Fraud, My Sweet-Internet Love Gone Awry-The Con Artist Conned-A Detective Phillip Larkin Expanded Tale-The Deluxe Edition-Of Sorts

Fraud, My Sweet-Internet Love Gone Awry-The Con Artist Conned-A Detective Phillip Larkin Expanded Tale-The Deluxe Edition-Of Sorts  

For this story it was hard to find a Wikipedia entry or YouTube film clip to accompany the piece, to do it justice but the more I thought about Tom Clary's situation the more I thought about schoolboy stuff. Hence Frankie and the boys

By Zack James

After the ashes burned to a cinder in their “relationship” (those quotation marks betraying no irony but rather a statement of “what was” what when those silly ashes burned down) this is an e-mail that one Massachusetts attorney, Tom Clary, from Lowell, a good one if you are in trouble with the law but otherwise avoid him like the plague, sent to, well let’s call her Katrina, as good a name as any and maybe her rightful name too when the dust settles before he “sent her over”:

“Katerina sweetie I will have to pass on helping you financially with your rent, living expenses and alleged hospital bill problems that you have been bugging me about since I am, no, we are in some trouble around the previous help I tried to give you paying for that life insurance premium to cash in on the policy that your late mother allegedly left you. I will describe the trouble in more detail below after   I get a few things off my chest.

“As you may know, or maybe you don’t know since you seem kind of stubbornly naïve or not seemingly knowledgeable about a lot of things, lawyers when they are in trouble or need legal advice will not depend on their own understandings of the law but seek opinions from other lawyers. You might have heard the expression about how ‘any lawyer who defends himself has a fool for a lawyer.’ That is what I am talking about. So lawyers use another lawyer as their lawyer when they need serious legal advice. So what I am about to tell you is done under advice from my lawyer who has told me that I have had to do the following based on my situation.

“Since you have not been able to provide me with receipts, the front page of the insurance policy and a copy of your mother’s death certificate for that policy you said you were supposed to collect on and for which I loaned you one thousand dollars in United States currency via Western Union money transfer to the Philippines I have had to protect my law practice and myself by having a warrant sworn for your arrest when, and if, you come back inside the jurisdiction of the United States. I did this Monday April 4, 2016 with Assistant United States Attorney Emma Wright for the Federal District Court of New Hampshire in Concord as you told me your home town and last known address was in Manchester which falls under that court’s jurisdiction charging you with Internet fraud (18 U.S. Code, section 1030 fraud using a computer, four counts, the drug bill, your mother’s hospital bill, the funeral expenses and the insurance premium payment-we would press the issue of the bogus hospital bill for $1500 USD you tried to foist on me since while you attempted to defraud me I never provided funds so I will claim no foul)  and telecommunications fraud (using Western Union for the money transfers which is regulated under the Federal Communications Commission and a violation of 18 U.S. Code, section 1343, five counts, the previous four on section 1030 plus an additional count on the insurance payment when I had to re-sent at your request after the first time it “bounced.” Like the fraudulent use of computer charges I let the later ‘attempted” bogus hospital bill frauds slide since we have enough on you with the actual acts of fraud-you can thank me and I will say you are welcome for that anyway.).

“You can do what you want when you come back to the United States but you should probably get in touch with Assistant United Attorney Wright who is handling the case to tell your side of the story, if any. You should be aware though that the “feds” don’t issue warrants without some pretty good reason, enough for some judge to rule favorably on going forward. In your case it was more the number of occasions you allegedly committed fraud and the ways you did it that gave them enough reason to pursue the case further. I assume you still will be out of the United States when you receive this e-mail so if you have trouble at U.S. Customs upon trying to re-enter the country and are detained then please call meet at 781-247-8236 and I will contact Attorney Wright and we will come to where you are being detained and can settle the matter there. Or at least figure out what to do with you.  

“All of this is not as terrible as it sounds and we, you and I, will be able to get out from under this problem if you are more forthcoming than you have been in the past about the fate of that insurance premium and the others. Restitution or arrangements for restitution of the three thousand three hundred dollars I lent you over the five valid money transfers could settle the matter although not if the “feds” want to make an example of you. What triggered all of this legal necessity was when I put the money that I borrowed for you (the one thousand dollars for the funeral expenses and then the one thousand for the insurance premiums) back into the office funds without explaining how or why it had been taken out and why it had been returned without explanation. My accountant informed that what I had done was both legally wrong and a violation of my legal responsibilities as a professional lawyer which would trigger an investigation from the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers, the organization that regulates lawyers in this state. My accountant said I would at least be, no question, in some kind of legal trouble from them.   

“Since I acted in good faith with you and I need to keep my professional standing as a lawyer to earn a living for some time longer I have had to do the above legal action, have the warrants issued, to show that I acted in good faith and that you did not. I have had to “throw you under the wheels of a bus” to use a current expression although I prefer as a literary matter the term “sending you over.” That arranging for a warrant for your arrest will clear me, hopefully. I am sorry that I had to take this action but since I don’t really know you, having never met you in person, having never even for your own reasons talked to you on the phone, and whatever has motivated you through all of this I have had to think of myself.

“Sweetie I don’t know if it will do any good, do any damn good at all but I want to explain why I have had to do what I have had to do whatever your reasons for not coming clean with me. Want to give you an idea of the bad feeling I get about this situation whatever I think about you. Hell I don’t half know how explain it to myself let alone to you but here goes because we are both in trouble, both “sitting under the gallows” if you want to be dramatic about it. Which you were often enough when you wanted something, wanted something from me and got all school-girlish and “pretty please” about it which I have learned to pick up from the tone of your e-mails when you want something. You know all that “can’t wait until we can get together” in some distant non-specified future stuff and which you assumed would make me drop everything and jump through hoops for you. Yeah, I admit I bought into that “come hither” in the distant future bit for a while until I realized, remember that e-mail I sent about us going our separate ways and forgetting whatever was driving us together, that you and I were never going to meet. Meeting was not part of your plan for me. No question I had played the fool for you. Okay, maybe I liked you and maybe you liked me as cyber-pen pals as long as I was the ever ready dough guy but that was it. I’m not bitter but I do feel used so take that for what it is worth.  

“Well, the way things look now which is not what you or I thought was going to be the future as little as a few weeks ago when you sprang that whole life insurance business on me that was going to be your ticket to a so-called better life and then that sudden sick in the hospital and can’t get out until you paid the bills just when you were supposed to collect on the insurance policy, if you get a good break, you'll be out of Danbury, that’s where the “feds” throw minimum risk women prisoners like you in six years ...and you can come back to me then. I’ll promise to be waiting. If I am still around.

“I hope they don't throw the whole book at you, sweetie, take all that sweet and innocent face of yours and turn it kind of rough, give you that prison pallor some of my tougher clients have developed from repeated incarceration. Have some bull dyke turning you off men, turning you into some girl toy. Yes, sweetie, I'm going to send you over.

The chances are you'll get off with that six years on concurrent sentences since you are probably a first-time offender and if not then you had better have a fast-talking lawyer. If you're a good girl, you'll be out in four or five years. You’ll be a ripe old thirty-something, the time when women look their best. If they let me visit you I will come down as often as I can. If not I'll be waiting for you. If they tact on the sentences for each count consecutively making it fifty or sixty years well then I'll always remember you. But believe me you are taking the fall, taking the big step-off on this one.

“Now I know you’re going to say that I have been playing with you, pretending I cared about you, trying to trap you and your confederates Rickey, I guess that is the way you spell it if he even existed, Johnny, yes, I know you want this bum called Jonathan but what the fuck do I care what you want me to call him now, so Johnny, hell Johnny Blaze if you want the real name for the guy, this mule, and that punk brother of yours, Angel, who wouldn’t lift a finger for you, wouldn’t or couldn’t raise dime one for you, and maybe I have a little. Get this though through your pretty little head-I will not play the sap, the sucker, the mark, the fall guy for you. You have never played it square with me once since I “met” you going back to that silly fake sex website “come on” that brought us together a few months ago.

“Right now I don’t care who likes or doesn’t like who I won’t be your fall guy. I will not walk in I don’t know how many other guy’s footsteps-you probably have been playing this same foul game since you were about sixteen, since you “graduated” from a high school out in San Diego that didn’t exist at the time, had been closed for years, except in your felonious mind. Jesus I should have dropped you then when I had that sneaking suspicion that you weren’t on the level if you weren’t on the level about your freaking high school. A freaking throw-way thing like that which you didn’t have to fake. You played me for a sucker and you are going over for it. 

“Ah, hell, why am I wasting my time trying to explain what you didn’t given a damn about anyway once the money dried up. I know this won’t do any good, any more than trying to explain what was happening to me and my health and other concerns in those six million e-mails you purposely always took what you want from, what served your evil purposes. You’ll never understand me but I’ll try once and then give it up.

“When a man seeks a woman, no matter how, where, or why they met and she knives him in the back for no good reason, for nothing other than her own whims and pleasures he is supposed to do something. That goes double for lawyers because we are supposed to be wise to the ways of the world, supposed to automatically discount fifty percent of what we hear and see. Even from friends and family, yeah, maybe especially then. It makes no difference what you think of yourself, or what others think of you. You have to do something to get that rock off your back, that rock that will crash your career, leave you in the office alone and desolate doing cross-word puzzles and drinking low-rent gin from a desk bottom drawer.  Like I say especially lawyers who have to appear pure and simple. When a lawyer, any lawyer not just me, gets stabbed in the back by a piece of fluff he has to do something about that. It’s bad business frankly to let the dame get away with it, bad for the lawyer, bad for the profession.

“I know you are going to say that is not enough of a reason to send you over. Get this through that pretty head though. I have no earthy reason to think I can trust you. If I forget this, forget that you played me more than a couple of times, and let you get away with it, you’ll have something on me that you can use whenever you want. Since I have this massive amount of material on you I couldn’t ever be sure you wouldn’t cook something else up again in that evil mind of yours. Maybe have somebody put me out of the way, one of those of courier, bagman, “mule,” “cousins” of yours, yeah Johnny Blaze sounds like he is built for that kind of action, the guys you kept trying to have me sent dough to you through for some ill-spoken reason, if I know you. Find myself in some funny dark corner somewhere. Hey, I am a lawyer so let’s put all those things on one side like I do when I am trying to argue a case. Okay maybe some of them are not important, I won’t argue that. But look at the number.  What have we got on the other side? Maybe you like me, and maybe I like you. You’ll say I do know if I do like you and maybe I do. Sure I will have some sleepless nights about what I have done after I sent you over but that will pass. Believe me that will pass.

“If all I have said doesn’t mean anything to you then forget it and let us make it just this: I won’t, because all of me wants to regardless of consequences … and you counted on that….the same as you have probably counted on that with all the others you have deceived. Don’t be so sure I am as addled as I am supposed to be, always acting kind of cock-simple, believe me such an aura helps in bringing in clients, dough and makes it easier to deal with opponents. But me having more dough, especially the last bonanza Washington case I told you about can be just added to the wrong side of the equation. And that is that. So long sweetie and good luck.”  

WTF, pardon my English if you know what that iconic letter combination means. I was forced to put this damning e-mail upfront because this Tom Clary case, this Internet love gone awry case as Zack James put it, left me know choice. Hell, this one is so baffling that I have not even introduced myself first as I do as a gentleman of the old school first. Hey, Phil Larkin here, Phil Larkin as in private investigator Phil Larkin and not that Zack James baloney about being a private detective, or snoop if I know what he is thinking. Let me guide you through this one, one of the oddest ones I have been involved with but since it involves sex, or the scent of sex is probably the better way to put the matter I should have known better than to get excited about the matter, get excited about a fully grown man in his fifties acting like a silly school boy no matter what his legal abilities. But enough of this let me “bring it on.” This is how I first started out describing the saga when I thought the whole deal had dealt, before the above e-mail sent to Katrina by Tom told her he was finally sending her to her just rewards, finally sending her over:      

The first time a few months ago I had my say about a case I was working on, Tom Clary’s case, make that Attorney Tom Clary’s case, and not one in which he was the lawyer but one in which he was so to speak “defending himself” just to rub it in a little, throw some well-placed salt in the wound, Zack James complained that I had not properly introduced myself in the beginning to let people know who and what I was about. You might as well know right now that Tom Clary is not his real name and if there is a Tom Clary on the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers’ active list this is not him so don’t get ticked off if you have that name because this is a purely fictionalized use of a name and everybody should know that from the get-go and know too that all the facts of the case are real so the poor bugger of a lawyer needed to have an alias in the worst way.

Zack, kind of a stickler for form like that, said I just dived into the story like I was sitting in some ill-lighted barroom sipping my tenth low-shelf scotch, telling some cronies, bar-flies really, telling anybody who would listen, “war stories” and not the great unwashed public who would not be familiar with my career, my professional as a long-time private investigator, private eye, you know a detective for hire by the hour or day just like in some other professions. Wouldn’t know that I am well-known as a great advocate of “exposing” this whole cult of the hard-bitten, shoulder to the wheel, crusader after truth and justice, chaser of windmills, don’t mind taking a bump or two, a slug or seven in the cause and sex magnet of pulp crime novel and splashy cinematic private detectives.

Well I hope Zack is satisfied, hope the reader is satisfied that I now have my credentials in order and that I can tell a real detective story with the best of them and that at the end of Tom Clary’s case (as far as it is ever going to end since every time I think it is nailed down tight some ill-begotten ghost) and that you will have seen for yourselves why I speak the truth no matter how bitter. See you at the end. Okay Zack.           

Here’s how I originally presented the set-up and I hope with all the e-mail exchanges the reader doesn’t get too confused but strangely for a private investigator telling the nuts and bolts of a story e-mails are the key to understanding what the “action” of this one. There might just be a cautionary tale on that score.

A while back I told you a short story about this sex-bedazzled attorney from Massachusetts whom I called Tom Clary who like a lot of guys who had been around for a while was looking for, well looking for something in all the wrong places. Well maybe it wasn’t so much about a wrong place as about him. See Tom had wound up “meeting” some young dishy dame on an Internet sex site who took him “for a ride,” a cyber-ride thus far since until this very day he has not actually met, real met, her (that’s the “looking for something” here, sex, okay, as any guy over the age of twelve might have figured when I mentioned “looking for something” and “all the wrong places” in the same sentence). As a result of a few false notes, meaning that he had finally wised up to something a twelve- year old guy would have wised up to after the second e-mail, Tom had actually asked me to help him when he finally figured out that the dame was nothing but a scam artist, or an alternative theory that he had was that she was crazy as a loon. That crazy figured for him as a “theory” so he could defend her even longer. Crazy like a fox more was more like it.

Any way you want to cut it she took him for a ride. I, in the end, or what we thought was the end couldn’t help him because she had either never came back to America (from the Philippines to be explained more fully below) or if she had come back had kept a low enough profile that she had not been arrested. Yeah, it was that kind of dizzy case that we finally figured was no longer worth pursuing and Tom  let the matter drop, although I am sure he brooded over the damn thing for a while after we gave up the ghost. Then she re-surfaced, or rather, e-mailed him with some cock and bull story about being kidnapped by some desperate political types, some woe begotten dregs of the “Che” Guevara legend or crazed dope dealers, I don’t know all the details of that cock and bull story since I stopped listening at the kidnap part because no way this cookie was kidnapped by anybody in their right minds for any purpose whatsoever. Hit over the head with a gong, yes, kidnap no. So I wound up on the case to see if I could find her, see if I could find what rock, what beautiful rock if Tom reads this I could find her under. By the way don’t worry your head about whether I could have found her the second time. That was only prelude since she would re-surface again like some evil monster out of the Greek calends and who knows someday might again.     

[This is what that stickler Zack James wanted me to start with like I mentioned above so here it is again just in case you were too preoccupied or something to get the gist of what I was talking about the first time.] You know I, I Phil Larkin, Private Investigator (not that silly detective business that Zack James put in the title of this piece) like I told you in that first part of what now will be a three- part story have done plenty of work for lawyers, private lawyers not those public prosecutors who couldn’t defend a case if they had the gun handed to them two seconds after some sicko killed his wife because she decided she would rather play with some hard dick than his stub, over my twenty plus years in the profession. Early on it was mostly divorce work, what unkind people call key-hole peeping, to get the goods on some adulterer, male or female what did I care as long as somebody paid the freight, when the divorce laws were a lot tougher on people trying to get out from under a bad marriage anyway they could. Lately though mainly missing persons cases for a whole lot of reasons, a whole lot of reasons why they went missing. An occasional looking for an heir about to inherit in a will not trying to go missing. Maybe some investigative work in a criminal case where a defense attorney has a client with enough dough to buy an alibi. Stuff like that. Stuff that sounds good, sounds good enough to write about to inform the public about what is what in real investigative work until you realize to the average reader it would be their hum-drum lives which they have in their own ho-hum lives had their fill of.  

In what is now the first part of  the Internet Love caper though the lawyer, Tom Clary, working out of Lowell, Jack Kerouac’s old town, Jack the self-proclaimed “king of the beats” from what I heard, they have a little memorial park near the old mills near the Merrimack that says that exact thing, an old mill town that still has seen better days no matter what hype they put on the publicity charts needed my help to get out from under some silly fraud thing he had gotten himself into when his “member” (okay, we are all adults, his cock, his woody, penis whatever) did his thinking for him and not his brain. And the second twist shaped up to be another version, part two, of that same bummer from the look of things at the time-the way Tom spent every waking minute it seemed trying to soft-soap his part in the caper and had also been thinking about six different ways to finally “meet” her if I am any judge of aging sex-addled guys. Probably despite the later part three of the caper still is figuring a way to “meet” her- putting paid to my judgment about aging sex-addled guys.     

That first caper was just another example of how whatever you read in the detective pulp magazines, in the high gloss hardcover novels that you can barely read through once, can barely follow they are so full of silly scientific stuff that defies logic and good sense, at twenty plus bucks a copy, or watch on television or the movies real life private investigator is absolutely nothing like that-even when sex is involved, or the dream of sex as here. Usually I lay out the story that I get from my client (naturally discounted about fifty percent for lies even from lawyers, maybe especially for lawyers since they go to school for that kind of stuff) and then tell the good reader how I used my skill and experience to work out the case, sometimes successfully, sometimes no so good just like in real life.

On Tom Clary’s case though I wanted to start out with the last e-mail he sent the bimbo to let you know how he let it get all out of hand in a short time, how he almost lost his ticket, his license to practice, for that silly cock instead of brain reason. Let you too wonder whether the days of snail mail were so bad after all when dealing with sex, or anything important. That’s the e-mail I felt compelled to start this little sketch out with, the one with the WTF response by me (and probably by the reader too).    

Jesus, you can imagine my snicker when I saw that little tidbit. Saw he was under the influence of Bogie as Sam Spade to Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon including a few straight rip-off lines. This fluff, this frail of Tom’s would have Mary Astor for lunch and have time for a swim after. What Attorney Clary, who I had worked for before on a couple of missing persons cases that went nowhere (that nowhere the result of the clients running out of dough, interest, or reason to pursue the person further) needed as much background information on the bimbo as I could find since he, as we shall see, in his love bug state neglected to find out much about her except a few saucy and raw nude photographs (like I said cock over brains). He knew my work, knew I could help him out-on the quiet. But I needed the story-the whole story minus the fifty percent bullshit I expected from lawyers and everybody else if I was to help get him out from under his rock in one piece. Needed to find out why a guy who was just horny which a lot of guys are, me included, had to send an e-mail telling some honey she could wind up in the federal slammer as some bull-dyke’s girlfriend for cooking up some two-bit scheme to defraud a love-addled attorney. To make him look less stupid over some young sweet fluff than he really was if you wanted to know the truth.

So he gave me this run-down before giving me my marching orders and what little information he knew about Katerina.              

Tom Clary like a lot of fifty something guys, me too, had been unlucky in love, had had three marriages ending in three divorces and plenty of alimony and child support checks (me, two marriages, two divorces and ditto on the checks), had given up on love as a no-win investment. Had girlfriends and live-ins for various periods once he figured out that it was cheaper that way than marrying them like some Podunk Catholic schoolboy. However of late, the last couple of live-ins according to what Tom told me that night at Jimmy’s Tavern on Merrimac Street where we sipped a couple while he was telling his story had been “no-go” on the sex issue. Nice to be with but had had it with sex and its discomforts (and pleasures he added). So he started, as he had done periodically in the past, looking at the sex sites to see if he could find a sex partner. And not any old sex partner but, as he said if he was going to go to the time and expense of joining one of those sites, a younger woman to make him feel young again. Not a bad idea if you can keep it up.      

Now this sex site thing with its million fake “come hither” “come ons” and women ready to jump into bed with you at the click of an icon is tricky, is mainly stuff to lure guys with some kind of unspoken loneliness and sadness into buying all kinds of stuff but mostly dreams and cash drain for no action. I had looked at them at one point myself after my last divorce and kind of joined one site for “free” which meant nothing since any “action” required a buy-in to some credit card plan for X amount of months. I was saved from knowing a lot more about this racket by a thirty-something blonde gal who came into my office looking for help to find her missing teenage daughter who had run off with some carny grifter and she didn’t mind spending a “little money” trying to find the daughter. When the little money she really did have  ran out she persuaded me to continue for a little while longer with a barter offer I couldn’t refuse. Eventually, while she was a wild one in the sack and worth the barter, that trade-off didn’t get the daughter back, and I never did find her, but that romp with the worried mother solved my immediate sex problem and so I never had to get deeper into the sex site racket.         

Tom did, did get onto one of those well-known sites where everybody is married (at least they say they are as Tom did and I suppose you could say with three marriages he was married, if not currently) and just on the site to have a fling or short affair. No foul, no harm. He didn’t have much luck to begin with until he scrolled onto a profile (this site stuff is all about profiles and half a million lies connected with the profiles some for good reason on anonymous sites, some just pure bullshit) without a photograph (a sure sign that whoever is not up to showing herself in a photograph is some kind of Methuselah at best). But her “come on,” Katerina’s come on was that you could contact her directly by figuring out her email address which was in her greeting (it wasn’t hard and as Tom found out and I could have told him that ruse is used by rival sex sites or “independent” sex workers to either lure business to their sites or connect with guys for paid sex-all this stuff where I say guys goes for gals too if they are looking for sex okay).

So he did and Katerina responded quickly. They did the usual asking this and that question including her telling him she was a cam model ( a sex worker on video who does whatever the viewer asks for sexually-for a price is the best way I can put it-one of the wonders of the Internet). This is when she asked him to go to another sex site and this is how he learned first-hand about the raiding of sex sites by rivals. Except that the front of this sex site was so amateurish that even horny Tom could see it was a scam (most sex sites even if they don’t deliver real sex or sex dreams at least are “legitimate” sites and not total credit card or identity theft rip-offs whatever their sexual dream shortcomings or ethics if for no other reason than to stay in business and keep those credit payments rolling in month after month when people don’t opt out which is in small print on the application page-nice rip-off right). That should have tipped him off-and it did for a while. Did until a few days later (after he had blown Katerina off as a stooge for some nefarious sex fraud bandits) she asked where he had been. That started another “conversation” which was actually progressing, Tom said, to the stage of meeting. (Meeting at a hotel somewhere outside of Nashua, New Hampshire since he was from Lowell and she was from Nashua.) Then the axe fell.  

Katerina from that point to the point of that e-mail I showed you that Tom showed me which got his wise finally (I think, you never know with guys who have the “rut” on) ran her “script” pretty straightforwardly and intensely. This is the play. She had received word from a cousin that her mother in the Philippines was sick and because she was poor (although naturally good-hearted whore Katerina was sending dough along to help out) the mother couldn’t afford the medicines necessary to save her. (This gag as smart as Tom is as a lawyer has been pulled a million times-although not always with the mother dying in the Philippines.) She “pretty please” asked Tom to “lend” her five hundred dollars U.S. to help out until next pay-day when Katerina would pay him back (that one has been played a billion times including in the Philippines). This, of course, while they were making “arrangements” for their assignation. So Tom bit. Sent the dough to the cousin via Western Union (a money transfer that he had never done before which was interesting-the first time). Done, and he figured that he was on the way to great blow-jobs and whatever she had in her bag of sexual tricks.      

The day before the big assignation (remember that five hundred smackers was already sent along) Katerina e-mailed that the cousin had informed her that her mother had died. RIP. The next thing he knew, the next time he heard from her Katerina was on an airplane heading for the Philippines to give her mother a final send-off (and Tom was holding his sore cock, sore since he had taken some sex aid medication as a prelude to that big “date”). Told Tom not to worry she would grease his skids when she got back after the funeral.

End of story-right. Wrong. A few days later Katerina send an e-mail about how she could not claim her mother’s body until the hospital where she had been treated and had expired at was paid for its services. The bill-eight hundred dollars. Could Tom “pretty please” sent the dough to get her mother out of the deep freeze and into the ground. I am just giving you the highlights here there was more to it but the reader can get the drift. The drift here being another Western Union money transfer to her in her name for eight big ones. (That money transfer process not so interesting this time.)   

Now end of story-right. No, still wrong. Of course the mother needed a funeral and there was no money to do so. Again a lot of back and forth and promises that this was the last hit (and subtly mixed in promises by her about all she would do for him when she got back to America) but in the end he did the Western Union money transfer (a total bummer as to process this time but he was horny, he was love-bugged even though he had never actually talked to her on the phone or seen more than some nice, and some raw, photographs of her sent via e-mail) for, ouch, twelve hundred  smackeroos. Hell if it was that easy I would have liked to have gotten on Tom’s gravy train myself.    

Now finished. Well not quite because she put the bite on him for a thousand bucks to pay some insurance premiums that the mother had not paid and were overdue on a fifty-thousand dollar life insurance policy that all of a sudden after the funeral had surfaced and which would have left Katerina and her brother on “easy street,” for a while anyway. Except Tom as a lawyer who knew about life insurance policies and the fact that those cold-hearted bastard insurance companies don’t like to pay out penny one if they don’t have to knew something was wrong about this set-up if not exactly what (to speak nothing of how all of a sudden a daughter who was living in the mother’s old apartment “found” the policy which would have taken care of everything Tom already paid for if it had been “discovered” earlier). Hence the stinging e-mail and hence my employment.

Hence too after checking out that the address Katerina had given him in Nashua and found it was bogus and few other facts that surfaced as I looked into matters that I was not able to produce much about her. In any case by the end of round one she had not surfaced in America or if she had she has not come forward to clear her name-and probably never will. So like I said forget about those smart lawyers on television and in the bookstores and remember Tom Clary’s saga-that’s your average lawyer, very average.

Here’s part two which Zack James has called A Con Artist Conned-With Katerina, The Girl With The Sparkling Eyes, In Mind but I just call cock where the brain should be-finally. Since Zack James the “king of the sticklers” bitched and moaned about not introducing myself properly when I told you guys the first part of Attorney Tom Clary’s case I am repeating it here for “literary effect” as they say. Here goes: 

Hey, Phil Larkin, P.I. private eye to you here to give you the low-done ne, oops low-down, pardon me for being a little cynical but that must have been a Freudian slip as they say, on my lawyer friend , Tom Clary, (and a guy whom I have worked for on a contract basis for several years in the interest of full disclosure investigating people’s troubles for him in order to “get a little rough justice in this wicked old world” as he likes to put it on his more liberal and expansive days), who has as usual let himself get in way over his head with a dame, a young dame to boot, who has been leading him by the nose (or another more private part if you ask me) for a few months now.

Usually I like to make some commentary about the cases I am trying to tell you about, to set you straight about what real cases in the private investigation business are about not that tripe, hell, that crap you get on television or the movies, get in lurid half-dressed babe covered  crime novels. This time I will just let Tom bask in his glory, his maybe glory,  since apparently this time, this “one last time” as the dame, Katrina, has said right along every time she put the bite on him he has finally got everything right-right for now anyway. This is the way he told me the story one night at Nick’s, another of several bars we have frequented over the years, on Merrimack Street in Lowell where he has his one-man law office in the seen better days Orley Building when we were discussing the details of another case (a missing person’s case where the wife was looking for the left suddenly husband for alimony and child support whom I never found at least under that name and social security number. That is the way of such cases. Usually a client could save his or her money by filing a “missing person’s report” with the public cops and be done with it for all the good getting a private investigator to do the work since people who seriously go missing, go for a reason, and go deep down in the crevices). If I have something to say, or the narrative needs a little explanation I will put what I have to say in brackets. Hey Tom, good luck brother-and forget about anymore “one last time” with this one, with this Katrina fox:   

[If you can believe this, although maybe today with all the social media, social networking I think they call it, maybe it isn’t so unbelievable, Tom and this Katrina have never met in the flesh. Have not for reasons that shall not detain us here even talked on the cellphone. All of their communications has been through a few hundred more or less short and almost business-like e-mails. So what Tom was telling over drinks that night at Nick’s was about the details of an e-mail that he had sent her after she had sent him yet another “request” for dough, for money, this time to get her out of a hospital, Saint Tomas’ in Manila, that’s in the Philippines. [The same hospital that he had “lent” this frail money to get her mother out of deep freeze and into the ground earlier in their “relationship.” He had read the dispatch to her composed on his word processor on his computer that he had brought with him so he could do some work at home.]       

“Sweetie- some days it is great to be a lawyer, to actual help somebody, to help a damsel in distress, you okay, and today is one of them. Yeah, to actually help somebody without having to crush somebody else which is the usual case in our adversarial legal system where in court one side wins and the other side loses most of the time.  Most days are like that, dog eat dog, not at all like they tried to play with your head with in law school about justice being blind and everybody is equal under the law.

“And it is not just the court system that is screwed up but I remember back when I was doing more criminal cases starting out like a lot of young hungry lawyers looking to get a start in the business and some guy, usually they were guys, was in court on a drug charge, maybe trafficking, maybe possession of too much dope to not be prosecuted like for kilos or something who would get up on the stand and act all innocent (like I told him to do) and then the prosecutor starts talking about a couple of prior convictions for the same offenses that had been “continued without a finding” (meaning they would go away if the guy kept his nose, literally his nose in cocaine cases, clean for a period long enough to say he was rehabilitated). Of course he never told me that little piece of information when I had asked him about ‘priors’ so naturally I looked like a fool when I went to the bench and asked for some kind of plea bargain rather than the “not guilty” I was looking for. Or the time a guy in all honesty (he was a little simple-minded but not as much as he pretended) thought he had some kind of constitutional right to have a pistol in his hand when he displayed it in a 7/11 store in Dracut and the clerk, scared out of her mind, though it was an armed robbery as she handed over the money. It was, the guy had about six ‘priors,’ for various armed and unarmed robberies.  Had a million cases like that.       

“Hell later the civil case clients would still goof with me sometimes like when I did a few divorce cases before I gave that up as too scary once I realized that I would rather defend the low-rent criminals who at least were half honest when they would lie, male or female it didn’t matter, about why they wanted a divorce. Worse when it came to dividing up the property. Christ they fought tooth and nail over a television set or some foolish piece of furniture. I won’t even go into the “civil wars” when there were lawsuits between two unrelated parties about ownership of land, or chattels. Worse when there were personal injury cases (although “win or lose” I made good money on those cases I will admit) and one party would almost ask the judge for the death penalty beside money damages in the case for some car dent or whiplash back deal. Jesus.   

“You will appreciate this one. I have to chuckle every time I think about Harry’s case, or rather cases. Harry was from up your way, up in Bedford if I recall, who had a small printing business in Lowell over on Merrimack Street by the river in the Taylor Building (now converted to condos at some outrageous price just because they had a river view but they were poorly constructed and I wouldn’t live in one if you paid me). He was always coming to me to “negotiate” with some customer who was not paying his or her bills. One time a big customer, an independent book publisher, got behind on his payments, had as it turned out made a bunch of bad decisions about what books would sell in the consumers’ market, and got so far behind in his bills that Harry took him to court, rightfully so. When Harry got up on the stand to say his piece he, on his own, started talking about putting the poor guy in now non-existent debtor’s prison like something out of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations which you probably read in school.  Like Harry had never heard of bankruptcy laws (which that the guy finally had to go to which was sad in a way because he had in his younger days published some very fine if not exactly best-seller books which is always worthwhile). When I asked you about your situation in the hospital and whether you could leave or were being held before you explained everything to my satisfaction I thought of you as a Harry’s case for real.       

[I remember Harry, Harry Argos, a good guy but had been as an immigrant too trusting of what he had heard told to him in those classes he took to become a citizen and so thought justice was on the side of the little guy. Got all riled up when some “native” tried to pull the wool over his eyes and so wound up in Tom’s office half the time for no reason that any court of law could, or would, do anything about.]   

“You know even this big deal case from Washington I am working on now that I keep telling you I am busy on is a “one side wins, the other side loses” situation (except me because I am getting paid, paid a lot, or I should say I shall get paid a lot since I am working by the hour on the thing and so not dependent on winning like in some cases I have had, some cases when I put a lot of time in and got nothing for it when the client lost). It is about land, or really land use which people come to me about since I won a case a while back, a big case in Massachusetts, on appeal about who owned the land. Not a big case like the U.S. Supreme Court case in Miranda, the give you your rights case, or Lawrence, the gay civil rights case, but a big land use case that lawyers still refer to when they have what are called “adverse possession” cases. What that means in laymen’s terms is that one guy used land for a long time, over twenty years, thinking it was his but on the land deed it was really another guy’s. That other guy showed no proof of active ownership so the first guy got possession. What was important to the first guy, my guy, was that he have that land to sell because a huge condo developer wanted the land but only if he could have all of it undisputed. That is what the D.C. case is all about but the land use size is much bigger, the developer wants to put 160 condos/townhouses up but needs a disputed strip for a street between sections. Without that-no go.

“But enough of these law court ‘war stories’ let’s get to why you should be happy that I feel good to be a lawyer today. [I agree-why the hell is he telling some bimbo who could care less except maybe for the dollar signs lure that might be brought in about these old and new cases. Like she gave a fuck except for her own capers, her own screwball antics.] Last night I was talking to my accountant about your situation, about the blizzard of e-mails we had sent back and forth earlier in the day in order to made a plan to move forward and get you out of ‘jail,’ about what had been happening to you over the past couple of weeks since you paid off that late insurance premium on your mother’s life insurance policy. See I need his authorization from the law office accounts, especially for a large sum like $2100. I have been keeping him ‘out of the loop’ on those bank transfer things that didn’t work because they were being drawn off my credit cards which he doesn’t have control over (meaning he doesn’t have to authorize use although he does need the monthly statements for tax purposes, Christ, he always as you know wants some damn receipt for every little thing).

[Of course this whole “imaginary’ conversation with his accountant, with Sal Manning, who really has kept Tim out of more trouble with more authorities than you can shake a stick at, and that is exactly what it was, had been nothing but a lie. A lie for a lie. See Tim had finally figured out that Katrina, if that was even her real name, had been “scamming” him, had been leading him on a classic scam build-up which at this point involved the idea that Tim was supposed to send dough, a couple of thousand dollars, United States Dollars, to her bank in the Philippine, the Banco de Oro, BOD, to get her out of the hospital she had entered the night before she was supposed to go to an insurance company, Sun Life, and collect about fifty thousand dollars from a life insurance policy her recently deceased mother had left for her and her brother. Tom by the way had paid the “late” premium on that policy otherwise the policy would have lapsed. As I tell you these details you can see what our Katrina was all about and why I said that nasty remark about Tom being led by something other than his nose. The deal she was putting was down at that point had been that she needed dough to pay the hospital bills, and her back rent. That hospital part was the key-supposedly she couldn’t leave the hospital until she paid her bill and so couldn’t get to the insurance company to pick up that sweet fifty thousand-in cash. She needed “babe,” her term of endearment for Tom, to “one last time” help her out. And Jesus he was still ready to.]            

“By the way when I told him [Sal Manning, the accountant] about the failed bank transfers from my bank, Bank of America (hereafter B of A), to your bank, Banco de Or, especially from Xoom which he uses all the time and likes and which you said you were not in favor of using he had the problem solved in a jiffy. That paperwork BOD (Banco de Oro) wanted you to sign was because you had a savings account and not a checking account. According to him there was no way Xoom or Bank of America (I mean B of A) could transfer money from my bank account to yours because you didn’t have a routing number. So what that local branch of BOD (Banco de Oro, okay) would have wanted from you if you could have contacted them was to sign off on paperwork to allow international bank transfers into your savings account. That was all.

[This, again for the gullible or easily misled, was all a lie as mentioned in the previous brackets. Never let it be said that once Tom got on his own high horse that he could lie with the best of them, tell a tale as good as he received. Hell he was born on the hard-edged working class section of Riverdale about twenty miles away from Lowell so he was no stranger to the “lie,” the non-professional lie once he saw the light. He did say that night at Nick’s that he had gotten “rusty,” had not seen the tell-tale signs of the scam. I have already made my statement about why that was, what he was being led by and I won’t rub it in further-for now.]                              

“But that wasn’t the reason he, my accountant, called me, although while I had him the line I told him about your situation. You know about you being in the hospital for stomach ulcers since you had not been eating, or had been fasting for some reason, I don’t remember off-hand which it was, the former I think, but basically not taking care of yourself because you had no dough to live on until you cashed in on the $50,000 (sorry I don’t know how many pesos, Philippine pesos that was, about 2,000,000 if I remember the conversion rate correctly) insurance policy we, oops, I  had paid the premium on. That you had gone to the hospital, taken I think by your brother and two cousins, Rufus, no, Ricky, and Jonathan the night before you were supposed to get the big insurance pay-out you were entitled too.

“Damn getting sick just when you were going to get financially well. (Did you ever tell me your brother’s name I know he is a student and is about seventeen, right?). They had taken you to the same hospital, Saint Tomas, where your mother had been taken to before she passed away and which we had had to buy off for $800 USD (United States dollars, 35,000 pesos right) in medical bills before they would let you give her a proper burial.

“My accountant asked about which wing of the hospital you were being held at, the low-rent charity ward or the “plush suites,” his terms since he knew the hospital from trips to Manila on business, and I told him because we had pieced off the place in your  mother’s case with that 800 clams (35,000 peso clams) before they let you be treated with the Mayfair swells, you know the upper crust, in the nicer section (his saying “being held at” like you were a prisoner which is as you know I thought until just yesterday when you straightened me out and so I did the same for him about your wanting to do everything by the book, legally).

“Like I said the real reason my accountant called was because he had received an e-mail by some parish priest from that Quinpo (sorry if I misspelt it) church your mother belonged to thanking me for sending the five years Mass Card. Although this gabacho was not familiar with your mother’s name, didn’t know her from Adam or Eve from what my accountant said, he was pleased that I had thought of her, one of God’s children, and that of course on her death anniversary day they would do their duty to her by saying a Mass in her name. (I gave February 27^th as her death date since that was the day you left I think and if that is not right then that will still count for her as her remembrance time anyway.) Of course you know I only did that out of respect for you (and indirectly your brother whose name I don’t know, is it Angel, maybe you did tell me). I have mentioned my feelings as an old-time sinner myself about the Church before and I don’t want to get started on that because that is not what this message to you is about. About great news not ancient Catholic childhood mental wounds that have never properly healed. But just be aware that as for your mother somebody is looking out for her when you are away elsewhere.

[Again why the big build up- why would she give a fuck about his traumatic rigid and distorting Catholic upbringing that she, he, we, had suffered through.]                 

“Of course since I have known my accountant for a long time and except when he goes crazy over receipts and invoices he and I get along, and he has after all kept me out of trouble, out of serious trouble anyway, he felt free to make his usual “pussy-whipped” comment after I told him about your sad ass tale and your various post insurance premium- related capers. You remember, I hope, that e-mail I sent you one time about his comment about “thinking with my cock, not my brain,” in dealing with you once he saw how pretty you were and how nice too. Here is a copy just in case you forgot what with your other worries and stuff:

“Hi Sweetie-hope things are going well with you-thanks for the revealing photos of you. They certainly had my woodie getting hard just thinking about those beautiful tits of yours (“Woodie” that’s your word for cock right-I remember you calling it that once time when we were talking before you left for the Philippines). Of course I would have to have a closer inspection, a much closer inspection in order to confirm how nice they are.

[Now you finally in detail get what I am talking about in this “relationship” between an older man and a younger woman-right. Forget all the “business’ stuff this is the hard-core truth coming out. The stuff that should half make you think Tom, however innocent, deserved all he got from this vixen. I told him so many times so I am not telling and tales out of school.]  

“Now that the business stuff is over let me tell you a story about why I was asking for revealing photos of you. During this last insurance premium go-round my accountant said I was thinking with “my cock and not my brain” in dealing with you what with all the zigzags we went through.  He didn’t exactly put it that way but you know how guys talk about good-looking women and their desire for them  what he meant was that I was pussy-whipped, “cyber-pussy-whipped” by you because every little request by you for anything and I was calling him up day and night to see if it could be done without getting into trouble. That got me to thinking back to the previous photos that you had sent me of you before you went away. I was thinking that if I was pussy-whipped (which you and I know I am not but rather just trying to help a damsel in distress and will in the future too if necessary and we will work out some kind of thing that will be okay for both of us so we are on the same page) then I might as well have a look at the pussy I am being whipped by. Sometime when you get a chance I would not mind a little photo like that. This would be just between us but I would be able to laugh every time he [Sam Manning] went on and on about stuff like that. You could do that for me sweetie I hope.          

“As usual when I have gone to Washington I always get behind and so I have been working today to get caught up on an interesting case I will tell you about sometime. I also jogged this morning before the rain started here. If you can believe this and this is no April Fools’ joke tomorrow and the day after (Sunday and Monday here) it is supposed to snow-not much but what the heck it is April. I am also finishing up an interesting novel by Ernest Hemingway-do you know who he is-or remember reading anything by him in high school-about Paris in the 1920s during the Jazz Age. I would like to go Paris this year in the fall so I am reading stuff like that to get motivated to go –Of course Paris is a place you don’t want to go alone if you know what I mean.    

“I often think about what you are reading about, what you are doing over there while you are waiting for your fortunes to change. Tell me some stuff like that, what kind of food do they have there, did you go any place of interest. You know stuff like that so we can “reconnect.” 

“I have learned the basics of sexting (oops) texting but it takes me a long time to put a message together. I haven’t got all the symbols and shorthand down. As you can tell it is much easier (and faster) for me to write a bunch of stuff in an e-mail-Let me hear from you and what you are up to and remember I will continue to be your amigo as things go forward-Later.” 

Then I sent you another e-mail which went like this:  

 “Hi sweetie- thanks for note- I sent you a note about sending your photos to g-mail address but that can wait until you have a phone-Will you have a phone before you leave the Philippines or wait until you get back to America. I sure would like to have a voice to put with that lovely face. I hope you don't mind me being a little sexy with you- all I know is that “woodie” was pretty hard when I saw those photos-kind of got hard just like that but I am sure you know that would happen when I saw them and I hope you are glad about it-I don't think you do mind about the little sexy stuff but everything I say is just between us.

[Need I say more.]

“As far as my accountant goes if he had seen those photos of you and the ones you sent before he would have the same reaction I did. Then who would be cyber-pussy-whipped. He's a good guy and like I said he has kept me out of trouble for a while and so that is good but he would never understand why I like a nice younger woman like you and have gone out of my way to help you even though we haven't met in person. But accountants are like that-never take a risk because it might throw their balance sheets off. You know the only sheets I am worrying about taking off-I hope.              

“It is funny when you say you would never let me down because all through this business stuff whatever was going on I think in the back of my mind I had a feeling you would not, you just seemed to be that way. Maybe it was our both growing up kind of poor, kind of from the wrong side of the tracks as they say that made me feel that way. We can take about that some other time but we should talk about it.

“You know you might know that guy Hemingway although not his name did you ever read about a story called the Old Man and the Sea where this old-time Cuban fisherman is out by himself and sees a huge fish that will put him on easy street if he can catch it and bring it back to port and sell it. He catches the fish but along the way back to port about seven things happen and when he gets to port there is nothing to sell, the fish is nothing but bones. So much for easy street…” 

You had such a great response-remember. If not here’s the way that went:

“Hello babe thank you so much again I’m glad you like my photos! I know Woodie will like it too xoxoxo! Don't mind your accountant once we meet in person we will both show him and laugh in him for calling you that way! I know you're not that kind of guy he's just bitter because you will be with a fine lady and he won't! I appreciated all your good deeds for me babe and I promise I will never let you down! Speaking of down I can show you my down stairs of course but right after I get a phone with camera xoxo! Lol really? No I don't know that person but I love to read what you been writing! We will both go to the place I wanted so much and see the still constructing church together!! I've been reading a lot of space lately just bunch of random facts about universe and galaxy! I have never been to any nice place here since I don’t have money yet I have been eating more of Philippine foods and I kind of like it its call tinolang manok and pork sisig! Lol I’m glad you learning how to text if you can you can shoot me one sometimes and I will reply back! I only have less than $10 to survive the week and I hope I can get the money by this coming week or next week once I do I will let you know and will keeping you update of my comeback! I miss talking stuff like this with you!” 

Remember too how my accountant went crazy looking for that Sun Life insurance premium invoice or there was going to be hell for me to pay (and you bailed me out by sending the copy which was hard for you do to do when you were hospital and which I haven’t forgotten about, believe me I haven’t forgotten). Here’s a refresher:

“Desperate situation-HELP

Sweetie this is why the situation is desperate and I need your help. I, you maybe, we, are in trouble about that money I loaned you out of my pocket to pay your insurance premium of $1000 or whatever it was. I told my accountant who handles both the law office and my personal financial accounts about my sending you the WU money transfer and when I told him I had lent you the dough from my pocket (what he called “behind his back”) he flipped out-again. Said didn’t I realize that lending the dough for the insurance premiums on top of paying the medical bills and funeral expenses made it look like I had an interest in the insurance money. Make it look like I was in with you on the insurance deal since I am the guy who sent the WU money transfers. In any case lawyers involved with client’s (that was the way the previous medical and funeral expenses went on the books in the law office ) is a big no-no-not legal, not ethical and he will be forced to report that to the Massachusetts Board Of Bar Overseers-the people who make sure lawyers don’t do stuff like that. Where you could be in trouble is that you knew I was a lawyer, knew the money for the medical expenses and funeral expenses and that first time I tried to send you the insurance money where I made a mistake on the name-remember was coming from a lawyer.           

“He is not going to lose HIS job or get in trouble with the CPA (Certified Public Accountants) guys who license him so I need to get that damn insurance receipt and fast to show that I just loaned you the money to help you out. Otherwise he will be forced to turn his information over to the Bar Overseers and who knows what will happen. They do not like and there are plenty of cases about it seeing lawyers even looking like they are benefitting from a third-party (you) insurance claim. I need to keep my license clean in order to practice law (and help you in the future when you get back to America and your nursing career or whatever else you want to do).

“So sweetie can you please, please, please find another computer place there must be more than one in Manila to scan that receipt and send it quickly-very quickly. You can do that sweetie right-I have stood by you and done the best I could by you but now, right now, I need you to help me out.    

“After that is done, after we can show that the insurance premium money was just a personal loan, then everything will look right and I can help you with the other stuff like the rent and all and it will just be personal and all right. You can do that for me sweetie-yes. After we get this behind us then I will help you to the best of my ability.

“And you know that’s true because I have a track record of helping you that you can depend on.       

“Right now though nothing else matters but that receipt so let’s get to that. My lawyer said I shouldn’t even be communicating with you except to ask for the receipt but I felt I had to tell what I was up against so you would know how serious the situation is. I will abide by what he says though-no communication- until I get that receipt- I will be glad when this is behind us-su amigo”

[Jesus what a sap.]

All of this rehashing of e-mails has a purpose though, a purpose that will make you realize what a good guy my accountant really is, how much you and I owe him, and why I am happy to be a lawyer today. I mentioned to my accountant as we were talking last night that because you were, in effect, under house arrest you couldn’t leave the hospital under penalty of arrest and incarceration in a real slammer (jail) and so couldn’t get to your bank to take care of that international money transfer issue that I mentioned above that he had solved for us by cluing us in about what BOD (Banco de Oro) wanted from you. Also that your relationship with Sun Life was thwarted when you got sick the night before you were to complete the deal and couldn’t get over to their offices to get your hands on what I then thought before you straightened me out otherwise was an insurance check you could deposit in your BOD (Banco de Oro) savings account. After you had told me that Sun Life only deals in cash pay-outs on insurance policies, even large ones like $50,000 USD (United States dollars and about 2,000, 000 Philippine pesos) I told him the same thing,

Told him that was why you couldn’t draw the dough out since you had to go there in person. That because you were in gaol (jail) you needed my help for one last time to pay off your jailers (they really are when you think about it since you, trying to act legally, can’t leave except under severe penalty). Needed me to sent you $2100 USD (United States dollars, around 9000 or 10,000 pesos right?) via Moneygram in care of your cousin Rickey, no, Jonathan, Jonathan Mateo because Rickey had either lost his driver’s license or had failed to renew it (that’s right isn’t it, lost it for speeding or something-did he, Rickey, ever get it back).

That’s when my accountant “flipped” out but also when he came back to earth and “saved” us. He told me and I quote, “ What are you crazy, didn’t you know that Moneygram  had been involved in settling a big fraud claims case a few months ago where they had let scammers use their site for illegal actions?” I said no, and that I wasn’t until recently in dealing with you up to speed on all this electronic money transfer stuff. He answered, “I wouldn’t use Moneygram in a million years.” Period.

When he settled down, after I asked him, pretty please, asked him how was I to help you if that avenue was closed off, he, once again, came up with the solution. Here is where it is good to know a few people in key places. See, as you might expect of a business accountant who works for lawyers, he deals with insurance companies all the time, so he knows, Sam Larkin, the Vice-President for International Affairs at Sun Life in America, which Sun Life in the Philippines is a subsidiary of. My accountant called Sam this morning and told him my/your/our story. No problem. Sam has ordered an agent in the Philippines, Tomas Ramos, to go to you at Saint Tomas  Monday or any day you want if Monday is no good and on giving him your insurance policy and premium invoice do whatever you need done. If you want cash or a check, done. He will arrange it. Sam suggested a check because $50, 000 USD (United States dollars, or what did I say before a couple of million Philippines pesos) is a lot of money to be carrying around the Philippines these days and he is right I think from what you have said about not going out at night or just being around that dangerous drug-infested neighborhood you lived in with the batos locos hanging out right on that street you live on doing their dirty deeds just like in Manchester [New Hampshire, remember,  the town that when Tom and Katrina first “met” on a sex site Katrina claimed she lived in ] or Lowell. Damn. If you need a ride to your bank, done. Anything you need to get you right just tell me what day and what time you want Tomas Ramos to come and take care of business I will call Tomas direct and it is done.

[Remember please that all the above is all bullshit, all set up to eventually “catch” Katrina out, or if necessary bring some kind of legal action against her knowing Tom’s wont in such matters. More likely if Katrina ever comes back to America, and that is iffy, I will be “contracted” to find her and bring her to “justice.” The less said about that possibility right now in theory the better.]     

So you can see why I like being a lawyer today. You win, I win, Angel (I think that is his name now that I think about it) wins, Jonathan and Ricky win.  My accountant, a good guy right, wins. Great news-right.              

[You now know why Tom is “on a mission,” or will be once I explain that Katerina told Tom that it was “impossible” for her to meet with Tomas Ramos, the representative from Sun Life in the Philippines that Sam Manning had arranged to meet Katrina in the hospital, no fuss, no muss because the hospital would not “let him in” where she was being held pending payment of her mounting hospital bills, brought on not by continuing care for whatever condition, unknown and never revealed to Tom, but in Catch-22 fashion by her inability to pay. That refusal, a “last straw” for Tom, since no hospital is going to refuse to let an agent in who is going to bring dough to pay them off if nothing else prompted another “lie” feast by him to finally “blow her off” pending whatever else legally or via my investigative prowess he might deem appropriate.]     

Here we go again adding fuel to the fire:

“Sweetie-I hate to write a note like this but I am really up against it, or could be. I hate to ask for money from anybody since I usually have my own resources but like I said in my last e-mail I am in immediate trouble. I particularly hate to ask girls for money but I figure that we are beyond that, you are my best friend of late and I hope I am yours so it is okay. I know you would never let me down if you could help it and you already know I have not let you down when the deal went down. Another reason I don’t like asking you for money is because I don’t want you to get the idea that I am just hanging around you because you have that $50, 000 USD (United States Dollars, okay, which is what, about two million Philippine pesos, right) just sitting there waiting to be spent or invested (we can talk about that investing later which is a good idea even if like with me it ties up dough so you can’t get to it quickly sometimes).  But I figure there is no harm in trying to see if you can help me since I am the guy that got you the dough to pay the life insurance premium on your late mother’s, RIP, policy in the first place. 

[Tom had the day before written a “distressing” short e-mail about his own mounting bills which had to be paid and which thus made it impossible for him to send that couple of thousand, $2100 USD, United States Dollars, Katrina “needed” to pay out the hospital bills and the back rent. Her response “could you send $1500 USD.” Jesus what a vulture.] 

“Here is the score and remember this stuff is only something I am telling you about to try to have you do something about to help if other things don’t work out. On May 1^st (our time, May 2^nd your time), or really May 2^nd ,May 3^rd your time, right, since May 1^st falls on a Sunday this year) my yearly health insurance premium of $4462. 53 USD (United States Dollars, about two hundred thousand Philippine pesos, right) is due. Yeah, I know I should pay by the month like everybody else but stuff like that, stuff that you have to pay anyway, I like to pay in one lump sum. What happens is that Harvard Pilgrim takes that out automatically from my checking account (the one I control but which my accountant monitors for tax purposes and the never-ending freaking receipts and invoices that you know he is crazy for, that makes his day for crying out loud even if he is a good guy otherwise).

“The problem like I told you earlier is that with one thing and another I only have about two thousand ($2015 USD, United States Dollars, about a hundred thousand Philippine pesos, right) in the bank as of today, and that includes the one thousand bucks ($1000 USD, United States Dollars) you are not supposed to go below or they whack you with a penalty. So I am short, way short and if some dough I am expecting doesn’t come in from the various accounts (as you know, or maybe you don’t know but I will tell you now, we sent out invoices on monthly billing on the 15^th of the month [our time, the 16^th your time]) I am cooked because that bill will bounce from here to China, or maybe the Philippines anyway.

“You know with my recent health problems which means I better have health insurance or go directly to the poor farm and the requirements of the Affordable Health Care Act to keep health insured (you might know that Act as Obamacare but that is the official name, okay) I cannot afford to let my health insurance lapse-even short term-since they double whack you with a premium hike and a penalty on your state/federal taxes. So I need to make sure I have dough to cover to be on the safe side by Friday April 29^th (Saturday April 30^th your time). That is why I need your help. That is why I know you will not let me down, no way, you are not built that way.  I know that already.                 

“Here’s the way out, here is the caper that depends on you and your help. I know you are in that dirty dungeon of a hospital, (where are you being held now - in the charity wards with the geeks and “lost souls” –damn those bastards holding you like this was the 19^th century and you were in some debtor’s prison out of a Charles Dickens novel). I know too that you have no dough to pay off your freaking mounting hospital bills since you can’t get over to Sun Life to get your hands on that real dough, that $50,000 USD in cash (United States Dollars) that will set you, your brother, your cousins Rudy and Jonathan and ME too up for a while. I know too because you told me and because you are a young woman who is both responsible enough to want to pay her bills as best she can and do stuff legally you don’t want to just “jail break” out of that hellhole.

“But this is what I want you to do first thing Monday morning your time (Sunday our time)-and it is perfectly legal-just go to the hospital administrator or the head of the billing/accounting department and tell them your story. Tell them (and show them that paid up invoice and the insurance policy too) you need to get out to do business with Sun Life. Let them have somebody go with you if they say they don’t trust you to come back. Tell them you will have dough, cash, dollars to pay off that hospital bill in full (don’t get pesos because as I will tell you in a minute how much I need they don’t help me in the United States, okay). Cry, flirt, go into a fit of despair, threaten them with a lawsuit, mention you have a lawyer (me) who will get to the bottom of this sordid business but make them do the right (and smart for them) thing.

“With that done (with or without some escort-does it really matter to you, I hope not because you are up against it and I am too remember) and with your money safely in that BOD savings account (Banco de Oro) you can sent me say $1500 USD (United States Dollars, please), maybe $2000 USD (you know what that USD means now, right) by the best available method. A thousand ($1000 USD) might be enough if a check for $2500 USD comes in from a guy I did work for last month but figure the two numbers I quoted you-okay. You know more about all the aspects of international money transfers than I do so that is up to you-you know my name and address I think and if not I will sent it to you after you do this wonderful deed. I know you are a good girl and that you can do this for me, please. But I need it by Friday okay. You can do this, I know you can and if for some reason I don’t need the dough I will let you know before Friday because like I said I don’t like the idea that you might get the idea that I am just looking for a hand-out since right now you have a ton of dough just waiting to help you out and I am up against it.                     

“If there is a snag on this perfectly reasonable plan for some reason here is what I ask you to do. Doesn’t your cousin Rudy, no, Ricky owe me five hundred bucks ($500 USD) from back a couple of months ago when I sent him dough from Washington to cover a speeding ticket or some problem he had. Tell him I will settle for say $250 or $300 USD and forget the rest. Your cousin Jonathan sounds like a helpful guy can you hit him up for say another $250-300 USD (maybe he and Ricky have to do it in Philippine pesos but that is okay I will take that and convert it here). How about your brother, I forget his name but I think it was Angel, or maybe I hope he is an angel, he must have few bucks saved up somewhere, say maybe $100 USD (or the peso equivalent). Maybe they can sell some books, or a television or something. Of course with Johnathan and our angel brother I will pay them back-asap-you know that, right. Let’s say they can put together $1000 USD together- that would help. Like I say you know all the money transfer routes so I will leave it up to you what way you sent it but please do so by Friday-okay.

“I know you can do that first plan sweetie-do it for your good friend okay and when you get back to America believe me you won’t regret it-no at all.

[So the game continued.]

**************

Lawyer Thomas Clary, despite due diligence and the hire of a private investigator, me,  to “track her down like a dog” as he put it to me after, long after he got wise to what she was pulling on him, never heard about or from her again after that e-mail. Surprise-surprise.  Good riddance-that’s me, Phil Larkin talking.

Or so I thought here is stage three-Jesus                   

“Sweetie <3 <3 <3 Thanks for nice note of concern. I could feel your concerns coming right through note although you are not a person who writes a lot usually what you do write always seems heartfelt. That is why you are such a nice person to know. Since I hadn’t heard from you for a few days I thought you might be mad at me for my accountant’s insistence that you provide him with an invoice of your hospital bill so he can take care of it as I requested him to do. Now I know that you are not angry at me I feel better. I really was worried that things were over between us. I hope you feel better too.

“By the way since my office computer had been down the past couple of days and I have had a tech specialist trying in to retrieve my data I don’t know if you were able to get an invoice of your hospital expenses to send to my accountant. Did you get a chance to get that invoice? If so please sent it to me so I can forward it to him and he will take care of it for you however you wish to deal with the matter.

“On my situation on my health insurance premium as of today, Friday April 29, 2016 our time and day, I am still about $1000 USD short. (Remember I needed about $4500 USD (United States Dollars) I have been between this money thing, the computer crash, and that rich Washington case up to my eyeballs in doing stuff. I have one last quick request to make of you to see if you can help me get part of that thousand ($1000 USD) I need by Monday May 2^nd our time at the latest.

“Now that you are going to have your hospital bills taken care of by my law office account I am asking you if you can ask your good guy cousins Ricky and Jonathan, and your brother Angel to help me out with a loan of let’s say five hundred dollars, $500 USD, between them (I will take pesos if that is all they have and convert here- okay). I know I asked for a thousand before but after getting your note I guess I was aiming too high. I think I can get the other five hundred from a friend but if I could get that $500 USD (or what- 20,000 pesos) I would really appreciate it.

“Of course your good guy cousin Ricky doesn’t owe me a thing (I don’t know how I mixed him up with another guy but I think it was something to do with revoked or expired licenses or something-did Ricky beat the rap or whatever the problem was with his license which kept him from being a bagman on one of our capers). Neither does Jonathan who I know I never helped but who I think helped you by muling one of the money transfers for you so he must be a good guy too. Maybe you could pitch my money needs like this-help a guy out for a short time, emphasize that, short time, okay who has helped their cousin out-you. Like we were all family. Which in a funny odd-ball way we are. What the heck we are all going to get a little something out of that $50,000 insurance pile when you cash in soon (can you believe 2,000,000 pesos, two million, don’t you love the sound of that number off the tongue in Spanish or Tagalog). Of course I will pay it back as soon as possible.             

“What I figure is that each guy is good for say $200 USD (United States Dollars but like I say I will take pesos-okay). If both are working that would be no sweat, if not then maybe one guy $300 USD the other $100USD. They must have that much around-or maybe as I suggested they could pawn some stuff and I will repay very quickly-maybe if they have a car see if they can borrow off the value of the car. Okay $400 for that part.   

“Now your brother Angel is a different story. I THINK he owes me something if only through helping you. This is the pitch to him-and I don’t like to bring it up but I am up against it just now. I am the friend, his sister’s friend, who got his mother out of the deep freeze in the hospital and into sanctified and holy ground. Got her a simple but proper burial in hallowed ground and a five year Mass Card to boot. Besides he is going to be in for a bigger chuck of that $50K, that two million pesos than I am (while I am thinking about it now remind me and write it down so we don’t forget I have a few sound investment ideas for that dough while you are thinking through that nursing career idea.) He must have a hundred ($100 USD, and pesos are okay for him too) squirreled away in the bank or on some closet shelf for college. Press him on it. Remember too everybody gets paid back-quick as I get money coming in from the monthly billings. Once you grab the dough sent it fastest way possible but no later than midnight Monday May 2^nd our time (Tuesday noon yours)-I will never forget this kindness as I have told you before and give many, many thanks to you blood for their help. Later   

{Moving on, still Jesus on the dodge the ball game of NOT playing her mounting hospital bills.] 

“You Sent The Wrong Invoice 

Sweetie <3 <3 <3 Sometimes in this wicked old it is better to be lucky than smart and today was one of those days. I was able to save my health insurance policy without damage to continuity of available service or Affordable Care Act penalty (that’s Obamacare which is what you probably know it by, the Massachusetts version anyway).  It was a close call but I made it before midnight as I had the necessary $4500 USD (United States Dollars) in the account and waiting.

“I owe it all to you and your family, to your good guy cousins Johnny and Ricky who I hope to meet some day and thank in person. Maybe help out too in looking for a job, what kind of work do they do, so they have some ready cash when their cousin, you, needs a little help in the future since you helped them out now. Fair is fair. To your sweet quiet brother Angel too and I hope he does well when he goes to college and all that. I hope that I will be able to help him too-maybe get him a tutoring job or maybe work in an office while he is going to school so he doesn’t act as a drain on your resources while you are going to school as well. 

“Yeah, I know you are going to say that Johnny and Rickey didn’t do anything, they had no dough help me out, that you were unsuccessful in putting the squeeze on them because they didn’t have any ready cash and no way to get any. Sure I know that from your last e-mail and I haven’t gone cuckoo. I also know that you couldn’t put the bite on Angel either because even though you used the mean big sister pitch I told you to use (I think you said you used it, right.) I know that too.         

“Before you think I am crazy I should tell how you and your blood helped me which will eventually allow me to help you. See I borrowed that last dough I needed off my brother, my older brother who over the years I have gotten pretty distant from. Once I found out that you couldn’t help me with that last five hundred I needed ($500 USD) and the other $500 USD I was supposed to get from a friend fell through I decided to call him up seeing as how you and your blood stick together. “At first it was a little strained but then it got better. When I asked for help and explained the purpose he said sure, why not. That is why I am thanking and won’t soon forget the efforts of you and your family to help me in my time of troubles.    

“Sweetie the other reason I am writing is that you sent the wrong hospital invoice. When you sent the invoice to me I forwarded it on by e-mail to my accountant and that was that until this morning (Monday morning our time) when he called me and told me that this was the wrong invoice. According to his records (and mine too when I looked it up after we talked) you need to send the invoice for when you were admitted to the hospital on or around April 9^th when your good guy cousins Johnny and Rickey, your brother too had you admitted to the hospital after you complained of stomach ulcers after not eating for a few days. I remember that too since I got the e-mail from you about it as I was leaving Washington after I grabbed that big case I am still working on. If you look at the invoice you sent me the date admitted in April 4, 2016 so that can’t be the right bill. Hurry, hurry and please send the right bill so we can put this behind us. Later.     

Tom keeps pushing on with his bullshit once he realized that he would not only never meet this twist, this Katrina in person but that the three plus thou he had “lent” her was gone too so he went full throttle knowing he was going to “sent her over” as described at the very beginning of this weird saga.

“A Story Goes With It 

“Sweetie-<3<3<3 sorry I have not gotten back to you sooner but after that last e-mail I received from you with the new update attachment containing the corrected information about your hospital bill I was kind of floored by your message when you said that there were no additional charges for the week from April 27^th to May 4^th because you were no longer in a room but out in some Dickensian world with the great unwashed, the dead-enders, the losers and the lost souls in the charity wards, out with the geeks and goners. (That “Dickensian” reference is of course to Charles Dickens, maybe you read some of his work in high school, you know the 19^th century English novelist, the guy who wrote Great Expectations, A Tale Of Two Cities, Oliver Twist (a story line not very dissimilar from your by the way like maybe you had read his story and were living out his capers in the 21^st century), Bleak House (which is maybe my story, a lawyer’s story), Little Miss Dorsett, and a million others). That part about being out among the great unwashed, the dead-enders, the losers, grifters, grafters, drifters and midnight sifters was not the disturbing part because after all who am I, who is anybody to talk about being temporarily cast with the lost souls of the world didn’t floor me.

“But what floored me (sorry for repeating the same expression more than once which I know is frowned upon in literary circles where you should vary up what you are saying even if it is just a synonym for what you have just said) was when you said you had no additional charges for the week after you had been staying in some lap of luxury quarters, a private room probably had your own television, probably had a great menu selection, probably had maid service and probably had your flowers changed every day for the past few weeks when you could have saved money by going out into the debtor’s prison ward since you literally had no money when you entered the hospital. Remember you hadn’t eaten in days and had those stomach ulcers because you were down to your last dollar and it was only by the quick thinking of those bravos, those good guy resourceful cousins of yours, Johnny and Rudy, no Rickey, and I assume your beloved, loving brother Angel too although you never talk about him much, so maybe he didn’t help out so at least a tip of the hat to Johnny and Rickey that saved your precious little life.

“(Rudy by the way is the guy I helped get his license back here in Lowell since he needed it for work after he was arrested for drunk driving and I got him confused with Rickey who had some trouble over there in Manila with his license so he couldn’t mule for you any longer with Western Union when you were hitting me up for dough for some weird caper in the beginning of your stay, your now long stay in Manila.)                  

“That was what bothered me, okay, that you could have saved ME some money by going to the cheap seats, and that you could have gone out among the human muck early on since I am the one guy out of seven plus billion people in the world who can apparently come to your rescue. Give you some dough that you are always squawking about to the exclusion of any other rational human discourse. I’m the guy in the hot seat and you can profess forever your desire, your determination, your sincere wishes to pay me back when your ship comes in but right this minute, right now in May of 2016 I am the guy who in on the hook for five grand, for more probably, closer to six, by the time we get to your overdue rent so you can get into that locked apartment of yours to get  whatever documents you need to give to Sun Life to complete that insurance caper. Documents you should have kept with you when you went to the hospital or have entrusted to my man, my guy Johnny or my other man, my guy Rickey (you were probably right not to entrust such document to your younger brother Angel you know how wet-behind-the-ears, head-in-the- clouds teen age high school kids are. Especially guys going to college who think they know it all- hell was that way myself and I am sure you were too.)

“What I have been thinking about is your judgment in all of this. I assumed that I was dealing with a smart person. I know you had yourself surrounded by smart guys, first Rickey who handled that first bag job for those pills or whatever the drugs were beautifully while you were still in America, and Johnny who has been raring to go, ready to be a first-rate mule with Moneygram (should that word be capitalized I have seen you go both ways on it since it is the name of a company, a service I will capitalize it) as soon as cousin Kristine’s actions start to make sense. I am frankly wondering about your judgment in all of this business since you put your mother in holy ground and sanctified ground.

“I can understand that when you were distraught over your mother’s death you rushed right over to Manila to take care of her burial despite the fact that you had no dough, and no way to get dough. Then that serious ordeal, something out of Tales From The Crypt or Frankenstein, in order to pay ransom to that wretched Saint Tomas to get her body out of the deep freeze for a proper Catholic burial. Then the agonizing over getting dough for that cheapjack funeral they tried to piece off on you (fortunately as a good Catholic you didn’t freak out and beat up on those bums at the funeral home but accepted that your mother was in a being place, was with God we hope). Now I am not sure whether I am dealing with a smart person or not. I hope I am but the evidence as they say is weighed against you right now. Something snapped inside you at some point in the last month or so.

“Then starting with the insurance grift things started getting kind of weird. You kind of lost your way I think. Let your no dough, nothing to eat in the house situation get the best of you. You didn’t suck it up and push forward but kind of let things drift away, maybe let your younger brother Angel’s fate cloud your judgment, maybe he egged you on, maybe he did like all teenagers do, started whining about his fate, you know  about that precious two-bit college future when there was no dough around anymore. Hell he was getting something to eat at school what did he care. I hope he at least thought to bring home a banana or some yogurt or something for you-the stingy greedy little bastard. I don’t know. Then that whole ugly landlady saga that had you all upset instead of telling her to buzz off (I am really thinking f—k off but I am being nice here and that she would be paid someday when your ship came in.

“Of course I already mentioned the bad play on your part by leaving your precious life insurance documents in that hell-hole of an apartment when that savage landlady, some homeless drifter, some squatter, some junkie getting ready to shoot up, some whore doing her do to a John, some gangbanger could come in and rip the papers off once they knew the apartment was empty. (As bad as I think your judgment was about this hospital stay was I am glad as hell that you are there even if previously you were not in the cheap seats to save money, my money when the deal went down, rather than that hell-hole on Solis Street that I keep reading about in the on-line Manila Time-Christ the place sounds like Syria or Iraq and you are better off where you are even if you have to stay a bit longer. Damn I hope there are no kids in that apartment building of yours, the one with the ugly landlady. Of course as well I have already beaten you over the head about the extravagant hospital stay that you want me to cover you for. Yeah, bad judgment, bad judgment all around on you part.

“Now all of this stuff I am going on and on about, old news if you want to call it that, or whatever you want to call it, is being done for a reason. Maybe to your eyes and heart not a good one but let me spell it out for you and maybe that will explain why I hadn’t been in contact with you for a few days-okay. The other night, Wednesday night American time, my main man accountant, Sal Manning, my law partner, Keith Powers, my personal lawyer, Larry Smythe, and me were sitting around Nick’s, Nick’s on Merrimack Street, down by the river you might have been there, it has that old-fashioned neon sign out from the old days when the “king of the beats” Jack Kerouac drank there with his buddies, were discussing your latest situation. You know this silly botched up foolish looking hospital invoice you sent me that made Sal, hell, made me wonder what the world is coming to when a sullen low-rent high school drop-out billing clerk can’t get the right date, your get your right age and address and can’t even add up simple numbers, and that remark of yours about no additional expenses. [Hell, Tom said what it was, a fake, a damn amateurish fake job that even I knew was fake before you showed it to me, before you asked me out of the blue what I thought was wrong with it. And I told you the printing looked exactly the same as a couple of the other “receipts” she had sent you under pressure and which you accepted as good coin.]               

“ Katerina, before you go off about why you are being talked about in some gin mill in Lowell by a bunch of guys you don’t know remember Sal is the guy who authorizes payments from the law office accounts, the guy who allowed me to sent you dough before via Western Union before you, or Rickey, or Johnny botched the whole thing up, Keith is part of my law office so what affects me affects him and I have to keep him in the loop or he will have my head on a platter, and of course you know Larry is my personal lawyer who bailed me out when I was in trouble with that foolish complaint Sal was going to be forced to pursue with the Massachusetts Board Of Bar Overseers, the guys who regulate the practice of law in the state, unless you came through with that silly Sun Life premium payment invoice. [Which in turn was a fake although you never asked me what was wrong with that one. Never asked why the typing on that one was the same as hospital invoice.] Whatever else happens I will always but thankful to you for that-that was a close thing. [I am glad Tom is only fucking around with her now if he was serious I would be offering him a pistol or hemlock or something.

“What you can go off on because I did too, believe me I did defend you and Johnny, Rickey (does or does he not have “e” after the “k” I know I have written it both ways, even Angel, was when Sal who doesn’t really hold his liquor well, lost at least one wife because he loved alcohol more than her or that was what she thought, after a few shots of Johnny Walker Black whiskey started talking about my latest episode of being “pussy-whipped,” “cyber pussy-whipped” by you as you know he has called it before. Called me that, which I told you about I think when he was hassling me to hassle you over the funeral invoices or something, something to do with silly record-keeping which he is good at but you know that is not the end of the world.

 “Of course the other guys knew bits and pieces about my odd-ball relationship with you, our “cyber-pal” relationship I call it to get a laugh sometimes, knew you were under my skin but didn’t know all of the all details like Sal. Then he told his story, you know about how you had re-sent that botched up hospital invoice and that no additional expenses comment which sounded odd to him. Here’s where it got crazy, where guys had to pick up sides, Sal put it exactly that way. He laid this bombshell. He said he believed that the hospital invoice was a forgery, and not a good one. Of course he had it there and passed it around to all the guys for their inspection. First he noted the previously mentioned botched date. And that the new date had exactly the same time. He noted that your age and address were wrong but the biggest thing was that then numbers for services were all done in different fonts and were from different type-writers (or word-processors ) 40,000 pesos, 4,099, 25,500 and 69, 588. He roared over that last one-the one where whoever did the forgery didn’t know how to add 500 and 099. (I admit I laughed too but for a different reason). Then he asked the question-who agreed the thing was toilet paper (his expression)-Larry and Keith raised both hands.

“Of course since I know you, as little as I know you, better than them I   defended you as best I could. Said you had been under stress and that the loss of your mother had unhinged you a bit. That maybe you had come under the influence of those cousins who seemed to be everywhere and nowhere, everywhere when it came to mule time, to grab some money transfer dough, but nowhere when it came to lend their cousin a few bucks. Believe me I was trending water on most of it, on your cousins because what the hell I have no real interest in defending them if they are a couple of deadbeat bums although I know you have vouched for them, but I do have an interest in defending you up to a point. A point because what do I really know about you except you are an unemployed sex worker out in the middle of some hell-hole in Manila where the guns are blazing day and night and are desperate to get the hell out of there.

“So that was a not a good evening. We had to practically carry Sal to a taxi to slide him on his way home. Not a good evening for you because that three to one vote against you means that there will be no law office funds available for you now. But not to fear because for some silly reason I still believe in you (although those bastard cousins of yours I am not so sure of, even your brother who might be in thick with them I am not sure of now maybe he is the evil genius in back of this with his little airs of superiority over you since you had to drop out of high school-let me know what you think-I hope I am misjudging these guys, hoping they are not just deadbeats preying off of your good nature- Rickey in particular I thought of almost as a son, and I was getting to feel that way about Johnny too).

“If you can wait until May 15^th I am getting a big advance payment check on that Washington job I have already told you about a million times (I am working by the hour on that job plus bonus if we win so win or lose I am going to have a fistful of cash for the next year or so).

[Thank God I know he is pouring it on the little twist now, adding fuel to the flame, know that the very last time he sent money, money that didn’t “bounce” back because of some problem was April 2^nd and all this stuff since has been pure imagination on his part-too back he didn’t see the light back in February. See if I didn’t know that I would whack him over the head for even thinking about telling about the fact that he had big dough coming in because then she would have about seven more “just one last time” grifts at his door before she could that alleged 2,000,000 pesos. Might as well call it that because it sounds better that 50k since it is all so much hot air anyway.]    

“If you can’t wait then maybe Johnny, Rickey and Angel can sell newspapers or pan-handle, or sell some righteous dope, something to get you coin. We actually, and I laughed too, maybe I had a couple of drinks too many myself although I got home okay, talked about the different ways those guys could help you out if worse came to worse. My guys all came up with “midnight auto,” jack-rollers, working at McDonald’s as their professions. I laughed because I knew Johnny, Rickey and young Angel didn’t have six pesos between them help out their cousin when crunch time came- all they knew how to do was mule-I kept that to myself though). Later        

[Tom kept on in that same vein over the last few e-mails before the lights went out. You have the basics already but in the interest of completeness, as complete as whatever he gave me which I assume to be everything but you never know with lawyers, they can be as tricky as your average grifter I will run out the string until the bitter end.]  

“Sweetie< 3<3<3 thanks for sending the billion updated hospital bills. I forwarded them to my main man good-guy-to-have-when-you-are-in trouble accountant Sal Manning who is now down in Florida in a golf tournament and who will be back on Saturday and take care of the matter. He is a pretty good golfer and knows a lot about the game. He always, or almost always, beats me, even when I get strokes (in golf if two people have different abilities the great equalizer is one guy gives the other guy strokes to make a fair match. So say on a hole you get a stroke and you had five for a score you would really get four so the guy who gave the stroke has to get three to win, four to tie and if he got a five too he would lose. Well that is enough about golf.

[WTF-and don’t excuse my English because what the f- -k does some dishy grafter care two hoots about golf, golf a game for old guys and not worth a freaking sentences talking about. NO wonder she led him before he got wise too later by whatever she led him by. Easy pickings and if he wasn’t a client I would have picked him clean long ago.]            

“Great news about your being able to free-load for the rest of your stay in the hospital. That they are not going to charge you for room and board is great.  At first I was a little miffed about it because I thought you should have gone out there with the grifters, drifters, losers, lost souls, bad asses, and crazies in the charity wards from the beginning since you had no dough and needed to save money (save me money too) but I got over it. See it makes me breathe easier knowing that we have plenty of time to work everything out. I was getting worried as the bills kept piling up for no reason since as far as I know you are no longer sick. So relax and enjoy it as long as you can.   

“A little tip: I guess you no longer have room service and have to eat your meals in the cafeteria with the riff-raff. Fill up your tray with extra stuff so when Johnny, Ricky and that little brother of yours, Angel, come to visit you can keep them from hunger. Especially Johnny because we don’t want him looking like a refugee from Syria or someplace like that  when he has work to do grabbing the money transfer dough when I get Sal to send it. Funny how I feel that Johnny is almost like a son to me now so take care of him. Make sure Ricky gets something too because you don’t talk about him much anymore since that license problem and maybe he needs it more than Johnny. Feed little Angel please, although I know I once called him a little sniveling bastard and maybe the evil genius working you like a puppet, since he is a growing boy although maybe he gets a free lunch at school and if he does give the extra to Johnny, okay.     

“Truthfully I am now very glad you are staying in the hospital and since it is free I think you should stay there until your ship comes in and are ready to return to America. I keep reading in the on-line Manila Times about all the gun play and drug dealing around Solis Street, around the whole town for that matter, so you are much better using the hospital to work your on-going capers out of than that dangerous street. Maybe you can get a day pass to go do your Sun Life business while you are waiting. Remember Sal has a copy of that premium invoice for documentation if you need that when you are dealing with the Sun Life people if they will spring you out of that place on a day pass. Later   

[You can see where if you were in serious legal trouble, criminal trouble Tom is a guy you would think about although you would probably rather shoot him that allow him to date your young adult daughter. I know I would, would shoot him if he ever went nearmy Jessica.] 

Here’s more as Tom started to go in for the kill, his expression not mind. A guy out over three thou and nothing else after working up a ton of stuff on some ill-used sex cite hardly deserves to use “going for the kill” under any and all circumstances:

“Last night I woke up in the middle of the night from a dream, a nightmare really, a living nightmare when I thought about it later, thought about our, you Katrina and me, wayward situation. I couldn’t get back to sleep so I laid there thinking about how mad I was at you for not telling me that last week you switched from a lap of luxury private hospital room where you sat eating bon-bons, maybe drinking many cups of coffee if you drink coffee I don’t even know that as long as we have known each other, reading Ripley’s facts as if that could help you out of your dilemma, having a good old time at my expense to the woe-begotten charity wards with the geeks, freaks, crazies, zombies and los olvidados. The place you should have gone in the first place if you had half a brain and could remember back a month before when it took practically a civil war to get your mother out of the deep freeze the same hospital, at Saint Tommy’s.

“I know, I know that I sent you an e-mail recently that said I was over that “you not telling me stuff like that,” not letting me know where you were, for all I know you could have been back in Manchester or working in some high-end whorehouse in Hong Kong but I guess I am still pissed off about it because it has come in my mind to symbolize our whole downbeat low-rent stinky “cyber-” relationship. Yeah, that’s about right, a stinky silly ass relationship that would shame retarded high school students, would make them laugh themselves silly since we haven’t set real eyes on each other and haven’t even heard each other’s voices after that off-the-wall caper with the bogus cellphone mic not working for almost two months now.

“Yeah and not just those stupid high school students laughing at the situation either but my guys, my accountant, my law partner and my personal lawyer, when we go to Nick’s for a few drinks and Sal starts in on the latest Katrina excuse for why something can, or cannot be done, mostly cannot except sending cash to some third party bagman, a guy named Johnny Blade or Rickey Rich or something like that now that she has worn out her welcome with Western Union. This has gotten embarrassing and I need not remind you of Sal’s (Sal Manning, my main man accountant and except when you are leading me by my nose a good guy) “cock instead of brain” mantra which he ignites every time he has a few high shelf scotches in him.      

“Maybe it had to do with balking about having to pay out for this impending inflated hospital bill of yours which you have built into a monster with seven heads by your own actions which offends my old-time working class sense of frugality and not paying for “luxuries” since I started out poor as poor could be when you could have saved some money by going with the bad asses on the displaced persons wards for a few weeks. (By the way what kind of goofballs, junkies, faggots, whores, and whore-masters’ sons does that hospital, that freaking blood-sucking Saint Tom’s hire as billing clerks who can’t even get the admission date, your age, your address and who knows what else right. The thing really looks like some junkie or some “fix it” man jumped all over the thing.)

“Maybe I am just freaking out because after this pretty please twenty-third “last time” request for dough from you I am still faced with you coming to me again having to get dough pretty please twenty-fourth “last time” from me so you can pay your back rent to that righteous unholy ugly landlady. Yeah it bothers me having to pay serious USD (United States Dollars), or pesos or British pounds sterling or whatever the hell she wants to some mad woman who rented you some hellish apartment over on lawless “gunfire-junkie- whore edge city” Solis Street so you can get your sacred mother’s life insurance documentation and get that dough you keep telling everybody that is going to bring your ship in, a rosy future or whatnot. You should have if you had thought about it when you went into the hospital knowing what a bitch she would be once you left the premises kept the papers in your underwear, in your bra, in your wallet or given to one of the tres amigos-Johnny, Ricky, and Angel (well maybe not Angel since he is too young to take that kind of responsibility on and probably would have run over to Sun Life grabbed the dough and run away with some senorita with it and left you high and dry but more on him later) to keep in a safe place until you could complete that insurance caper.

“While we are on the subject of that insurance pot of gold maybe I was a little greedy too with the idea that I would get my own soiled hands on that pile, that 50 large, so I could invest it for you while you were figuring out whether you wanted to go back to being a soft porn cam artist which you did before or a nurse, or maybe a lawyer I am as clueless about your dreams as I am about your day to day machinations to grab dough and run for cover.

“Maybe it finally got to me that after the upcoming rent emergency has passed who know what the twenty-fifth pretty please lamo begging “last time” emergency will be. Maybe your plane fare home because they don’t take checks on plane tickets in the Philippines which must be the last cash only economy in the world, especially the hospitals that seem to be in the 19^th century and hire as I have already said junkies and winos to give bad information about how the hospital only takes hard currency unlike 99.9% of the hospitals in the world, your tough luck that you landed in only one in the country that has that policy according to whatever geek misinformed you, and that is the only way Sun Life doles out money to its policyholders when the due date arrives like they had never heard of the international banking system, never heard of checks, that has been in place for at least one hundred and fifty years.

“Hey, maybe Ricky will need dough, just five hundred maybe so he could get his license back and go to work for Uber, maybe Johnny will need something for his services as the primo mule, or take his cut for his work for you before as your gofer leaving you short a few hundred, maybe a thou. Who knows?

“In any case now that I know you are in the downtrodden charity wards with the freaks, grifters, and cretins and no longer piling up the bills for no reason I can feel free to get a few things that have been bothering since that insurance grift started back in in mid-March after that funeral expense caper for your mother ended. Everything since then has led us into a very strange place where I am having nightmares and maybe you will be having them too if you have to stay with the weirdos and tramps for the summer-waiting for help but more on that down below. (I won’t even get into that whole gag about paying your old time hospital bills and funeral expenses to get to get your mother out of the deep freeze at the morgue and into a proper burial in sacred ground. Those seemed like reasonable and plausible days before you went over the top with your whining and wailing about what a tough deal you had been dealt and you then sitting on a cool 50k almost.)

“Listen up now and you can have your say later, write a couple of sentences or less explaining why everything under the sun cannot be done like the Philippines was not part of the global economy and was mired in about 1912 or something not 2016. I am nothing but a pretty good small-time lawyer, working with a partner (Keith) in a small-time law firm in a small-time city with limited, very limited as it turned out and as I have found out as I have tried to help you, resources and with small-time dreams. Those small-time dreams included the not outrageous idea that I wanted to have an affair with a younger woman-you as it turned out. That dream, and you will have to agree, has become very attenuated over the past few months as we have gone from a flirty if platonic and pious cyber-relationship to a strictly business arrangement. As I have because your accounting agent, your clerk for every harebrained grift you have come up with.

“Remember back to the days when we shared our little kinky sexual thoughts and desires. Remember when you told me about your dreams of becoming a nurse, or was it a high-end porn star-or both. Remember all the little odd-ball things we used to share from talking about going to the San Diego Zoo to what we liked for food and music. Lately and looking over the last few weeks’ six billion and one e-mails the tone has been nothing but an on-line version of the Battan Death March, nothing by stupid business details and who knows what number of “last time” pretty please demands from you for cold hard cash-USD and not those fake pesos nobody wants. Not even people in the Philippines who use them for wallpaper from what I read recently. We have definitely drifted away from anything like that small-time dream that I have had in the past. You too have to agree, if you are honest as I think you are capable of being if you decide to put your mind to it.         

“I don’t want to dwell on the past but one night a few of us, you know Sal, Keith, Larry, my personal lawyer, were drinking at Nick’s, not the one on Bridge Street, the one on Merrimack Street, where Jack Kerouac “the king of the beats” used to drink, you’ve been to Lowell, right?  We were, or rather Sal was, “re-capping” the various misadventures that have occurred between us, me and you, since the start of that ill-advised Sun Life insurance grift. Remember how that Western Union thing I tried to send you to pay the premium “bounced” back from here to China and back when they thought I was running some kind of scam into the Philippines. Everybody chuckled over that one even me. Then that whole goofball business with Ricky and his expired license which I never did get straight about the reason that he lost it, drunk driving, speeding, or something, and then Johnny, my boy Johnny who really has been like a son to me although when he goofs up I will take him to task for it just like my own son, stepping up to the plate and taking over the muling operation for you when you couldn’t show your face at Western Union (WU).

“Then remember how it took practically a civil war with you to get you to send me that receipt for the Sun Life insurance premium which turned out to be no big deal but which you made a big deal about the paperwork which you should have kept with you even if you had to tape it to your stomach so you wouldn’t lose it (but don’t think I don’t remember that you bailed me out of trouble with the Bar Overseers on that one and I still thank you-okay). Who could forget, and I know when we were at Nick’s we had a big laugh over it, when you came up with that rent grift, when you asked for that $800 USD (and I forget what the peso situation was but you can figure it out okay, thirty thousand something but maybe from here on in forget pesos since they are like Confederate money in the U.S., in the United States) and Western Union went nutty again bouncing the thing back to the Seven Seas and beyond. Even I secretly laughed at that one.

“Here’s a beauty, the primo example, classic Kristine, oops, Katrina.  The night before you were supposed to go to Sun Life and get the loot, get that pretty $50K that would get us all well, yes me too, in  a hurry you had to go to the hospital, some stomach thing you could have taken an over-the-counter drug for or just gone to the Mission or Salvation Army and gotten fed in the soup line you went to Saint T’s where you knew, or should have known, they were going to hold you up, keep you a prisoner like something out of Charles Dickens in the 19^th century. Just like they held your mother’s corpse until you coughed up the dough. Kind of stupid, right. Then the whole fucking thing went downhill from there.

“You know the story from there so I don’t have to remind you of most of it. That caper with the bank account where I tried to use Xoom and it turned out the bank account you said you were setting up to hold the cash dole out from Sun Life which in the Philippines and nowhere else only deals with cash, had about sixteen holes in it was the best. No, no, the best was when I really needed help with my health insurance premium last week and asked you to get those slugs and deadbeats Johnny, Rickey and that no good dingbat brother of yours, Angel, Diablo whatever his name is since I don’t think we ever got that straight on the name thing like so many other questions I have asked about and you have not answered like you were some CIA agent working in the dark, to fork up a thousand in American money, you know USD (United States Dollars), hell, I was ready to convert worthless pesos if need be they couldn’t rub three quarters (American) together.

“I love those three amigos like sons but the reality is that after you have been held prisoner in the hospital for the past month they haven’t taken step one to spring you. Well if you don’t count Johnny ready to do some bagman job for you-which I am sure he is getting well paid for, or will be well paid for if I know my Johnny when you get that scratch from Sun Life. Hell why should he get well and the rest of us left hanging just because he, and don’t get me wrong on this, had more sense than Ricky not to lose his freaking license for some chump change reason.

“Well I have basically had my say, got what I had to say off my chest but you know me I don’t like to leave things hanging, leave without a plan or an idea. All of which have been reasonable and all of which you have shot down one way or another-except that incessant drumbeat for sending money to various third party sites you seem to be an expert in working (well except when Western Union, WU caught up with you) to be picked up by driftwood like Johnny who from what I can tell, is a net drain on your resources but I already said that so forget I said it again. Here is what I think, especially since they couldn’t gather up enough dough for bus fare in any major city in the world when I was desperate for dough on that health insurance grift, so desperate that I had to tap my brother, had to hit up a guy I hadn’t spoken to in years. Jesus, but blood came through in the end.

“That’s my point. It’s time to let old Pete off the hook and let the tres amigos go to work on your case, make dough appear out of the ashes for you.  After all they are right there in Manila and know more about what they can and cannot get away with than I can some six thousand mile away, more or less. Yeah I know, I know and we had a few laughs about them back here at Nick’s, called them the “gang that couldn’t shoot straight” and all that when they came up empty-handed on that $500, USD of course, reduced rate help I was looking when they busted out on the $1000 tap but that was for me a perfect stranger. This is for blood, for a sister, for a hermana.       

“This all gets back to what these clowns have been up to, or not up to over the past month. It is time for you to “squeeze them,” what you made fun of me saying when I begged you to ask them with a hammer over their heads to do if need be but you were too soft-then. But now you are facing at least spending another several weeks, maybe months, in that damn prison of a hospital. And what do they do? Come around and grab whatever food you hustled from the cafeteria on your tray. I can just see Johnny grabbing some chocolate cake and munching it down. Proud as a peacock that he got the thing for free.  Let these guys put their heads together and grab a couple of thousand dollars to get a sister well (you know I mean USD, United States Dollars, or if you prefer eighty or ninety thousand pesos but don’t take pesos unless you are desperate-okay). What has he been doing for work lately, or is he just hanging out waiting for your dough to come in and grabbing what he can from that while smoking that goddam weed, ganja, you know dope he keeps in his stash. He has a license or at least some identification to get dough from Western Union or Moneygram (I noticed that you small case the “m” but it is a name of a company like WU so I will capitalize it) so what can’t he drive for Uber and make a quick few hundred driving the touristas around instead of figuring ways to dummy up hospital bills, or dodging the landlady over on Solis Street when he sneaks into the apartment after she goes to bed, or whatever he has on his little mind. Same goes for Ricky and you can tell my young son that I will spring dough for him to get his license back and join Johnny working for Uber-there’s a thousand right there in a couple of weeks, maybe less.

“Now I have left Angel, let’s assume for the sake of brevity that is his name, out of stuff, figuring, figuring before today anyway that he was too young to work, or help out until I realized that this little wizened kid was the evil genius behind all this crazy stuff you have been doing. All this kids’ stuff like having you go to Manila without any dough and no prospects of dough just because he didn’t want to face the music over getting your mother out of deep freeze and burying her in holy ground alone. Yeah, let “Sis” do the dirty work. I think he was the guy behind a lot of this weird stuff you have been doing lately. Maybe bringing in Johnny and Ricky to clean things up if necessary but he has been the mastermind. The one who told you how to do the insurance grift for sure since he was living right there with your mother and knew she was behind on her payments. Hell I’ll bet six, two and even you don’t even have life insurance, who at twenty-six, oops twenty-seven even thinks about such stuff. I know you don’t have health insurance but I won’t rub that in here and now. Yeah he is the one who set you up on that hunger strike of yours when you needed dough for rent and told you NOT to go to the Mission or the Salvation Army the evil of a bitch and you were so weak you bought into the madness.  

“And this one is priceless as they say. Angel is the guy who told you to go to the hospital just before you were supposed to go grab that dough from Sun Life so you would be out of the way when he figured out a way to grab that dough while you were in prison. If I ever get my hands of that little smartass runt for what he has done to you he’ll wish he never was born. You should feel the same way too but I know you will not because he is kin. But just remember who has left you behind in that stinky hospital while he is out free as a bird. Sometimes you have to hear the truth no matter how bitter.

“As for me, as for my plan I am turning over your case to the American Embassy in Manila and the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of New Hampshire organizations which have greater resources than I do to figure out this whole mess Angel has gotten you into. Later. 

[Nice Tom, nice burning your bridges behind you-almost. Now for the closer-finally.]

“A New Plan           

I hope things are going well with you in your new rooms at Saint T’s. It looks very nice from the photographs I have seen of the place, hope you are using the exercise room and walking around the gardens. Hope too the geeks, loonies, displaced person, brain-addled, bad asses, lost souls, los olvidados, and batos locos don’t bother you now that you are out among the great unwashed. I know you can deal with the situation with some strength given what you have been through over the past few months. I have been over the past few days seriously thinking about your situation over the long haul and not just the way we have done things in the past seemingly on the spot without thought as each new emergency has come up. Look where that has gotten us.

“The other day, maybe last week in an e-mail I mentioned that I was pissed off at you when you sent a note with that new updated hospital invoice that looked almost exactly like the previous one except some goofball clerk changed the date of admission and told me that the prior week you have asked to be placed in the cheap seats charity wards to avoid further expenses. Not that it wasn’t a good idea which it is as I will talk about below but that, as is your habit, you told me out of the blue after the fact a whole week after you moved when you could have told me earlier, you kept me out of the loop when you expect help from me. Hell you could have been back in New Hampshire or working in a high-end brothel in Hong Kong for all I know.

“That is part of what I was thinking about the past few days as we move forward. You have to communicate better with me and we have to have a better long range plan not only about getting you out of the hospital but also the other nut to crack- how you are going to pay your back rent so you can get those documents you need that are now locked in that apartment that is now locked with seven seals by that ugly horrible landlady you rented from over in that hell-hole Solis Street. It would make my blood boil if I knew you were going back there what with all the whores, junkies and shoot-em-up cowboys roaming the streets around there. Is it as bad as it seems from reading the on-line Manila Times. Thankfully you are in the hospital and have some protection from the riff-raff. Right?  

“Like I said I was pissed off but in thinking about the situation, thinking about my new plan you made a wise decision to move to the charity wards to finish out your sentence and so I am not pissed off at you anymore. That “sentence” part is not me trying to be funny but serious since the way you have explained your situation after I mentioned to you about getting a day pass to go do that Sun Life business you really are a prisoner even if you don’t have bars holding you in. Call it minimum security but it is still a prison and still a sentence even though initially you didn’t do anything wrong as far as I can tell except maybe being a little stupid about what the hospital would do when you couldn’t pay since we went through that whole bummer with your mother when you were trying to get her out of the deep freeze at Saint T’s back in March.

See now that you are living for free, now that you can grab some extra food on your tray for mi tres amigos, that is what I call your cousins Johnny, Rickey, and your brother Angel, to keep them from starving like they let you starve before they got the sense that God gave geese to get you into the hospital I think you can stay there for a while until we figure out how to wrap everything up. I think you can ride out staying there for maybe another month, maybe six week because then my plan should have everything ready to go. You know this is the best part because I like the idea of “getting over” on this hospital where they keep you like a prisoner just because you don’t have dough. There is some justice to this, maybe poetic justice as you get free room and board while we get ready to spring you.

“Notice I said we. That is the other part of the plan. I have to be honest after that whole deal when I asked you to “squeeze” Johnny, Rickey and Angel for $1000 USD (United States Dollars) to help me with my health insurance premiums last week that are now mercifully taken care of due to my brother bailing me out for that last $1000 (USD) I was pissed off at them. Then when I asked for a measly $500 (USD, although if you remember I was willing to take pesos even though they are so worthless that people use them for wallpaper, at least that is what I have read in the Times) they couldn’t come up with three quarters to rub together to help me out after all I did for them through you. (I won’t give how much that three quarters is in pesos since I don’t have my calculator with me right this minute-okay). So yeah I was pissed, and angry okay.  

“But then I settled down once I figured that what the hell I was a perfect stranger to them so why should they help me out (although I don’t know how hard soft-hearted you “squeezed” them since they were kin, were blood probably not hard at all). You though are a different matter, you are kin, you are blood, you are a hermana. Frankly over the past couple of months these guys haven’t done a damn thing for you and I resent that now. Resent that me, a perfect stranger and still really a perfect stranger since we know almost nothing about each other except you are always in dire need of dough for some caper and I am always wondering why I am worried about your dough needs capers, has done a hell of a lot more for you than these tres amigos, these three slugs, hell, lets’ call a thing by its right name deadbeats living off of you. I love these guys like sons but in the clinch here they have fallen down, fallen down badly.

“Oh I know Johnny is going to say hey he has been ready, willing and able to “mule” for you, grab the dough at Western Union (WU), Moneygram (I am using capital “M” because it is the name of a company although I notice you use small “m”), Retify (sic), Xoom, PayPal, Applepay, American Express or the ten million money transfer terminals you have intimate knowledge about. Big deal. Rickey will probably chime in that he “muled” that first $500 (USD) for you when you were still in Manchester (that was the town you were from right, I know it was in New Hampshire). I don’t even consider that on the level of sneeringly saying it is a big deal. And then there is your cipher brother, sweet foolish Angel. Of course he will lame out with that high school student excuse while you are stuck trying to do right by him, by your mother, hell, by God too. If I ever get my hands on that little runt I’ll let him know what I think about him letting his sister down like that while he goes off with some sultry senorita or who knows what else a teenager is up to.             

“(By the way where are these guys all living these days, I know that you once gave that damn shooting gallery over on Solis Street as Johnny’s, and your, address when you had him muling for you but they have been locked out of there. I know where they are eating since you are filling up your tray with extra stuff for them when they visit –feed them good because they are an important part of the plan.)   

“But all will be forgiven. All will be redeemed as they say in the RCC. We’ll all be walking with the “King.” They can step up to the plate, can help you too. This is where you staying put at Saint Tommy’s for a few weeks works to our advantage. Let’s look at the numbers, dough numbers-okay say $1500 USD for the hospital bills (pending Sal, my accountant, making sure those junkies at Saint Tom’s haven’t overcharged you which  I am sure they have taking advantage of you being nothing but  an American national, a gringa to them) and I think at this point what maybe $1000 USD for back rent for that bitch landlady and of course you’ll need walking around money after you get sprung and to get back to the States, say $500 USD, so say $3000 USD-total.

“Okay here’s how we will work it, here’s how everybody can get well again (remembering you have that $50K USD minus what you will owe me, Johnny, Rickey and Angel waiting for you at the end of the rainbow). I’ll put up the $1500 USD like I said I would-you know you can trust me on that since I have spring for over three thou already and was willing to spring for more if half the goofy money transfer places you have suggested hadn’t shut you off. Then tres amigos can put $1500 USD (pesos if necessary but really “squeeze” them away from that I don’t need any wallpaper, okay).

“Here’s how they do it if they are not already working which I think you implied when I asked you to ask them for dough last week they were not. Johnny and Rickey can become Uber drivers you know private taxi-drivers. They can make serious dough in just a few weeks from what guys around here tell me especially at peak demand hours like Friday and Saturday nights. Neat idea right. Yeah I know Rickey had that problem with his license but I am sure he can put the fix on that okay. As for Angel, well, don’t get me wrong but you can’t protect that little bugger from the real world forever. School is out or will be out soon so let him get a job at a fast food joint, McDonald’s or Burger King or whatever they have there. If he can throw in a couple of hundred bucks USD that will ease the burden on Johnny and Rickey.

“This sounds like a plan to me. Then when they get their $1500 USD and I sent mine you pay off the hospital, pay off that blood-sucking landlady, run over to Sun Life (bring the guys with you with that much dough, with $50K USD in cold hard cash even I might try to rob you), pay off Johnny, Rickey, and Angel (you can wait on my cut), grab a plane and you are home no later than the July 4^th weekend. And I will feel better, hell, Johnny, Rickey and Angel, will feel better about the situation. And the best part is that we will have turned the tables on stupid Saint Tommy’s and their stupid bill collection policy. I like it and I know you had better like it too. Get the boys moving right now!           

******

I don’t like to say things twice but it was that kind of case.

Lawyer Thomas Clary, despite due diligence and the hire of a private investigator, me,  to “track her down like a dog” as he put it to me after, long after he got wise to what Katerina was pulling on him, never heard about or from her again after that last e-mail. Surprise-surprise.  Good riddance-that’s me, Phil Larkin talking.

After checking out that the address Katerina had given him in Nashua and found it was bogus and few other facts that surfaced as I looked into matters that I was not able to produce much about her. In any case by the end of round three she had not surfaced in America or if she had she has not come forward to clear her name-and probably never will. So like I said forget about those smart lawyers on television and in the bookstores and remember Tom Clary’s saga-that’s your average lawyer, very average.

An Encore Presentation-In The Time Of The 1960s Folk Minute- With Tom Rush’s No Regrets In Mind

An Encore Presentation-In The Time Of The 1960s Folk Minute- With Tom Rush’s No Regrets In Mind 

I know your leavin's too long over due
For far too long I've had nothing new to show to you
Goodbye dry eyes I watched your plane fade off west of the moon
It felt so strange to walk away alone

No regrets
No tears goodbye
Don't want you back
We'd only cry again
Say goodbye again

The hours that were yours echo like empty rooms
Thoughts we used to share I now keep alone
I woke last night and spoke to you
Not thinkin' you were gone
It felt so strange to lie awake alone

No regrets
No tears goodbye
Don't want you back
We'd only cry again
Say goodbye again

Our friends have tried to turn my nights to day
Strange faces in your place can't keep the ghosts away
Just beyond the darkest hour, just behind the dawn
It feels so strange to lead my life alone

No regrets
No tears goodbye
Don't want you back
We'd only cry again
Say goodbye again

From The Pen Of Zack James 

A few years ago, maybe more like a decade or so, in an earlier 1960s folk minute nostalgia incantation fit Sam Eaton, who will be described further below, had thought he had finally worked out in his head what that folk moment had meant in the great musical arc of his life. Had counted up, had taken up and put value on its graces, did the great subtractions on its disappointments, that lack of beat that he had been spoon fed on in his head having heard maybe in the womb the sweats of some backbeat that sounded an awful lot like a band of the devil’s bad ass angels giving battle to the heavens, and got his head around, his expression, its clasps with certain young women, some absolute folkie women met in the Harvard Squares of the heated horny sex night and loves too not always with folkie women but just the muck of growing up and taking what came his way. So he had taken a back-flip, his expression, when he was required not out of his own volition like that great prairie fire burning before in his youth about why he felt after all these years that he needed to go back to what after all was a very small part of his life now that he was reaching four score and seven, going back over the terrain of a small part of the musics that he had cultivated since early childhood.

Some of those musics from his parents’ slogging through the Great Depression and World War II be-bop swing big band Saturday night get your dancing slippers on imposed on his tender back of brain not to be revived and revisited until many years later when he had heard some ancient Benny Goodman be-bop clarinet backing up a sultry-voiced Peggy Lee getting all in a silky sweat rage because her man like a million others was not a "do right" man but had been chasing her best friend the next best thing when he got his wanting habit on and Peggy turned ice queen when he ran out of dough after shooting craps against the dealer and decided he had been wrong to dismiss such music out of hand. Some of the music along the edges of his coming of  age from that edgy feeling he got when he heard the classic rock that just creeped into his pre-teen brain and lingered there unrequited until he found out what in that beat spoke to his primordial instincts, what caused his feverish nights of wonder, of what made him tick, of what he had missed.

Folk, the folk minute he deeply imbibed for that minute, at least the exciting part of the minute when he heard, finally heard, something that did not make him want to puke every time he turned on the radio, put his ill-gotten coins, grabbed from mother’s pocketbook laying there in wait for his greedy hands or through some con, some cheapjack con he pulled on some younger kids in Jimmy Jakes’ Diner jukebox to impress a few of the girls in town who were not hung up on Fabian or Bobby, heard something very new in his life and so different from the other musics that he had grown up with that he grabbed the sound with both hands. He thought that sweating a decade ago where he done a few small pieces to satisfy his literary sense of things and put them in a desk drawer yellow, frayed and gather dust until he passed on and somebody put the paper in a wastebasket for the rubbish men, thought he had ended those thoughts, closed out the chapter.

Recently though he did another series of short citizen-journalist sketches of scenes from that period for various folk music related blogs and social media outlets. Sam had done that series at the request of his old time friend, Bart Webber, who will also be described in more detail below, from Carver, an old working-class town about thirty miles south of Boston which at the time was the cranberry capital of the world or close to it, and close enough to Boston to have been washed by the folk minute that sprouted forth in Harvard Square and Beacon Hill in Boston.

Sam and Bart, who in their respective youths had been very close, had been corner boys together when that social category meant something, meant something about extreme teen alienation and angst combined with serious poverty, dirt poor poverty as in hand-me-down older brother clothes, as in no family car for long periods between old wreak of cars, of many surly peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, many Spam suppers, all fashioned to make these young men forever talking about big break-outs, about getting something for them and theirs but also for big candy-assed dreams too all put paid to, as one would expect of sons of “boggers,” those who cared for and harvested those world famous  cranberries, but also close because that was the way that corner boys were then, “having each other’s backs” was the term they used which confused even the best of the social scientists who investigated the phenomenon when that corner boy life meant juvenile delinquency, meant some unfathomed anger, some lack of socialization, some throwback to primeval muds, to some rising of the unkempt heathens they were payed to watch out for. Meant as well worry to those in power who were trying to weld society as one piece of steel to fight the internal and external red scare Cold War fight against the faithless, fang-toothed Ruskkie reds wielding nuclear weapons from the hip.

Like a lot of high school friends the cement that bound them in high school, that alienation, that comradery, those best left unsaid larcenous moments, the “midnight creeps” in Bart’s words when somebody asked him later what had made him and the corner boys put their reputations at risk for such small gain, a fact which also played a part in that “having each other’s back” broke apart once they graduated, or rather in their case once they had sowed their wild oats in the 1960s, those wild oats at the time meaning “drugs, sex, and rock and roll” combined with drifting the hitchhike road west in what one of their number, the late Pete Markin, called the search for the great blue-pink American West night.

Sam had stayed out in the West longer than the others except Markin and Josh Breslin whom he and Markin had met on a yellow brick road merry prankster bus before he drifted back East to go to law school and pursue a professional career. Bart had returned earlier, had gotten married to his high school sweetheart and had started up and run a small successful specialty print shop in hometown Carver based on the silk-screening tee-shirt and poster craze. They would run into each other occasionally when Sam came to town but for about twenty years they had not seen each other as both were busy raising families, working and travelling in different circles. One night though when Sam had been sitting in Jimmy Jakes’ Diner over on Spring Street in Carver having a late dinner by himself after having come to town to attend the funeral of a family member Bart had walked in and they then renewed their old relationship, decided that some spark from high school still held them together if nothing else that they both had been deeply formed, still held to those old corner boy habits toward life whatever successes they had subsequently enjoyed.

Along the way to solidifying there new relationship they would alternate meetings, some in Carver, some in Boston or Cambridge where Sam lived. On a recent trip to Boston to meet Sam at the Red Hat at the bottom of Beacon Hill Bart had walked pass Joy Street which triggered memories of the time in high school when he and his date who name he could not remember but she was a cousin of Sam’s “hot” date, Melinda Loring, who they went to school with and whom Sam was crazy to impress even though Melinda was not the daughter of a “bogger” but of school teachers and so from among the town’s better element and he was constantly on eggshells that she would toss him aside once she had figured out he was just another Fast Eddie corner boy trying to get into her pants, had taken them on a cheap date to the Oar and Anchor coffeehouse which stood at the corner of Joy and Cambridge Street to hear Lenny Lane. Lenny was an up and coming folk singer whom Sam had met on one of his clandestine midnight trips to Harvard Square on the Redline subway to hang out at the Hayes-Bickford.

That "cheap" part of the cheap date thing was important since Bart and Sam were as usual from hunger on money in the days when around Carver, probably around the world, guys paid expenses on dates, girls just looked beautiful or if not beautiful glad to not be forever hanging around the midnight telephone waiting for some two-timing guy to call them up for a date, and so short of just hanging at the Hayes for free watching weirdoes, con men, whores plying their trade, drunks, winos and occasional put upon artists, poets, writes and folk-singers perfecting their acts on the cheap, for the price of a couple of cups of coffee, a shared pastry and a couple of bucks in the “basket” for the performer you could get away with a lot especially when Bart was doing Sam a favor with that cousin (and worse could have gotten in trouble if Besty Binstock, his high school sweetheart. found out he was two-timing her although the two-timing involved the possibility of some off-hand sex with that cousin who was supposed to be “easy” but that in another story although come to think of it the situation could serve as another  prime example of “having each other’s back” when one of them was up against it).

Bart remembered that he had been very uncomfortable that night since he had had some feelings of guilt about two-timing (and lying to) Betsy starting out, had had trouble talking about anything in common, school, sports, the weather, with that cousin since she said she was doing Melinda a favor in order that she could go to Boston with Sam which Melinda’s mother would have balked at if she had told her they were going into Boston alone, going into Boston with a “bogger” alone. Moreover she knew nothing, cared nothing for folk music, didn’t even know what it was, said she had never heard of the thing, was fixated on Bobby Vee, dreamy guys, or something like that. What made that date worse was that Bart too then could hardly bear the sound of folk music, said repeatedly that the stuff was all dreary and involved weird stuff like murder and mayhem done on the banks of rivers, in back alleys, on darkened highways just because some woman would not come across, Jesus, strangely thwarted love reminding him of Sam’s forlorn quest for Melinda which seemed like some princess and pauper never the twain shall meet outcome, or hick stuff about home sweet home down in some shanty town in some desolate cabin without lights or water which sounded worse than Boggertown, singing high holy Jehovah stuff that made him wince, and of the hills and hollows in some misbegotten mountains made his teeth grind. So not a good mix, although it did turn out that the cousin was “easy,” did think he was dreamy enough to have sex with (with their clothes mostly on which was how more than one quicky one night stand wound up down by the boathouse near the Charles River after they had split from Sam and Melinda after the coffeehouse closed and that helped but had been the result of no help from the folk music they half-listened to but more some dope that she had in her pocketbook after she had passed a joint around to get things going.            

After telling Sam about his recollections of Joy Street and that cousin, whose name was Judy Dennison Sam told him and who Sam had gone out with and agreed was a little sex kitten once she was stoned, Bart started asking some questions about folk music. Sam said he was not finished with that Judy story, told Bart that fling was after the thing with Melinda had passed due not to class distinctions but to that hard fact that she was saving “it” for marriage, and had been very glad that he had that run around with Judy and was not sorry he did. Bart started in again and asked Sam a million questions about various folk-singers and what had happened to them, were they still playing, still alive since Sam although he did not have the same keen interest of his youthful folk minute still kept small tabs on the scene, the now small scene through his long-time companion, Laura Perkins whom he met one night at the Café Nana several years before when Tom Tremble was playing there after Sam had not heard him in about forty years.

The reason for Bart’s interest given that above he had said that the genre made his teeth grind was that after that night with Judy Bart did go on other double dates with Sam and Melinda, and later Suzanne when she was Sam’s next flame and a real folkie, to folk places and while he still would grind his teeth at some of the stuff he did develop more tolerance for the genre, especially if the date Sam set up was a real foxy folkie girl (thinking on it now he couldn’t believe how unfaithful he had been to Betsy in those days but she too was saving “it” for marriage and some of those young women were very willing and had apartment or dorm rooms too).

The upshot of all of Bart’s questions was that Sam found that he was not really except for Tom Tremble who had lost his sweet baby James voice, forgot lyrics and had “mailed it in” that night he had met Laura and was cold “stonewalled” by the audience but possibly motivated by that old folkie feeling, or maybe just feeling sorry for a guy who had a big local following back in the day when the “basket” went around everybody put some dough in, Sam and Laura included, and a couple of other guys up on what had happened to the old-time folkies since for years he had merely listened on radio station WCAS and when that station went under WUMB out of U/Mass-Boston or listened to records, tapes or CDs. (Sam got big points from Laura that first night when he panned Tom, who Laura had never heard before being enough younger not to have been bitten by the folk minute craze and she agreed that Tom had “mailed it in”.) Since Sam was not all that familiar with what had happened to most of them he thereafter did some research, asked Laura some questions to lead the way and wound up writings that series of sketches. One series entitled Not Bob Dylan about the fate of prominent male folk-singers was a direct result of the Sam and Bart conversation. Here’s what he had to say about Tom Rush who back in the day he knew best from hanging around the old Club 47 on Mount Auburn Street:     

“…Other than enigmatic Bob Dylan who is the iconic never-ending tour male performer most people would still associate with that folk minute period they would draw a blank on a list of others who also were aspiring to make names for themselves in the folk milieu. I am not talking about guys like Lenny Lane who had one hit and then went back to graduate school in biology when he couldn’t get another contract, when his well ran dry, or like Tom Tremble who had a big local following around the old Club Nana when it was on Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge not where it is now on Brattle Street but who did mainly covers and just never broke out or Mike Weddle who had good looks, a good stage presence, had the young women going crazy but who just walked away one day when some good looking woman from Radcliffe came hither and he “sold out” to her father’s stockbroking business.

I’m talking about people like Tom Rush from New Hampshire who lit up the firmament around Cambridge via the Harvard campus folk music station, Dave Von Ronk the cantankerous folk historian and musician who knew more about what happened in the early, early days in the Village at the point where “beat” poetry was becoming passe and folk was moving in to fill in the gap, Phil Ochs who had probably the deepest political sensibilities of the lot and wrote some of the stronger narrative folk protest songs, Richard Farina who represented that “live fast” edge that we were bequeathed by the “beats” and who tumbled down the hill on a motorcycle, and Jesse Collin Young who probably wrote along with Eric Andersen and Jesse Winchester the most pre-flower child lyrics mid-1960s hippie explosion before folk got amplified of the bunch.

My friend Bart had just seen a fragile seeming, froggy-voiced Bob Dylan in one of stages of his apparently never-ending concerts tours up in Maine and had been shaken by the sight and had wondered about the fate of other such folk performers. That request turned into a series of reviews of male folk-singers entitled Not Bob Dylan (and after that, also at Bart’s request, a series entitled Not Joan Baez based on some of the same premises except on the distaff side (nice word, right, you know golden-voiced Judy Collins and her sweet songs of lost, Carolyn Hester and her elegant rendition of Walt Whitman’s Oh Captain, My Captain, Joan’s sister Mimi Farina forever linked with Richard and sorrows, and Malvina Reynolds who could write a song on the wing, fast okay, and based as well on the mass media having back then declared that pair the “king and queen” of the burgeoning folk music minute scene).

That first series (as had the second) had asked two central questions-why did those male folk singers not challenge Dylan who as I noted the media of the day had crowned king of the folk minute for supremacy in the smoky coffeehouse night (then, now the few remaining are mercifully smoke-free although then I smoked as heavily as any guy who though such behavior was, ah, manly and a way to seen “cool” to the young women, why else would we have done such a crazy to the health thing if not to impress some certain she)  and, if they had not passed on and unfortunately a number have a few more since that series as well most notably Phil Ochs of suicide early, Dave Von Ronk of hubris and Jesse Winchester of his battle lost over time had come, were they still working the smoke-free church basement, homemade cookies and coffee circuit that constitutes the remnant of that folk minute even in the old hotbeds like Cambridge and Boston. (What I call the U/U circuit since while other church venues are part of the mix you can usually bet safely that if an event is scheduled it will be at a U/U church which is worthy of a little sketch of its own sometime in order to trace the folk minute after the fanfare had died down and as a tribute to those big-hearted souls at radio stations like WCAS and WUMB and in places like Club Passim whose efforts have kept the thing going in order to try to pass it on to the younger generations now that demographics are catching up with the folkies from the 1960s heyday). Moreover, were they still singing and song-writing, that pairing of singer and writer having been becoming more prevalent, especially in the folk milieu in the wake of Bob Dylan’s word explosions back then. The days when the ground was shifting under the Tin Pan Alley Cole Porter/Irving Berlin/ Jerome Kern kingdom.   

Here is the general format I used in that series for asking and answering those two questions which still apply today if one is hell-bent on figuring out the characters who rose and fell during that time: 

“If I were to ask someone, in the year 2005 as I have done periodically both before and after, to name a male folk singer from the 1960s I would assume that if I were to get any answer to that question that the name would be Bob Dylan. That “getting any answer” prompted by the increasing non-recognition of the folk genre by anybody under say forty, except those few kids who somehow “found” their parents’ stash of Vanguard records (for example, there were other folk labels including, importantly, Columbia Records which pushed the likes of Dylan and John Hammond forward) just as some in an earlier Pete Seeger/Weavers/Leadbelly/ Josh White/Woody Guthrie records in our parents’ stashes. Today’s kids mainly influenced by hip-hop, techno-music and just straight popular music.

And that Dylan pick would be a good and appropriate choice. One can endlessly dispute whether or not Dylan was (or wanted to be since he clearly had tired of the role, or seemed to by about 1966 when he for all intents and purposes “retired” for a while prompted by a serious motorcycle accident and other incidents) the voice of the Generation of ’68 (so named for the fateful events of that watershed year, especially the Democratic Convention in America in the summer of that year when the old-guard pulled the hammer down and in Paris where the smell of revolution was palpably in the air for the first time since about World War II, when those, including me, who tried to “turn the world upside down” to make it more livable began to feel that the movement was reaching some ebb tide) but in terms of longevity and productivity, the never-ending touring until this day and releasing of X amount of bootleg recordings, the copyrighting of every variation of every song, including traditional songs, he ever covered and the squelching of the part of the work that he has control over on YouTube he fits the bill as a known quality. However, there were a slew of other male folk singers who tried to find their niche in the folk milieu and who, like Dylan, today continue to produce work and to perform. The artist under review, Tom Rush, is one such singer/songwriter.”

“The following is a question that I have been posing in reviewing the work of a number of male folk singers from the 1960s and it is certainly an appropriate question to ask of Tom Rush as well. Did they aspire to be the “king” of the genre? I do not know if Tom Rush, like his contemporary Bob Dylan, started out wanting to be the king of the hill among male folk singers but he certainly had some things going for him. A decent acoustic guitar but a very interesting (and strong baritone) voice to fit the lyrics of love, hope, and longing that he was singing about at the time, particularly the No Regrets/Rockport Sunday combination which along with Wasn’t That A Mighty Storm and Joshua Gone Barbados were staples early on. During much of this period along with his own songs he was covering other artists, particularly Joni Mitchell and her Urge For Going and The Circle Game, so it is not clear to me that he had that same Dylan drive by let’s say 1968.

I just mentioned that he covered Joni Mitchell in this period. A very nice version of Urge For Going that captures the wintry, got to get out of here, imaginary that Joni was trying to evoke about things back in her Canadian homeland. And the timelessness and great lyrical sense of his No Regrets, as the Generation of ’68 sees another generational cycle starting, as is apparent now if it was not then. The covers of fellow Cambridge folk scene fixture Eric Von Schmidt on Joshua Gone Barbados and Galveston Flood are well done. As is the cover of Bukka White’s Panama Limited (although you really have to see or hear old Bukka flailing away on his old beat up National guitar to get the real thing on YouTube).”

Whether Tom Rush had the fire back then is a mute question now although in watching the documentary, No Regrets, in which he tells us about his life from childhood to the very recent past (2014) at some point he did lose the flaming “burn down the building fire,” just got tired of the road like many, many other performers and became a top-notch record producer, a “gentleman farmer,” and returned to the stage occasionally, most dramatically with his annual show Tom Rush-The Club 47 Tradition Continues held at Symphony Hall in Boston each winter. And in this documentary appropriately done under the sign of “no regrets” which tells Tom’s take on much that happened then he takes a turn, an important oral tradition turn, as folk historian. 

He takes us, even those of us who were in the whirl of some of it back then to those key moments when we were looking for something rooted, something that would make us pop in the red scare Cold War night of the early 1960s. Needless to say the legendary Club 47 in Cambridge gets plenty of attention as does his own fitful start in getting his material recorded, or rather fitful starts, mainly walking around to every possible venue in town to get backing for record production the key to getting heard by a wider audience via the radio and to become part of the increasing number of folk music-oriented programs, the continuing struggle to this day from what he had to say once you are not a gold-studded fixture.

“Other coffeehouses and other performers of the time, especially Eric Von Schmidt, another performer with a ton of talent and song-writing ability who had been on the scene very, very early on who eventually decided that his artistic career took first place, get a nod of recognition.  As does the role of key radio folk DJ Dick Summer in show-casing new work (and the folk show, picked up accidently one Sunday night when I was frustrated with the so-called rock and roll on the local AM rock station and flipped the dial of my transistor radio and heard a different sound, the sound of Dave Von Ronk, where I started to pick up my life-long folk “habit”).

So if you want to remember those days when you sought refuse in the coffeehouses and church basements, sought a “cheap” date night (for the price of a couple of cups of coffee sipped slowly in front of you and your date, a shared pastry and maybe a few bucks admission or tossed into the passed-around “basket” you got away easy and if she liked the sound too, who knows what else) or, ouch, want to know why your parents are still playing Joshua’s Gone Barbados on the record player as you go out the door Saturday night to your own adventures watch this documentary and find out what happened to one Not Bob Dylan when the folk world went under.   

   

An Encore- Coming Of Age, Political Age, In The 1960s Night- A Baptism Of Fire-Making War On The War-Makers

An Encore- Coming Of Age, Political Age, In The 1960s Night- A Baptism Of Fire-Making War On The War-Makers

 





From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 


He was scared. All of fourteen year old Peter Paul Markin’s body was scared. Of course he knew, knew just as well as anybody else, if anybody thought to ask, that he was really afraid not scared, but Peter Paul was scared anyway. No, not scared (or afraid for the literary correct types), not Frannie De Angelo demon neighborhood tough boy, schoolboy nemesis scared, scared that he would be kicked in the groin, bent over to the ground in pain for no reason, no reason except Frannie deep psycho hard boy reasons known only to himself. Markin was used to that kind of scared, not liking it, not liking getting used to it but he was not tough, not even close although he was wiry, but not Franny heavyweight tough, but used to it. And this certainly was not his usual girl scared-ness on the off chance that one, one girl that is, might say something to him and he would have no “cool” rejoinder. (Yes, girls scared him, not Franny scared but no social graces scared, except in the comfortable confines of a classroom where he could show off with his knowledge of two thousand arcane facts that he thought would impress them but no avail then, later he would be swarmed, well, maybe not swarmed but he didn’t have to spend many lonely weekend nights studying to get to three thousand arcane facts) This was different. This, and his handkerchief-dabbed wet palms and forehead did not lie, was an unknown scared. 

See, Peter Paul had taken a bet, a “put your money where your mouth is" bet, from best freshman high school friend Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, if you want to know the full name. Now these guys had previously bet on everything under the sun since middle school, practically, from sports game spreads, you know Ohio State by ten over Michigan stuff like that, to how high the master pizza man and owner at Salducci’s Pizza Parlor, Tonio, would throw his pizza dough one strange night when Frankie needed dough (money dough that is) for his hot date with girlfriend Joanne. So no bet was too strange for this pair, although this proposition was probably way too solemn to be bet on. 

 

What got it started, the need for a bet started, this time, really had to do with school, or maybe better, the world situation in 1960. Peter Paul, a bundle of two thousand facts that he guarded like a king’s ransom, went off the deep end in 9th grade Civics class when he, during a current events discussion, exploded upon his fellow classmates with the observation that there were too many missiles, too many nuclear bomb-loaded guided missiles, in the world and that both sides in the Cold War (The United States and the Soviet Union and their respective hangers-on) should “ban the bomb.” But you have not heard the most provocative part yet, Peter Paul then argued that, as a good-will gesture and having more of them, the United States should destroy a few of its own. Unilaterally. 

 

Pandemonium ensued as smarts guys and gals, simps and stups also, even those who never uttered a word in class, took aim at Peter Paul’s head. The least of it was that he was called a “commie” and a "dupe" and the discussion degenerated from there. Mr. Merck was barely able to contain the class, and nobody usually stepped out line in his class, or else. Somehow order was restored by the end of class and within a few days the class was back to normal, smart guys and girls chirping away with all kinds of flutter answers and the simps and stups, well the simp and stups did their simp and stup thing, as always. 

 

Frankie always maintained that that particular day was one of the few that he wasn’t, and he really wasn’t, glad that Peter Paul was his friend. And during that class discussion he made a point, a big point, of not entering the fray in defense of his misbegotten friend. He thought Peter Paul was off the wall, way off the wall, on this one and let him know it after class. Of course, Peter Paul could not leave well enough alone and started badgering friend Frankie about it some more. But this was stone wall time because Frankie, irreverent, most of the time irreligious, and usually just happy to be girl-smitten in the world, and doing stuff about that, and not worried about its larger problems really believed, like the hard Roman Catholic-bred boy that he was underneath, that the evil Soviet Union should be nuclear fizzled-that very day. 

 

But Peter Paul kept egging the situation on. And here is the problem with a purist, a fourteen year old purist, a wet behind the ears fourteen year old purist when you think about it. Peter Paul was as Roman Catholic-bred underneath as Frankie but with this not so slight difference. Peter Paul’s grandmother, Anna, was, and everybody who came in contact with her agreed, a saint. A saint in the true-believer catholic social gospel sense and who was a fervent admirer of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker for social justice movement started in the 1930s. So frequently The Catholic Worker, the movement newspaper, would be lying around her house. And just as frequently Peter Paul, taking grandmother refuge from the hell-bend storms at his own house, would read the articles. And in almost every issue there would be an article bemoaning the incredible increase in nuclear weapons by both sides, the cold war freeze-out that escalated that spiral and the hard fact that the tipping point beyond no return was right around the corner. And something had to be done about it, and fast, by rational people who did not want the world blown up by someone’s ill-tempered whim. Yah, heady stuff, no question, but just the kind of thing that a certain fourteen year old boy could add to his collection of now two thousand plus facts. 

Heady stuff, yah, but also stuff that carried some contradictions. Not in grandmother Anna, not in Dorothy Day so much as in Peter Paul and through him Frankie. See, the Catholic Worker movement had no truck, not known truck, anyway with “commies" and "dupes”, although that movement too, more than once, and by fellow Catholics too, was tarred with that brush. They were as fervent in their denunciation of the atheistic Soviet Union as any 1950s red-baiter. But they also saw that that stance alone was not going to make the world safer for believers, or anybody else. And that tension between the two strands is where Frankie and Peter Paul kind of got mixed up in the world’s affairs. Especially when Peter Paul said that the Catholic Worker had an announcement in their last issue that in October (1960) they were going to help sponsor an anti-nuclear proliferation rally on the Boston Common as part of a group called SANE two weeks before the presidential elections. 

Frankie took that information as manna from heaven. See, Frankie was just as interested in knowing two thousand facts in this world as Peter Paul. Except Frankie didn’t guard them like a king’s ransom but rather used them, and then discarded them like a tissue. And old Frankie, even then, even in 1960 starting to spread his wings as the corner boy king of the North Adamsville high school class of 1964, knew how to use his stockpile of facts better than Peter Paul ever could. So one night, one fiercely debated night, when Frankie could take no more, he said “bet.” And he bet that Peter Paul would not have the courage to travel from North Adamsville to Park Street Station in Boston to attend that SANE rally by himself (who else would go from old working- class, patriotic, red-scare scared, North Adamsville anyway). And as is the nature of fourteen year old boy relationships, or was, failure to take the bet, whatever bet was social suicide. “Bet,” said Peter Paul quickly before too much thinking time would elapse and destroy the fact of the bet marred by the hint of hesitation. 

But nothing is ever just one thing in this wicked old world. Peter Paul believed, believed fervently, in the social message of the Catholic Worker movement especially on this nuclear war issue. But this was also 1960 and Irish Jack Kennedy was running, and running hard, to be President of the United States against bad man Richard Milhous Nixon and Peter Paul was crazy for Jack (really for younger brother, Bobby, the ruthless organizer behind the throne which is the way he saw his own future as a political operative). And, of course, October in election year presidential politics is crunch time, a time to be out hustling votes, out on Saturday hustling votes, especially every Irish vote, every Catholic vote, hell, every youth vote for your man. 

 

On top of that Jack, old Irish Jack Kennedy, war hero, good-looking guy with a good-looking wife (not Irish though not as far as anyone could tell), rich as hell, was trying to out-Cold War Nixon, a Cold War warrior of the first degree. And the way he was trying to outgun Nixon was by haranguing everyone who would listen that there was a “missile gap,” and the United was falling behind. And when one talked about a missile gap in 1960 that only meant one thing, only brooked only one solution- order up more, many more, nuclear-bomb loaded guided missiles. So there it was, one of the little quirks of life, of political life. So, Peter Paul, all fourteen year old scared Peter Paul has to make good on his bet with Frankie but in the process put a crimp into his hoped-for political career. And just for that one moment, although with some hesitation, he decided to be on the side of the “angels” and to go. 

That Saturday, that October Saturday, was a brisk, clear autumn day and so Peter Paul decided to walk the few miles from his house in North Adamsville over the Neponset Bridge to the first MTA subway station at Fields Corner rather than take the forever Eastern Mass. bus that came by his street erratically. After crossing the bridge he passed through one of the many sections of Boston that could pass for the streets of Dublin. Except on those streets he saw many young Peter Pauls holding signs at street corners for Jack Kennedy, other passing out literature, and others talking up Jack’s name. Even as he approached the subway station he saw signs everywhere proclaiming Jack’s virtues. Hell, the nearby political hang-out Eire Pub looked like a campaign headquarters. What this whole scene did not look like to Peter Paul was a stronghold place to talk to people about an anti-nuclear weapons rally. Peter Paul got even more scared as he thought about the reception likely at the Boston Commons. He pushed on, not without a certain tentative regret, but he pushed on through the turnstile, waited for the on-coming subway to stop, got on, and had an uneventful ride to the Park Street Station, the nearest stop to the Common. 

Now Park Street on any given Saturday, especially in October after the college student hordes have descended on Boston, is a madhouse of activity. College student strolling around downtown looking for goods at the shops, other are just rubber-necking, other are sunning themselves on the grass or park benches in the last late sun days before winter arrives with a fury. Beyond the mainly civilized college students (civilized on the streets in the daytime anyway) there are the perennial street people who populate any big city and who when not looking for handouts, a stray cigarette, or a stray drink are talking a mile a minute among themselves about some supposed injustice that has marred their lives and caused their unhappy decline. Lastly, and old town Boston, historic old town Boston, scene of many political battles for every cause from temperance to liberty, is defined by this, there are a motley crew of speakers, soap-box speakers whether on a real soap-box or not, who are holding forth on many subjects, although none that drew Peter Paul’s attention this day. After running that gauntlet, as he heads for the Francis Parkman Bandstand where the SANE rally was to take place he was amused by all that surrounds him putting him in a better mood, although still apprehensive of what the day will bring forth. 

Arriving at the bandstand he saw about twenty people milling around with signs, hand-made signs that showed some spunk, the most prominent being a large poster-painted sign that stated boldly, “Ban The Bomb.” He is in the right place, no question. Although he is surprised that there are not more people present he is happy, secretly happy, that those twenty are there, because, frankly, he thought there might be just about two. And among that crowd he spotted a clot of people who were wearing Catholic Worker buttons so he is now more fully at ease, and was starting to be glad that he came here on this day. He went over to the clot and introduced himself and tells them how he came to be there. He also noted that one CWer wore the collar of a priest; a surprise because at Sacred Heart, his parish church, it was nothing but “fire and brimstone” from the pulpit against the heathen communist menace. 

Get this-he also met a little old lady in tennis sneakers. For real. Now Frankie, devil’s advocate Frankie, baited Peter Paul in their arguments about nuclear disarmament by stating that the “peaceniks” were mainly little old ladies in tennis shoes-meaning, of course, batty and of no account, no main chance political account, no manly Jack Kennedy stand up to the Russians account. Peter Paul thought to himself wait until I see Frankie and tell him that this little old lady knew more about politics, and history, than even his two thousand facts. And was funny too boot. Moreover, and this was something that he had privately noticed, as the youngest person by far at the rally she, and later others, would make a fuss over him for that very reason talking about young bravery and courage and stuff like that. 

Over the course of the two hours or so of the rally the crowd may have swelled to about fifty, especially when a dynamic black speaker from the W.E.B. Dubois club at Harvard University linked up the struggle against nuclear weapons with the black struggle down South for voting rights that those in the North had been hearing more about lately. It was not until later, much later, that Peter Paul found out that this Dubois club business was really the name of the youth group of the American Communist Party (CP) at the time but by that time he was knowledgeable enough to say “so what.” And it was not until later that he found out that the little old lady with the tennis sneakers was a CPer, although she had said at the time he talked to her she was with some committee, some women’s peace committee, within the Democratic Party. Oh, well. But then he would also be able to say “so what” to that accusation in proper “family of the left” fashion. 

 

But forget all that later stuff, and what he knew or did not know later. See, that day, that October 1960 autumn day, Peter Paul learned something about serious politics. If you are on the right side of the angels on an issue, a central issue of the day, you are kindred. And although there were more than a few catcalls from the passers-by about “commies”, “dupes”, and “go back to Russia” he was glad, glad as hell that he came over. Although nothing turned inside him, noticeably turned inside him that day, about his politics and his determination to see Jack Kennedy and the Democrats take the White House he thought about those brave people at the bandstand and what they were standing for a lot for a long time after the event faded from memory. Oh yah, it was good to be on the side of the angels. And it didn’t hurt that he won that Frankie bet, either.

Rage Against The Dying Of The Light-With Dylan Thomas’ Poem "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Goodnight" In Mind

Rage Against The Dying Of The Light-With Dylan Thomas’ Poem "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Goodnight" In Mind

By Fritz Taylor

Richard Roche, normally for public consumption an easy-going, laid back and kindly man, was angry, no better, in a rage. (Somehow the anger of his wickedly harsh childhood had gotten dissipated over the years for let’s say when he was in his late teens or early twenties he was as likely to throw fire and water as to seek to reason with anybody. So much for a little backdrop to fill the reader in on where he had come from to earn that easy-going demeanor.) That rage came with a name Lila Crawford, his long, long time companion who had recently given him his walking papers. That “recently” was well over two months before the time in question so his anger, his rage needs some explanation. No question that Richard (not Rich or Rick) and Lila had had their share of problems in their relationship which had spanned three decades. Somehow, some way, Lila a few months before had decided that whatever ailed the relationship could no longer to fixed, except by separation, a final separation.            

Who knows what might have sparked her anguish, maybe it was that since her retirement Lila was at wits end about what to do with the rest of her life. A big theme when she gave Richard his walking papers had been that she had to find herself, had to figure out who she was and that the journey had to be alone. Richard tried to reason, argue really, that he did not understand why her angst and alienation could not be addressed in the context of the relationship like it had been on several previous occasions. Lila had said that this was different, this was deeper. Closer to the nut was what Lila had sensed were dramatic changes in Richard’s demeanor which had created what she called, and he agreed when it was pointed out, undue tensions in the household. He admitted that his health issues over the previous several months had made him cranky, irritable and a pain in the ass.

He had been poked and prodded some many times by doctors and their cohorts that he was sick unto death, well almost unto death, of the whole thing. And then there were the medications, plural on that word, which were making him crazy (and one of them was doing some damage that way as he later found out, too late later found out). That, the diagnosis of bladder cancer which he had been battling (which he had been in denial about for a period), and his turning sixty had unwound his usual public consumption easy-going ways. From her perspective, from her own considerable health issues point of view she had cut him to the quick when she said that a major cause of her recent illness problems could be laid to the tensions created in the household by him, that he was causing her illnesses to rage unabated. That was the final sting that told him that whatever had happened over the recent past they needed what in his mind was a separation. That like in many interpersonal relationship matters between them she was miles ahead of him.         

After finding a temporary place along the seacoast in Maine for a month through the good offices of Air B ‘n’ B Richard moved him small bundle of precious and necessary goods (okay, clothes, books, a few utensils and the mandatory computer complex complete with printer). The place was to be rented for a month (the limit of the stay in any case since the owners were closing up for the cold weather Mainer winter) at which time Richard had figured that Lila would have come to her senses and be welcoming him back into her embraces again. Even before that month was up Lila made it clear that the separation in her mind, at least the living together part, was final if not irrevocable and they had argued over that since, as usual Richard had assumed that they had agreed on the month and that was that. Naturally he was dead-ass wrong about how serious she was about the break, about the need for the break. She cut him to the quick again by telling him that her health had improved with the lack of tensions around the house in his absence (they had agreed that she would stay in their long time residence since he was more of a rolling stone in his ability to move and then there were the cats who knew no other abode but that place, and incidentally were a separate cause stress for her since they were young and full of pent-up energy.    

Although Lila had gone up to the place Richard had in Maine to signify in her mind that her earlier idea that they would never see each other again had been premature and not well thought out she nevertheless insisted that she need an undisclosed amount of time to get her own life in order (her term had been the diplomatic wishy-wash “for the foreseeable future”). The net effect, no the gross effect, remember Richard had been angry, no again, in a rage over this latest set-back but he had to go along with it-what else was he to do when she didn’t want to  live with him. He then took a place, a winter rental in a seacoast town in New Hampshire under loose tenant at will conditions (meaning that with thirty days’ notice either party could break the lease). His idea was if the Empress recalled him he could get out from under without too much financial damage (moreover he wanted to be by the ocean for reflection and an occasional run to keep in shape so there was a certain method to his madness). And so he moved south closer to Boston where all his connections to the known world were.     

Richard had made some changes though during the separation, which Lila had commented on positively although without giving in an inch. He had under her initial guidance taken up meditation daily in order to get some peace within himself, to calm down and to accept the idea that he had both cancer and had slowed down with age both ideas repugnant to his psyche but there it was. The meditation, something he had laughed at in previous suggestions by Lila had actually helped. When Richard got into something he believed in he was “all in” and he was in that kind of mood (‘all in” a term he had used a couple of years previously when they had been under Lila’s suggestion again in couples counselling and once he got his head around the idea he actually like it, certainly thought it was useful). 

Moreover having been cut to the quick by Lila’s remarks about how he was affecting her health something that had plagued her as long as he had known her he started reflecting on where things had gone some badly, where their early love had drifted to a very bad place. He was determined to “win” her back.      

Now all of these Richard insights were well and good but it takes two to work this kind of thing out even though he now had gotten “religion” but her continual rebuffs of his attempts to reconcile had, well, left him with feelings of rage, with a sense that he was lost. This rage had no place to go, had to break or it would put more fire in his head than he could he use (the “put out fire in his head” a phrase he picked up from a song by Patty Griffin where her lover was in his own problematic world). That rage in his head had initially driven him to seek another companion via a senior citizen on-line dating service which proved fruitless to quell his angst.

The thing finally blew up in his head around Thanksgiving, around the season where family and community come into play. He had had, and Lila had as well which is where they “saved” each other during this holiday season, horrible times around holidays when they were kids and even sixty years later Richard could feel the sting of the past coming on with nobody to help him get through the thing-his Lila a distant memory for that purpose. He determined that he was through with her, decided to let her have the house, having nothing more to do with her, to drift to California and start anew, maybe some find somebody out there so that his morbid fear that he would die “alone” would not come true. So filled with rage for several days which even multiple daily meditations would not curb he was about to call her. Before he could do so she called him, said she had been depressed around the holidays and could she come up and see him. Yeah, sure. That is what their thing had always been, why he always liked the pleasure of her company. “Yeah, sure come on up.” Sometimes raging against the fading of the light is the only course though.             

[Although Lila was adamant for the “foreseeable future” about not living together they did agree to see each other on occasion as a result of that meeting but who knows where that will lead if anywhere. F.T.]  

Johnny Prescott’s Itch- With Kudos To Mister Gene Vincent's Be-Bop-A -Lula

Johnny Prescott’s Itch- With Kudos To Mister Gene Vincent's Be-Bop-A -Lula

A YouTube film clip of Gene Vincent performing his rock classic, Be-Bop-A-Lula.


He had the itch. John Prescott had the itch and he had it bad, especially since his eyes flamed up consumed with hell-bend flames when he saw Elvis performing live on the Ed Sullivan Show one Sunday night. And he had it so bad that he had missed, unbeknownst to his parents who would have been crestfallen and, perhaps, enraged, his last few piano lessons. Sure, he covered his butt by having saxophonist Sid Stein, drummer Eddie Shore, and bass player Kenny Jackson from his improvisational school jazz combo, The G-Clefs (ya, a well-thought out name for a musical group) come by his house to pick him up. While standing at the Prescott door parents and sidemen went through the “well aren’t things looking up for you boys,” and “they seem to be” scene without missing a beat. But as soon as Kenny’s 1954 Nash Rambler turned the corner of Walnut Street Johnny was a long-gone daddy, real long-gone. And where he was long-gone but not forlorn to was Sally Ann’s Music Shop over on the far end of West Main Street. Now the beauty of Sally Ann’s was that it was, well, Sally Ann’s, a small shop that was well off the main drag, and therefore no a likely place where any snooping eyes, ears or voices that would report to said staid Prescott parents when Johnny went in or out of the place. Everyone, moreover, knew Sally Ann’s was nothing but a run-down, past its prime place and if you really wanted all the best 45s, and musical instrument stuff then every self-respecting teenager hit the tracks for Benny’s Music Emporium right downtown and only about a quick five-minute walk from North Clintondale High where Johnny and the combo served their high school time, impatiently served their high school time.

Now while everybody respected old Sally Ann’s musical instincts (she was the queen of the jitterbug night in the 1940s, had been on top of the be-bop jazz scene with Charley, Dizzy and the guys early on, guys whom the G-Clefs covered, covered like crazy, and nixed, nixed big time that whole Patti Page, Teresa Brewer weepy, sad song thing in the early 1950s) she was passé, old hat when it came to the cool blues coming out of Chicago, and the be-bop doo wop that kids, white kids, because there were no known blacks, or spanish, chinese, armenians, or whatever, in dear old Clintondale were crazy for ever since Frankie Lyman and his back-up guys tore up the scene with Why Do Fools Fall In Love?

But her greatest sin, although up until a few weeks ago Johnny would have been agnostic on that sin part, was that she was behind, way behind the curve, on the rock ‘n’ rock good night wave coming though and splashing over everybody, including deep jazz man, Johnny Prescott. But Sally Ann had, aside from that secluded locale and a tell-no-tales-attitude, something Johnny could use. She had a primo Les Paul Fender-bender guitar in stock just like the one Gene Vincent used that she was willing to let clandestine Johnny play when he came by. And she had something else Johnny could use, or maybe better Sally Ann could use. She had an A-Number One ear for guys who knew how to make music, any kind of music and had the bead on Johnny, no question. See Sally Ann was looking for one more glory flame, one more Clintondale shine moment, and who knows maybe she believed she could work some Colonel Parker magic and so Johnny Prescott was king of the Sally Ann day.

King, that is, until James and Martha Prescott spotted the other G-Clefs (Kenny, Sid, Eddie) coming out of the Dean Music School minus Johnny, minus a “don’t know where he is, sir,” Johnny. And Mr. Dean, Johnny’s piano instructor, was clueless as well, believing Johnny’s telephone story about having to work for the past few weeks and so lessons were to be held in abeyance. Something was definitely wrong if Mr. Dean, the man more who than anyone else who recognized Johnny’s raw musical talent in about the third grade had lost Johnny's confidence. But the Prescotts got wise in a hurry because flutist Mary Jane Galvin, also coming out the school just, then and overhearing the commotion about Johnny’s whereabouts decided to get even with one John Prescott by, let’s call a thing by its right name, snitch on him and disclosed that she had seen him earlier in the day when she walked into Sally Ann’s looking for an old Benny Goodman record that featured Peggy Lee and which Benny’s Emporium, crazed rock ‘n’ rock hub Benny’s would not dream of carrying, or even have space for.

The details of the actual physical confrontation with Johnny by his parents (with Mr. Dean in tow) are not very relevant to our little story. What is necessary to detail is the shock and chagrin that James and Martha exhibited on hearing of Johnny’s itch, his itch to be the be-bop, long-gone daddy of the rock ‘n’ roll night. Christ, Mr. Dean almost had a heart attack on the spot when he heard that Johnny had, and we will quote here, “lowered himself to play such nonsense,” and gone over to the enemy of music. As mentioned earlier Mr. Dean, before he opened his music school, had been the roving music teacher for the Clintondale elementary school sand had spotted Johnny’s natural feel for music early on. He also knew, knew somewhere is his sacred musical bones, that Johnny’s talents, his care-free piano talents in particular, could not be harnessed to classical programs, the Bachs, Beethoven, and Brahms stuff, so that he encouraged Johnny to work his magic through be-bop jazz then in high fashion, and with a long pedigree in American musical life. When he approached the Prescotts about coordinating efforts to drive Johnny’s talents by lessons his big pitch had been that his jazz ear would assure him of steady work when he came of age, came of age in the mid-1950s.

This last point should not be underestimated in winning the Prescotts over. James worked, when there was work, as welder, over at the shipyards in Adamsville, and Martha previously solely a housewife, in order to pay for those lessons (and be a good and caring mother to boot) had taken on a job filling jelly donuts (and other donut stuff) at one of the first of the Dandy Donuts shops that were spreading over the greater Clintondale area.
Christ, filling donuts. No wonder they were chagrined, or worst.

Previously both parents were proud, proud as peacocks, when Johnny really did show that promise that Mr. Dean saw early on. Especially when Johnny would inevitably be called to lead any musical assemblage at school, and later when, at Mr. Dean’s urging, he formed the G-Clef and began to make small amounts of money at parties and other functions. Rock ‘n’ rock did not fit in, fit in at all in that Prescott world. Then damn Elvis came into view and corrupted Johnny’s morals, or something like that. Shouldn’t the authorities do something about it?

Johnny and his parents worked out a truce, well kind of a truce,kind of a truce for a while. And that kind of a truce for a while is where old Sally Ann enters again. See, Johnny had so much raw rock talent that she persuaded him to have his boys (yes, Kenny, Sid and Eddy in case you forgot) come by and accompany him on some rock stuff. And because Johnny (not Sally Ann, old Aunt Sally by then) was loved, loved in the musical sense if not in the human affection sense by the other boys they followed along. Truth to tell they were getting the itch too, a little. And that little itch turned into a very big itch indeed when at that very same dime-dropper, Mary Jane Galvin’s sweet sixteen party concert (yes, Mary Jane was that kind of girl), the G-Clefs finished one of their covers, Dizzy’s Salt Peanuts with some rock riffs. The kids started to get up, started dancing in front of their seats to the shock of the parents and Mary Jane(yes, Mary Jane was that kind of girl), including the senior Prescotts, were crazy for the music. And Johnny’s fellow G-Clefs noticed, noticed very quickly that all kinds of foxy frails (girls, okay), girls who had previously spent much time ignoring their existences, came up all dream-eyed and asked them, well, asked them stuff, boy-girl stuff.

Oh, the Sally Ann part, the real Sally Ann part not just the idea of putting the rock band together. Well, she talked her talk to the headmaster over at North Clintondale High (an old classmate, Clintondale Class of 1925, and flame from what the boys later heard) and got the boys a paying gig at the up coming school Spring Frolics. And the money was more than the G-Clefs, the avant guarde G-Clefs made in a month of jazz club appearances, to speak nothing of girls attached. So now the senior Prescotts are happy, well as happy as parents can be over rock ‘n’ roll. And from what I hear Johnny and the Rocking Ramrods are going, courtesy of Aunt Sally, naturally, to be playing at the Gloversville Fair this summer. Be-bop-a-Lula indeed.

When Humphrey Bogart Single-Handedly Built The Second Front In World War II (Sort Of)-“All Through The Night”- A Film Review

When Humphrey Bogart Single-Handedly Built The Second Front In World War II (Sort Of)-“All Through The Night”- A Film Review

By Joshua Lawrence Breslin

DVD Review

All Through The Night, starring Humphrey Bogart, Conrad Veidt, Peter Lorre, Warner Brothers, 1941


No question, no question at all, at least cinematically, Humphrey Bogart did not like Nazis. In the United States or abroad. And he was willing to do something about it, cinematically. We all know and loved his dashing role as Rick, the owner of Rick’s American Café, in Casablanca, where he got off the dime and decided that the love interests of three little people in this wicked old world were not “worth a hill of beans” compared to lining up, lining up gratis as it turned out, against the Nazis (and their Vichy French sympathizers) and helping freedom-fighter Victor Lazlo out of a jam. Ditto when some second level free-fighter gets dinged in Vichy French Martinique and, he, Captain Harry Morgan this time, has to get off another dime and help the good old cause in To Have Or Have Not. Of course there love interest Lauren Bacall as a wayward fellow traveler made that decision so much easier.

Now to the film under review, a lesser film, and obviously one released (December 2, 1941) before the Americans went into World War II big time, All Through The Night, and Mister Bogart’s efforts to derail the German “fifth columnists” (real enough) infesting New York City and other American locales. Bogart, as “sportsman” (I am being nice) Gloves Donohue, the toast of Broadway is incensed when the guy who delivers his thrice daily cheesecake is mysteriously murdered. And when another “colleague” from the entertainment business is offed and he is the “fall guy,” patsy, he determinedly decides to get to the bottom of these cases.

And at the bottom is that a Nazi spy ring that is planning, planning assiduously a big time event, in New York Harbor. Naturally, after much rigmarole Gloves saves the day but not before taking care of that ring, and its nefarious leader, Ebbing (played by Conrad Veidt, last seen as a German Major at the Casablanca airfield very dead from a Rick bullet after trying to stop Victor Lazlo from doing his anti-Nazi business. Of course, the surprise in all of this rather long film given the rather simple task, is that it is played half-way for laugh.

Gloves Donohue, unlike Bogie portrayals of hardened criminals like Duke Mantee in Petrified Forest or Roy ‘The Boy” Earle in High Sierra is strictly out of some second-rate Damon Runyon hi-jinx episode. So there is plenty of slapstick, and wistful colorful New York language, to accompany this ferreting out of ‘fifth columnists” in our midst. Frankly I liked his grittily determined efforts as Rick and Captain Morgan better (and the female company provided a little better as well, although Leda, his love interest here and in a jam as well, could sing a torch tune, no question.) Like I say though chalk up one Humphrey Bogart as a guy that Nazis (and on the run hoods, who like to slap girls around, like Johnny Rico in Key Largo) should stay away from, very far away.