From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- Ancient
Dreams, Dreamed- Magical Realism 101
Introduction
The following sketches, and
that is all they pretend to be, flash-colored sketches, are based, mainly, on
stories told to me by my old friend Peter Paul Markin, although I have taken
the usual liberties with the truth to “jazz” some of the stories up. I might
add that these sketches are more or less in chronological order (although exact
dates or time periods may be off slightly, like all misty remembrances),
although he told them to me in helter-skelter order time over many years, some
under, well, let’s just call them trying circumstances and be done with it. I might add that occasionally he will speak
in his own voice on stories that are either too fantastic for me to write with
a straight face, or too deep for me to comprehend rightly.
Markin and I first met long
ago in the searching for the great American West 1960s good night the details
of which are supplied in a few of the sketches from that period. This however,
is not a “memoir” of that period, although we are both certified members in
good standing of the generation of ’68, the generation who at one time promised
to fight for a “newer world.” And lost, or retreated before that massive task. The
literary universe is thick with, and frankly I am sick unto death of, memoirs
from that period, great or small.
What these things pretend to
be in earnest, using Markin as a lightning rod, are looks at the extreme
variety of human experiences that our wicked old world has spewed forth. Given
the very long and arduous human struggle to meet our immediate daily needs,
they also underline the narrowness of human expression in facing the great
tasks that confront us in living on this wicked old earth. Josh Breslin- September 2012
When Miss Cora Swayed
Click on the headline to link
to a Wikipedia entry for the 1946 film adaptation of James M. Cain’s The
Postman Always Rings Twice.
Yah, sometimes, and maybe
more than sometimes, a frail, a frill, a twist, a dame, oh hell, let’s cut out
the goofy stuff and just call her a woman and be done with it, will tie a guy’s
insides up in knots so bad he doesn’t know what is what. Tie a guy up so bad he
will go to the chair without a murmur, the electric chair for those not in the
know or those not wound up in the love game with a big old knot very tightly
squeezing him. That is he will not murmur if there is such a merciful chair in
his locale, otherwise whatever way they cut the life out of a guy who has been
so twisted up he couldn’t think straight enough to tie his own shoes, or hers.
Here’s the funny part and you
know as well as I do that I do not mean funny, laughing funny, the guy will go
to his great big reward smiling, okay half-smiling, just to have been around
that frail, frill, twist. dame, oh hell, you know what I mean. Around her
slightly shy, sly, come hither scents, around her, well, just around her. Or
maybe just to be done with it, done with the speculation, the knots and all,
six-two-and even he would go back for more, plenty more, and still have that
smile, ah, half-smile as they lead him away. Yah, guys just like Frank.
Frank Jackman had it bad. [But
you might as well fill in future signatures, the Peter Paul Markins, the Joshua
Lawrence Breslins, and every corner boy who ever kicked his heels against some
drugstore store front wall, name your name, just kids, mere boys, when they
started getting twisted up in knots, girl knots, and a million, more or less,
other guys too, just as easily as Frank, real easy]. Yah, Frank had it bad as a
man could have from the minute Miss Cora walked through that café door from the
back of the house, the door that separated the living quarters from the café, a
cup of joe in her hand. Just an off-hand plain plank door, cheaply made and
amateurishly hinged, that spoke of no returns.
She breezed, Frank thought
later when he tried to explain it, explain everything that had happened and how
to anyone who would listen, trade winds breezed in although this was the wrong
coast for that, in her white summer frilly V-neck buttoned cotton blouse, white
short shorts, tennis or beach ready, maybe just ready for whatever came along,
with convenience pockets for a woman’s this-and-that, and showing plenty of well-turned,
lightly-tanned bare leg, long legs at first glance, and the then de rigueur
bandana holding back her hair, also white, the bandana that is. Yah, she came
out of that crooked cheapjack door like some ill-favored Pacific wind now that
he had the coast right, some Japan Current ready, ready for the next guy out.
Jesus.
I might as well tell you,
just like he told it to me, incessantly told it to me like I was some
father-confessor, and maybe I was, before he moved on, it didn’t have to finish
up like the way it did. Or start that way either, for that matter. The way it
did play out. Not at all. No way. He could have just turned around anytime he
said but I just took that as so much wind talking, or maybe some too late
regret. Sure there are always choices, for some people. Unless you had some Catholic/Calvinist/Shiva
whirl pre-destination Mandela wheel working your fates, working your fates into
damn overdrive like our boy Frank.
Listen up a little and see if
Frank was just blowing smoke, or something. He was just a half-hobo, maybe
less, bumming around and stumbling up and down the West Coast, too itchy to
settle down after four years of hard World War II Pacific battle fights on
bloody atolls, on bloody coral reefs, and knee-deep bloody islands with names
even he couldn’t remember, or want to remember after Cora came on the horizon. He was just stumbling, like he said, from one
half-ass mechanic’s job (a skill he had picked in the Marines) in some flop
garage here, another city day laborer’s job shoveling something there, and
picking fruits, hot sun fruits, maybe vegetables depending on the crop
rotation, like some bracero whenever things got really tough, or the hobo
jungle welcome ran out, ran out with the running out of wines and stubbed cigarette
butts. He mentioned something about freight yard tramp knives, and cuts and
wounds. Tough, no holds barred stuff, once tramp, bum, hobo solidarities broke
down, and that easy and often. Frank just kind of flashed that part of the
story because he was in a hurry for me to get it straight about him and Cora
and the hobo jungle stuff was just stuff, and so much train smoke and maybe a
bad dream.
Hell, the way he was going,
after some bracero fruit days with some bad hombre bosses standing over his
sweat, the “skids” in Los Angeles, down by the tar pits and just off the old
Southern Pacific line, were looking good, a good rest up. Real good after
fourteen days running in some Imperial Valley fruit fields so he started
heading south, south by the sea somewhere near Paseo Robles to catch some ocean
sniff, and have himself washed clean by loud ocean sounds so he didn’t have to
listen to the sounds coming from his head about getting off the road.
Here is where luck is kind of
funny though, and maybe this is a place where it is laughing funny, because,
for once, he had a few bucks, a few bracero fruit bucks, stuck in his socks. He
was hungry, maybe not really food hungry, but that would do at the time for a
reason, and once he hit the coast highway this Bayview Diner was staring him
right in the face after the last truck ride had let him off a few hundred yards
up the road. Some fugitive barbecued beef smell, or maybe strong onions getting
a workout over some griddled stove top, reached him and turned him away from
the gas station fill-up counter where he had planned, carefully planning to
husband his dough to make the city of angels, to just fill up with a Coke and
moon pie. But that smell got the better of him.
So he walked into that Bayview Diner, walked in with his eyes wide open.
And then she walked through the damn door.
She may have been just
another blonde, a very blonde frail, just serving them off the arm in some
seaside hash joint as he found out later, but from second one when his eyes
eyed her she was nothing but, well nothing but, a femme fatale. Frank femme
fatale, fatal. Of course between eyeing, pillow-talk dreaming, and scheming up
some “come on” line once she had her hooks into him, which was about thirty
seconds after he laid eyes on her, he forgot, foolishly forgot, rule number one
of the road, or even of being a man in go-go post-war America.
What he should have asked,
and had in the past when he wasn’t this dame-addled, was a dish like this doing
serving them off the arm in some rundown roadside café out in pacific coast
Podunk when she could be sunning herself in some be-bop daddy paid-up hillside
bungalow or scratching some other dame’s eyes out to get a plum role in a B
Hollywood film courtesy of some lonely rich producer. Never for a minute, not
even during those thirty seconds that he wasn’t hooked did he figure, like some
cagey guy would figure, that she had a story hanging behind that bandana
hair.
And she did. Story number one
was the “serve them off the platter” hubby short-ordering behind the grill in
that tramp cafe. The guy who, to save dough, bought some wood down at the
lumber yard and put up that crooked door that she had come through on first
sight and who spent half his waking hours trying to figure how to short-change
somebody, including his Cora. Story number two, and go figure, said hubby didn’t care one way or the other
about what she did, or didn’t do, as long as he had her around as a trophy to
show the boys on card-playing in the back of the diner living rooms and Kiwanis
drunk as a skunk nights. Story number three was that she had many round-heeled
down-at- the-heels stories too long to tell Frank before hubby came along to
pick her out of some Los Angles arroyo gutter. Story number four, the one that
would in the end sent our boy Frankie smiling, sorry half-smiling, to his fate
was she hated hubby, hell-broth murder hated her husband, and would be
“grateful” in the right way to some guy who had the chutzpah to take her out of
this misery. But those stories all came later, later when she didn’t need to
use those hooks she had in him, didn’t need to use them at all.
Peter Paul Markin Interlude
One: “I swear, I swear on seven sealed bibles
that I yelled, yelled from some womblike place, at the screen once I saw her
coming through that door for him, for Frank,
to get the hell out of there at that moment. This dame was poison, no
question. Frank stop looking at those long paid for legs and languid rented
eyes for a minute and get the hell out of there to some safe hobo jungle. Hell,
just walk out the diner, café or whatever it is door, run if you have too, get
your hitchhike great blue-pink American West thumb out and head for it. There’s
a hobo jungle just down the road near Santa Monica, get going, and tonight grab
some stolid, fetid stews, and peace.”
But here is where fate works
against some guys, hell, most guys. She turned around to do some dish rack
thing or other with her lipstick-smeared coffee cup and then, slowly, turned
back to look at Frank with those languid
eyes, what color who knows, it was the look not the color that doomed
Frank and asked in a soft, kittenish voice
“Got a cigarette for a fresh out girl?” And wouldn’t you know, wouldn’t
you just know that Frank, “flush” with bracero dough had bought a fresh deck of
Luckies at the cigarette machine out at that filling station just adjacent to
the diner and they were sitting right in his left shirt pocket for the entire world
to see. For her to see. And wouldn’t you know too that Frank could see plain as
day, plain as a man could see if he wanted to see, that bulging out of one of
the convenience pockets of those long-legged white short shorts was the
sharply-etched outline of a package of cigarettes. Yah, still he plucked a
cigarette into her waiting lips, kind of gently, gently for rough-edged Frank,
lit her up, and dated her up with his eyes. Gone, long-gone daddy gone, except
for dreams, and that final half-smile.
Peter Paul Markin Interlude
Two: “I screamed again, some vapid man-child scream, some kicking at the womb
thump too, but do you think Frank would listen, no not our boy. You don’t need
to know all the details if you are over twenty-one, hell over twelve and can
keep a secret. She used her sex every way she could, and a few ways that Frank,
not unfamiliar with the world’s whorehouses in lonely ports-of-call, was kind
of shocked at, but only shocked. He was hooked, hook, line and sinker. Frank
knew, knew what she was, knew what she wanted, and knew what he wanted so there
was no crying there.”
Here is what is strange, and
while I am writing this even I think it is strange. She told Frank her whole
life’s story, the too familiar father crawling up into her barely teenage bed,
the run-aways, returns, girls’ JD homes, some more streets, a few whorehouse
tricks, some street tricks, a little luck with a Hollywood producer until his
wife, who controlled the dough, put a stop to it, some drugs, some L.A.
gutters, and then a couple of years back some refuge from those mean streets
via husband Manny’s Bayview Diner.
Even with all of that Frank
still believed, believed somewhere from deep in his recessed mind, somewhere in
his Oklahoma kid mud shack mind, that Cora was virginal. Some Madonna of the
streets. Toward the end it was her scent, some slightly lilac scent, some lilac
scent that combined with steamed vegetable sweat combined with sexual animal
sweat combined with ancient Lydia MacAdams' bath soap fresh junior high school
crush sweat drove him over the edge. Drove him to that smiling chair.
He had to play with fire, and
play with it to the end. Christ, just like his whole young stupid gummed up
life he had to play with fire. And from that minute, the lit cigarette minute,
although really from the minute that Frank saw those long legs protruding from
those white shorts Manny was done for.
And once Frank had sealed his
fate (and hers too) on that midnight
roaring rock sandy beach night when the ocean depths smashing against
the shore drowned out the sound of their passion everybody from Monterrey to
Santa Monica knew he was done for, or said they knew the score after the fact.
Everybody who came within a mile of the Bayview Diner anyway. Everybody except
Manny and maybe somewhere in his cheap- jack little heart he too knew he was
done for when Cora, in her own sensible Cora way, persuaded him that he needed
an A-One grease monkey to run the filling station.
The way Frank told it even I
knew, knew that everybody had to have figured things out. Any itinerant trucker
who went out of his way to take the Coast highway with his goods on board in order to get a full glance at Cora and try
his “line” on her knew it (Manny encouraged it, he said it was good for
business and harmless, and maybe it was with them). Knew it the minute he sat
at his favorite corner stool and saw a monkey wrench-toting Frank come in for
something and watch the Frank-Cora- and cigar-chomping Manny in his whites
behind the grille dance play out. He kept his eyes and his line to himself on
that run.
Damn, any dated –up teen-age
joy-riding kids up from Malibu looking for the perfect wave at Roaring Rock
(and maybe some midnight passion drowned out by the ocean roar too) knew the minute
they came in and smelled that lilac something coming like something out of the
eden garden from Cora. The girls knowing instinctively that Cora lilac scent
was meant for more than some half-drunk old short order cook. One girl, with a
friendly look Frank’s way, and maybe with her own Frank Roaring Rock thoughts,
asked Cora, while ordering a Coke and hamburger, whether she was married to
him. And her date, blushing, not for what his date had just said but because
he, fully under the lilac scent karma, wished that he was alone just then so he
could take a shot at Cora himself.
Hell even the California
Highway Patrol motorcycle cop who cruised the coast near the diner (and had his
own not so secret eyes and desires for Cora) knew once Frank was installed in one of the rooms over the garage that
things didn’t add up, add up to Manny’s benefit. And, more importantly, that if
anything happened, anything at all, anything requiring more than a Band-Aid, to
one Manny DeVito for the next fifty years the cops knew the first door to knock
at.
Look I am strictly a money
guy, going after loot wherever I could and so I never got messed up with some
screwy dame on a caper. That was later, spending time later. And maybe if I had
gotten a whiff of that perfume things might have been different in my mind too
but I told Frank right out why didn’t he and Cora take out a big old .44 in the
middle of the diner and just shoot Manny straight out, and maybe while the cop
was present too. Then he /they could
have at least put up an insanity or crime of passion defense. Not our boy
though, no he had to play the angles, play Cora’s evil game.
These two amateurs gummed up
the job every which way, gummed it so that even a detective novel writer would
turn blush red with shame. Murder is, from guys that I know who specialize in
such things, make a business out of taking guys out for dough, an art form and
nothing for amateurs to mess around with. They tried one thing, something with poison
taken over a long time that couldn’t be traced but Manny was such a lush it
didn’t take. Then they tried to get him drunk and drown him off of Roaring Rock
but that night around two in the morning about sixty kids from down around
Malibu decided to have a cook-out after their prom night. In the end they just
did the old gag that the cops have been wise to since about 1906 and conked
him, threw him in the car, drove to the Roaring Rock and pushed him and the car
over the cliff. Jesus, double jesus.
Peter Paul Interlude Three:
“Frank, one last time, get out, get on the road, this ain’t gonna work. That
poison thing was crazy. That drunk at the ocean thing was worst. The cops
wouldn’t even have had to bother to knock at your door. Frank on this latest
caper she’s setting you up. Who drove the car, who got the whiskey, who knew
how to trip the brake lines, and who was big enough to carry Manny? Why don’t you just paint a big target on your
chest and be done with it. She just wants the diner for her own small dreams.
You don’t count. Hell, I ain’t no squealer but she is probably talking to that
skirt –crazy (her skirt) cop right now. Get out I say, get out.”
If you want the details, want
to see how she framed him but good and walked away with half the California
legal system holding the door open for her, just look them up in the 1946 fall
editions of the Los Angeles Gazette.
They covered the story big time, and the trial too. That’s just the details
though. I can give you the finish now and save your eyes, maybe. Frank, yah,
Frank was just kind of smiling that smile, what did I call it, half-smile, all
the way to the end. Do you need to know more?
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