound of the wind and the chimes.  I’m thinking of the music of Charles Lloyd, and the shadows that look like ghosts, and the clouds that appear to have messages,  and how everything is different when you are alone.  I dine without pause and usually finish before I’ve even wiped my mouth. I have extended conversations with the cats, Bugsy and Alice,  and moments are elongated.  I sit down at the counter and this wind and chime continues to circulate the house. It is an announcement- it is expectant of spring.  I jotted down some notes and knew what I wished to write about today. 

April is expectant- there is expectancy everywhere you look. The buds on the stark tree limbs are about to bloom, the birds have evacuated their nests and begin singing early in the morning, and insects eject themselves from their hidden corners. I don’t know what spring is like for a man, I’ve never asked any man, but I am going to tell you what spring is like for one woman. 

 The essence of spring is sensuous, and for a woman it is an overture.We strip down the layers of clothing; replacing socks with sandals, and sweaters with t-shirts.  When I hear birds and watch them in the trees, I think of babies, and innocence. There are flowers about to shoot through the heavy clasp of winter dormancy, and when they do, the colors remind me to replace all the black pants and turtlenecks with pastel shades of coral and blue.     The sunlight radiates through my skin and warms every thing. My heart  feels like it has been through a tune up.  My body wants to dowse in sea water, eat less,   run up canyon road,  listen to music,  dine al fresco, and get pedicures. Men, do notice your woman’s new pedicure, it will make her very happy.  All of this preparation is to tune up the romantic notes,  and to get YOUR ATTENTION. It is time to bring you out of the garage, or wherever you go in spring, and to notice that we are blooming. This is what I felt the night I heard the Charles Lloyd Quartet;  I heard them blooming.    Surprise us with flowers, a new hat, or a picnic on the banks of the Rio Grande.  Spring is time to redirect your attention to woman because we are at our best in spring.  Our attention is on our surroundings; we will want to buy flowers, and baskets and new cushions for the patio furniture.   We change our lipstick color, comb our hair different, and we look for new ways of expressing how good we feel.   Today I see cherry blossoms in my neighbors’ yard.  They remind me of

a day in April at Golden Gate Park.  Then I feel young again, like I was in the park that day, when I was in love with a man who would prove to be one of the great adventures of my life. 

If you live in Santa Fe then you understand when I say-hurry up spring and start undressing!   “Is there any feeling in a woman stronger than curiosity? Fancy seeing, knowing, touching what one has dreamed about. What would a woman not do for that? Once a woman’s eager curiosity is aroused, she will be guilty of any folly, commit any imprudence, venture upon anything, and recoil from nothing.”Excerpt from Guy De Maupassant, “An Adventure in Paris.”    

SMILEY’S DICE ON SPRING & WOMAN

SMILEY’S DICE

SMILEY’S DICE

SMILEY’S DICE

CONFESSIONS OF OTHER KIDS  

The day after Confessions of a Mob Kid posted Iin the NEW YORK POST new names appeared in my email box.  The messages were the same, “We have a connection.”

Over the years I’ve contemplated the whereabouts of all those aunts and uncles belonging to my father’s world. The aunts and uncles were not genetic; they were part of that other family. 

Some of them had children that became part of my childhood gang.

When our fathers were talking business in delicatessens, poolside or a hotel, we were busy being children.  Over the years I asked dad what happened to some of these kids, and he‘d answer, “Meyer puts it this way; ‘You don’t inherit friends.  He said if often, as if it was a warning; “When I’m gone so are my friends.” He was right; all of his friends vanished into thin air. It was if they had not been part of my life. Yet they formed my first impressions of conversations and behavior between adults.  They set the standards for whom I felt comfortable and with whom I didn’t.  

 The first email was signed Uncle Myron. He said his father, known as “Sugie,” was in the juke box business in New Jersey with Abner “Longy” Zwillman.  We had a juke box in our first home.  I was too young to remember Abner, but I remember the name Longy; my dad talked of him with other friends.  Uncle Myron took over his fathers business and during the seventies and eighties was known as the Emperor of slot machines in New York.  

After three emails, I was ready to talk to my Uncle Myron.   

“Hi Myron, this is Luellen.”

“How are you sweetheart?”  That one line ran circles around my memory. His voice assimilated all the voices of those uncles, and best friends that left without saying goodbye.

“I’m all right.”

“Our fathers were from another world.”

“I know. Do you think they’d be angry with what I wrote?”

“Absolutely NOT! Are you kidding, you’re humanizing them. My father may his soul rest in peace, worked with Longy and Meyer.

“Yes, mine did too. But more closely with Ben Siegel.”

“Sure, they all came from the same fabric. And when you met them, you were part of the family instantly. They knew how to treat you so you would never forget.

“ I haven’t forgotten.”     

“When did dad pass on?”

“It was 1982.  I was devastated. It was awkward to have that background and no one to share it with.

“It’s difficult for all the kids to adjust after that upbringing.”

“Are there a lot of us?”

“Sure, some don’t acknowledge the background; they hide for one reason or another. Most of them are in legitimate business today, it’s a different world sweetheart.”

Sugerman broke the ice within seconds.  I was ready at that moment to get on a flight to Newark and meet him.  Over the next few days he sent me fascinating articles and stories.  The breakage of that controversial and complex lineage is rebuilding itself.  I feel as if I can call on him any time of the day.  

The next email came from a relative of another member of the Jersey boys.  He knew both my parents, and especially liked my mother. He had stories to tell and was eager to exchange impressions.  We got cut short on the telephone by present day business interruptions. 

The next one came a few days later. First an email and then a request to call him.  When Michael answered the phone, he introduced himself as

an associate by birth of the Cleveland Syndicate. It struck me that each one felt loyalty towards their parent’s people.   

My dad was as close to the Cleveland bosses as he was to Ben Siegel.  Lou Rothkopf, one of the four bosses was referred to as Uncle Rhody. Lou flew out to be with Dad the night of Ben’s murder. He would do more for a friend than the friend’s own family. If someone owed him money, he crossed the street to avoid the meeting. He was respected in his community.  After Senator Estes Kefauver whipped up the country’s vengeance against gangsters, bookmakers, bootleggers, and on down the line, Lou was called in to testify.  The humiliation killed him, he committed suicide. Michael’s Uncle was part of Lou’s syndicate.  It is better known as the “Silent Syndicate” because the bosses were so understated. They’d never have been discovered by the feds if it wasn’t for the fabulously flamboyant Benny Siegel. 

Michael didn’t follow in his dad’s footsteps but he has no reservation about pointing to his history. He is, like Myron, an educated and proud Jew.   “I’m sick to death of the caricatures of hoodlums in books and on television.    My life is boring–the history of my people is what fascinates me.  If I had more time I’d study it all day long.” 

“Me too.  They seemed to run the whole country.”

“They did! Your absolutely right.”

“We have a very close connection.”

“We do?”

“Yea. Are you sitting down?”

“Yes.”  

“You know who backed the Flamingo.”

 “New York and Chicago wasn’t it?”

“Cleveland.”

“Oh really.”

“You know what I think?”

“What?”

“ Cleveland took Ben out.”

“Cleveland? You don’t mean Rhody’s clan?”

“I don’t know– its conjecture. From all the stories I heard, the books I’ve read–that’s what I’ve hypothesized.”

We talked for over an hour, and then he said, “Call me anytime; I’d love to talk more. I have a lot of stories about Cleveland.” 

The third connection came as I was driving along the highway in Santa Fe. When she identified herself, I told her to hang on, “I had to faint first.”

It had been thirty years since I’d spoken to her.   She was the one I wanted to find.  I’d imagined our meeting again.  Our mother’s were best friends.   Instead, I was given a friendly warning not to mention anyone in her family.  I agreed.  I didn’t inherit his friends, but I did adopt his sense of loyalty. When a friend says don’t identify me; there is no argument.  I doubt we will have that reunion. She is suspicious of writers and honestly I can’t do anything without writing about it.  

No regrets on my end.  Had it not been for the New York Post, I wouldn’t

be planning a trip to New Jersey to meet Uncle Myron.   He’s saving the

best stories until we meet, and I will pass them on to you.    

ADVENTURES IN FILM « Galleryloulou’s Weblog

ADVENTURES IN FILM « Galleryloulou’s Weblog