JANUARY DD, 2013
WELCOME BACK MY FRIENDS
So anyway, the weather has been brisk for around here. Native San Franciscans have been lurking about the Island and we can see them clearly for who they are. These are the folks who stroll around wearing sandals without socks in their shirtsleeves while the saner people around them scrape the ice from their windshields, wearing mittens, fuzzy hats, and full parkas from REI.
Decent people would at least pretend to be chilled so as to bond in some kind of human sympathy with the rest of the world, but not these folks seeking avenues of escape from the obscenely high rents over there in Babylon. Meanwhile, Jacqueline of Jackie's Hair Salon looks out these mornings and smiles to herself, as Jackie stems from Bear Lake upstate Minnesota near the Canadian border. You talk about cold you just talk to Jackie while she is in there doing a tint job on Mrs. Blather, trying to make the lady look a little less gray.
But tastefully, tastefully. Jackie would not have it any other way.
Jackie tells the story about the rumored reason about how the Erickson kid with the cleft lip got that way and the story goes that this boy, whose name was Alfred, had done the worst thing that a boy could do in wintertime. He had taken the double dare and acted out the most grievous nightmare -- plus or minus a few other really really horrible things involving knives and witches -- that afflicted all of us while growing up.
Yes, the hapless child put his tongue upon an iron pump handle after the temperature had dropped well below minus twenty degrees. And there he found himself frozen to the metal there and unable to get loose.
So there poor Alfred was stuck and all the kids too scared to do anything and half afraid if they helped him they would get stuck too somehow the way electricity was known to do -- everyone knows about that, right? If you touch someone who has been electrocuted then you would get electrocuted and have a heartattack and die and be buried in the cold ground. It is a known and proven fact and my cousin read about it in a magazine or saw it on TV.
So all the kids ran off, too scared to do something to help poor Alfred with his tongue frozen to the pump handle and the reason nobody is around to tell about this now is that they all were embarrassed by their cowardice and so each one of them grew up with this terrible dark secret in their hearts about having failed to help a fellow human being.
Even Gwen, dear sweet Gwen with the blond hair and the blue eyes whom Alfred had rather liked in Mr. Joe's Biology class for figuring out the ATP pump cycle before anyone else and who always had smiled at him even though he lived on a farm with his dull brother Axel, even she had run off.
So there he was, all alone, surrounded by snow, hearing the howling of wolves, or something that sounded like wolves, half afraid he would just die there of exposure overnight, his family wondering where he had gotten off to at suppertime and his father in a wax on his lateness and his mother sorrowfully putting away the hot dish casserole.
He would die and they would find him and cut loose the pipe there and put him in a casket with the pump still attached to his tongue and he would bury him like that in a coffin in the farmyard with Father Danyluk debating with Rome as to whether this was considered a suicide or a hapless accident and the good father winning out over that German fellow in the Vatican because Father Danyluk was a good man as head of the parish of Our Lady of Incessant Complaint.
So that is the way he would approach the kingdom of heaven, with the pump handle frozen to his tongue and him having to carry it right up to St. Peter with his beard and the Book among the Host of Heaven and St. Peter exclaiming, "Well we really cannot have this sort of thing in Heaven you know! You will have to chose to go to the Other Place, where it may be hot enough to thaw that thing, or Gabriel.
So of course he chooses Gabriel and along comes the ferocious archangel with his terrible mighty sword with comes up and swishes down and . . .
O my gawd! So much blood in heaven not been seen for so long . . .
In the other scenario, Old Grima, the neighboring bachelor farmer comes along and deals with the situation as tough Norwegian bachelor farmers are known to do. Out comes the knife, the same one he uses for the bulls to make them tame, and . . .
O my gawd . . .!
So that is how the Erickson boy got his cleft lip and got the way he was. However the story does not end there.
Alfred's family saved up their pennies and got the boy to a surgeon who fixed his cleft lip, however with the unfortunate result that the boy spoke with a French accent the rest of his life.
Alfred got a scholarship that took him to France where he stayed and changed his name to Eric, while his brother, Axel, remained on the farm tending livestock. All the French marveled at how, finally, they had discovered one American who finally could speak their difficult language flawlessly. People came from miles around just to listen to him speak.
Eric became immensely successful as a novelist and a fashion designer and he sent home pots of money to help out his aging parents who fixed up the farm so well that Axel became a sort of tour guide for transplanted Minnesotans who traveled up from San Diego to visit the Erickson Estates and ride Percheron horses on the farm that had been made into a dude ranch. And during the long winter months he invited his family to a little place he kept on the Cote d'Azure, where they drank campari by the beach and wore sandals with no socks and shirtsleeves in weather properly designed for such.
As for his companions who had abandoned him, no one now remembers them at all. Not one.
So however the boy had gotten his cleft lip, he wound up pretty well off in the end.
So let this be a lesson to you. Seize the day. Take the dare. It may hurt a lot at first, it might cost you a world of pain, but you just might go places you otherwise might never have seen.
High above MacArthur Boulevard, Denby, Javier, Festus, and a few of the other Islandlife crew went through their rehab paces, enforced as physical therapy regimens for each one to deal with their respective injuries after the terrible disaster on El Abuelito di Diablo had nearly killed all of them in September of last year. The room was filled with men, women and teenagers working laboriously on cable machines and padded tables, struggling to regain function in shattered limbs. A fortyish man walked himself between chrome rails over a thick pad, gripping the rails to either side while trying to make his legs work again. A thickset man wearing an armbrace tossed a ball to an inclined trampoline over and over. A teenager removed a solid boot from his right foot on one of the padded benches to run through his routine.
Festus, standing in the window sill, called Denby over from his bicycle, where the musician had set the seat at 9 to get his knee to bend again via constant rotation.
"Look down there," Festus said.
Denby looked down to see a young woman with flowing black hair wheeling a baby carriage down Broadway past the park towards the intersection with its tangle of concrete barriers painted orange and the flapping draped construction going on for the new high rise across the way. The woman was on the Macarthur Park side approaching Macarthur itself and the long light there, breath steaming out of her in the frigid air outside.
"That's Amanita," Denby said. "I know her."
Indeed. Amanita had once a boyfriend who had gotten her pregnant while both had been going to Washington High School. Washington had closed, due to the fiscal crisis, before officialdom could react to yet one more case of a teen pregnancy. The boyfriend had long since vanished, his parents choosing to remove to the Valley rather than face disgrace.
It was unknown if the boy had much say in the matter, but that left Amanita with child and a Catholic upbringing, a combination not conducive to kindness, leniency, or comfort. Father Danyluk, who understood the ways of the world, had hooked her up with some County support and WIC, but having a child at 17 is always a hard row to hoe and sometimes the laughter dies if nothing else.
Amanita reached the corner as the light turned red and she briefly stood there, a thin-stick waif wearing a thick black parka, breathing clouds of steam. Then, suddenly she started wheeling the carriage in a circle and flinging her dark hair and the two of them watching from the fourth floor of the Kaiser building could she that she was singing as she danced with her child.
After a few long moments the light changed, and the girl was gone and the two returned to their routines in the heart of the cold city.
Out on the swell of the wine-dark sea, Pedro fiddled with his radio, trying to bring in his favorite broadcast of the Rotschue Televangalist Variety Show, and got a sort of poor connection with hall-echo sound that made it seem like everyone was talking inside an immense cold auditorium.
There would not be much comfort this night from the show.
There were scant days left on the calendar for crabbing on this season before the pots and nets would give up to lines for herring and other things. As a sole proprietor he was bound to the schedule of local ordinance as well as to the seasons.
As it turned out, the haul was less than as expected this time around and so he returned to port, patient and unbowed, knowing the sea would always provide in some fashion, even though the times had changed, the catch had varied and even the weather had turned quandary.
Out on the high seas, the small hillocks of the waves lifting and lowering his boat El Borracho Perdido, he remembered the pile of ashes by the back steps and the plant which had appeared there one year, a small tearose.
Latterly, despite the gloomy weather, he had noticed the scrawny thing sending out a series of green shoots, one ending in some kind of swelling.
By now in other parts of the country people may be noticing green shoots firing up through the coverlet of snow.
In Mosswood Park, in Oaktown across the street from the Kaiser building, the old tramp shambles in the cold as the rain began to fall to the bench. He failed to get to the shelter on time, so there would be no bed or food and he thought he might get on the bench and huddle up with newspapers. On the table there someone had left a white box. The tramp opened up the box and inside was a big cake with the printing "Congratulations Marsha and Allen" and a small figure of a man in a tuxedo dancing with a woman in a bridal dress. The cake had been partially carved with some pieces missing on one end.
The rain came down and pitted the frosting. It is Mosswood Park and someone
left the cake out in the rain. The tramp took a cut piece, ate it and went over
to the covered busstop and lay down there and went to sleep. He left the box
open and the rain came down on the cake, destroying the message.
From far across the water, the long howl of the the throughpassing train ululated
across the waves of the estuary and the grasses of the Buena Vista flats as
the locomotive glided past the dark and shuttered doors of the Jack London Waterfront,
headed off on its journey to parts unknown.
That's the way it is on the Island. Have a great week.
