Entry for NPR’s three-minute story contest, never submitted.  The rules: under 600 words and beginning with the sentence

“The nurse left work at five o’clock.  The sun had not yet come up, and as she waited for the bus, a man rolled his I/V out of the hospital entrance, fumbled under his gown and, realizing he didn’t have any pockets, asked her if she had a light.  Snow began to fall.  You spend your time trying to save peoples’ lives, she thought, and they’re intent on killing themselves, but then mused that she had her own fondness for the biscuits and sausage gravy in the hospital cafeteria, which, eaten over the course of several years, had their own cumulative deadliness.  She ate this comfort food to sustain her psyche while depositing cholesterol along the secret corridors of her arteries.  Despite the sausage gravy, she was very slim, and men often found her attractive, especially men desperate to evade the mortality which the hospital, a grim brick tower with a brightly lit apex like the snowy peak of a distant mountain, brought to mind.  The bus was late.  A car careened into the entrance drive, drunkenly swerved to avoid nothing, and collided with one of the concrete pylons defending the sidewalk.  The driver got the door open and fell out, his sports coat snagging on a handle so that he spun on his way down and went face first into the sidewalk.

“Holy Bejesus,” rasped the I/V toting smoker as he watched the nurse, already at the man’s side, open his collar to ease bloodflow to his head.

“Tell the desk we need emergency personnel out here, stat,” she shouted to the smoker.  Almost upsetting his IV, he called this loudly to the staffer at the desk.

“Can you hear me?” she said to the man, who seemed to be somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness.

“Statim,” croaked the man.   Her fingers found his pulse, her mental rolodex spun through scenarios: head-injury, heart attack, hemorrhage . . . his pulse thrummed, his breathing spasmed, his eyes opened suddenly, wide and wet and blue, looked into hers.  Maintain communication with the victim.

“Huh?” she said.

“Stat. f- from Latin.  Statim.  Immediately.  Sss.  Ssss.  Sooo cold,” said the man.  She used her sleeve to wipe blood from his nose, which wasn’t really according to procedure, blood diseases being what they are these days, but she wanted to see his face without the blood, wanted the man not to have blood there, wanted to be speaking in a normal situation, perhaps over biscuits and sausage gravy in the hospital cafeteria with this man who had, despite its contortion, a kind face.

Help arrived.  The emergency room people took over, whisking him into the ER.  She followed along.

“Don’t go,” she whispered.

“Go where?”  The nurse replied:

“Don’t leave.  Don’t die.”

“’S ’ll righ-.  Jus’ if you.  Dine with me.”

“Are you asking me out?”  He was going into surgery and she couldn’t follow him there, only watch as his pale, supine frame slide behind a veil of uniforms and equipment.

After she left work at 5 o’clock, the nurse stopped by the room where the Latin teacher convalesced.

He confessed that it was awkward, going on a date while still wearing a hospital smock, especially with someone who already knew that he wore boxers with latin expressions on them.  “Call me old fashioned,” he said.  “Where are you taking me, by the way?”

“It’s just around the corner.  The food isn’t great, and I doubt there’s much you’re allowed to eat, but it’s quiet and a good place to chat.”

You’re going to need a stiff drink.

So after the detective leaves, consider taking the half-drunk bottle of Tequila out of the trash, which is where you put it at his suggestion after he dusted it for fingerprints, “Because you never know what sort of diseases these scumbags are carrying.”  Between you and me, Tequila kills most things, even the fleeting thought that drinking out of the bottle that the thief swigged from is kind of like kissing him.  Better use a glass, just to be on the safe side.

No matter how hot it is, even if it’s so hot the walls are sweating, do not under any circumstance turn on a fan while the detective dusts for fingerprints.

Turning on a fan is counter-productive and detracts from the hard-boiled atmosphere of being visited by an actual detective on a ninety-nine degree day.  Our detective, Detective K, wore blue plastic gloves as he applied an adhesive film to the window sill where a partial finger print emerged in the powder—an entire hand print stood out in the dust of the sill of the open window where he or she had climbed in.   But any print on the outside of the building would almost certainly be useless, Detective K pointed out, because even if they got an I.D., a lawyer would argue that the defendant had simply leaned up against our house to urinate while passing through the alley.  “And that’s not a crime, right?”  I thought about all those times I’d slunk into alleys to pee, worried about getting caught and arrested, which I’m pretty certain is a crime. He mounted the adhesive film in a tiny cardboard slide and showed it to me, holding it up to the light.  “There,” he said.  “That’s almost certainly your man.”  It showed the impression like a fossil, of the whorled tip of an index finger.  Detective K lifted another print from my girlfriend’s jewelry canister.  “Now this one,” he said, “This one looks promising.”  The prints would be fed into a computer and run through AFIS, or the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, which would look for a match in its Herculean memory of known criminals’ fingerprints.

Consider holding, or not holding, an insurance policy.

This time, the robber or robbers had taken a digital video camera and a stash of foreign money I’d been given by a veteran of WWII who had stumbled into a bombed-out bank in the Pacific theatre near the end of the war.  A lot of the notes were worthless, Rupees and Dollars and Pesos that the Japanese government had printed up for their inevitable conquest of the world, bearing the promise: “The Japanese Government Promises to Pay the Bearer on Demand”.  Worthless that is, except to me, who liked to nostalgically thumb through them once in a while.  The nice gentleman who had given them to me had since died.  The camera hurt, but in this, and other break-ins, the psychological effect of having your house ransacked hurts most. The thief or thieves had put these and assorted other theft-worthy items into my red back-packer’s pack, which pained me most because I’d traveled half way around the world with that pack.  To me, the pack symbolized freedom.  To the alleged thief, whose name was Ramone Green, for it was Ramone Green’s wan mugshot that AFIS, after Detective K fed it the fingerprints, spit out like Jonah from the Whale, it represented convenience, like plastic bags at the end of a checkout line. Forget material value, for which you will at best receive, after deductible, a pittance.   The best insurance is a baseball bat and eternal vigilance.

Have You Hugged Your Police Officer Today?

Detective K told us we could come down to the station to pick up the evidence.

“This is my desk”, he said.  “And this is my inbox.”  He indicated your standard  institutional-gray vertically-stacking in- and out-box trays, only his had thirty or so trays stacked all the way to the nicotine-stained fluorescent bulbs of the District 5 station, a precariously leaning tower of Babel of larceny, aggravated assault, arson, and who knows what else.  I didn’t expect them to catch anybody, and I certainly didn’t expect to see our DV camera again, but for the first time, the Law had actually expressed an interest in one of our break-ins.  A far cry, this, from previous break-ins: the litany of which, not that you asked, continues below.

Stories of your many break-ins will not interest other people, who will simply assume that you have exercised poor judgment in choosing where to live, or worse, that due to karma or dharma or whatever it’s called, you somehow deserve to get robbed.

Columbia, SC.  Having moved there for grad school, unbeknownst to us the breeze-tousled grasses of a field adjacent to our street concealed the foundations of a notorious housing project razed a mere month before our arrival.  From our front door you could see a derelict, rusty shack labeled “Mama’s Small Repair and Car Wash” lettered like a seven-year-old had hand-painted the sign.   A corroded chain-link fence enclosed the lot, where the carapace of a Ford F-1 pickup and a fallen, open Frigidaire bred mosquitoes.  The day we arrived, I’d walked around the block to survey our environs, and stood regarding Mama’s Small Repair and Car Wash, shifting uneasily on my feet, which produced a crunch that turned out to be a discarded hypodermic needle and a broken Marvin Gaye cassette under my shoe.  At dusk, ragged silhouettes slunk in and out of Mama’s and several weeks later, at dusk, I watched two men carry out another.

They cased our place, coming by and knocking with what might have been flyers or religious pamphlets held conspicuously in front of them, peering as they did so, through our hurricane shutters.  J was home, saw them, but knew better than to answer the door.  The next day they (there had been two at the door the day before and the ransacking appeared to be a concerted effort) shouldered in the front door, split the deadbolt out of the frame.  Our terrified dog hid, and thankfully, didn’t flee through the door, which J discovered hanging limply on its hinges.  Gone were a video camera, TV, and VCR containing an ethnographic film from the University of South Carolina Film archives (this last being the most vexing, expensive and irreplacable item).  Here again you see that ideas are just as easily, and often all-the-more-painfully stolen than things.  They’d taken every loose penny in the place, a sure sign of junkies. “And see,” I told the tall, black cop who responded to the scene, “the perpetrators left this.”  Proud of my amateur sleuthing, I held up a flyer addressed “Mama’s Small Repair and Car Wash”.  “They must have been holding it at the door so they would look legit,” I suggested.

“Uh huh,” said the cop.

“So maybe you’ll go check out that place?”

“Uh huh.”  I never learned whether the Columbia cops took a look-around in the foreboding interior of Mama’s Small Repair and Car Wash.  We moved soon after, to another place, not really any more secure, but it helps not to be able to imagine hoodlums rooting through your bedroom.  Two years later, a week before we left South Carolina, I drove by and saw back hoes leveling Mama’s.  “Progress?” I thought.

Always be sure to lock up your bike.

Bike No. 1:  A yellow Schwinn mountain bike, the first day I moved into a one-room apartment on Bishop street.  Bike thefts were rampant.  Witnesses, and there were many, although nobody did anything, claimed to have seen someone driving around in a pickup piled high with purloined bikes, pulling over to add another to the moving mountain of bicycles.  A graffiti artist friend of mine told me he’d been in an abandoned warehouse downtown one night, and found an entire floor of dusty bikes.  “It was like the warehouse scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark,” he said.  “Only with bikes.  Millions of them.”  This, I feel, would make a great and eerie shot for the ending of a sequel to The Bicycle Thief, shot in modern day New York City, perhaps, and acted entirely by Bicycle Messengers.

Whenever possible, cooperate with The Law

While in that same apartment, these kids skipping school came into our back yard and stole my roommate’s walkman while he napped nearby, but one of them got picked up by cops shortly thereafter.  Because my room-mate had to get to class, the cops made me look into the back of their squad car at this pudgy, sweating kid.  The cops told me that this was part of a wider “targeted enforcement” in the area to counteract the rash of recent break-ins and would I, as a helpful citizen, appear as a witness?  This involved showing up at juvenile court, a.k.a. “Juvie” the next Wednesday morning.  Before Wednesday, a knock came at the back door.  There stood a freaky looking dad dressed like Urkle in a straw hat, plaid shorts, socks pulled up to his knees, sandals, gripping the upper arm of the fat kid from the squad car.  “I just wanted to ask you to drop the charges,” he said maneuvering his son forward.   “He’s just a kid.  He knows he done wrong.  I didn’t raise my son to behave this way.”  I explained that the police were pressing the charges, not me.  The next Wednesday, I waited around in Juvie, signed some papers as an official witness, to what exactly, I couldn’t, to this day, tell you, and was led into a court room where a scared, skinny kid shivered under the dead-eyed bureaucratic gaze of the room.  They never actually asked me anything, nor did I ever see the fat kid.   Then my warden took me to collect an eight dollar witness fee.  The spokes of the wheels of justice are splendid and mysterious indeed, even if the whole thing grinds unpleasantly as it turns.

“Stuff” is not worth putting yourself in harm’s way for, but harm’s way might be better than surrendering your last pathetic shred of dignity

Stolen bike number four: another yellow mountain bike, this one a Diamondback, with Fat Albert stickers on the top tube.   Gone with the bike were a Nintendo and a TV-VCR combo, so presumably he or she—I’m leaning towards a he on this one, because it takes considerable strength to ride an unfamiliar mountain bike with a TV-VCR combo and a Nintendo balanced on the handle bars down to the ghetto (lets not quibble with terms here), which is where, from the bus the next day, I saw a guy riding a familiar-looking yellow mountain bike wrong way down the one-way street outside.  I got off at the next stop, Funkadelic blasting black protest rock in my headphones as I walked toward the convenient store where the guy had leaned my yellow Diamondback while he went inside.  I put my hands on the bike, Fat Albert stickers and all, and the guy walked out of the store.

“What up, playa?”

“This is my bike.  It was stolen out of my house yesterday.”

“I bought this bike for a hundred bucks.”  This guy could easily kick my ass.

“I’ll buy it off you,” I said.  He kind of smirk-squinted at me, incredulous, and gave me a pager number for me to call to finish the deal and rode off on my bike, turning into the dark corridor of a warren-like building called “The Columbia”.

“Was that your bike?” asked these nearby construction workers, who, had I used my peripheral vision, might have altered the balance of the exchange, if called upon.

“Yeah,” I said.  “That was my bike.”  From work, guiltily, gullibly, I called the dummy number.

It’s healthy to be a little bit curious about your thief.  Within reason.

A real writer—Susan Orlean, say, appearing on This American Life—would no doubt have visited Ramone Greene in jail by now, would have conducted a chirpy conversation into the possible socio-economic origins of his tendency toward misanthropic deeds, then probably have become best buds and helped him write his own praise-garnering memoir.  The first time we went to court, we were just a little scared about having to see this guy who, because of us, in a way, was facing real jail time.  When Detective K had first showed us Ramone’s picture, he’d said that it was strange, because Ramone had been “clean” for almost three years, had been out of jail, and had stayed out of trouble, which was rare, and didn’t fit the usual pattern.  Then he said that there was now a warrant out, but they didn’t know how long it would take for him to turn up.  He said “turn up”, like Ramone and our stolen belongings had simply been misplaced and what could you do but stop looking and just see if they happen to turn up?  Outside of the courtroom stood an angry black woman, arms tightly crossed, lips pursed and constantly shifting and pacing with intense, discontented energy.  Could this be some relative of Ramone’s? His baby mama, worried she was now going to have to resume visiting him in jail—parking across from the jail and communicating, as I had seen the significant others of persons in the jail do, by pulling over on the desolate stretch of road across from the cell block and holding up these big magic marker signs that said things like “We Love you, Tre” or “F&%$ You Robby. We’re through and I hope they rape you in there”?

Ramone Greene didn’t show up in court that day, which was strange, given that he had by then been picked up and was already incarcerated with a pretty hefty bail.  Actually, our lawyer said, it was Ramone’s lawyer who had failed to show up because he’d double-scheduled.  So Ramone waited, as did we.  This story, of course, has no real ending.  Detective K got a signed statement from us, and took down my work number in case, at subsequent court dates, my testimony was needed, adding that this “probably wouldn’t be necessary.  We already have a pretty good case against this scumbag.”  Several weeks later he told us Ramone pled guilty and was sentenced to two years.  He was out on parole within a year, a law-mandated note in our mail said, and that was as close to the end of the thing as you can get.  The overwhelming sense is that, whether or not he had been caught, nothing would have changed.  He’d lost a year of his life, but for us, for Detective K, for society as a whole, what exactly it all amount to?  Paychecks for guards and prison cafeteria workers?    To the further “sexing up” of Ramone’s dossier, to be ingested and spewed forth again by AFIS, which, lacking real intelligence, has no idea of the identities it filters like so much plankton from the sea?  For us, it distills perversely into gratitude that we, having been so many times victimized, have never been physcially harmed, that some crude form of justice, in the form of the rather dubious mechanism of a retroactive deterrent, had been served.  The time we spent as part of this alleged justice being meted out being, honestly, yet another loss, but there you are.  Basically, and I can’t stress this enough, that in every case, the perpertrators or “perps” and “scumbags” as the 5.0 likes to call them had left our dog, useless though he may be as a theft deterrent, alone.

-Cedric Rose

Not  that you asked, but what could be worse than being subjected to vacation photos?  Why vacation photos embedded in a narrative of dubious informative value, with quotes from John Muir, of course.  Yosemite National Park.  After we parked our rental under a sheer, red cliff, in a field which would have been beautiful if it hadn’t been crammed with cars, lugged our backpacks to the backpackers’ camp and pitched our tent, like many of the other not-too-wildernessy campers, we went to get a beer and a bite to eat.  We returned to camp at dusk and had just gotten a fire started when this French guy came running up and asked if he could borrow our flashlight.  We gave it to him and he shone it on the shimmering fur of a black bear not more than 25ft away.  “Ze Bear, he eez not aferd ov uz”, said the French guy.  The bear snuffled around under the pines and trundled off in the dark toward French’s tent, and French and his girlfriend, who was speaking rapidly and fervently in her native tongue, disappeared after it with our flashlight.  We wondered if we’d ever get our flashlight back.  John Muir, in his diary of August 13, 1869 refers to the bears that plagued Yosemite shepherds’ sheep as “shaggy freebooters”, as in: “We also discovered another dead sheep half-eaten, showing there had been two of the shaggy freebooters at this early breakfast.”  Or, as he writes on the 14^th:

“Up to the time I went to bed last night all was quiet, though we expected the shaggy freebooters every minute. They did not come till near midnight, when a pair walked boldly to the corral between two of the great fires, climbed in, killed two sheep and smothered ten, while the frightened watcher in the tree did not fire a single shot, saying that he was afraid he might kill some of the sheep, for the bears got into the corral before he got a good clear view of them. I told the shepherds they should at once move the flock to another camp. ‘Oh, no use, no use,’ they lamented. ‘Where we go the bears go too. See my poor dead sheeps, soon all dead. No use try another camp. We go down to the plains.’ And as I afterwards learned, they were driven out of the mountains a month before the usual time.”Muir goes on to remark his amazement that the bears never attack people, but I hadn’t read any Muir at that point, and, it turns out, this was not one of the many areas in which he was right.  We banked up our fire.  A couple came down the trail and we warned them about the bear.  French came back and asked if he could continue to borrow our flashlight and disappeared, wild-eyed, back into the darkness.  Eventually he returned it, shrugged, and said he thought the bear was gone. We sat at the fire and drank a beer while our neighbors, wearing head-mounted lamps, mysteriously rearranging their camp, then moved their tent five feet.  Eventually, we tried to go to sleep, without much luck as every hour someone would scream “BEAR!  GIT!  YAH, YAH!   GET OUTTA HERE” followed by banging pots and pans , which is Standard Bear Operating Procedure, as dictated by National Parks literature included with our “Bear Incident Report” sheet, only to be filled out, we were admonished by a park ranger who looked like a 12-year-old elfin princess in a ranger uniform, in cases of actual interaction with the bear.  If you are approached by a bear, she said, make a lot of noise and don’t worry about waking people up.  Types of Bear Incident interaction included “Bluff Charge”, which the ranger pantomimed as a sort of sudden advancement with lowered shoulders, but we were less than confident in our ability to discern, in an Actual Bear Situation, the difference between a bluff and real charge.  Also, said the ranger, it was best to leave your backpack and its pockets unzipped to give the bear easy and unrestricted access, lest it deem necessary clawing apart your pack to get inside.  In this respect, bears are like Homeland Security at the airport.

At about three, something went WHUMP by our heads and Jen jumped up and grabbed me.  At five, she outlined a set of adjusted plans, in which the intrepid backpackers skip their overnight stay in the wilderness, instead opting for a couple of day hikes, and then drive back to San Francisco.   We were up with the sunrise, which is interesting in Yosemite Valley because the colorful rocks at the apex of the cliffs and peaks gleam, while below, it remains dark.  You find yourself at the bottom of a very deep, pine-scented and scenic hole.

We hiked to the head of the Mist Trail to Vernal and Nevada falls…  it’s the first section of the John Muir trail, which runs past Half Dome, then on some 200 km.  This was an absolutely splendid hike, despite our wrecked condition…   the sun angled across vertical rock faces with high contrast between the light and shadow containing every possible shade of folded, buckled granite–ochre, purple, pink, gray and blue, all veined darkly.  You could see anything in those mountains: cubist faces of God with scrub pine growing out of His nose, entire scenes of John Muir discovering Yosemite, or the visage of some great Native American ancestor sternly regarding your upward progress.  The cliffs range from steep, pebbled slants that end in boulder-clumped talus, to gaping, overhung hollows.  As we climbed the trail among massive, lichen-dotted boulders, an atomized mist from the falls above wafted over us.  We reached a bridge where a parks worker industriously applied a leaf-blower to the roof of a public restroom.  We’d wondered, as we climbed, about the motor sound echoing through the canyon.  After taking in the long view of the glowing valley and the falls high above, we continued upward on steps scraped into the canyon walls above an aqua-green champagne river fizzing through the boulders below.  We sat out on dewy grass outcrops at face level with Vernal falls, the water cracking and blasting outward against the base of the tower of water.  In “The Yosemite”, Muir, with his characteristic effusive tendency toward personification that, at its extreme, makes you wonder if he might just have been high on Mendocino County pot, writes:

“The Vernal, about a mile below the Nevada, is 400 feet high, a staid, orderly, graceful, easy-going fall, proper and exact in every movement and gesture, with scarce a hint of the passionate enthusiasm of the Yosemite or of the impetuous Nevada, whose chafed and twisted waters hurrying over the cliff seem glad to escape into the open air, while its deep, booming, thunder-tones reverberate over the listening landscape.  Nevertheless it is a favorite with most visitors, doubtless because it is more accessible than any other, more closely approached and better seen and heard. A good stairway ascends the cliff beside it and the level plateau at the head enables one to saunter safely along the edge of the river as it comes from Emerald Pool and to watch its waters, calmly bending over the brow of the precipice, in a sheet eighty feet wide, changing in color from green to purplish gray and white until dashed on a boulder talus. Thence issuing from beneath its fine broad spray-clouds we see the tremendously adventurous river still unspent, beating its way down the wildest and deepest of all its cañons in gray roaring rapids, dear to the ouzel. . .”

We took our time up the steep slab steps with their twisted rail, climbing at well over 45 degrees to gain the wide, smooth slab across which the river cuts before sluicing over the edge.  As we climbed, and sat snacking beside the falls, Chickarees, or Douglas Squirrels, which had been visible on the trail and stairs, watched, hopeful for some snack, and at the falls scurried right up to us.  They only got one dropped dried cranberry.  Jen and I knew better after a painful encounter with a chipmunk up in Algonquin Park in Canada (chipmunk incisor, Jen’s thumb).  The Emerald Pool is this incredibly inviting, aptly named pool above the fall, into which the river spills from an incredibly long inclined plane, a natural waterslide, surrounded by signs that explain hysterically that to swim in the Emerald Pool is to die in the Emerald Pool.  1Half-Dome, Nevada Falls, and two other towering monoliths, looking out over Vernal Fall, and the long vista of the valley, the cliffs capped with isolated, scrubby meadows. 

We ate some snacks and hiked even higher…  it began to get really hot on the loose, moon dust and gravel trail at just under 7000ft.    Eventually we began to descend again, looking out along the valley where vistas were framed in vistas and, within that vista, what was that?  Surprise!  Another vista!  We waited patiently behind lines of carefully descending mules carrying terrified Asian kids while their guides shouted words of encouragement at the mules.  A couple of hikers said “Go Cubs” in response to my Reds cap, to which I responded “Go Reds”…  then one of them said back: “Hey.  Are you the people who told us about the bear last night at the back packer’s camp?”  We confessed that we were.  They told us that in the brief interval that they had visited the general store at Camp Curry to supplement their supplies, the bear had gotten into their tent, torn up a sleeping pad, and relieved itself (No. 2).  They were the campers I had seen mysteriously moving their tent five feet.  This hearty couple was setting out for two weeks on the John Muir trail–they’d just lucked into a couple of trail passes, having flown in from Blacksburg, Virginia without reservations.  The bear, said the guy, before hiking on up the dusty trail, “had definitely been eating people food”.  They’d done everything right:  had properly applied their bear canister, left their packs outside of their tent, etc.   Jen suggested that they had probably gotten the worst out of the way and had now amassed a supply of good karma.  We wished them luck.  When they were out of earshot, we agreed that they were obviously suicidal maniacs.  This discussion went something along the lines of:  “They’re making us look kind of like pansies.”  “If that had been us, we would have been like ‘sorry Marcie’ and just left the tent, gotten in the car and driven back that night.”
In Curry Village, which is for the most part a collection of for-rent so-called cabins of mildewed vinyl tarpaulin, where so-called campers’ boom boxes compete and incoming visitors troll the gravel lots for parking spots, then migrate en masse and rather cult-like toward the restaurants and points-of-retail to stand in line for overpriced pizza and beer, it is easy to see why the National Parks Service has slated the area for reclamation.  We came across a deer in the middle of the parking lot, ribby and mange-flanked, eating from one of the stunted green apple trees amid the SUVs.   It didn’t stop eating as we walked eight feet away from it.  And in the parking lot and beside the campground you come across these bear traps–basically a large trailer-mounted corrugated steel tubes with breathing holes and a trap door on one end, with a large sign that says: WARNING: BEAR TRAP.  Its being mounted on a trailer facilitates bear removal, one assumes, but the whole contraption looks a lot like a wide-bore Howitzer for blasting the bear into the next canyon.  All of the evidence suggests a troubled relationship between the visiting hordes and the indigenous wildlife.  “A Fed Bear is a Dead Bear”, reads one recurring sign.  The roads are dotted with red bear silhouettes which indicate where bears have been struck and killed, so you really have to feel for the bears–but it is absolutely ridiculous to hope that, with traffic jams of visiting tourists with barbeques attached to their Winnebagos, the bears aren’t going to come out.
On a bike path through a scenic meadow, eight or nine amateur photographers lined up for the perfect shot of a couple of foraging fawns.  No sign of the doe.  We took the shuttle bus back to the parking lot were our rented car waiting under a scrubby apple tree near a bear trap.   At one bus stop, everybody craned their necks to see what everybody else was craning their necks at.  “There’s a bear cub, over there, playing in the dirt.”  The entire family seated behind us got off to view the majestic beauty of the bear cub in nature.  We stayed on the bus, wondering what mama bear would think of all this, got off at our car, hit the road south, determined to see the Mariposa grove before the long drive back to SF.

Later, as we drove south toward the Mariposa Sequoia Grove, Jen suggested that as a “hilarious joke”, I should just “walk right into the world-famous Wawona hotel and ask if they happen to have any cancellations. As always, Jen had painstakingly researched every aspect of visiting Yosemite, and the Wawona Hotel dates back to the 1800s, is picturesque and comfortable at the trail-head to the Mariposa grove, lacks to this day telephones and televisions, and is absolutely impossible to get a room in.  Jen kept repeating the joke, and when we pulled into the Mariposa visitor’s center, it stood beside the inviting, deep eaves and intricate, whitewashed woodwork of this venerable Yosemite institution.  After entering the visitor center, running my fingers through a plush black bear pelt, and feeling, myself, a bit like a dust- and sweat-encrusted bear, I walked up the broad steps to the cool lobby and asked: “I have a silly question.  Do you have any vacancies?”  To which a stern and rather matronly maitres d’hotel replied that yes, they had a one bedroom without a bathroom.  I think this is the best $129+ tax I will ever spend in the state of California, and it’s easy, as everyone knows, to spend a lot of money and quick in Cali. If there is a heaven, it should be like the Wawona hotel.  Lawns slope from the pine forest, a warm breeze rustles off the golf course, sun-stroked visitors sip cocktails on verandas that apron each cottage.  On August 4, 1869, Muir opens his journal “It seemed strange to sleep in a paltry hotel chamber after the spacious magnificence and luxury of the starry sky and Silver Fir grove.”  Well our room seemed anything but paltry, and I guess that’s the difference between a Scottish shepherd meets amateur naturalist and a couple of vacationing Ohioans circa 2008.  We availed ourselves of the pool, drank a Sierra Nevada, enjoyed cocktail hour on the porch of the hotel where a pianist played Summertime and other greats, ate an epic meal with a bottle of Sonoma Valley Fire Engine Red Pinot , and looked up at the stars in a glen behind the Moore cottage, .  The thought did cross our minds that, theoretically, a bear could careen out of the chaparral and eat us.  So we didn’t wander too far from the lights of Wawona.  Sleep, check.  The hotel serves a great breakfast (included), and then we were off early for the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoia. The Sequoia Grove seems more ancient, somehow, than the mountains, as though they’re aliens from before the earth began, or like mythic beasts, given their reliance on fire for reproduction.  The woods themselves are anything but dense, and everywhere is evidence of fire.  Giant Sequoia seedlings cannot compete, and the fires both eliminate competition and stimulate seed production in the upper canopy.  In California, in 2008, signs of the long-running drought are everywhere, not to mention conflicted efforts of people to make the landscape accessible, to render it on human terms and to save it–except that the saved version seems irreversibly tame. Again, the encountered deer that completely ignored us, even as they passed several feet away.  The California Tunnel tree and the the Fallen Tunnel Tree (where a coterie of oily black ravens heckled us as though we were personally responsible for the tree’s fall in a terrible 1969 winter) show just how quickly several thousand years of growth can be undone, but also provide a sense of the scale of life, the universe, and its processes, in geological and evolutionary terms, processes as incontrovertible as the upthrust slabs of raw granite that underlie our present, petty existence.  Sure, Schwarzenegger’s governor of California, but so was Pontus Pilate once a governor…  we leave scratches on history, but these trees, these rocks might as well stand in relationship to us as the desert sands did to Ozymandias. Odd that we are the competition and the means of propagation: it has come to this: the deliberate setting of fires by those who would be husbands of the wilderness.  Which entails, basically, what wilderness?  

Many have wondered where the sequoias came from, whether they are on the brink of disappearing.  My post-Yosemite reading took me to an interesting article about Sequoias that, in discussing their previous distribution and historical migrations, makes them sound quite a lot like a lost tribe of Native Americans.  While John Muir was wondering how it was that the Sequoia groves stood isolated from one another, without signs at their perimeter of dead trees (which themselves can last thousands of years–and indeed, Muir made remarkable observations as to the groves’ presence in areas undisturbed by the “mare de glace”), horticulturalists, especially English ones, were sprouting Giant Sequoias in Europe.  Today, Giant Sequoias are possibly the largest trees in Europe.  While sequoias can only propagate under a very specific set of conditions, they have flourished around the world, under human care.  Human beings, then, as far as the Giant Sequoia are concerned, are simply incredibly advanced, jet-setting, gardening and greenhouse-owning squirrels, distributing sequoia seeds to such far-flung locations as Egypt and New Zealand.  It is important to note, however, that Giant Sequoia have never self-propagated in “captivity”, such is the specificity of the conditions required, but it helps, seeing the fragility of the Mariposa grove, to know that there are Giant Sequoia alive and well the world over.

When we began the drive west to San Francisco, the sky took on a biblical, bloody tinge.  The sun, reflected in the windshields of oncoming cars, looked like a ruby laser, the roadside a Martian landscape of acid-trip hues.  Our eyes burned and a fat-bellied helicopter thumped low over the highway, going forth to face the dragon.  At our exit, the ranger sunnily bade us have a good day, as though everything were completely normal, which, we supposed, it was.  We drove the parched width of California, past Hetch Hetchy, the dammed reservoir that supplies San Francisco’s water, and against which John Muir fought and lost.  We sped through passes, gold rush towns, along the flat plain beside perfectly rowed and ingeniously irrigated orchards.  Approaching Oakland, I-580 climbs ridges where a thousand ominous scissors spin–this is the Altamont wind farm, the subject of recent environmentalist criticism for the inordinate number of migrating raptors it kills.    All of which goes to show that good intentions don’t mean squat. 

It wasn’t until Monday in a San Francisco coffee shop that we caught the headlines: Yosemite Fire Out of Control.  Obviously, fires have been raging in Yosemite since Yosemite began, but global warming can’t be helping the matter.  Anyway, it was a good vacation, even if it did make the outdoors here in Southern Ohio look like a Superfund Site (newsflash: Fernald has just been opened up as a nature preserve.  Seriously.)  Anyway, can’t wait to get back in the wilderness, such as it is, and hope to get deep into the mountains next time.   Maybe they’ll succeed in ridding Yosemite of cars–force everyone to hike, bike, or take an electric shuttle in.  Possibly put a Plexiglas dome over the Sierras, while they’re at it.  In the meantime, we’ll settle for Minnesota, Canada, or North Carolina.   There’s always next summer and plenty left of this one.

Bessie Smith

It’s been years since I read the story below in its vintage format, a nicotine-yellowed Cosmopolitan magazine from 1948, from the Special Collections Department in the Thomas Cooper Library at the University of South Carolina, which I frequently visited as an ILL tech. One of its greatest patrons and denizens, my favorite Interlibrary Loan customer, recently passed away. The obits don’t adequately describe just the way Matthew J. Bruccoli, grouchy in his seersuckers and focused on some apocryphal mission would skid his rag top Mercedes into the parking lot and harumph upstairs to wreak havoc in Special Collections… His special collections–he’d sold them most of it, which includes many Salinger, Fitzgerald and Heller manuscripts, the typewriter on which Catch 22 was written, and many, many F. Scott Fitzgerald whiskey flasks, to the university for something like 2 million dollars, but continued to visit it almost daily. Bruccoli and those special collections were solidly connected to that Golden Age of the American Short Story, the first half of the last century.

Anyway, I’ve been struggling a lot with some sad sack attempts at short stories recently, and my struggles took me back to Blue Melody, from which the title of this post hales. I am convinced if this one doesn’t make you shed a tear or two, you’re deader than dead inside.

J. D. Salinger
Blue Melody
Cosmopolitan, September 1948, pages 50-51, 112-119

A saga of Lida Louise who sang the blues as they have never been sung before or since

In mid-winter of 1944 I was given a lift in the back of an overcrowded GI truck, going from Luxembourg City to the front at Halzhoffen, Germany—a distance of four flat tires, three (reported) cases of frozen feet, and at least one case of incipient pneumonia.

The forty-odd men jammed in the truck were nearly all infantry replacements. Many of them had just got out of hospitals in England, where they had been treated for wounds received in action somewhat earlier in the war. Ostensibly rehabilitated, they were on their way to join rifle companies of a certain infantry division which, I happened to know, was commanded by a brigadier general who seldom stepped into his command car without wearing a Luger and a photographer, one on each side; a fighting man with a special gift for writing crisp, quotable little go-to-hell notes to the enemy, invariably when outnumbered or surrounded by the latter. I rode for hours and hours without looking anybody in the truck very straight in the eye.

During daylight hours the men made an all-out effort to suppress or divert their eagerness to get another crack at the enemy. Charade groups were formed at either end of the truck. Favorite statesmen were elaborately discussed. Songs were started up—spirited war songs, chiefly, composed by patriotic Broadway song writers who, through some melancholy, perhaps permanently embittering turn of the wheel of fortune, had been disqualified from taking their places at the front. In short, the truck fairly rocked with persiflage and melody, until night abruptly fell and the black-out curtains were attached. Then all the men seemed to go to sleep or freeze to death, except the original narrator of the following story and myself. He had the cigarettes, and I had the ears.

This is all I know about the man who told me the story:

His first name was Rudford. He had a very slight Southern accent and a chronic, foxhole cough. The bars and red cross of a captain in the medics were painted, as fashion had it, on his helmet.

And that’s all I know about him except for what comes naturally out of his story. So please don’t anybody write in for additional information—I don’t even know if the man is alive today. This request applies particularly to readers who may sooner or later think that this story is a slam against one section of this country.

It isn’t a slam against anybody or anything. It’s just a simple little story of Mom’s apple pie, ice-cold beer, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the Lux Theater of the Air—the things we fought for, in short. You can’t miss it, really.

Rudford came from a place called Agersburg, Tennessee. He said it was about an hour’s drive from Memphis. It sounded to me like a pretty little town. For one thing, it had a street called Miss Packer’s Street. Not just Packer Street or Packer’s Street, but Miss Packer’s Street. Miss Packer had been an Agersburg schoolteacher who, during the Civil War, had taken a few pot shots at some passing Union troops, from the window of the principal’s office. None of this flag-waving, Barbara Fritchie stuff for Miss Packer. She had just taken aim and let go, knocking off five of the boys in blue before anybody could get to her with an axe. She was then nineteen.

Rudford’s father originally had been a Bostonian, a salesman for a Boston typewriter company. On a business trip to Agersburg, just before the first World War, he had met—and within two weeks married—a well-heeled local girl. He never returned either to the home office or to Boston, apparently X-ing both out of his life without a jot of regret. He was quite a number altogether. Less than an hour after his wife died giving birth to Rudford, he got on a trolley going to the outskirts of Agersburg and bought out a rocky, but reputable, publishing house. Six months later he published a book he had written himself, entitled, “Civics for Americans.” It was followed, over a period of a few years, by a highly successful series of highly unreadable textbooks known—only too widely, even today—as the Intelligence Series for Progressive High School Students of America. I certainly know for a fact that his “Science for Americans” paid the public high schools of Philadelphia a visit around 1932. The book was rich with baffling little diagrams of simple little fulcrums.

The boy Rudford’s early home life was unique. His father evidently detested people who just read his books. He grilled and quizzed the boy even at the height of marble season. He held him up on the staircase for a definition of a chromosome. He passed him the lima beans on condition that the planets were named—in order of size. He gave the boy his ten-cent weekly allowance in return for the date of some historical personage’s birth or death or defeat. To be brief, at the age of eleven Rudford knew just about as much, academically, as the average high-school freshman. And in an extracurricular sense, more. The average high-school freshman doesn’t know how to sleep on a cellar floor without using a pillow or blankets.

There were, however, two important footnotes in Rudford’s boyhood. They weren’t in his father’s books, but they were close enough to make a little quick sense in an emergency. One of them was a man named Black Charles, and the other was a little girl named Peggy Moore.

Peggy was in Rudford’s class at school. For more than a year, though, he had taken little notice of her beyond the fact that she was usually the first one eliminated in a spelling bee. He didn’t begin to assess Peggy’s true value until one day he saw her, across the aisle from him, insert her chewing gum into the hollow of her neck. It struck Rudford as a very attractive thing for anybody to do—even a girl. Doubling up under his desk, pretending to pick up something from the floor, he whispered to Peggy, “Hey! That where you put your gum?”

Turning, her lips ajar, the young lady with the gum in her neck nodded. She was flattered. It was the first time Rudford had spoken to her out of the line of duty.

Rudford felt around the floor for a nonexistent ink eraser. “Listen. You wanna meet a friend of mine after school?”

Peggy put a hand over her mouth and pretended to cough. “Who?” she asked.

“Black Charles.”

“Who’s he?”

“He’s a fella. Plays the piano on Willard Street. He’s a friend of mine.”

“I’m not allowed on Willard Street.”

“Oh!”

“When are you going?”

“Right after she lets us out. She’s not gonna keep us in today. She’s too bored…Okay?”

“Okay”

That afternoon the two children went down to Willard Street, and Peggy met Black Charles and Black Charles met Peggy.

Black Charles’s café was a hole-in-the-wall hamburger joint, a major eyesore on a street that was regularly torn down, on paper, whenever Civic Council convened. It was, perhaps, the paragon of all restaurants classified by parents—usually through the side window of the family car—as unsanitary-looking. It was a swell place to go, in short. Moreover, it is very doubtful if any of Black Charles’s young patrons had ever got sick from any of the delicious, greasy hamburgers he served. Anyway, almost nobody went to Black Charles’s to eat. You ate after you got there, naturally, but that wasn’t why you went.

You went there because Black Charles played the piano like somebody from Memphis—maybe even better. He played hot or straight, and he was always at the piano when you came in, and he was always there when you had to go home. But not only that. (After all, it stood to reason that Black Charles, being a wonderful piano player, would be wonderfully indefatigable.) He was something else—something few white piano players are. He was kind and interested when young people came up to the piano to ask him to play something, or just to talk to him. He looked at you. He listened.

Until Rudford started bringing Peggy with him he was probably the youngest habitué of Black Charles’s café. For over two years he had been going there alone two or three afternoons a week; never at night, for the very good reason that he wasn’t allowed out at night. He missed out on the noise and smoke and jump indigenous to Black Charles’s place after dark, but he got something, afternoons, equally or more desirable. He had the privilege of hearing Charles play all the best numbers without interruption. All he had to do to get in on this deal was to wake the artist up. That was the catch. Black Charles slept in the afternoon, and he slept like a dead man.

Going down to Willard Street to hear Black Charles play was even better with Peggy along, Rudford found out. She was not only somebody good to sit on the floor with; she was somebody good to listen with. Rudford liked the way she drew up her racy, usually bruised legs and locked her fingers around her ankles. He liked the way she set her mouth hard against her knees, leaving teeth marks, while Charles was playing. And the way she walked home afterwards; not talking, just now and then kicking at a stone or a tin can, or reflectively cutting a cigar butt in two with her heel. She was just right, though, of course, Rudford didn’t tell her so. She had an alarming tendency to get lovey-dovey, with or without provocation.

You had to hand it to her, though. She even learned how to wake Black Charles up.

One three-thirtyish afternoon, just after the two children had let themselves in, Peggy said, “Can I wake him up this time? Huh, Rudford?”

“Sure. Go ahead. If you can.”

Black Charles slept, fully dressed except for his shoes, on a bumpy, ratty-looking settee, a few stacked tables away from his beloved piano.

Peggy circled the problem academically.

“Well, go ahead and do it,” Rudford said.

“I’m fixin’ to; I’m fixin’ to. Go away.”

Rudford watched her a trifle smugly. “Naa. You can’t just shove him around and get anywhere. You’ve seen me,” he said. “You gotta really haul off. Get him right under the kidneys. You’ve seen me.”

“Here?” said Peggy. She had her finger on the little island of nerves set off by the dorsal fork of Charles’s lavender suspenders.

“Go ahead.”

Peggy wound up and delivered.

Black Charles stirred slightly, but slept on without even seriously changing his position.

“You missed. You gotta hit him harder than that anyway.”

The aspirant tried to make a more formidable weapon of her right hand. She sandwiched her thumb between her fist and second fingers, held it away from her and looked at it admiringly.

“You’ll break your thumb that way. Get your thumb out of—”

“Oh, be quiet,” said Peggy, and let go with a haymaker.

It worked. Black Charles let out an awful yell, and went all of two feet up in the stale, café air. As he came down, Peggy put in a request: “Charles, will you play ‘Lady, Lady’ for me, please?”

Charles scratched his head, swung his immense, stockinged feet to the cigarette-butt-specked floor, and squinted. “That you, Margar-reet?”

“Yes. We just got here. The whole class was kept in,” she explained. “Would you please play ‘Lady, Lady,’ Charles?”

“Summer vacation starts Monday,” Rudford enthusiastically put in. “We can come around every afternoon.”

“My, my! Ain’t that fine!” Charles said—and meant it. He got to his feet, a gentle giant of a man, towing a hook-and-ladder gin hang-over. He began to move in the general direction of his piano.

“We’ll come earlier, too,” Peggy promised.

“Ain’t that fine!” Charles responded.

“This way, Charles,” Rudford said. “You’re going right into the ladies’ room.”

“He’s still sort of asleep. Hit him just once, Rudford…”

I guess it was a good summer—the days full of Charles’s piano—but I can’t say for sure. Rudford told me a story; he didn’t give me his autobiography.

He told me next about a day in November. It was still a Coolidge year, but which one I don’t know exactly. I don’t think those Coolidge years come apart anyway.

It was afternoon. A half hour after the pupils of the Agersburg Elementary School had pushed and shoved and punched their way out of the exit doors. Rudford and Peggy were sitting high in the rafters of the new house that was being built on Miss Packer’s Street. There wasn’t a carpenter in sight. The highest, narrowest, weakest beam in the house was theirs to straddle without annoying interference.

Sitting on a beauty, a story above the ground, they talked about the things that counted: the smell of gasoline, Robert Hermanson’s ears, Alice Caldwell’s teeth, rocks that were all right to throw at somebody, Milton Sills, how to make cigarette smoke come out your nose, men and ladies who had bad breath, the best size knife to kill somebody with.

They exchanged ambitions. Peggy decided that when she grew up she would be a war nurse. Also a movie actress. Also a piano player. Also a crook—one that swiped a lot of diamonds and stuff, but gave some of it to poor people; very poor people. Rudford said he only wanted to be a piano player. In his spare time, maybe, he’d be an auto racer—he already had a pretty good pair of goggles.

A spitting contest followed, at a heated moment of which the losing side dropped a valuable, mirrorless powder compact out of her cardigan pocket. She started to climb down to retrieve it, but lost her balance and fell about a quarter story. She landed with a horrible thud on the new, white pine floor.

“You okay?” her companion inquired, not budging from the rafters.

“My head. Rudford, I’m dyin’!”

“Naa, you’re not.”

“I am, too. Feel.”

“I’m not comin’ all the way down just to feel.”

“Please,” the lady entreated.

Muttering cynical little observations about people who don’t watch where they’re even going, Rudford climbed down.

He pushed back a hank or two of the patient’s lovely black-Irish hair. “Where’s it hurt?” he demanded.

“All over…”

“Well, I don’t see anything. There isn’t any abrasion at all.”

“Isn’t any what?”

“Abrasion. Blood or anything. There isn’t even any swelling.” The examiner drew back suspiciously. “I don’t even think you fell on your head.”

“Well, I did. Keep looking…There. Right where your hand—”

“I don’t see a thing. I’m going back up.”

“Wait!” said Peggy. “Kiss it first. Here. Right here.”

“I’m not gonna kiss your old head. Wuddaya think I am?”

“Please! Just right here.” Peggy pointed to her cheek.

Bored and enormously philanthropic, Rudford got it over with.

A rather sneaky announcement followed: “Now we’re engaged.”

“Like fun we are!…I’m leaving. I’m going down to old Charles’s.”

“You can’t. He said not to come today. He said he was gonna have a guest today.”

“He won’t care. Anyway, I’m not gonna stay here with you. You can’t spit. You can’t even sit still. And when I feel sorry for you or something, you try to get lovey-dovey.”

“I don’t get lovey-dovey much.”

“So long,” Rudford said.

“I’ll go with you!”

They left the sweet smelling empty house and moped along the four-o’clock autumn streets toward Black Charles’s. On Spruce Street they stopped for fifteen minutes to watch two irate firemen trying to get a young cat out of a tree. A woman wearing a Japanese kimono directed the operations, in an unpleasant, importunate voice. The two children listened to her, watched the firemen, and silently pulled for the cat. She didn’t let them down. Suddenly she leaped from the high branch, landing on the hat of one of the firemen, and springboarded instantly into an adjacent tree. Rudford and Peggy moved on, reflective and permanently changed. The afternoon now contained forever, however suspensory, one red and gold tree, one fireman’s hat and one cat that really knew how to jump.

“We’ll ring the bell when we get there. We won’t just walk right in,” Rudford said.

“Okay.”

When Rudford had rung the bell, Black Charles himself, not only awake but shaven, answered the door. Peggy immediately reported to him, “You said for us not to come today, but Rudford wanted to.”

“Y’all come on in,” Black Charles invited cordially. He wasn’t sore at them.

Rudford and Peggy followed him self-consciously, looking for the guest.

“I got my sister’s chile here,” Black Charles said. “Her and her mammy just come up from ‘gator country.”

“She play the piano?” Rudford asked.

“She a singer, boy. She a singer.”

“Why are the shades down?” Peggy asked. “Why don’t you have the shades up, Charles?”

“I was cookin’ in the kitchen. You chillern can he’p me pull ‘em up,” Black Charles said, and went out to the kitchen.

The two children each took a side of the room and began to let daylight in. They both felt more relaxed. The Guest discomfort was over. If there were somebody strange, some non-member, hovering about Black Charles’s place, it was only his sister’s child—practically nobody.

But Rudford, over on the piano side of the café, suddenly took in his breath. Somebody was sitting at the piano, watching him. He let go the blind string in his hand, and the blind snapped to the top; it slattered noisily for a moment, then came to a stop.

“ ‘And the Lord said, Let there be light’,” said a grown-up girl as black as Charles, sitting in Charles’s place at the piano. “Yeah, man,” she added moderately. She was wearing a yellow dress and a yellow ribbon in her hair. The sunshine that Rudford had let in fell across her left hand; with it she was tapping out something slow and personal on the wood of Charles’s piano. In her other hand, between long, elegant fingers, she had a burning stub of a cigarette. She wasn’t a pretty girl.

“I was just pulling up the shades,” Rudford said finally.

“I see that,” said the girl. “You do it good.” She smiled as she said it.

Peggy had come over. “Hello,” she said, and put her hands behind her back.

“Hello y’self,” said the girl. Her foot was tapping, too, Rudford noticed.

“We come here a lot,” Peggy said. “We’re Charles’s best friends.”

“Well, ain’t that glad news!” said the girl, winking at Rudford.

Black Charles came in from the kitchen, drying his huge, slender hands on a towel.

“Lida Louise,” he said, “these here’s my friends, Mr. Rudford and Miss Margar-reet.” He turned to the children. “This here’s my sister’s chile, Miss Lida Louise Jones.”

“We met,” said his niece. “We all met at Lord Plushbottom’s last fortnight.” She pointed at Rudford. “Him and me was playin’ mahjong out on the piazza.”

“How ‘bout you singin’ somethin’ for these here chillern?” Black Charles suggested.

Lida Louise passed over it. She was looking at Peggy. “You and him sweeties?” she asked her.

Rudford said quickly, “No.”

“Yes,” said Peggy.

“Why you like this little ole boy like you do?” Lida Louise asked Peggy.

“I don’t know,” Peggy said. “I like the way he stands at the blackboard.”

Rudford considered the remark disgusting, but Lida Louise’s threnodic eyes picked it up and looked away with it. She said to Black Charles, “Uncle, you hear what this little ole Margar-reet say?”

“No. What she say?” said Black Charles. He had the cover of his piano raised and was looking for something in the strings—a cigarette butt, perhaps, or the top of a catsup bottle.

“She say she like this ole boy on accounta the way he stands at the blackboard.”

“That right?” said Black Charles, taking his head out of the piano. “You sing somethin’ for these here chillern Lida Louise,” he said.

“Okay. What song they like?…Who stole my cigarettes? I had ‘em right here by my side.”

“You smoke too much. You a too-much gal. Sing,” said her uncle. He sat down at his piano. “Sing ‘Nobody Good Around.’ ”

“That ain’t no song for kiddies.”

“These here kiddies like that kinda song real good.”

“Okay,” said Lida Louise. She stood up, in close to the piano. She was a very tall girl. Rudford and Peggy, already sitting on the floor, had to look way up at her.

“What key you want it?”

Lida Louise shrugged. “A, B, C, D, E, F, F,” she said and winked at the children. “Who cares? Gimme a green one. Gotta match my shoes.”

Black Charles struck a chord, and his niece’s voice slipped into it. She sang “Nobody Good Around.” When she was finished, Rudford had gooseflesh from his neck to his waist. Peggy’s fist was in his coat pocket. He hadn’t felt it go in, and he didn’t make her take it out.

Now, years later, Rudford was making a great point of explaining to me that Lida Louise’s voice can’t be described, until I told him that I happened to own most of her records and knew what he meant. Actually, though, a fair attempt to describe Lida Louise’s voice can be made. She had a powerful, soft voice. Every note she sang was detonated individually. She blasted you tenderly to pieces. In saying her voice can’t be described, Rudford probably meant that it can’t be classified. And that’s true.

Finished with “Nobody Good Around,” Lida Louise stooped over and picked up her cigarettes from under her uncle’s bench. “Where you been?” she asked them, and lit one. The two children didn’t take their eyes off her.

Black Charles stood up. “I got spareribs,” he announced. “Who want some?”

During Christmas week Lida Louise began singing nights at her Uncle Charles’s. Rudford and Peggy both got permission, on her opening night, to attend a hygiene lecture at school. So they were there. Black Charles gave them the table nearest the piano and put two bottles of sarsaparilla on it, but they were both too excited to drink. Peggy nervously tapped the mouth of her bottle against her front teeth; Rudford didn’t even pick his bottle up. Some of the high-school and college crowd thought the children were cute. They were dealt with. Around nine o’clock, when the place was packed, Black Charles suddenly stood up from his piano and raised a hand. The gesture, however, had no effect on the noisy, home-for-Christmas crowd, so Peggy turned around in her seat and, never a lady, yelled at them, “Y’all be quiet!” and finally the room quieted down. Charles’s announcement was to the point. “I got my sister’s chile, Lida Louise, here t’night and she gonna sing for you.” Then he sat down and Lida Louise came out, in her yellow dress, and walked up to her uncle’s piano. The crowd applauded politely, but clearly expected nothing special. Lida Louise bent over Rudford and Peggy’s table, snapped her finger against Rudford’s ear, and asked, “Nobody Good Around?” They both answered, “Yes!”

Lida Louise sang that, and turned the place upside down. Peggy started to cry so hard that when Rudford had asked her, “What’s the matter?” and she had sobbed back, “I don’t know,” he suddenly assured her, himself transported, “I love you good, Peggy!” which made the child cry so uncontrollably he had to take her home.

Lida Louise sang nights at Black Charles’s for about six months straight. Then, inevitably, Lewis Harold Meadows heard her and took her back to Memphis with him. She went without being perceptively thrilled over the Great Opportunity. She went without being visibly impressed by the sacred words, “Beale Street.” But she went. In Rudford’s opinion, she went because she was looking for somebody, or because she wanted somebody to find her. It sounds very reasonable to me.

But as long as Agersburg could hold her, she was adored, deified, by the young people there. They knew, most of them, just how good she was, and those who didn’t know pretended to. They brought their friends home for the week end to have a look at her. The ones who wrote for their college papers sanctified her in glorious prose. Others grew smug or blasé when foreigners turned dormitory conversation around to Violet Henry or Alice Mae Starbuck or Priscella Jordan, blues singers who were killing other foreigners in Harlem or New Orleans or Chicago. If you didn’t have Lida Louise, where you lived, you didn’t have anybody. What’s more, you were a bore.

In return for all this love and deification, Lida Louise was very, very good with the Agersburg kids. No matter what they asked her to sing, or how many times they asked her to sing it, she gave them what there was of her smile, said, “Nice tune,” and gave.

One very interesting Saturday night a college boy in a Tuxedo—somebody said he was a visiting Yale man—came rather big-time-ily up to the piano and asked Lida Louise, “Do you know ‘Slow Train to Jacksonville,’ by any chance?”

Lida Louise looked at the boy quickly, then carefully, and answered, “Where you hear that song, boy?”

The boy who was supposed to be a visiting Yale man said, “A fella in New York played it for me.”

Lida Louise asked him, “Colored man?”

The boy nodded impatiently.

Lida Louise asked, “His name Endicott Wilson? You know?”

The boy answered, “I don’t know. Little guy. Had a mustache.”

Lida Louise nodded. “He in New York now?” she asked.

The boy answered, “Well, I don’t know if he’s there now. I guess so…How ‘bout singin’ it if you know it?”

Lida Louise nodded and sat down at the piano herself. She played and sang “Slow Train to Jacksonville.”

According to those who heard it, it was a very good number, original at least in melody, about an unfortunate man with the wrong shade of lipstick on his collar. She sang it through once and, so far as Rudford or I know, never again. Nor has the number ever been recorded by anybody, to my knowledge.

Here we go into jazz history just a little bit. Lida Louise sang at Lewis Harold Meadows’s famous Jazz Emporium, on Beale Street in Memphis, for not quite four months. (She started there in late May of 1927 and quit early in September of the same year.) But time, or the lack of it, like everything else, depends entirely upon who’s using it. Lida Louise hadn’t been singing on Beale Street more than two weeks before the customers started lining up outside Meadows’s an hour before Lida Louise went on. Record companies got after her almost immediately. A month after she had hit Beale Street she had made eighteen sides, including “Smile Town,” “Brown Gal Blues,” “Rainy Day Boy,” “Nobody Good Around” and “Seems Like Home.”

Everybody who had anything to do with jazz—anything straight, that is—somehow got to hear her while she was there. Russel Hopton, John Raymond Jewel, Izzie Feld, Louis Armstrong, Much McNeill, Freddie Jenks, Jack Teagarden, Bernie and Mortie Gold, Willie Fuchs, Goodman, Beiderbecke, Johnson, Earl Slagle—all the boys.

One Saturday night a big sedan from Chicago, pulled up in front of Meadows’s. Among those who piled out of it were Joe and Sonny Varioni. They didn’t go back with the others, the next morning. They stayed at the Peabody for two nights, writing a song. Before they went back to Chicago they gave Lida Louise “Soupy Peggy.” It was about a sentimental little girl who falls in love with a little boy standing at the blackboard in school. (You can’t buy a copy of Lida Louise’s record of “Soupy Peggy” today, for any price. The other side of it had a fault, and the record company only turned out a very few copies.)

Nobody knew for certain why Lida Louise quit Meadows’s and left Memphis. Rudford and a few others reasonably suspected that her quitting had something—or everything—to do with the corner-of-Beale-Street incident.

Around noon on the day she quit Meadows’s, Lida Louise was seen talking in the street with a rather short well-dressed colored man. Whoever he was, she suddenly hit him full in the face with her handbag. Then she ran into Meadows’s, whizzed past a crew of waiters and orchestra boys, and slammed her dressing room door behind her. An hour later she was packed and ready to go.

She went back to Agersburg. She didn’t go back with a new, flossy wardrobe, and she and her mother didn’t move into a bigger and better apartment. She just went back.

On the afternoon of her return she wrote a note to Rudford and Peggy. Probably on Black Charles’s say-so—like everybody else in Agersburg, he was terrified of Rudford’s father—she sent the note around to Peggy’s house. It read:

Dear kittys

I am back and got some real nice new songs for you so you come around quick and see me.

Yours sincerely,

(Miss) Lida Louise Jones

The same September that Lida Louise returned to Agersburg, Rudford was sent away to boarding school. Before he left, Black Charles, Lida Louise, Lida Louise’s mother and Peggy gave him a farewell picnic.

Rudford called for Peggy around eleven on a Saturday morning. They were picked up in Black Charles’s bashed-in old car and driven out to a place called Tuckett’s Creek.

Black Charles, with a fascinating knife, cut the strings on all the wonderful-looking boxes. Peggy was a specialist on cold spareribs. Rudford was more of a fried-chicken man. Lida Louise was one of those people who take two bites out of a drumstick, then light a cigarette.

The children ate until the ants got all over everything, then Black Charles, keeping out a last spare rib for Peggy and a last wing for Rudford, neatly retied all the boxes.

Mrs. Jones stretched out on the grass and went to sleep. Black Charles and Lida Louise began to play casino. Peggy had with her some sun-pictures of people like Richard Barthelmess and Richard Dix and Reginald Denny. She propped them up against a tree in the bright light and watched possessively over them.

Rudford lay on his back in the grass and watched great cotton clouds slip through the sky. Peculiarly, he shut his eyes when the sun was momentarily clouded out; opened them when the sun returned scarlet against his eyelids. The trouble was, the world might end while his eyes were shut.

It did. His world, in any case.

He suddenly heard a brief, terrible, woman’s scream behind him. Jerking his head around, he saw Lida Louise writhing in the grass. She was holding her flat, small stomach. Black Charles was trying awkwardly to turn her toward him, to get her somehow out of the frightening, queer position her body had assumed in its apparent agony. His face was gray.

Rudford and Peggy both reached the terrible spot at the same time.

“What she et? What she done et?” Mrs. Jones demanded hysterically of her brother.

“Nothin’! She done et hardly nothin’,” Black Charles answered, miserable. He was still trying to do something constructive with Lida Louise’s twisting body.

Something came to Rudford’s head, something out of his father’s “First Aid for Americans.” Nervously he dropped to his knees and pressed Lida Louise’s abdomen with two fingers. Lida Louise responded with a curdling scream.

“It’s her appendix. She’s busted her appendix. Or it’s gonna bust,” Rudford wildly informed Black Charles. “We gotta get her to a hospital.”

Understanding, at least in part, Black Charles nodded. “You take her foots,” he directed his sister.

Mrs. Jones, however, dropped her end of the burden on the way to the car. Rudford and Peggy each grabbed a leg, and with their help Black Charles hoisted the moaning girl into the front seat. Rudford and Peggy also climbed in the front. Peggy held Lida Louise’s head. Mrs. Jones was obliged to sit alone in the back. She was making far more anguished sounds than those coming from her daughter.

“Take her to Samaritan. On Benton Street,” Rudford told Black Charles.

Black Charles’s hands were shaking so violently he couldn’t get the car going. Rudford pushed his hand through the spokes of the driver’s wheel and turned on the ignition. The car started up.

“That there Samaritan’s a private hospital,” Black Charles said, grinding his gears.

“What’s the difference? Hurry up. Hurry up, Charles,” Rudford said, and he told the older man when to shift into second and when into third. Charles knew enough, though, to make good, unlawful time.

Peggy stroked Lida Louise’s forehead. Rudford watched the road. Mrs. Jones, in the back, whimpered unceasingly. Lida Louise lay across the children’s laps with her eyes shut, moaning intermittently. The car finally reached Samaritan Hospital, about a mile and a half away.

“Go in the front way,” Rudford prompted.

Black Charles looked at him. “The front way, boy?” he said.

“The front way, the front way,” Rudford said, and excitedly punched the older man on the knee.

Black Charles obediently semicircled the gravel driveway and pulled up in front of the great white entrance.

Rudford jumped out of the car without opening the door, and rushed into the hospital.

At the reception desk a nurse sat with earphones on her head.

“Lida Louise is outside, and she’s dying,” Rudford said to her. “She’s gotta have her appendix out right away.”

“Shhh,” said the nurse, listening to her earphones.

“Please. She’s dying, I tellya.”

“Shhh,” said the nurse, listening to her earphones.

Rudford pulled them off her head. “Please,” he said. “You’ve gotta get a guy to help us get her in and everything. She’s dying.”

“The singer?” said the nurse.

“Yes! Lida Louise!” said the boy, almost happy and making it strong.

“I’m sorry, but the rules of the hospital do not permit Negro patients. I’m very sorry.”

Rudford stood for a moment with his mouth open.

“Will you please let go of my phones?” the nurse said quietly. A woman who controlled herself under all circumstances.

Rudford let go of her phones, turned, and ran out of the building.

He climbed back into the car, ordering, “Go to Jefferson. Spruce and Fenton.”

Black Charles said nothing. He started up the motor—he had turned it off—and jerked the car to a fast start.

“What’s the matter with Samaritan? That’s a good hospital,” Peggy said, stroking Lida Louise’s forehead.

“No, it isn’t,” Rudford said, looking straight ahead, warding off any possible side glance from Black Charles.

The car turned into Fenton Street and pulled up in front of Jefferson Memorial Hospital. Rudford jumped out again, followed this time by Peggy.

There was the same kind of reception desk inside, but there was a man instead of a nurse sitting at it—an attendant in a white duck suit. He was reading a newspaper.

“Please. Hurry. We got a lady outside in the car that’s dying. Her appendix is busted or something. Hurry, willya?”

The attendant jumped to his feet, his newspaper falling on the floor. He followed right on Rudford’s heels.

Rudford opened the front door of the car, and stood away. The attendant looked in at Lida Louise, pale and in agony, lying across the front seat with her head on Black Charles’s head.

“Oh. Well, I’m not a doctor myself. Wait just a second.”

“Help us carry her in!” Rudford yelled.

“Just be a minute,” the attendant said. “I’ll call the resident surgeon.” He walked off, entering the hospital with one hand in his pocket—for poise.

Rudford and Peggy let go of the awkward carry-hold they already had on Lida Louise. Rudford leading, they both ran after the attendant. They reached him just as he got to his switchboard. Two nurses were standing around, and a woman with a boy who was wearing a mastoid dressing.

“Listen. I know you. You don’t wanna take her. Isn’t that right?”

“Wait just a min-ute, now. I’m callin’ up the resident surgeon…Let go of my coat, please. This is a hospital, sonny.”

“Don’t call him up,” Rudford said through his teeth. “Don’t call up anybody. We’re gonna take her to a good hospital. In Memphis.” Half-blinded, Rudford swung crazily around. “C’mon, Peggy.”

But Peggy stood some ground, for a moment. Shaking violently, she addressed everybody in the reception lobby: “Damn you! Damn you all!”

Then she ran after Rudford.

The car started up again. But it never reached Memphis. Nor even halfway to Memphis.

It was like this: Lida Louise’s head was on Rudford’s lap. So long as the car kept moving, her eyes were shut.

Then abruptly, for the first time, Black Charles stopped for a red light. While the car was motionless, Lida Louise opened her eyes and looked up at Rudford. “Endicott?” she said.

The boy looked down at her and answered, almost at the top of his voice, “I’m right here, Honey!”

Lida Louise smiled, closed her eyes, and died.

A story never ends. The narrator is usually provided with a nice, artistic spot for his voice to stop, but that’s about all.

Rudford and Peggy attended Lida Louise’s funeral. The following morning Rudford went away to boarding school. He didn’t see Peggy again for fifteen years. During his first year at boarding school, his father moved to San Francisco, re-married and stayed there. Rudford never returned to Agersburg.

He saw Peggy again in early summer of 1942. He had just finished a year of internship in New York. He was waiting to be called into the Army.

One afternoon he was sitting in the Palm Room of the Biltmore Hotel, waiting for his date to show up. Somewhere behind him a girl was very audibly giving away the plot to a Taylor Caldwell novel. The girl’s voice was Southern, but not swampy and not blue-grass and not even particularly drawly. It sounded to Rudford very much like a Tennessee voice. He turned to look. The girl was Peggy. He didn’t even have to take a second look.

He sat for a minute wondering what he would say to her; that is, if he were to get up and go over to her table—a distance of fifteen years. While he was thinking, Peggy spotted him. No planner, she jumped up and went over to his table. “Rudford?”

“Yes…” He stood up.

Without embarrassment, Peggy gave him a warm, if glancing kiss.

They sat down for a minute at Rudford’s table and told each other how incredible it was that they had recognized each other, and how fine they both looked. Then Rudford followed her back to her table. Her husband was sitting there.

Her husband’s name was Richard something, and he was a Navy flier. He was eight feet tall, and he had some theater tickets or flying goggles or a lance in one of his hands. Had Rudford brought a gun along, he would have shot Richard dead on the spot.

They all sat down at an undersized table and Peggy asked ecstatically, “Rudford, do you remember that house on Miss Packer’s Street?”

“I certainly do.”

“Well, who do you think’s living in it now? Iva Hubbel and her husband.”

“Who?” said Rudford.

“Iva Hubbel! You remember her. She was in our class. No chin? Always snitched on everybody?”

“I think I do,” Rudford said. “Fifteen years though,” he added pointedly.

Peggy turned to her husband and lengthily brought him up to date on the house on Miss Packer’s Street. He listened with an iron smile.

“Rudford,” Peggy said suddenly. “What about Lida Louise?”

“How do you mean, Peggy?”

“I don’t know. I think about her all the time.” She didn’t turn to her husband with an explanation. “Do you too?” she asked Rudford.

He nodded. “Sometimes, anyway.”

“I played her records all the time when I was in college. Then some crazy drunk stepped on my ‘Soupy Peggy.’ I cried all night. I met a boy, later, that was in Jack Teagarden’s band, and he had one, but he wouldn’t sell it to me or anything. I didn’t even get to hear it again.”

“I have one.”

“Honey,” Peggy’s husband interrupted softly, “I don’t wanna interrupt, but you know how Eddie gets. I told him we’d be there and all.”

Peggy nodded. “Do you have it with you?” she asked. “In New York?”

“Well, yes, it’s at my aunt’s apartment. Would you like to hear it?”

“When?” Peggy demanded.

“Well, whenever you—”

“Sweetie. Excuse me. Look. It’s three thirty now. I mean—”

“Rudford,” Peggy said, “we have to run. Look. Could you call me tomorrow? We’re staying here at the hotel. Could you? Please,” Peggy implored, slipping into the jacket her husband was crowding around her shoulders.

Rudford left Peggy with a promise to phone her in the morning.

He never phoned her, though, or saw her again.

In the first place, he almost never played the record for anybody in 1942. It was terribly scratchy now. It didn’t even sound like Lida Louise any more.

I should preface by mentioning The City of Cincinnati’s long-standing vendetta against me. I’ve been fined for jay walking, for getting hit on my bike by an SUV, and have also had the occasional displeasure of finding little orange slips of my windshield for “abandoning” a vehicle and for the occasional parking violation. Yet, when I am almost run down in plain sight of a cop, they do nothing. So today, it is with great relish that I say to the City of Cincinnati: “Up Yours, City of Cincinnati.” For today I played parking meter roulette and won.

It was pouring this morning when I was getting ready to bike to work (way too late to bus it). Also, the rain made my dog less than enthusiastic about taking his morning constitutional, thereby presenting the need for a mid-day walk, and while I sometimes ride home for lunch, Ravine Street hill makes me sweat like a fat man in a donut shop. So I drove. I parked in a 30 minute spot. I moved to a 60 minute spot, laying on the horn behind a couple of bankers having some sort of discussion about economics in their double parked SUV. I set my outlook calendar to remind me to feed the meter. I fed the wretched thing. I hustled. I waited one minute for my meter to expire so that I could get my free ten minutes. I returned to my vehicle to drive home on lunch to find the meter reading a satisfying zero. I drove home for lunch, took out Mose, put on my helmet, got on my bike and the sky opened up with a heavy deluge for my entire ride in (I’m still wet. Well probably not now, but as I was writing this).

I can see how easily this euphoria could become an addiction. In the tradition of Calvin Trillin’s Tepper, or that Seinfeld episode “The Dealership” in which Kramer explores the lower limitations of a fuel gauge, or George Costanza’s lascivious pursuit of perfect spots (which begs the questions, could there be a little Calvin in George? Or George in Calvin? And does city living make you petty?) Whatever the case, Parking Meter Roulette is a game of great rewards, but not for the faint of heart. From the New York Times February 12, 2002:

“Parking gives the parker a sense of power and territorial acquisitiveness, although temporary. Abjuring metaphorical implications, the fictional Tepper says, ”It’s just something I do.” After he finds a space, he generally remains in his car reading a tabloid newspaper until his time (on the meter, if there is a meter) expires. He always gets his money’s worth, which infuriates other drivers. Tepper couldn’t care less. He is doing nothing illegal. When asked if he is leaving, he wags his index finger, an all-purpose ”rule me out” gesture the author picked up in Europe.”

We’re really stepping up our biking at the Merc.

This is our new immersion wort (pronounced “wert”) chiller in action, transferring heat from a batch of “robust porter” (Midwest Brewing’s kit). Stuff took off like a racehorse. Four o’clock in the morning, I was awoken by a loud clatter to discover wort geysering forth . . . the top of the airlock blown out. I quickly fashioned (and sterilized) a blow-off tube with a wider aperture, capped it, and went back to bed. Have yet to check the specific gravity, but wouldn’t be surprised if it’s at target. Despite the trouble, the rewards of homebrewing are worth it.

The other day I went to the practice space to play drums with these guys. We were rearranging some amps when something heavy fell off a shelf and struck me in the back of my head. I found myself in a sunny meadow, next to a sleeping dragon and a sign that said “in many cases, mud is good, in others…” Then I woke up and there, on the floor next to me was a Commodore Vic-20. I mention this only because it isn’t every day you get hit in the head with a Vic-20. -Ed Scripsi

Isn’t it odd that when we pay gas and electric bills we are simultaneously paying to heat our domiciles and to cool the food that is in our refrigerators inside our toasty domiciles?

In his recent biography, Fidel Castro calculates the number of days he has saved in the course of his life by not shaving. How much energy could be saved if we replaced our fridges with some sort of passive refrigeration unit that took advantage of the as-yet plentiful arctic air that just this morning was blowing straight through my Khakis at the bus stop? And irony of ironies: refrigeration contributes to global warming. Taking advantage of existing cold would work towards preventing global warming.

My friends Chris and Caroline had just such a nifty device in their old apartment–a compartment in the wall of their kitchen opened to the outside. You could put your beer or icecube trays in there and get them nice and cold. Couldn’t you take this idea a step further and, using modern electronics, have an in-wall fridge that, when outdoor coldness availed itself, took advantage of the situation? Just a thought. And I’m seriously considering quitting shaving like Fidel.

Dear Mr. Obama:

First, let me say what a huge supporter I am. My girlfriend and I are rooting for you. My girlfriend, who actually knows about politics, suggests that you might want to try to look a little more enthusiastic. She’s afraid that if you don’t step up, Hillary is going to get the Democratic Nomination, and then we’ll end up with a Mormon in the white house.
My girlfriend and I are also enjoy watching old Soul Train episodes and we’re in on your little secret. We’ve seen you on several episodes, Mr. Obama. And we’re not the only ones who have spotted you. Corduroy jacket with elbow patches ring a bell, Mr. “I’m Rocking the collegiate look way before that collegiate look was the look”? You look great. You dance great. We’re just worried that when this story breaks there might be some sort of smear campaign, attempting to associate you with the free and loose mores of the Swinging Seventies.
Far be it from us, Mr. Obama, to make suggestions to you, but here’s one possible thought. Turn this disadvantage into an advantage. Dust off the corduroy and bust a move, Barach! Seriously shaking your shit will show that you’re not just another wind-bag politician. Nothing says “Man of the People”, not to mention “Power to the People” like dancing to groovy funk and/or disco music. Perhaps Mr. Cornelius would even let you use his line. “… and you can bet your last money, this election’s gonna be a stone gas, honey! I’m Barach Obama, and as always, in parting, we wish you love, peace and soul!” sincerely, your loyal supporter,

Ed Scripsi