Dan Leo

tales of the hotel st crispian: chapter 97

2013-02-21T12:57:00.001-05:00

"done wrong"

by horace p sternwall and manfred skyline

illustrated by konrad kraus, roy dismas and eddie el greco

a rhoda penmarq™ studios production

(click here to read the entire thrilling chapter!)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 334: Lady Brett

2013-02-15T18:26:00.001-05:00

Let’s rejoin our hero Arnold Schnabel and his hearty comrade Big Ben Blagwell here in a rather unusual sub-basement bar in Greenwich Village, on this fateful August night in 1957...

(Please click here to read our previous chapter; in case you need your head examined then go here to return to the first tentative beginnings of this Gold View Award™-winning 68-volume memoir.)

“I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I consider Arnold Schnabel’s mammoth masterwork to be the ne plus ultra of American literature.” — Harold Bloom, opening remarks at the yearly convention of the Arnold Schnabel Society at the Pvt. Raymond T. Osmond VFW Post at Chew and Lawrence; Philadelphia PA.

“Well, Lady Brett,” said Ben (or, again, “shouted Ben”, because as I said this place was very noisy, so please just assume that everyone is shouting until our narrative takes us elsewhere, if it ever does), ”we certainly wouldn’t want a lady to die of thirst, now would we, Arnie, I mean Porter?”

“No,” I said, with a sinking feeling that my personal narrative might never take me from this place unless I took some strong measures not to be the passive protagonist I had pretty much played my whole life, or lives.  

“You don’t seem enthusiastic, Mr. Porter, at the prospect of having cocktails with three I daresay reasonably attractive ladies,” said Brett, looking into my eyes through the smoke trailing up from her cigarette. Although her hair was dark her skin was very pale, almost as pale as her jersey and her skirt. Her eyes were a smoky blue. (I’m trying to remember to describe these people I kept meeting, but it’s not always easy for me, as sometimes I get so wrapped up in myself that I fail to notice even the most basic features of someone until I’ve been around them for a year or two.)

“He’s enthusiastic,” said Ben (filling in the conversational void which I had inadvertently created as a byproduct of my private lucubrations). “Arnie I mean Porter’s just like reserved, like, ain’t you, Arnie, Porter, whatever?”

He gave me another elbow in the ribs, well, it was the same elbow, a little harder this time, but not quite hard enough to cause me to gasp in pain.

“How very curious,” said Brett. “A reserved American. You intrigue me, Mr. Porter.”

“We was just about to try and find you ladies,” said Ben, “so’s we could buy you them drinks we promised.”

“Oh, splendid,” said Brett. “We’re just over at the other end of the bar.”

“We are on our way, ma’am,” said Ben. “Let’s weigh anchor. I gotta say I got me a powerful thirst my own self.”

“Yes but I’ll tell you what, dear Ben is it?”

“Ben it is,” said Ben. “Big Ben Blagwell they call me. On account of the size of me.”

“Yes you are a big boy,” said Brett. “And just full of beans, aren’t you?” 

“I was born full of beans,” said Ben. “Not to mention piss and vinegar. Oh, shit, sorry, I didn’t mean to say that.” 

“Say what?” said Brett.

“Piss,” said Ben. “Shit, now I’ve said it again.”

“Plus the word shit,” said Brett.

“Damn,” said Ben. “Please forgive me and my like uncouth ways. But it’s like I said, too many years before the mast and down in the fo’c’sle and the engine room, and in low dockside taverns from Boston to Bangkok and back again.”

“You are forgiven,” said Brett.

“Swell,” said Ben. “Now let’s get them drinks. Say, let me ask you something, Lady Brett, you ever have a Planter’s Punch with a float of ‘151’?”

“I never have, actually,” said Brett. “Is it as good as a Sidecar, or a French 75?”

“Better,” said Ben.

“Well, I must have one then.”

“Good, let’s cast off, baby.”  

“Yes but as I was attempting to say before we somehow got sidetracked, Big Ben,” she said, “why don’t you run along ahead, or rather heave prow-first into that sea of humanity full steam ahead in your parlance, as I want just a brief private word with Mr. Porter. But do please order me one of those Planter’s Punches, they sound delightful.”

“With a float of ‘151’,” said Ben.

“Righto,” said Brett.

“You gotta have the float of ‘151’, otherwise it’s just a plain ordinary Planter’s Punch,” said Ben.

“Yes, of course,” said Brett. “Now just you set sail right through this mob of drunks, and down at the other end of the bar, dear Ben, you’ll find the lovely Misses Becky and Hester. Panting with thirst.”

“I am already gone,” said Ben, and his face, which was always red, or at least inflamed, suddenly grew more red, almost like an overripe tomato just before it starts to bubble and burst its skin. He leaned in toward me and whispered, that is yelled in a somewhat lower voice, into my ear.

“Pal,” he said, “you are in like Flynn.”

He struck me once with his fist on my triceps but I managed not to fall down, and then he turned and shoved himself off into the crowd.

“Alone at last,” said Brett.

“Yes,” I said.

“Ah, he speaks.”

“Yes,” I said. “But listen —”

“Yes.”

“I have to tell you something,” I said.

“Oh no. Don’t tell me,” she said.

“Pardon me?” I said.

“Don’t tell me you’re a pansy. Good-looking chap like you, and with a rather attractive stubble of beard.”

I felt my chin. It was true, I seemed to have a day or two’s growth of beard. But that was Porter, not me. I normally shave every morning, even when I’m hungover and the very thought of shaving makes me want to remove the blade from the safety razor and put an end to the need to shave forever.

She was looking at me with a sad expression.

“How very sad,” she said. “What a dreadful waste of manhood.”

“Well,” I said, I don’t know why, I guess my pride was challenged, “I’m actually not a pansy.”

“Oh, splendid!”

“But —” I said.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “That most awful of all conjunctions. But. Damn you and your but. What is it.”

“Pardon me?”

“What is your but. Don’t tell me you were wounded in the war. Please don’t tell me that.”

“No,” I said.   “Oh, thank God,” she said. “I couldn’t go through that again. Being madly, horribly in love with a man who is unable to perform because of a war wound.”  

“I wasn’t wounded,” I said.

“So you are able to perform then.”

“If you mean what I think you mean —” I said.

“And I think you know what I mean,” she said.

“Yes, well, technically, I suppose I am able,” I said.

“That’s all I need to know,” she said.

 “But —”

“That word again,” she said. “That dreadful word. Can we agree never to use that word with each other again?”

“It’s a pretty common word,” I said.

“Promise me,” she said.

“Well, okay,” I said, “but — oh, gee, I said it again.”

“Please don’t say it again. Never again.”

“Okay,” I said. “But, oh, sorry —”

“Oh, never mind,” she said. “You can say it if you must.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“So what is it?”

“What is it?”

“This but of yours.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, you see, the thing is, I really have to be somewhere.”

“Somewhere else you mean.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Why. Where. Why.”

I realized suddenly that these were hard questions for me to answer, especially under these circumstances, the noise, the music, the shouting and laughing people all around, and the fact that Brett was standing very close to me, so close that her breasts, which were not small, were just touching the front of my seersucker jacket. I hesitated, as I tried to assemble some appropriate words in a coherent order.

“What could possibly be so important, dear Porter?” she said. “Is it a rendezvous with a woman?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Then what is the pressing urgency.”

“Well, it’s not a really pressing urgency,” I said. “But —”

“That word again,” she said. “That damned word.”

“Sorry,” I said. “But — and again I apologize for using the word —”

“I told you you could use it,” she said. “Even though each time you do it’s as if you’re driving an upholsterer’s tack into my bosom.” And as she said this she pressed her bosom closer against me. “What is it you’re trying to tell me, dear Porter? Please just say it. I’ve been hurt before. I’ll be hurt again. Just spit it out dear boy. I can take it.”

“It’s just that I have a friend waiting for me upstairs,” I said.

“A friend.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Another friend.”

“Yes,” I said. “You see, I was with this friend of mine in the bar upstairs, and I left to find a men’s room.”

“At least you found a ladies’ room, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “Anyway, I left him some time ago to try and find the men’s room, and he’ll be wondering where I am.”

“Will he really?”

“Well —”

“I suppose he’s sitting all alone at the bar, glancing at his wristwatch every ten seconds.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” I said. “I mean, you know, he’s with a few other people.”

“People.”

“Yes, a couple of girls, and —”

“A couple of girls you say. So already the lying, the prevarication begins. I should have known. Go. Go then to your friend and to these girls and I’m sure they’re so terribly and awfully charming.”

“But,” I said.

“Go, go to your little playthings.”

“But they’re not my playthings,” I said.

“And these ‘girls’, are they very pretty?”

“Well,” I said, sinking ever deeper and deeper, “yeah, I guess they’re pretty —”

“You guess.”

“Yeah, they’re pretty,” I said.

“Why didn’t you just tell me, Porter. I’m a big girl. As I said, I’ve been hurt before. I’ll be hurt again. And again.”

But,” I said.

“Please go, dear Porter. And enjoy what I believe you Yanks call your ‘double date’, and I hope it culminates in the most satisfying orgy."

“But we’re not on a double date with these girls,” I said, realizing even as the words left my mouth that once again I was falling victim to my own propensity for attempted honesty. “They’re just a couple of girls my friend and I ran into. They live down the hall from me, and —”

“They live down the hall from you.”

“Yes,” I said. “I really just don’t want my friend, you know, worrying about me.”

“Worrying about you.”

“Well,” I said, and once again I felt a fresh new flood of perspiration oozing from all my thousands of pores all at once. “Uh —”

She looked at me, I suppose trying to divine if I were lying, and, truth be told, at this juncture even I didn’t know if I were lying or not.

Her cigarette in its black holder had burned down and gone out. She pulled out the stub and dropped it to the floor. Then she pointed the mouthpiece of the holder at my face.

“This ‘friend’ of yours,” she said. “He also is not a pansy?”

“No,” I said. “He’s not a pansy.”

“And he’s with these two attractive girls you say.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Two very attractive girls.”

“Pretty attractive,” I said.

“He’s with two extremely attractive girls,” she said. “Doing what? Sitting in a booth or at the bar?”

“Well, they were dancing, actually,” I said.  

“Dancing you say? Perhaps the Charleston, or the Lindy Hop?”

“I think it was more of a free-form thing,” I said.

“The Boogaloo perhaps?”

“Possibly,” I said.

“So, to sum up,” she said. “This pal of yours is dancing the Black Bottom with two ravishing young girls and you really think, you honestly believe he’s waiting with bated breath for your return?”

“Well, I don’t know about bated breath,” I said.

“Oh, dear Porter,” she said. “Do you honestly think he cares if you’re just a tiny bit late, or indeed if you ever show up?”

She moved closer to me, so that her breasts were now pressed firmly against my ribcage.

“Um, well,” I said, “I just, um —”

“And don’t you think he might — provided of course he is a true friend and not a begrudging viper — don’t you think he might be happy for you that you are in the company of a beautiful and ardent woman such as myself?”

She touched my cheek, the stubble on my cheek, with her fingertips. I noticed that her fingernails were painted red.

“I didn’t really think of that,” I said. “But, still, it seems kind of rude just to go off and not come back.”

“You must think me a frightfully importunate bitch,” she said.

“No,” I said.

To make matters worse I now began to feel the first faint quiverings of an erection.

“I’m such a fool,” she said. “Throwing myself at a man simply because he is a handsome brooding young poet. And I know I would only make you miserable. And myself too, it goes without saying. And yet we could possibly have some good moments, could we not?”

“Well, sure,” I said, and I moved back a half step, so that she might not notice my erection which was growing slowly but surely of its own free will. “I mean, anything is possible, but —”

“That damned word again.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Porter,” she said.

She took a half-step closer to me.

“Yes?” I said.

“One damned drink,” she said. “Don’t make me beg. I will beg if you force me to, but I beg you not to force me to beg.”

“I won’t,” I said.

“Oh good, so you’ll at least have one drink with me.”

“All right,” I said. I knew I was beaten. And, after all, there really was no pressing urgency. She was right. Josh probably wouldn’t miss me. He was the son of God. He had a lot more to think about than me and my little problems.

She put her arm in mine. She gave me a yank, and pulled me toward the bar. My leg had not miraculously cured itself, and so I limped, and I was now further hobbled by the almost full erection I was now possessed of.

To be honest, I really felt as if I could use a drink at this point.

(To be continued, under a doctor’s supervision.)

(Kindly look to the right-hand column of this page for an up-to-date listing of links to all other published chapters of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train To Heaven©. Now appearing also in the Collingswood Patch™: “South Jersey’s widely-acknowledged cynosure of belles-lettres.”)

tales of the hotel st crispian: chapter 96

2013-02-13T19:10:00.001-05:00

"Kid Conrad"

by Horace P. Sternwall

edited by Dan Leo*

illustrations by roy dismas and rhoda penmarq

Frisco Johnny Ramirez took an envelope out of his inside suit-jacket pocket. The envelope had been folded four times, and he unfolded it and then poured a white powder out of it onto the little ormolu table between his arm chair and Conrad’s.

“You don’t mind, do you kid? I like a little snow now and then to give me a little lift, a little pick-me-up on top of the booze.”

“I could ask Williams to make us some fresh coffee if you like,” said Conrad.

“No thank you, Conrad,” said Johnny. “You see, I drink too much coffee it gives me gas.”

“I understand,” said Conrad.

“You like a line, pal?”

“A line?”

“Of snow. The Bolivian marching powder. The Big C.”

“I’m sorry, Johnny,” said Conrad. “You must forgive me, but I suppose I have lived a rather sheltered life. So, to be honest I have no idea what you’re talking about, in what I can only suppose is a sort of netherworld argot or patois.”

(Please click here to read the entire sordid chapter.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 333: dynamite

2013-02-09T02:16:00.001-05:00

On a rainy August night in 1957, in the ladies’ room of a mysterious subterranean bar in Greenwich Village, our hero Arnold Schnabel and his faithful companion Big Ben Blagwell have made the acquaintance of three ladies: Becky Thatcher, Hester Prynne, and Brett Ashley...

(Kindly go here to read our preceding thrilling episode; potential completists may click here to return to the very beginning of this Gold View Award™-winning 53-volume masterpiece.)

“At this point in my life the only thing that keeps me going is the prospect of a new chapter of Arnold Schnabel’s monumental chef-d'œuvre.” — Harold Bloom, in The AARP Literary Supplement.

When Ben and I came out of the ladies’ room the women were already almost halfway down that dim narrow hallway, all three of them talking at once and the heels of their shoes making a sound like someone tossing handfuls of marbles on the concrete floor.

Ben put his big hand (again, and I hope for the last time, the only size hand he had) on my arm.

“Arnie,” he said, in a low voice, a low voice for him anyway, which wasn’t really all that low, but I don’t suppose the women could hear him over their own voices and the clacking of their heels, even if they were interested in what he had to say. “Arnie, listen, maybe we ought to decide ahead of time. Which one do you want?”

“Which one?”

“Yeah, which one do you like? Becky, Hester, or Brett”

“Well, Ben, like I said, I really should be going soon.”

“Yeah, but just for argument’s sake, which one do you prefer. I mean if push came to shove. If you had to choose with a Luger to your head.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “The blond one?”

“Becky? Are you sure, Arnie? I don’t know, pal, she seems like a handful, you ask me.”

“Uh,” I said.

“Hey, let’s talk while we walk,” he said. “We’re losin’ em.”

It was true, the women were already turning the corner of the hallway, still chattering away together, the sound of their footsteps growing slightly less reverberant now, like the sound of a tennis table tournament rising up from the windows of a basement parish hall as you walk by, alone, headed towards a tavern in which you hope no one will try to talk to you.

Ben kept his hand on my arm and pulled me along.

“So which one?” he said. “I mean setting Becky aside just for a minute. You don’t like Hester, do you?”

“She’s the one with the red letter A on her dress, right?”

“Right. Don’t know why she has that letter A on her dress if her name’s Hester Prynne.”

“Well, if I remember correctly, I think it's because in this novel she was in, The Scarlet Letter, she —”

“Arnie, save the goddam literary talk for later. I don’t really care why she’s got a goddam A on her dress. I care about what’s under the dress.”

“Oh,” I said. “You like her?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I like them women what’s got spirit, ya know? So you don’t mind if I take her?”

“No, sure, go ahead,” I said.

“Thanks, buddy. I’ll do you a favor sometime.”

“No problem,” I said.

We came to where the hallway turned to the right. The women were up ahead, still chattering amongst each other.

“Hold on a sec,” said Ben. He still had his hand on my arm, and he yanked me to a standstill.

“Here’s my dilemma,” he said.

“A dilemma?”

It seemed odd to me that Ben would have a dilemma, but he lost no time in elucidating.

“I like that Becky, too,” he said. “That gal’s got sand. And I like a gal with sand. I like a gal with sand and I like a gal with spirit, too.”

“I don’t know what to say, Ben.”

“Don’t say nothing. Except do me a favor. You mind taking Brett?”

“The English girl?”

“Yeah. She ain’t bad-looking, Arnie. She ain’t bad looking at all. She’s got a figure like a fine racing yacht, all smooth lacquered curves but with like a built-in speed and power, like. I don’t sound like a queer, do I?”

“No, not at all.”

“She’s class, Arnie. Class all the way. Which is good for a classy guy like you. But me? A dame like that I’m always worryin’ about breakin’ one of her little Dresden china teacups, y’know?”

“Sure.”

“Try gettin’ these big sausages into one of them delicate Dresden teacup handles.”

He took his hand off my arm finally, and, putting his cigarette in his mouth, he held out both his hands splayed before my face, knuckles outward. For the first time, and I have no idea why it took me so long to notice this, but I noticed that he had a single letter tattooed on the first knuckle of each of the first four fingers of his hands; the ink was a faded navy blue, and crossed here and there with scar tissue, but with his hands held out so close to my face I could read the letters easily enough, even though they were upside down. On his right hand were the letters DYNA, on his left hand: MITE.

“Yes, I can see how you would have problems with delicate china, Ben,” I said.

He took the cigarette out of his mouth and lowered his hands.

“The thing is, Arnie,” he said, “high class English broads like that give me the willies. I always feel like they’re gonna correct my grammar or something on account of my unfortunately curtailed education which was not a very good one even before it got its curt tailed, ya wanta know the God’s honest truth.”

“Um,” I said.

“So you’ll take Brett then.”

“I don’t think I’ll be taking any of them, really, Ben.”

“Okay, fine, but if you do take one, take the English broad, okay?”

“Uh,” I said.

“Good. That’ll leave Becky and Hester for me, and who knows, if I’m lucky, I mean really lucky, maybe I can get them to go for one of them menageries like they have in them French post cards. You know what I’m talkin’ about, right?”

“Um,” I said.

“Word of advice about these English broads though, Arnie. Word of advice. Get ready for a wild ride. I mean a buckin’ bronco ride if ya know what I mean. These high class English dames, once you finally get ‘em on the springs you gotta be prepared to go the full fifteen rounds, but with the gloves off and no Marquess of Queensberry rules, neither.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Just a word to the wisenheimer.”  

“Sure,” I said.

Ben turned his head and looked down the empty hallway.

“Shit,” he said. “We lost ‘em. Come on, pal, let’s catch up.”

I started to limp along (because limping was the only way I was able to ambulate myself, due to the pain which persisted in my right leg, even during those passages in which I have neglected to mention it). But once again Ben grabbed my arm.

“Wait, Arnie, not so fast.” He slowed me down to a very moderate hobble. “You never want to seem too anxious with dames, Arnie. Act like you really don’t give a damn.”

“Well, like I said, Ben,” I said, “I really don’t think I’m going to, you know —”

“Good, that’s good, Arnie, nonchalant like that. Like you’d just as soon go home and have a quick date with Lady Five Fingers while you’re drinkin’ a cold pint can of Rheingold and leafin’ through one of them men’s adventure magazines, ‘cause ya know why? ‘Cause then you don’t have to worry about talkin’ to her in the morning. Good. Keep playing it like that.”

“The thing is, Ben —” I said. We were coming out into the bar area again, between one end of the crowded bar and the bandstand, on which the combo were still playing, loudly, with a bunch of people in front of the bandstand waving their arms and shouting.

“What, Arnie?” said, or shouted, Ben. “You were saying something? Where’d those babes go?” He had let go of my arm and was now swiveling his head left to right, looking out at the people in front of the band, the people dancing, the people crowded up at the bar.

I put my mouth near the side of his head and shouted.

“My friend Josh is waiting for me upstairs.”

“Josh?” said Ben. He was still looking through the crowd, smoking his cigarette, searching for the girls.

“My friend Josh,” I said. “I don’t think I told you about him.”

Ben turned and looked down at me (I might have mentioned this about a thousand pages back, but Ben was about four inches taller than me).

“You have a friend?”

“Yes,” I said. “Believe it or not.”

“Not that I’m jealous, Arnie.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I mean, I got other friends, too.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Plenty of friends. Shipmates, mostly. The brotherhood of the sea.”

“Sure.”

“Who is this guy. You don’t mind my asking.”

“My friend Josh?” 

“You know who I’m talking about.”

“Yes,” I said. “Josh. Well, he’s a young guy, sort of young, well, early thirties I guess.”

“Good looking guy?”

“Yes, he’s pretty good-looking,” I said. “Girls seem to like him.”

“So he’s no pansy is what you’re saying.”

“No,” I said. “No, I don’t think he’s a, uh —”

“Pansy.”

“No, I don’t think he’s a pansy, Ben,” I said.

“I’m really glad to hear that. Not that I got nothing against pansies. I am a seafaring man, Arnie, and one thing about us old sea-dogs, we are very shall we say liberal on the subject of pansies, and you would be too if you ever shipped out on a slow tanker from Frisco to Jakarta.”

“Well, he’s not a pansy, anyway, Ben,” I said.

“What’s his rice bowl?”

“Pardon me?”

“His gig. His métier like the Frogs say.”

“What’s he do for a living?”

“Yeah,” said Ben. “I mean if he does anything for a living.”

“Well,” I said. “This isn’t easy to say.”

“He’s not like a secret government agent, is he?”

“No, nothing like that,” I said.

“Wait. He ain’t one of them international soldiers of fortune, is he?”

“No,” I said. “It’s not that.”

“Spit it out, Arnie. I can take it.”

“He’s the son of God,” I said. “Jesus. Jesus, Christ I guess is his last name. But he goes by the name of Josh. Because he’s traveling incognito, like a regular man.”

“Christ,” said Ben.

“Yes,” I said. “Jesus Christ.”

“No, I meant Christ, as in Jesus Christ, I mean like holy shit.”

“Okay.”

“I mean, Jesus Christ, Arnie. You’re friends with Jesus? Christ?”

“Yes,” I said. “I know it’s hard to believe.”

“Christ,” said Ben.

“Yes,” I said.

“I mean Jesus,” said Ben. “Jesus Christ. I’m impressed.”

“Um,” I said, “well —”

“So what’s he like?” He took a drag on his Sweet Caporal, then slowly exhaled, while he took another look around the bar, then he looked at me again. “Good people?”  

“Yeah,” I said.

“Good guy, huh?”

“Yes.”

“But then I guess he would be. Son of God and all.”  

“Yes,” I said.

“He ain’t like stuck up or nothing?”  

“No, not really.”

“Not that you could blame him if he was,” said Ben. “Being the son of, you know, the Big Guy.”

“I think humility is one of his basic precepts,” I said.

“I say you chaps.”

Suddenly Brett was standing in front of us. She was tall for a woman, and she still held her cigarette, or maybe it was a new cigarette, not that it matters, in her cigarette holder, which was black and shiny.

“Hey,” said Ben.

“Um,” I said.

She looked at me, through a living plume of cigarette smoke.

“A lady could die of thirst,” she said.

Ben drove his elbow into my side, but it didn’t hurt too much.

(Continued here, not to do so would be cruel.)

  (Special thanks to Kathleen Maher, who has sand.)

(Please turn to the right-hand side of this page to find a current listing of links to all other available chapters of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train To Heaven©. Now published also in the Collingswood Patch™: “South Jersey’s last toehold on literacy.”)  

tales of the hotel st crispian: chapter 95

2013-02-07T16:34:00.001-05:00

"in the war"

by horace p. sternwall

illustrated by roy dismas and eddie el greco

a rhoda penmarq studios™ production

(click here for the entire thrilling episode...)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 332: heroes

2013-02-01T22:09:00.001-05:00

Let’s rejoin our hero Arnold Schnabel and his stout companion Big Ben Blagwell, here in the ladies’ room of a rather unusual subterranean Greenwich Village bar, on this hot moist August night in the year of our lord 1957…

(Please click here to read our previous exciting episode; go here to return to the very first chapter of this Gold View Award™-winning 61-volume autobiography.)

“Here’s the thing, Charlie. Arnold Schnabel’s universe is not just ‘another’ universe. No. The point is it’s a so much more fun universe.” — Harold Bloom, on The Charlie Rose Show.

“Aw, Lady Brett,” said Ben, “I think if you gave me a chance I could slow it down to an easy loping gallop, if you know what I mean.”

“Ha ha,” said Brett.

“Oh, please,” said Becky.

“Men,” said Hester.

I didn’t say anything.

“So,” Ben said, and he reached under the tails of his Hawaiian shirt and hitched up his belt a little. “What say you ladies let me and Arnie, I mean, wait, not Arnie, what was it you wanted to be called, Arnie? Harper? Archer? Wagoner?”

“Porter,” I said. “Porter Walker.”

“Porter,” said Ben. “What say you ladies let me and my pal Porter here buy you gals a libation or two or three?”

The women all looked at each other before saying anything. Then they somehow seemed to come to a silent agreement that it was Becky who should answer for all of them.

“Look,” she said, “you’re not some kind of weirdo, are you?”

Ben smiled at this. He looked at me and shrugged, then took his pack of Sweet Caporals out of his shirt pocket. I neglected to mention it before, and this is why I would make a terrible novelist, but he had come out of the stall without the still-lit cigarette stub he’d gone in there with. I can only presume he had flushed it down the toilet. I do know that it doesn’t matter what he did with it, and so I will now resume my narrative with Ben taking his Musso and Frank’s matches out of the same shirt pocket and lighting a new Sweet Caporal, and, after exhaling a great cloud of smoke into the already smoky ladies’ room he coughed once or twice and then said:

“Let’s face it, Becky, if I was a weirdo, would I admit it?” He paused, looking each of the ladies in the face in turn. “In my vast experience of all kinds of humanity in all my many travels and adventures on land and sea and through peace and war, it’s been my experience that the one thing a real weirdo will never do is admit to being a weirdo. Until he has you chained up in his dungeon that is. Once he’s got you helpless in his dungeon, then he can and probably will brag about being a weirdo till he’s blue in the face — but not until then.”

“Okay,” said Hester. “So in other words you very well might be a weirdo.”

“There’s only one way to find out,” said Ben. “And that’s to have a cocktail with me and Arnie I mean Porter.”

“No,” said Hester. “There is another way.”

“And what would that be?” said Ben.

“We could read or at least take a skim through your book.”

“Or one of his books, if he is in fact a recurring character,” said Brett. “And something tells me he is.”

“What?” said Ben.

“You don’t even need to skim through it,” said Becky. “Just read the front and back cover copy, that’s all you need to do.”

“What the hell are you broads talking about?” said Ben. He was smiling, but in a tentative way, as if he wasn’t sure if the ladies were joking or not.

“Oh dear,” said Brett. “He doesn’t know.”

“Oh dear God,” said Becky. “He’s a newbie. A rookie.”

“Hey, I think you’ll find that Ben Blagwell is no rookie,” said Ben. “I been around the block a few times. Quite a few times. Why, I’ve had adventures that would make your hair stand on end, even you, Hester and Becky, with your long hair and all. Stand straight up it would.”

“Who’s going to tell him?” said Hester.

“Does his friend know? Young dark and broody over there?” said Becky.

“I think he knows,” said Brett. “Don’t you know, Mr. Porter?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think I know. I mean, I think I would be more sure if I were better read, but to be honest I mostly just read books about guys who are caught in a deadly whirlpool of deceit and flaming passions, that sort of a thing.”

“Not much of a classics man,” said Hester.

“No,” I said. “Not at all.”

“So do you even know who I am?”

“Arnie,” said Ben. He wasn’t smiling any more. “Will someone please tell me what the hell everybody is talking about?”

“Answer my question,” said Hester, ignoring Ben and addressing me. “Doesn’t this scarlet letter A on my dress signify anything to you?”

“Oh,” I said. “Now I remember. The Scarlet Letter. By, uh, Nathaniel — somebody —”

“Hawthorne,” said Hester. “So you have read the book.”

“Well, I read the Classics Illustrated comic,” I said. “You see it was on the troop ship in the army, and I ran out of books about guys caught in vortexes of deadly passion, and they had these comics, so —”

“Hey, Arnie, or Porter,” said Ben. “Excuse me, but you can tell your life story some other time. Now fill me in on the gen, buddy. ‘Cause I’m getting a little uneasy here. Reminds me of this time I got trapped in this castle of torture by these leather-clad Nazi SS harlots, and —”

“Ben,” I said. “The thing is, everybody in this place is a character from a book.”

“What?”

I looked at the ladies.

“I mean,” I said, “I think that’s the case, right?”

“Of course,” said Hester.

“What did you think?” said Becky.

“Isn’t it an absolute yell of laughter?” said Brett.

“And,” I continued, speaking to Ben, “you and I are fictional characters also.”

“What?” said Ben. “Like in a book or one of them magazines?”

“Yes,” I said.

“This is where all the great characters go,” said Hester.

“Even the really villainous ones,” said Becky.

“They’re the best ones, anyway,” said Brett. “Give me a good nasty villain any old time.”

“I sort of agree,” said Becky. “Just no weirdos.”

“No,” said Brett. “No weirdos. They grow tiresome very quickly.”

“And we still don’t know that this fellow here isn’t a weirdo,” said Hester, gesturing toward Ben with her cigarette.

“He’s not,” I said. “He’s more the seafaring, hearty, brawling adventurous type.”

“And how do we know you’re not a weirdo,” said Hester. “And maybe you’re covering for your friend, who’s also a weirdo.”

“Well, I hate to admit it,” I said. “But I guess I might as well. In fact I feel duty-bound to do so —”

“Oh, get to the point,” said Becky. “We can’t stand in this ladies’ room all night. We’re wasting valuable drinking time.”

“I’ll say,” said Brett. “I’m absolutely dying of thirst.”

“I want to know what Porter here was going to admit,” said Hester. She reached over to the sink and tapped her cigarette ash into it. “What is it, Porter?”

“I’m a weirdo,” I said.

“No, really?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Arnie,” said Ben. “I mean Porter. You are not a weirdo. A little strange, maybe, a little eccentric, yeah; a little odd, sure — but you’re not a fucking weirdo. Pardon my French, ladies.”

“What do you do?” Hester asked me.

“My character in the book I’m in?”

“What else?”

“I’m a poet,” I said. “It’s kind of embarrassing, but — a sort of darkly handsome, brooding young poet.”

“Oh, that’s not so bad,” said Hester.

“Sure, darkly handsome brooding poet is fine,” said Becky.

“The broodinger the better,” said Brett.

“As long as he’s not a boring brooding poet,” said Becky.

“Are you a boring brooding poet?” Hester asked me.

“Yes, I’m afraid so,” I said.

“Arnie,” said Ben, “Porter, whatever — you’re not boring. I mean, you may not be the liveliest guy at the party, but you are not a bore-ass.”

“Maybe I’m not,” I said, “but Porter’s kind of boring I think.”

“Okay, you two have lost me,” said Becky. “And why do you keep calling him Arnie if his name’s supposed to be Porter.”

“Well, ya see, Becky,” said Ben, “the thing of it is, in real life Porter’s actually this guy named Arnold Schnabel.”

“What?” said Hester.

“Huh?” said Becky.

“Arnold who?” said Brett.

“Schnabel,” said Ben. “Arnie Schnabel, nicest guy ya’d ever wanta meet, too. Sure, a little quiet maybe, a little bit of a loner like, but no weirdo, not really. And not too boring, either. Just a little like dry maybe.”

“All right, I’m confused,” said Brett.

“Me too,” said Becky. “Confused and, yes, getting bored. Let’s get those cocktails.”

“Yeah, might as well,” said Hester. “Come on,” she said, glancing from Ben to me. “We’ll let you boys buy us a round.”

“Now we’re talking,” said Ben. “Come on, Arnie, Porter, I mean.”

“Ben,” I said, “the thing is I should really be getting along.”

“But you just fuckin’ got here.” He quickly turned to the ladies. “Pardon my French, ladies. I spend a lot of time at sea, and in the kind of rough uncouth dives that seamen frequent, so you know how it is.” He turned back to me. “Arnie,” he said, in a low voice. “We got three good-lookin’ babes ready to have a drink with us. Don’t be a goddam stick in the ass.”

“But I’m supposed to be somewhere,” I said. “Back at Mr. Arbuthnot’s, because I said I would get his cat some —”

“Arnie,” said Ben. “Mr. Arbuthnot is in that other world, right? The one where you’re Arnold Schnabel.”

“Yes,” I said, “and in fact you’re there too, Ben, and that’s one thing I can’t figure out, which is are you the same Ben who’s waiting back at Mr. Arbuthnot’s, or —”

“Excuse us, gentlemen,” said Becky. “You two can stay here and hash out whatever little character conflicts you have going on there, but we’re hitting the bar.”

“No, wait, Becky,” said Ben. “Listen, Arnie, Porter,” he said. “Let me just ask you a question. What are the odds that your old world is working in the same, whaddyacallit, time thing, relative, you know, the time, fuckin’ —”

“Time continuum?” I said.

“Right, exactly,” said Ben. “Time continuum. You read them science fiction magazines, too.”

“Sometimes,” I said. “If there’s nothing else around.”

“How the hell you know your world is on the same time continuum?”

“You know,” I said, “in fact, now that I think about it, I don’t think it is. Because the first time I came here —”

“What, to this boozer?”

“Well, to this world —”

“Oh, I get it. So you’ve been in this, um, world before —”

“Only a couple times,” I said.

“Only a couple times he says,” said Ben. “You slay me, Arnie, Porter, whatever your name is.”

“Anyway, the first time I came here it happened when I was sleeping, and I had all these adventures —”

“Adventures.”

“Yes,” I said, “I had all these adventures that seemed to go on for a really long time, like enough to fill a good-sized novel, but when I finally woke up and came back to my own world it was only the next morning. In my world that is.”

“Okay, we’re going now,” said Becky.

“No, wait,” said Ben. “Look, Arnie, don’t you see? You can take your time here, have a ball, and then when you go back, if you can get back, maybe only like a milli-second will have passed.”

“Yeah, I suppose you’re right,” I said. “But still —”

“You want to get back.”

“Well, it is my world,” I said.

“Okay. I can understand that,” said Ben. “But I’m not talking about staying here and going off on some crazy exotic ‘adventure’ or nothing, God forbid. I’m just talking about having one lousy drink.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Maybe two.”

“Well —” I said.

 “One drink and then we’ll see how we feel.”

“Okay,” I said. “One drink.”

“Maybe two,” said Ben. “Nothing is written in stone.”

“Can we please go now?” said Becky.

“Yeah, we’ve missed almost an entire set, too,” said Hester.

“Rick Martin is the most,” said Brett. “That cat can blow a mean trumpet.”

“Right, let’s go then,” said Becky.

I remembered my manners at the last second and quickly limped over and opened the door for the ladies.   It suddenly occurred to me that Josh and my other so-called friends were waiting for me in the bar upstairs, and might be wondering where I was. Or, come to think of it, maybe they weren’t thinking about me at all.

(Continued here, for the sake of all humanity.)

(Kindly look to the right-hand column of this page to find an up-to-the-minute listing of links to all other published chapters of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train To Heaven©. Now appearing also in the Collingswood Patch™: “South Jersey’s last bastion of fine literature.”)

  

tales of the hotel st crispian: chapter 94

2013-01-31T10:58:00.003-05:00

"The Ballad of Holy Joe"

by Horace P. Sternwall

edited by Dan Leo*

illustrations by danny delacroix and eddie el greco

Holy Joe came into town
with just a bible and a sixgun.
He preached the word to all and one,
heathen, Jew, and Christian,
and if the people heeded the word
he let them live, but if they didn’t, well,
he let them have a bullet in the heart
to send them on their way to Hell.

No, Joe didn’t give a good goddam
for their excuses or rationalizations;
he just cocked the hammer on that .45,
and pulled the trigger, and then,
ignoring the womenfolks’ lamentations,
went to the saloon and had lunch.

But then one day he came on the gang
of bandits known as the Wild Bunch.
He preached them the word,
out in their hide-out in the canyon
called Robbers Roost. And when they laughed
at the word he pulled his famous .45,
and he was fast, but not fast enough;
fourteen bullets tore into the flesh of Holy Joe,
and just like that he was not alive.

Whether he went to Heaven or Hell I do not know.
But that was the end, the brutal sudden end,
of the man they called Holy Joe...

(Click here for the entire rip-snorting chapter.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 331: three gals

2013-01-25T22:42:00.000-05:00

Our hero Arnold Schnabel as usual is on a quest, and as usual the quest has somehow become a quest within a quest within a quest, and so on, perhaps a bit further on than we dare to contemplate at the present moment. Let’s rejoin Arnold and his boon companion Big Ben Blagwell, somewhere in the below-decks regions of a curious Greenwich Village bar known as Valhalla, on this fateful hot and rainy August night in the year 1957…

(Kindly go here to read our previous thrilling episode; click here to return to the seemingly unprepossessing beginnings of this Gold View Award™-winning 39-volume masterpiece.)

“The other night I dreamt I died and had passed over not to extinction, nor to Heaven, nor Hell, nor yet even to Purgatory or Limbo, but into the universe of Arnold Schnabel.” — Harold Bloom, on The Steve Harvey Show.

“Oh, God,” was all I said, and I suppose my despair was plain on my face. Because I knew that even if I turned and ran like a spastic ape in the opposite direction, to where supposedly the men’s room was, that something would prevent me from voiding my bladder, which was all I wanted to do, all I needed to do, more than I had ever needed or wanted anything in my life, in any of my lives, ever, or would ever want, in any possible or impossible life, ever, for all eternity, and if there is anything beyond eternity, then beyond that.

“Jeeze, buddy,” said this woman in black, and her hair was almost black, too, “is it really that bad?”

“He’s really gotta go, really bad,” said Ben.

“He looks absolutely ashen,” said the woman. “And not in an attractive way, either.”

“Oh, God,” I said, again, preparing myself to turn and run, yes, like a spastic ape, in the opposite direction, only to be thwarted, I knew, again.

“Wait,” said the woman.

I waited while she leaned forward and looked at her face in the mirror, pressing her lips together and then pouting them. Then she turned the bottom of her lipstick tube, retracting the lipstick.

“Look,” she said, as she picked up the lipstick cap from the back of the sink and replaced it on its matching golden tube, “if you’ve got to go that badly, just use one of these stalls.”

There were three of them, the stalls, waiting, right there before me.

“No, I couldn’t,” I said. “It’s okay, I’ll just —”

“If you don’t mind my saying so,” she said, as she opened a black purse and dropped the lipstick into it, “I’m not sure you’ll make it to the men’s room.” She clicked the purse shut. “Now don’t be a fool. Go use one of these toilets before you suffer an unseemly and malodorous accident.”

“Well, uh,” I said.

“Fine,” she said, and she took a drag of her cigarette, “it’s up to you. But that middle one is quite unoccupied. I know, because I just used it.”

“Go ahead, Arnie,” said Ben. “The lady said it’s okay.”

“This is a bohemian establishment,” said the woman. “We are not tied down by Puritan mores and customs here.”

“You heard the lady,” said Ben.

“Well,” I said.

“Go,” said the woman. “You look pathetic. I hate to see anyone looking that pathetic.”

“Go, Arnie,” said Ben.

Without another word I went ahead and lurched over to the middle stall, opened the door, closed it, latched it behind me, bent down and lifted the lid and the seat of the toilet, unzipped my jeans, and then did what I had to do, experiencing immediately what was perhaps the greatest relief, the greatest pleasure I had ever experienced in any of my lives, although I realize this might not be saying much. But as I reveled quietly in this state of ecstasy, trying my best not to groan or mutter thickly as I had heard plenty of other men do in hundreds of men’s rooms, even then I thought: Can this be? Can a simple biological function really be the greatest pleasure imaginable? My only honest answer was yes, yes, a thousand times yes, as what seemed like a good quart of warm liquid streamed out of me.

But could it be that this solitary pleasure was more intense, more profound, than that which I had achieved in congress with Elektra? She whom I had last been with only the previous evening (and, yes, with whom I had then performed the act of darkness, thus obviating any good my confession earlier that day had done), even though it felt like approximately forty-five months ago?

“Good lord, buddy, how much beer did you drink, anyway?”

It was a woman’s voice, shocking me out of my reverie, coming from the stall adjoining on my right.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but the lady outside said I could use this, uh, um —”

“I heard it all,” said the voice.

I could hear laughter outside the stall, emanating from Ben and the woman in black.

“Oh, leave the chap be,” said a woman’s voice from the stall on my left. “I like a man who can put away his beer.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, to everyone. “I should be finished soon.”

“Don’t hurry on our account,” said the voice to my right.  “Take your time, Invisible Man,” said the voice to my left, which had an English accent.

Then both voices broke into laughter, and the laughter of Ben and the lady in black, which had ceased a couple of moments before, resumed.

I tried to block it all out, and to concentrate instead on what I was doing, although, if I am to be honest, the brief dialogue I have just transcribed and its attendant laughter lessened almost entirely the psychological if not the physical pleasure of the function my body was performing.

At last it ended. I shook away the last few reluctant drops and put the damned thing away and zipped my jeans.

But I didn’t leave the stall right away. I felt the need of a private and solitary moment. I was drenched with sweat, which I could now feel cooling on my back, under my sodden shirt and my almost sodden seersucker jacket. The laughter had died away, but I could hear quiet voices outside the stall, Ben and the lady in black, conversing in almost whispering undertones.

My leg still hurt. Now that I thought about it, the locus of pain had been shifting all evening, from the front of my knee to the tendons behind it, to the upper front part of the calf to the lower rear of my thigh, almost as if the pain had a mind of its own. I didn’t care, though. After the agony of what I had just gone through trying to find a place to urinate, nothing else save some complex medieval torture could possibly compare.

I realized I was breathing deeply, nearly panting. The air was not fresh, but it was certainly fresher than in most men’s rooms I had ever been in. And there was perfume in this thick warm air, and not the sort of perfume in the air that writers talk about when they’re describing nice sunny days in the country, but actual perfume, the kind that women wear.

The toilet to the right of me flushed, and then mere moments later the one to my left flushed also.

I heard the ladies getting up, the rustle of clothing, the opening of stall doors, and then there was more conversation outside, not the low murmuring I had heard just before from Ben and the lady in black, but loud and clear badinage; however, through a skill I have somehow developed over the years I was able without even thinking about it to transform the words and meaning of the conversation into an undifferentiated babble, like overheard conversation in a dream, or like what one hears from the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant when the waiter shoves the swinging door open carrying his tray with your steaming bowl of wonton soup.

But then there came a pounding on the stall door.

“Hey, Arnie!”

It was Ben’s voice.

“Yes?” I said.

“You okay, buddy?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then what’s the hold-up?”

“Nothing.”

“Then flush the toilet and come out of there. Stop being a weirdo.”

I heard a high rippling of feminine laughter.

The toilet had one of those old-fashioned overhead tanks, with a wooden handle hanging from a chain. I pulled it, the water flushed. I put down the seat and the lid. I turned and unlatched the stall door and opened it.

They were all out there. Ben and the woman in black, and the two women who belonged to the disembodied voices I had heard from the adjoining stalls, at least I could only assume these were they. One was a young woman with long blond hair, in braids, wearing an old fashioned-looking print dress with puffed-out short sleeves. The other one had short dark hair combed back and parted on the side, and she wore a white jersey with a tight white skirt.

“Not bad,” said the woman with the short hair. She was smoking a cigarette in a holder. She was the one with the English accent.

“He’ll do in a pinch,” said the girl with the braids. She was smoking a cigarette too.

“You two are incorrigible,” said the the woman in black, who still held the same cigarette she had been smoking earlier, unless it was a new one.

“That’s my pal,” said Ben, who was still standing there near the stall, smoking the tail end of his cigarette. “Ladies, meet Arnie — or should I call you, what is it, Mortimer?”

“Porter, actually,” I said.

“Porter,” said Ben. “Porter it is then. Well, Porter, allow me to introduce you to these ladies, and a nicer and prettier three gals you’re never gonna meet.” He pointed to the woman in black. “This is Hester.”

“Hello,” I said. I noticed she had a red A embroidered on her dress, just above her heart, even though her name was Hester. Perhaps A was the first letter of her last name.

“Hester Prynne, right?” said Ben.

“Yes,” she said. (Well, there went my theory about her last name.) “Very pleased to be introduced formally to you at last and under less strained conditions, Porter.”

“And this is Becky, right?” said Ben, gesturing with his cigarette stub at the blond girl.

“Becky’s the name, don’t wear it out,” she said.

“Didn’t catch your last name, sweetheart,” said Ben.

“Because I didn’t say it,” she said. “But Thatcher’s my last name, and don’t wear that one out either, big boy. Hiya, Porter. Glad to see everything came out okay.”

“Heh heh,” said Ben. “I like a girl with spunk. And this tall drink of cool water is Lady Brett.”

“Lady Ashley, actually,” said the woman with short hair. “But, please, Mr. Porter, do call me Brett.”

All three of the women were standing close together by the room’s only sink.

“I’m very pleased to meet you all,” I said. “And I apologize for barging into the ladies’ room like this. And I thank you for letting me use the, uh, the, you know.”

“Toilet,” said Becky.

“Right,” I said.

“And now I’ll go,” I said.

“Aren’t you forgetting something,” said Hester.

Instinctively I patted my pockets. Yes, I still had my wallet.

“I mean I hope you’re going to wash your hands.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” I said. “It’s just that I didn’t want to, you know —”

“Ask us to move out of the way?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s probably it, or at least mostly it.”

“What’s the rest of it?” she said.

“A host of psychological quirks and impairments far too numerous and tedious to go into right now,” I said.

A pause ensued which was awkward for me if for no one else. Then Hester spoke, after taking a drag on her cigarette.

“I like this guy,” she said.

“Me, too, sort of,” said Becky.

“I told you he was a clever guy, didn’t I?” said Ben.

“I very much like Mr. Porter,” said Brett.

“You like every man,” said Hester.

“Yes, I suppose I do, actually,” said Brett. “So many men. And so dashed little time.”

“Let’s move out of the poor man’s way and let him lave his hands,” said Hester.

And they did move out of the way.

I limped over to the sink.

“Hey, ladies,” said Ben, as I turned on the water, “not to impose too much on your hospitality, but since we’re already in here, ya think I could use the toilet too?”

“It’s not going to take you a full ten minutes like your friend here, is it?” said Hester.

“Nah, not me,” said Ben. “Me, I’m fast when I go to the head, no horsing around.”

“Go,” said Becky.

“What a charming great hearty man,” said Brett “But I do hope we’re talking about liquid evacuation and not the solid kind.”

“Just need to take a quick number one, Lady Brett,” said Ben. “I’ll just be a minute, tops.”

“Please hurry,” said Becky. “We will miss you ever so much.”

“Our collective breaths will be absolutely bated,” said Hester.

And off Ben lumbered into the stall I had just evacuated.

A silence returned to the ladies’ room, or, if not a silence, then at least the absence of human voices, which is the next best thing.

I felt the eyes of the three women on me. I was rinsing my hands rather thoroughly at this point, after having washed them using plenty of soap from the wall dispenser.

“Hey, Porter,” said Becky. “Your hands are clean already. You’re just wasting water.”

I turned off the tap, shook my hands into the sink. I looked into the mirror and saw someone else, a good-looking, but also sad-seeming young fellow who needed a shave. And then I remembered that I was someone else now, this preposterous fictional character, Porter Walker.

“To your right,” said Hester.

“Pardon me?” I said, looking at her in the mirror.

“The paper-towel thing. It’s to your right,” she said.

“Ah, thank you,” I said.

“Oh, yeah,” came the deep voice of Ben, reverberating from the middle stall, accompanied by the unmistakable wet sound of a man urinating heavily into a toilet. “Ahhh, Christ. Goddam. Ahhh.”

So, my friend Ben was a men’s room groaner.

I turned the crank on the paper-towel roller, tore off a sheet, and began to dry my hands.

“Ahhh, damn it,” said Ben. “Ahhh, Christ.”

“Men,” said Becky.

“Why do we love them?” said Hester.

“What else can we do?” said Brett.

“Ahh, shit,” said Ben. “Ahhh. Jesus.”

I crumpled up the paper sheet and tossed it in the nearby trashcan.

“Ah,” said Ben’s voice. And the sound of urination finally began to lessen and cease, but in fits and starts. “Yeah,” he said. “Whooh!”

Finally the heavy tinkling ceased entirely.

“Oh yeah,” said Ben. “Yeah.”

There fell a brief silence, and then the toilet flushed.

Ben came out of the stall, just zipping up his dungarees.

“What’d I tell ya?” he said. “Quick, right?”

“I hope, dear boy,” said Brett, “that you don’t do everything so quickly.”

(Continued here, because we have now gone well past the point of no return.)

(Please turn to the right-hand side of this page to find a current listing of links to all other available chapters of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train To Heaven©. Published also in the Collingswood Patch™: “South Jersey’s finest and perhaps only source of literary culture.”)

tales of the hotel st crispian: chapter 93

2013-01-23T10:01:00.003-05:00

"a penny in the pistachio machine"

by horace p sternwall

illustrated by roy dismas and rhoda penmarq

(go here for the entire thrilling chapter!)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 330: buddies

2013-01-18T23:07:00.002-05:00

In a strangely selective subterranean barroom in Greenwich Village our hero Arnold Schnabel has encountered his old friend, that bold seafaring adventurer, Big Ben Blagwell...

(Please click here to read our previous chapter; go here to return to the only vaguely-remembered beginnings of this Gold View Award™-winning 69-volume memoir.)

“The Greeks have their Homer, the English have Shakespeare; the Germans have Goethe, the Russians their Tolstoy and their Dostoyevsky; and, yes, France has its Proust. But we — America, or rather I should say the United States thereof, we have our Arnold Schnabel.” — Harold Bloom, in his “Books Can Be Cool!” column in Tiger Beat.

“Arnie,” he said, “is that you?”

I looked at him for two seconds without saying a word, and then it hit me.

He was the same old Ben, my old friend and companion in adventure (even though by one standard of measuring time I had only met him that very morning), but I however had changed bodies entirely, once again.

“Yes, Ben,” I said. “It’s me. Arnold.”

He wore his usual outfit. The Hawaiian shirt, the crushed and sun-bleached yachting cap, the dungarees; and as usual he was unshaven, with maybe a weeks’ worth of shiny ginger stubble. In fact he looked pretty much the same as the last time I had seen him, in another universe, back in Madame Chang’s chambers in Singapore. He had a cigarette in his mouth, undoubtedly a Sweet Caporal, and a big blood-orange drink in his hand, probably a Planter’s Punch with a float of “151” rum.

“How did you know it was me?” I said, or, rather, shouted, because we were right in between the jazz combo and the bar, and surrounded by yelling and laughing people.

“How did I know it was you?” he said. He took his big hand (the only kind of hand he had after all) off my arm, made a fist of it, and gave me a play-punch on the jaw that only knocked me back a step or so. “It’s that walk of yours, buddy.” 

“My walk?”

“Yeah, your walk,” he said. “I mean, everybody’s got a distinctive walk, right?”

“I guess so,” I said.

“Some more so than others. And you, my friend, you got a very distinctive walk.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, look, Ben —”

“It’s like, on the one hand it’s like you’re walking out to a wall to be shot by a firing squad.”

“Oh,” I said. 

“And on the other hand it usually seems like you’re limping, like you got a bum wheel and you’re in like physical pain.”

“Well, I did hurt my leg,” I said. “You see I tripped and fell earlier tonight, and I am in pain, somewhat.”

“Sorry to hear that. Tripped and fell, huh?”

“Yes, I mean I don’t think it’s anything too serious. It only really hurts when I’m standing, or walking. It’ll probably get better eventually.”

“Let’s hope so,” he said. “Let’s hope so. I’m carrying around about a pound of kamikaze shrapnel in both my legs myself. What I do is just try not to think about the pain.” 

“I’m sorry, Ben,” I said. “I didn’t know —”

“But there’s another distinctive thing about your walk, Arnie.”

“There is?”

“Yeah. I don’t really know any other way to put it, but it’s kind of like you don’t want anybody to know it but you gotta go to the head to take a really, really wicked piss.”

“Well, I do, actually,” I said.

“Gotta take a wicked piss?”

“Yes,” I said.

He laughed, or coughed, it was one or the other or both, and he gave me a slap on the shoulder, but I managed to stay upright.

“Good ol’ Arnie,” he said. “Never a dull moment, hey, pal?”

“Not lately,” I said.

“So what’s your new whaddyacallit, persono-something?”

“Persona?”

“Yeah, like that.”

“Well, in this world I seem to be this guy Porter Walker, a young poet.”

“Handsome, too, I might add,” he said.

“So I gather,” I said. “You see, it’s a novel written by a woman — you know.”

“Oh, sure, I know,” he said. “Dames, they love they’re good-looking heroes, don’t they?”

“Yes,” I said. “I suppose so.”

“They do, Arnie, they do. At least when they write books they do. You might think a guy like me wouldn’t know about such things. But I read a lot of books. Out on the ocean. On them long sea voyages. And it’s true, mostly I like to read men’s adventure magazines and like Horace P. Sternwall novels and all, but sometimes I’ll pick up a book written by one of these ladies what’s lying around in the ship’s library. And they always got a handsome hero. Usually a handsome ‘brooding’ hero, y’know?”

“Well, I don’t really read those sorts of books too much, Ben, but —”

“You should, Arnie. You might learn something. About like the feminine mind. Their innermost secret desires and longings, and, like passions. You really should.”

“Yeah, I probably should,” I said, “but —”

“Of course in real life it’s different,” he said. He took a drag on his cigarette, and took a look around the bar, and then he looked at me again. “In real life dames settle for what they can get, just like men, Arnie. Just like men. They might want a handsome guy like Clark Gable. But in the end they settle for Wallace Beery if that’s all they can get. God bless their little hearts.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I guess you’re right, Ben, but, look, I don’t mean to be rude, but to be honest, I really have to, you know —”

“Take a wicked piss?”

“Yeah,” I said. “So, look, let me go find the men’s room, and I’ll see you when I come out.”

“Arnie,” he said.

“Yes?”

He took another drag on his cigarette, then took the cigarette out of his mouth and exhaled, slowly, looking at me.

“Think about it, Arnie,” he said, finally. “You may be this ‘Walker Porter’ guy —”

“’Porter Walker’, actually,” I said.

“Whatever, Porter Walker, Porky Pig, Peter Piper, it don’t matter — you’re still Arnie, right? Deep down in your gut and in your brain. In your — whaddyacallit —”

“My soul?”

“Exactly. Deep down in your soul. You’re still the same old Arnie. Right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“God love ya.”

“Um —”

“So, Arnie, bearing that in mind — who you really are, you, and not someone goddam else — you tell me what you think your chances are of you going into that men’s room and coming out without something disastrous happening? Tell me what the chances are you’ll come out at all, that you won’t wind up in some other fucked-up (pardon my French) universe? Go on, you’re an intelligent guy, you tell me.”

“Okay,” I said. “I admit my chances are slim that something disastrous won’t happen. But what can I do? My bladder’s about to burst.”

“Tell ya what, buddy, I’ll come with you.”

“Oh, no, you don’t have to do that, Ben.”

I only said this because I’ve always felt uncomfortable going to a men’s room with another man.

“It’s no problem, Arnie,” he said. “You’re my pal.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but, you know —”  “Anybody fucks with you, they fuck with me.”

“I appreciate that, Ben,” I said. “But, look, you’re, uh —”

“Come hell, come high water. Buddies. Through thick and thin.”  

“Yeah, well —”

“Through rivers of shit and oceans of piss. Pals to the bloody end.”

“Great,” I said. “But look, really, I’ll be okay. You just stay here and drink your drink.”

“This drink?” he said. And he looked at the drink in his hand. It was a big glass, a Collins glass, about three-quarters full of reddish-orange liquid, with a white straw in it.

“Yeah,” I said. “Relax and drink your drink, and —”

“Sure,” he said.

“And I’ll be right out,” I said.

“Wait. Hold on,” he said.

He lifted his glass, put the straw in his lips, and in three good slurps all the liquid was drained from the drink. Then he looked into it, stirring the cubes with a straw.

“Dead fly in there,” he said. “Just once I’d like to drink one of these bastards and not get a free dead fly with it. So, okay, let’s hit the head, buddy.”

“But I really am okay to go by myself,” I said. “Why don’t you order another drink, Ben, and then when I get back —”

“Can it,” he said. “I’m sticking with you, pal. And anyways, maybe I need to take a leak, too.”

“Really?” I said, I don’t know why.

“Sure,” he said. “One thing about me, I practically always need to take a leak. Except maybe if my ship’s been torpedoed out from under me and I’m floating around the South China seas in a rubber raft with no water for a week, a scenario like that let’s say.”

“Right,” I said.

“Okay, then.”

He made a fist again and gave me a little punch on the shoulder, but I remained on my feet.

He turned to a tall bearded man in a dark frock coat and a top hat standing at the bar behind him, and he held out his Planter’s Punch glass.

“Hey, Ahab,” he said. “Take this, will ya, and get me a refill. Planter’s Punch with a float of ‘151’. Get one for my friend here, too, and I’ll cover you when we get back rom the head.”

“Cross my palm with silver first and then I will order you your libations,” said this Ahab man. “But not before then.”

He was smoking a pipe with a long black stem, and he held a pewter mug in his hand. Or at least a pewter-like mug. He took a drink out of it, and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Y’know, Ahab,” said Ben, after a slight pause, “despite what you may think, it wouldn’t exactly kill you to pick up a round now and then.”

“I believe the price for two Planter’s Punches with floats of ‘151’ rum would be two dollars,” said this Ahab.

“Okay, forget it,” said Ben. The man hadn’t taken the empty glass, so Ben reached past him and put it on the bar. “I’m sorry I asked.”

“I am not a free-drink dispensary,” said this Ahab guy. “Despite what you may have heard in your fo’c’sle scuttlebutt.”

“Yeah, sure. Come on, Arnie,” said Ben, as if it were me holding up the show. “Let’s go drain the main vein. And maybe when we come out we’ll find a different spot at the bar. Somewhere where the assholes ain’t so tight.”

“I heard that,” said this Ahab man.

Ben turned and glared at the man.

“Ben,” I said. “Look, I really have to go.”

“Okay, pal,” he said, and before he could hit me on the shoulder again I started limping off toward this passageway right beyond the end of the bar.

“So, Arnie,” said Ben, doing a little hop and skip to catch up to me, and I could feel the floorboards buckle as he did so, “what’s the deal with this crazy universe, pal?”

“Look, Ben,” I said, “again, I don’t want to be rude, but I really can’t talk right now. I just really need to, you know —” 

“Pee,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

We had turned left down this narrow dim hallway behind the bar area, and pretty soon we came to a brick wall with two other passageways going off to the left and right.

“Which way we go?” said Ben.

“You haven’t been to the men’s room yet?”

“Arnie, would I ask which way if I had already gone?”

“No, sorry,” I said. “I think it’s to the left.”

“You’re pretty sure?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m positive this guy said it was to the left.”

“So let’s go left.”

So we went left down this other hallway, which seemed about twice the length of the one we had just passed through. There was only one naked lightbulb in an overhead fixture, about halfway down the hall, and the walls were bare, worn, unpainted brick, old and brown, and damp-looking.

At last we came to a door. My leg hurt, but the pain was nothing compared with my need to urinate. Maybe Ben’s legs hurt too. I didn’t ask.

“Why isn’t there a men’s room sign on the door?” asked Ben.

“Someone stole it,” I said.

“Oh, yeah, you can see where it used to be,” said Ben, and he pointed with his cigarette at a pale green rectangle on the door, surrounded by the deeper, brownish green of the rest of the door.

“Well, let’s go, then,” said Ben. “What are we waiting for?”

“Yes, you’re right,” I said.

I turned the doorknob and pulled the door open, and it was a bathroom, all right, but there was a woman in it, a woman in a black dress standing at the sink with a cigarette in one hand while she applied scarlet lipstick to her lips from a golden tube she held in her other hand. She turned and looked at me and Ben, standing there. And I don’t know why we were just standing there.

She looked from one to the other of us, and up and down. Then up again. She took a drag on her cigarette, and then finally she spoke:

“I think you have the wrong john, fellas.”

(Continued here, despite the so-called dictates of common sense.)

(Kindly turn to the right-hand column of this page and scroll down to find an up-to-date listing of links to all other available chapters of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train To Heaven©. Now also appearing in the Collingswood Patch™: “South Jersey’s last and best hope for literacy and culture.”)

"A No Good Dame"

2013-01-17T02:08:00.005-05:00

“What a bunch of schlemiels I was thinking. Sitting around playing poker while a good looking dame like me was sitting over here on the couch drinking highballs, smoking Sweet Caporals, and cooling her heels. I guess it was then that I decided I was gonna take them for every penny they were worth, and that included Johnny — 'Cleveland Johnny' Doyle, my so-called fiancé — the big chump.”

A No Good Dame, by "Helen P. Steinmetz" {Horace P. Sternwall} (Acme Books, 1953; one printing only, never republished).

(Scroll down the right-hand side of this page to find a listing of links to the opening passages of many other immortal but oddly out-of-print books by Horace P. Sternwall.)

"Port of Shame"

2013-01-17T01:35:00.006-05:00

“Listen, Mom,” I said, “I promise I’ll go to mass tomorrow. But I have to go now because me and some of the other guys are gonna go make a novena.”

Port of Shame, by Horace P. Sternwall (Ace Books, 1955; currently out of print).

(Scroll down the right-hand side of this page to find a listing of links to the opening passages of many other fine but sadly-obscure works of Horace P. Sternwall.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 329: Tom

2013-01-12T00:12:00.001-05:00

Let’s rejoin our hero Arnold Schnabel, currently inhabiting the corporeal form of “Porter Walker, handsome young bohemian poet”, a character in Ye Cannot Quench (Harcourt, Brace; 1960) by Gertrude Evans, the author of such other forgotten bestsellers as Green My Eyes, Black My Soul; The Temptation of Reverend Cartwright; and An Empty Pit Where Once Was My Heart...

(Kindly go here to read our previous chapter; in case you’re home with the grippe and have nothing to read, just click here to return to the faraway beginnings of this Gold View Award™-winning 62-volume masterpiece.)

“I should have suspected I would catch cold last week when I dined at the local Red Lobster and my waitress kept having to blow her nose. Fortunately I have my Kindle and Arnold Schnabel to keep me company as I sit with a rug on my lap by a roaring fire and with a hot toddy close to hand.” — Harold Bloom, in his “Bookish Chat” column, The Olney Times.

“What’s your moniker, fella?” said this Tom guy.

Moniker. That word again, which, except in movies or TV shows, I had never heard spoken before yesterday, that yesterday which felt like more than four or even forty years ago.  

“I say what’s your handle, partner,” said Tom. “Unless you’re one of these mysteriously unnamed characters, or maybe like an anonymous first-person narrator?”

“No,” I said. “I have a name.”

“And if it’s no secret?”

“Well, I suppose it’s Porter, Porter Walker,” I said.

“Porter Walker? Sounds like a high-class, kind of fancy name. You sure this book you were carrying wasn’t one of these critics’ darling literary affairs?”

“I doubt it,” I said.

“Well, my name’s Tom,” said the young fellow, and he held out his hand. I gave him mine, which was only a little numb from this Paul guy’s big mitt squeezing all the life out of my arm.

“Hi, Tom,” I said. It seemed like he was all set to perform one of those long and lingering handshakes, possibly combined with a contest to see who could squeeze the other’s hand the hardest, so I quickly pulled mine away again. “Now if you could just direct me to the men’s room —”

  “Already?”

“That’s the only reason he come in here,” said the big guy, Paul. He was filling his big corncob pipe from a leather pouch that I think he had pulled out of his pants pocket, but it was so big I wasn’t sure how he could have stuffed it into one of his pockets, even though they were pretty big dungaree pockets. But then I also didn’t care.

“So, Porter,” said Tom. “This true, that you only came in just to use the men’s room?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so,” I said.

“May I ask why you didn’t just use the men’s room upstairs?”

“Well, I was going to,” I said, “but then those guys accosted me —”

“The bore-asses?”

“Um,” I said.

“It was Melville, Cooper, Hawthorne, Emerson,” said Paul, striking a wooden match on the sole of his boot, and then putting the light to his pipe. “Them guys.”

“Damn those fellows,” said Tom.

“That’s what I said,” said Paul, drawing on that big pipe of his.

“Damn them straight to their bore-ass hell,” said Tom.

“Exactly what I said,” said Paul. He waved the match out and then tossed it to the floor. “More or less, anyways.”

“They keep this kind of shit up they’re going to lose their men’s room privileges entirely,” said Tom.

“Serve ‘em right,” said Paul, puffing in a contented-looking way on his pipe.

While all this was going on the jazz combo played, loudly, and the people packing this barroom shouted and laughed. No one cared about me and my little problems. Except for this Tom kid, and, maybe, this Paul guy.

“Tell me something,” said Tom, to me. “Why didn’t you just shove ‘em aside? These bore-asses.”

“Well, they had me surrounded,” I said. “And then two of them started fighting.”  

“Which ones?”

“I think it was the one called Emerson and that other one called Fenmore I think.”

“Fenimore,” said Tom.

“Right,” I said. “Fenimore.”

“So it got ugly, huh?”

“Yes,” I said. “I just wanted to get out of there, and, anyway, there were long lines for all the urinals.”

“And for the stalls, too?” 

“Yes,” I said. “It was very crowded. And it smelled really bad.”

“So you just beat a retreat.”

“Yes,” I said.

  “Nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I’m not,” I said.

“In a case like that no one’s going to call you a coward.”

“Well,” I said.

“You did what you thought best.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said, “but —”

“No one’s pointing the finger,” he said.

“Great,” I said.

“I wouldn’t say it’s great,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “But, listen —”

“It’s a shame it’s gotta be this way. Men’s rooms. Bore-asses. Toilet traitors. The whole damn thing’s a shame.”

“Uh,” I said.

“When I was a young boy it was so much simpler. I would just go off into the weeds.”

“Same with me,” said Paul. “Just go off into the trees. Nothing like it.”

“No lines,” said Tom. “No smells.”

“Just the clean fresh air,” said Paul.

“The sky above, the earth below,” said Tom.

“Just you and Mother Nature,” said Paul, except because of his accent it sounded more like “Mudder Nature”.

Tom took a little puff on his pipe.

“No bore-asses,” he said, looking at me.

“Not usually,” said Paul.

“So,” I said, “about this men’s room —”

“Oh, right, you do look like you gotta go,” said Tom.

“I do,” I said.

“I hope you’re going to stay for a drink.”

“I, um,” I said.

“’Course there’s no obligation. Not if you’re one of us.”

“Well, anyway —” I said.

“Oh, I guess you’re in a hurry.”

“I really am,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “Just head back that-away,” he gestured with the stem of his corncob pipe over his left shoulder. “Go past the bandstand and the end of the bar. You’ll see a cigarette machine. Right on the other side of it is a door.”

“Okay,” I said.

“But that’s not the men’s room,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “I guess that’s the office, or —”

“No, it’s not the office. Does it matter?”

“No, not at all,” I said.

“It’s the green room, where the musicians can relax between sets.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Have a drink and a smoke. Maybe even blow some reefer. It’s their business. They’re artists.”

  “Sure,” I said.

“So don’t go in that door.”

“I won’t,” I said.

“Don’t go in there,” he said. “Keep going just a little bit and you’ll come to a corridor going off to the left.”

“The left,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “But you don’t really have to remember that because it only goes to the left.”

“Okay,” I said. “So just go left down this corridor? Thanks.”

“Hold on, I’m not finished.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“A the end of this short corridor there’s a wall, but the corridor splits off in two directions, right and left again.”

“Okay.”

“Go left. Again.”

“Right,” I said.

“Left.”

“Right. Go left,” I said.

“At the end of this left hallway you’ll find two doors facing each other.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Take the door on the left. That’s the men’s room.”

“Okay,” I said. “The one on the left.”

“You got all that?”

“I think so,” I said.

“Basically you’re going to keep bearing left.”

“Right,” I said.

“Left,” he said.

“Right,” I said again. “Left.”

“I can say it all again if you’re not sure.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure,” I said. “But if I get mixed up there must be a sign on the door, right?”

“Well, there should be,” he said.

“There should be?”

“Should be and used to be. Except somebody stole it.”

“Someone stole the men’s room sign?”

“Stole it right off the door. The ladies’ room sign, too.”

“Oh,” I said.

I didn’t care. My bladder was about to burst.

“The men’s room sign showed a pointing dog.” he said. “And instead of saying ‘Men’ or ‘Gentlemen’, it said ‘Pointers’. Get it?”

“I get it,” I said.

“Ladies’ room had one with a sitting dog, and it says —”

“Setters,” I said.

“You’ve seen these signs before.”

“Yes,” I said.

He put the stem of his pipe to his lips and sucked on it, but apparently it had gone out. He looked into the bowl, then turned the pipe over and tapped it out on the forefinger of his other hand, letting the ashes fall to the sawdust below. Then he looked at me.

“I know what you’re thinking.”

  “You do?”

“You’re thinking, who would do such a thing? Steal a silly sign like that. Two silly signs.”

“I don’t care,” I said.

“You don’t care.”

“He don’t care,” said that big Paul guy.

This Tom kid just stared at me.

“Okay," he said. "So you don’t care. Fine. But listen. And listen good. There are people in here who might tell you I stole those signs. But I didn’t. My days of such mischievous, boyish pranks are behind me. You got that?”

“Yes,” I said. “But look, I really, really have to go.”

“No one’s stopping you. Go.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Maybe after you go we can have a drink. You can tell me your story. You probably already know mine of course.”

“Um,” I said.

“Maybe he ain’t well read,” said Paul.

“Look,” I said, “I’m sorry, but —”

“Okay, go. Go,” said this Tom kid.

I started to go.

“But just remember.” He pointed the stem of his pipe at my nose. “I didn’t take those signs.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Maybe Huckleberry stole them. Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. I’m not saying he did and I’m not saying he didn’t. But I am not responsible for his actions. Are we clear on that?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “Tell you what, after you finish your business let me buy you a drink.”

“All right,” I said. “Maybe.”

“Maybe, huh?”

  “Listen,” I said. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I really need to go to the bathroom. I can’t think about getting a drink afterwards now. All I can think about is getting to the bathroom before I have an accident.”

“I think you’re serious,” said this Tom kid.

“He serious,” said that big Paul guy. “He dead serious.”

“I think he is,” said Tom. “Okay, buddy. ‘Porter’,” he said to me. “Go. Go do your business.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I will.”

“You got those directions?”

“I think so,” I said.

“You better hurry then.”

Without another word I set off across the room, limping —because, yes, my leg still hurt — making my way through some tables all filled with drinking and laughing people, and up to the bandstand, which had a bunch of other people standing near it, listening to the music, and shouting encouragement and their appreciation to the musicians, and I was just about to go past the bandstand and the end of the crowded bar when someone grabbed my right arm, the same arm that that big guy Paul had just been hanging onto.

“Hey, pal, where you going?”

I turned.

It was Ben.

My friend.

Big Ben Blagwell.

(Continued here, and while strength endures.)

(Please turn to the right-hand column of this page for what may well be a current listing of links to all other published chapters of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train To Heaven©. Now also appearing in the Collingswood Patch™: “South Jersey’s last bastion of literacy.”)

tales of the hotel st crispian: chapter 92

2013-01-10T21:07:00.001-05:00

"blue moon"

by Horace P. Sternwall

edited by Dan Leo*

illustrations by roy dismas , danny delacroix and eddie el greco

*Associate Professor of Sumerian Literature, Assistant Water Polo Coach, Olney Community College; editor of How’s Tricks on the Outside? The Prison Poems of Horace P. Sternwall, Vol. 1; Olney Community College Press; underwritten in part by a generous grant from The Pep Boys: “Hey, you know you can’t afford a new car! Let Manny, Moe & Jack help keep that old jalopy of yours running just a little bit longer!”

"I say again, Mr. Sternhagen," bellowed Lord Wolverington, "don't you agree that youth is wasted on the young? Haw haw haw!"

Harold P. Sternhagen returned from the story (or was it a first chapter?) that had just passed through his brain, to the here and now, to this table in the Prince Hal Room of the Hotel St Crispian, and to the sight of the horrible gaping rictus of that old pansy Lord Wolverington across the table, to the leering wizened painted mask of his companion Miss Charlton, to the terrified pale face of that Michael fellow (or was it Henry?) squeezed in between those two ancient wrecks.

“Farmer” Brown clapped Harold on the shoulder, bringing him ever more fully into this world, the one people called reality...

(Click here to read the entire sad episode.)

"A Gal Named Elizabeth"

2013-01-10T04:19:00.001-05:00

Her name was Elizabeth, except you couldn’t call her Liz, or Betty, or Beth. You had to call her Elizabeth or else she would get pissed off. She was a real pain in the neck, and I don’t know why I fell in love with her. But I did, and I guess that’s why I’m writing this confession in this jail cell, instead of living the good life like I used to, working at Al’s Garage and living at Ma Jones’s boarding house over on Main Street…

A Gal Named Elizabeth, by Horace P. Sternwall, (Mammoth Books; 1955; paperback, 25¢; originally serialized in slightly different form as Call Her Elizabeth by “Horatia Sterne”, Romantic Crime Stories, Jan., Feb, March, 1954).

(Scroll down the right-hand side of this page to find a listing of links to the opening passages of many other works of Horace P. Sternwall.)

tales of the hotel st crispian: chapter 91

2013-01-09T17:27:00.001-05:00

"again"

by horace p sternwall

illustrated by roy dismas, konrad kraus and rhoda penmarq

editorial consultant: Prof. Dan Leo

i was down on my luck - again.

i had been played for a chump - again.

the wind was whipping down broadway - again.

i was headed for maisie's. she might be open.

she might not.

another bum passed me by. i didn't say nothing to him.

he didn't say nothing to me.

he disappeared into the night.

(click here for the whole sad story...)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 328: big guy

2013-01-04T23:10:00.002-05:00

Our hero Arnold Schnabel has entered the world of the now regrettably out-of-print novel Ye Cannot Quench (Grove Press, 1960) by Gertrude Evans, in which he has assumed the persona of “Porter Walker, young bohemian poet”. Let’s rejoin him as he tries to find somewhere to void his bladder, down in the lower bowels of a Greenwich Village basement bar called Valhalla, on a sultry night in August of 1957...

(Please click here to read our previous chapter; just in case you’re getting a little tired of rereading The Fellowship of the Ring over and over again and are in the market for a new literary obsession, then you may go here to return to the very beginning of this Gold View Award™-winning 57-volume memoir.)

“Once again I rang out the old year and rang in the new sitting by the fire with a glass of Taylor port, a Dutch Masters panatela, and a volume of Arnold Schnabel.” — Harold Bloom, on Person to Person with Edward R. Murrow.

Inside was what looked like yet another barroom, and this one was also packed with people, thick with smoke, humid, and hot, with a jazz combo banging away in the far right corner.

Was this perhaps a private room of some sort? I didn’t care. I had to go to the bathroom, and if this was a bar then it stood to reason it had to have a bathroom, a men’s room, a toilet, a hole in the floor, I didn’t care, at this point I would have gladly bellied up to an open window if the place had one, which of course it wouldn’t have, since this was a basement below a bar that was a basement bar to begin with.

I closed the door behind me and tried to look inconspicuous and casual. I believe I am good at looking inconspicuous, but then I’ve never been good at looking or needless to say being casual.

I took one limping step and then a big hand grasped my right forearm.

“Hold it, pal.”

It was a big guy, sitting on a barstool against the wall, a very big black-bearded guy wearing a dark blue watch cap and a faded red-and-white checked lumberjack’s shirt, with suspenders. He had a great big corncob pipe between his teeth and a pint bottle of Rheingold in his free hand.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He laid his beer bottle on a wooden ledge behind him, took a puff on his pipe, and then took the pipe out of his mouth.

“What are you sorry for?” he said. “You ain’t done nothing.”

Actually it sounded more like “You ain’ done nuzzin’,” like he had a slight French or French-Canadian accent.

“Well,” I said, “I mean, uh —”

“Not yet you ain’t done nothing,” he said.

“Um,” I said.

“You got a book?” he said. “I don’t see no book.”

“A book,” I said.

“Yeah. Where’s your book?”

“My book?”

“That’s right. One of them things with pages with words printed on ‘em. Didn’t you bring your book?”

My book. Did he mean the one I — as Porter Walker, the young bohemian poet — had written? What was it called? The Brawny Embraces?

“Well,” I said, “I did have my book earlier tonight, but you see, it’s still just in typescript form, because it hasn’t been published yet, but I think my publisher has a copy, um —” 

“Your publisher.”

“Yes, his name is, uh, Julian Smythe? Of Smythe & Smythe? Or maybe it’s Smythe & Son?”

“You didn’t bring no book.”

“Um, no, as I said, I, uh, had it on me earlier, the typescript that is, but —”

“I ain’t talking about no typescript. You’re telling me you ain’t got no book, that what you telling me?”

The veil fell. From my eyes that is.

Maybe he was referring somehow to that book Mr. Philpot had sold me, had more or less forced me to buy, what was its title?

“Wait,” I said, “I did have a book, I got it from Mr. Philpot?” 

“Mr. Philpot,” said the big guy. “You got one of his books?”

 “Yes,” I said. “Just earlier tonight, although God knows it seems like about nine months ago. Heh heh. You know Mr. Philpot?”

“Course I know Mr. Philpot. You think I’m some illiterate Canuck?”

“Oh, no,” I said, “I just wasn’t sure if, er, um — so, you know his shop too then?”

“Where is it?” he said.

“The shop?” I said. “Why, it’s just right up —”

“Not the goddam shop,” he said. “I know where Mr. Philpot’s goddam shop is. The book.”  

“The book,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “The book you claim you got from Mr. Philpot. Where is it.”

Where was the book?

“The book,” I said. I began patting my various pockets, with my one free hand, the left one, as he still held my right forearm firmly in his own enormous hand. “The book —”

“Was it a paperback book?” he said.

“No,” I said, “it was a, um —” I was still foolishly patting my pockets, “it was a, you know, a, uh —”

“A hardback book,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Hardback. Hardbound. Hard, uh.”

He still kept his big hand on my arm. It was a really big hand. (I might as well mention that my sore leg was still sore. It hadn’t gotten any worse in the last minute or two, but it hadn’t gotten any better. I’m not looking for sympathy, just striving for some sort of truth.)

“Is it a regular-size hardback book?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “Pretty regular, I guess.”

“So it ain’t one of them tiny little hardbound books, like you get at gift shops at the Chicago World’s Fair and like that with little sayings from Ben Franklin or Pascal?”

“No,” I said, “it was just a regular, you know, um —”

“Book.”

“Yes,” I said.

“How many pages?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Two hundred? Two-fifty?”

“So,” he said.   

He turned and knocked his pipe against the edge of the ledge behind him, letting the ash fall to the floor, which was covered with sawdust, I hadn’t seen that in a while. He stuck the pipe in the pocket of his workman’s shirt, and then picked up his bottle of Rheingold and took a good swig, emptying it. Then he put the bottle on the wooden ledge, which already had a half-dozen other empty Rheingold bottles on it. He wiped the whiskers around his mouth with the back of his hand and then looked at me. He had dark brown eyes, like a bull’s. He had never let go of my arm this whole time. I tried to keep my weight on my left leg, the one that didn’t hurt, at least not at this point.

  “So,” he said, again, “if it’s a two hundred-fifty-page hardbound book it ain’t gonna fit in one of them pockets of yours.”

“No,” I said. I don’t know why, but I gave each of the side pockets of my seersucker jacket just one more pat each.

“So where’s the goddam book, pal.”

“I just had it.”

“You just had it when?”

“Just a little while ago, when I came in the bar upstairs.”

“You had it when you come in.”

“Yes,” I said, “I’m sure I had it. And then, and then, um —”

“Take your time. Why you so nervous?”

“To be honest, I have to go to the bathroom.”

“What, you gotta pee?”

“Yes,” I said. “I really only came in here just to see if I could use the, uh, you know —”

“Sooner we get this straightened out, sooner you can go to the bathroom, pal. If we let you use the bathroom.”  (He pronounced it “batroom”, but I just can’t bear to transcribe his accent phonetically, so try if you will to bear in mind that he spoke with a French Canadian accent, if that’s what it was.)

“Okay,” I said. “Well, I had to go to the bathroom when I came in upstairs, and I know I had the book then, and I tried to use the men’s room up there, but —”

“You tried.”

“Yes, I tried, but there were these four guys in there, and they accosted me.”

“Four guys, accosted you.”

“Yes,” I said.

“What four guys.”

“Listen,” I said. “Do you think you could let go of my arm? You’re cutting off the circulation, and it’s growing numb.”

“I’ll just ease up on my grip a little,” he said, and, to be honest, he did. A little. “That better?”

“Yes,” I said. “But can’t you just let go of it?”

“Don’t tell me how to do my job, buddy. Nobody asked you to come in here.”

“Okay, I’m sorry,” I said.

What could I do, this guy was enormous, practically a giant.

“So who were these four fellas you say accosted you in the men’s room?” he said.

“Well, one was named Mel,” I said. “And one was named Matt, I think, no, Nat.”

“LIke Nathaniel?”

Because of his accent he said “Nataniel”, but I figured he meant to say Nathaniel.

“Yes,” I said. “Nathaniel. And this other guy was named Emerson, I believe, and the other one was, um — Penmore?”

“Penmore?”

“No,” I said. “That wasn’t it. Fenmore, I think.”

“You mean Fenimore?”

“Yes,” I said, “exactly. Fenimore. Anyway, these guys accosted me, all trying to shake my hand at once, and, well, I guess I dropped the book, it was all pretty confusing, and then this guy Emerson and the other guy Fenimore got in a fight, so —”

“Goddam those guys,” said this giant.

“Yeah, heh heh,” I said. “They were pretty obnoxious, really.”

“Goddam them straight to hell.”

“Um,” I said.

“Probably one of them stole your goddam book,” said the big guy. ”Lifted it right out of your goddam hand while they was all crowding around ya giving you the gladhand hail-fellow-well-met routine.”

“Maybe,” I said. “That’s possible.”

“Possible? Guys like that, professional bore-asses like Melville, Emerson? Hawthorne? Fucking Cooper? Not just possible but fucking probable.”

I didn’t know who or what he was talking about. I didn’t care. My leg hurt, and I just wanted to pee.

“So, look,” I said. “Do you think I can just use the men’s room?”

“Not so fast, pal.” He gave my arm, my forearm actually, a squeeze with that huge hand. People always say “hamlike” when they talk about really big hands, but usually a big hand isn’t really that big, but this guy’s hand was, and not just one of those one-pound hams that come in a tin container either, but a regular Sunday-dinner ham. “You say you got that book from Mr. Philpot.”

“Yes, I did,” I said.

“You did say that, or you did get the book from Mr. Philpot.”

“Both,” I said.

“And how do I know you’re not lying?”

“Maybe you could call him up?”

The guy stared at me. For maybe thirty seconds. The jazz band played. People shouted and laughed, but at least they weren’t shouting or laughing at me, not that I knew of, anyway. The big man opened his mouth a little as if he were going to say something, but then he said nothing, and the seconds ticked by, perhaps another thirty of them, although it felt like many more than that, and then finally he said:

  “So, what you’re telling me is that the fucking onus is on me to find out about the book. I’m supposed to get up, go all the way over to the bar over there, ask the bartender for the phone, and then call Mr. Philpot up. That’s what you’re saying, right?”

“Well,” I said, “He was in just a little while ago, so chances are he’s still there —”

“This guy giving you any trouble, Paul?” said a young guy who had just come over. He had a corncob pipe in one hand, but it was a normal-size one, not like that big thing that the big guy had.

“No trouble, Tom,” said the big guy, who apparently was named Paul. “Nothing I can’t handle anyway. Says he got a book from Mr. Philpot, except them bore-asses up in the men’s room upstairs stole it off him.”

“Well, I didn’t say for sure they had stolen it,” I said. “It’s just that I think I may have left it there, somehow, or, like, dropped it, or —.”

“Or had it stolen,” said Paul.

“I guess that’s a possibility,” I said.

“What kind of book we talking about here,” said this Tom guy. He had tousled, dark-blond hair, with a cowlick, and he was dressed very casually, in a worn blue work shirt and bluejeans, but then this was Greenwich Village after all. “This like one of these literary novels?”

“Um, well, I haven’t actually read it yet,” I said, “but I believe it’s about some guy who gets trapped in a web of passion, and betrayal, of fear and suspense.”

“Like caught in a deadly whirlpool of dread and despair?”

“Yeah, like that,” I said.

“It got a title?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s called, uh, um, The Ace of Doom, no — The Ace of Death, that’s right, The Ace of Death.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. Ace of Death.”

“Who by? Woolrich? Goodis? Fredric Brown?”

“Um, no,” I said. “It’s by Horace, um — what’s his name — Horace, uh —”

“Horace P. Sternwall?”

“Yes!” I said. “Exactly. Horace P. Sternwell.”

“Sternwall,” he said.

“Right. Sternwall. Horace P.,” I said. “Sternwall.”

This Tom kid just stared at me for about minute, taking an occasional puff on his pipe. I guess he was trying to figure out if I was lying or not. I tried to look honest, which is not easy when your leg hurts and when you really have to urinate. But finally he looked at that big Paul guy, and said:

  “Okay, Paul. He’s cool. He can come in.”

And, at last, the giant let go of my forearm.

I shook my hand and arm out, just to get the blood flowing back into my fingers again.

(Continued here, doggedly.)

(Kindly turn to the right-hand column of this page to find a rigorously current listing of links to all other available chapters of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train To Heaven©. Now also published in the Collingswood Patch™: “South Jersey’s lone voice of civilization crying in the wilderness.”)

tales of the hotel st crispian: chapter 90

2013-01-03T10:41:00.001-05:00

"the man who buys the mona lisa"

by manfred skyline

illustrated by konrad kraus and rhoda penmarq

editorial consultant: Prof. Dan Leo

cosima watched from the window as fortescue and carol got into the cab and the cab pulled away from the curb and headed downtown.

williams was waiting behind her. she turned to face him.

"did you say i had a couple of phone calls tonight?"

"indeed i did, miss. i wrote down the names and numbers. i can get them now, if you like."

"no rush. anybody you didn't know?"

williams hesitated. "one call was from mrs babson - young mrs babson, whom we both know very well."

"yes, only too well. and the other?"

"the other was from a gentleman who identified himself as mr slomo. he gave the impression of wanting to introduce himself. so i don't know if you are already acquainted with him."

"slomo?" cosima seemed momentarily startled. then she laughed. "it was probably a joke. from bucky burnside or one of his pals. or pete palomine."

"it didn't sound like mister burnside or mister palomine. of course i could be mistaken."

"well, if they were joking they would have been trying to disguise their voices."

"of course."

cosima stared at williams. "was there something else?"

"well, miss. perhaps i am being a bit presumptuous - "

"oh, williams, williams, presume away, please."

williams laughed politely. "but the name 'slomo' was not entirely unfamiliar to me."

"oh?"

for complete episode, click here

An Arnold Schnabel new year's...

2012-12-31T22:48:00.004-05:00

As a special holiday treat, here's a classic Arnold Schnabel poem, first broadcast here four years ago. Originally published in the Olney Times for January 4, 1963; two weeks later he would be in a padded cell at the Philadelphia State Mental Hospital at Byberry.

If the present poem appears particularly gloomy even for this time of the year, please remember that this particular new year's eve was a mere two months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which the destruction of mankind suddenly loomed as a very actual possibility, and concerning the horror of which Arnold Schnabel had already versified so beautifully.

(The “Chew Avenue” of the title refers to the location -- on the corner of Chew and Lawrence -- of the local Veterans of Foreign Wars post, now sadly defunct.)

New Year’s Eve on Chew Avenue

It’s New Year’s Eve, it seems we’ve made it,
If only barely, through another year;
The terror, if not gone, has abated
Into a dull and grey persistent fear.
My mother’s sound asleep by eleven,
So I go to the VFW,
Shove to the bar of this drunkard’s heaven,
And say, “Pat, if you please, I’ll trouble you
For a Schmidt’s, backed with an Old Forester,
And keep them coming till I say not to,
Or until you throw me out; whatever;
Do what your conscience says that you’ve got to.”
I take that first sacred drink of cold beer:
“Happy new (let’s hope it’s not our last) year.”

(Republished with the permission of the Arnold Schnabel Society of Philadelphia, PA. Kindly look to the right hand side of this page for a listing of links to many other fine poems by Arnold Schnabel, many of them suitable for recitations and toasts at family, business or social gatherings, weddings, and funerals during this holiday season. Be sure also to visit our ongoing serialization of Arnold's classic memoir Railroad Train to Heaven.*)

*"I read a page or two every night before retiring." -- Bertrand Russell

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 327: doors

2012-12-29T01:15:00.000-05:00

Once again our hero Arnold Schnabel is on a mission, or, perhaps more accurately put, a mission within a mission within a myriad of missions, to wit, to make it to the men’s room of a curious Greenwich Village bar called Valhalla, and there to relieve himself, if only temporarily, which really is the most that any of us can hope for in this world, or, in Arnold’s case, in whatever world he happens to be in, which at this moment is that of the sadly-obscure novel Ye Cannot Quench (Alfred A. Knopf, 1960) by Gertrude Evans, author of such other unfortunately out-of-print novels, such as Keep the Crock Pot Simmering, A Girl Called Fortunata, and Passion’s Pristine Promise.

(Kindly go here to read our previous episode; the young and the young at heart may click here to return to the very beginning of this Gold View Award™-winning 62-volume masterpiece.)

“A day without Arnold Schnabel is like a day without food or drink.” — Harold Bloom, on Last Call With Carson Daly.

Great.

I should have guessed.

The men’s room was packed, just as packed as that front barroom was.

There were lines of coarsely muttering and chattering guys waiting to get into the urinals and the stalls. It looked like there was barely even room enough to squeeze into one of the lines. The air was hot and thick, like hot dirty vaseline, a dishwater grey from tobacco smoke, and it looked like practically everybody in here was smoking — cigars, cigarettes, pipes, and even, unless I was mistaken, reefers. Oh, and yes, the place reeked, and not just of tobacco and urine and anal excretions and exhalations, but of a thick stench of what could only be called desperation. And, crowded near the two sinks, on the side closest to the door, were those four dodgy men I had seen in here earlier, what were their names? Mel, Nat, Ralph, Something Something-more — it all seemed so long ago, and in a sense it was. And all four of them came right up to me at once and huddled in a tight half-circle around me, all of them trying to shake my hand at once.

“Mr. Walker!” said the one guy, the one with a big beard, “so jolly to see you again!”

“Um, uh, hi,” I said, “uh —”   What was his name?

“Herman,” he said. He was pumping my hand in both his hands. “You remember me, right? But call me Mel. Everybody calls me Mel. Short for Melv—”

But right then this other guy, the one with a big droopy moustache, I was pretty sure it was Nat (but then maybe it was Matt?), pulled Mel’s hands away from my hand and replaced them with his own.

“Are you having a splendid time, Mr. Walker?” he said, looking in an earnest way right into my eyes. “Despite what society and the laws of man might dictate?”

“Uh, yeah, pretty good, um — Matt?”

“Nat,” he said, and I couldn’t help but notice that the whiskers of his moustache were a little wet with spittle on their ends. “Not Matt. Nat. Short for Nathaniel.”

“That’s what I meant to say,” I lied.

For the first time really it dawned on me that all four of these guys were dressed in a very old-fashioned way, like the way men used to dress in Civil War days, or even earlier. (Not that I was an expert in these matters, but I had seen movies like Gone With the Wind and Young Mr. Lincoln.)

“You remember me, don’t you pal?” said the one guy whose name totally escaped me. Nat wouldn’t let go of my right hand so this guy took my left and started shaking that in both his hands. This one was clean-shaven, but he needed a haircut. They all needed haircuts.

“He doesn’t remember you,” said the fourth guy, this was the one with the bushy long sideburns. “Do you, Porter?”

“No, uh, I remember you,” I said to the third guy, trying to seem like I wasn’t lying, and hoping he wouldn’t challenge me to actually say his name.

Then this fourth guy, I was pretty sure his name was Ralph, but I wasn’t entirely sure, he put his arm around me and put his hand on my right shoulder, I suppose because I didn’t have a free hand for him to seize and start pumping.

“Good old Porter,” he said, kneading my right shoulder with his one hand and then grabbing the biceps of my left arm, and practically hugging me to his chest. “Tell him his name, Porter.”

“His name?” I said.

“Yes, you said you knew his name — go ahead, say it!”

He was smiling broadly as he said this.

“Um,” I said.

“Go ahead, Porter. Tell him his name,” he said.

“His name is,” I said.

“Yes, go on,” said this guy Ralph, if that was his name, still smiling as if merrily, but in this way that didn’t show his teeth. He had a very long nose, and its tip almost touched my cheek.

“I fear he knows not his name,” said Mel, who looked like he was trying to figure out an opening to try and get closer to me again, what with two of these guys hanging onto my hands and this guy Mel massaging my shoulder vigorously with one hand while squeezing the biceps of my other arm like a clamp with his other hand. “I fear the name has been lost, as a piece of flotsam sucked into one of the great whirlpools of the chill waters of the Bering Sea.”

“Is it Barrymore?” I said.

“Ha ha, Barrymore he says! Barrymore!” said Ralph.

“Barrymore’s close!” said the guy who was obviously not named Barrymore. He shoved his face quite close to mine, looking into my eyes, and he said, “Fenimore. That’s what you meant to say, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said. “I meant to say that. Fenmore.”

“Fen-i-more,” he said. “With an i.

“Right. Fenimore,” I said. “I, um, made a, uh —”

“A mere slip of the tongue,” said Fenimore.

“Slip of the tongue my fundament,” said the Ralph guy.

“Fuck you, Emerson,” said Fenimore.

“And fuck you if you can’t take a joke,” said the guy who was apparently named Emerson, so I guessed I had been wrong and he wasn’t Ralph after all.

“How’s this for a joke?” said Fenimore, and suddenly he let go of my left hand and swung a quick right hook at Emerson, who was still holding onto my arm and shoulder. The punch must have hit him solidly on the jaw, because he fell straight backwards, pulling me with him, and with me dragging along this Nat guy, so that all three of us fell back against the inside of the men’s room door and then we all fell down to the floor in a thrashing pile.

My bad right knee hadn’t been hurting me so badly the past few minutes, or perhaps it had been hurting the same all along, but the pain had been eclipsed by the discomfort arising from my need to urinate; now, however, as I fell to this knee, once again I felt a sharp stabbing pain, much as if a rusty old railway spike had been driven into my kneecap. I couldn’t help but let out a shout of agony.

“Nice one, Fenimore,” said Mel. “Real classy.”

“Rafe here asked for it,” said Fenimore. “He’s always acting so high and mighty, him and his transcendentalism, but he’s also always ready to stick the needle in just because a fellow has a slip of the tongue and gets my name slightly wrong.”

The other two men and myself were all trying to stand up again, and getting in each other’s way, but finally I managed to grab onto the door handle with my right hand, and haul myself up, trying to keep my weight on my left leg. This Rafe or Ralph guy was still hanging onto my left arm, but with both hands now. I gave him a pull to help him up, but as soon as I did he just shoved me back against the door and stepped forward and said to Fenimore, “I used to pronounced my name 'Rafe'. But people thought that was pretentious, so now I pronounce it 'Ralph'.” He was rubbing his chin now, where Fenimore had punched him. “Ralph, like R-A-L-”

“No matter how you pronounce it, you're still pretentious,” said Fenimore.

“Pretentious, huh? How pretentious is this, wise guy?” and with that he took another step forward and threw a roundhouse right at Fenimore, who managed to duck back before the fist could hit him.

“Hey, Porter,” said Nat, who had made it to a kneeling position, and was holding a hand out toward me. “Little help?” He was smiling under his droopy moustache, but I knew he just wanted an excuse to grab my hand again and never let go.

I’d had enough. I ignored Nat’s extended hand, stepped around him, and pulled on the door handle. The door opened, although I could only get it open a foot or so because Nat was in the way. I started to squeeze through the opening.

“Hey, wait, Mr. Walker,” said Mel, “where are you going?”

“Yeah, don’t go,” said Nat. “They always carry on like this.”

I went out the door, with all four of them yelling after me.

I had two ways I could go, to the left, towards the back room, or to the right, back the way I came. I went right, limping badly, still in pain, the men’s room door closing behind me, the voices of those four losers suddenly muffled as the door closed.

I hobbled back down the narrow hallway, past the door marked “Ladies”. My first inchoate idea was just to leave this place entirely. I could run (or shamble, since I was unable to run in my present condition) across the street to one of the two bars that I knew were on the other side, or, perhaps even better, and safer, maybe just find a dark alleyway or areaway that I could pee in.

But then I turned the corner at the end of the hall, and I saw the door with a sign that said “Basement No Admittance”.

I don’t know why I stopped and turned the knob on that door. It clearly said “No Admittance”. Maybe it was because of all the music and noise coming from that front barroom, and I just didn’t want to have to face all those people again. And maybe, just maybe there was a staff restroom down in the basement. Or a sink, a drain, a dark corner, something or someplace into which or in which I could relieve myself before I wet my jeans. If the door was locked, well, then so be it, I would just fight my way through that mob in the front bar, go outside, and take it from there. But in the meantime there was no harm in just turning the door knob, maybe. So I did. I turned it, there was a satisfying click of a bolt, I pulled, and the door opened, onto a staircase lit only by a bare lightbulb in the low ceiling at the foot of the steps.

I took a deep breath and started down, holding onto the worn wooden rail that was there and taking it one step at a time, favoring my bad leg. It didn’t hurt quite so badly now. It was more like someone had pulled the railway spike out.

At the bottom of the stairs was a space not quite as small as a coffin, with two closed doors, one directly ahead, one to the left. On the right was only a bare old brick wall. The door ahead had a hand-painted sign on it that said “Sub-Basement”, and suddenly I remembered what Sam Clemens had told me about that place, that it was where the really boring writers were condemned to, and from which they were only allowed to come out of to loiter in the men’s room an hour or so every few weeks, writers like Emerson, and Nat, and Mel, and Fenimore. In fact this was probably where I, as a boring writer in my own right, was going to end up as a permanent resident someday. I definitely didn’t want to go down there, not yet, not until I had to, so I tried the knob on the other door. It wasn’t locked, and I opened it. It was dark in there, but, I thought, that might be a good thing. If it was dark that meant that no one was in there. So I stepped in, keeping the door open with one hand, and felt inside the doorway for a light switch. I found one, and another bare ceiling bulb came on. This was just a small room, it looked like a broom closet, and in fact there were a couple of brooms of different types in there, some brushes and a dustpan, a mop and bucket, some rags in a pile on the floor, some bottles and jars of cleaning products on shelves, some lightbulbs, boxes of toilet paper and paper towels. But there was another door, straight ahead, a closed door. I thought I could hear music and voices behind it, but I figured the noise might be coming from the barroom which was directly above. I closed the stairway door behind me, and put my hand on the doorknob of this other door. I turned it. it wasn’t locked.

I thought about it for a second. This could be trouble. But then crossing the street could be trouble. Getting out of bed in the morning could be trouble. It was just a door. And I really had to go to the bathroom.

For a second I considered just going ahead and peeing in this little room, this broom closet or whatever it was. But that wouldn’t be very nice for whoever came in here next, probably some poor old Negro man who had already had a hard life. He didn’t need to deal with something like that when all he wanted to do was to come down for a broom or a mop or something.

So I opened the door.

(Continued here, now that the Mayans have been proven wrong, indefinitely.)

(Please turn to the right-hand column of this page for a frequently up-to-date listing of links to all other available chapters of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train To Heaven©. Now also published in the Collingswood Patch™: “South Jersey’s beacon of the arts.”)

tales of the hotel st crispian: chapter 89

2012-12-28T00:08:00.004-05:00

"the best theater"

by manfred skyline

illustrated by roy dismas, rhoda penmarq and konrad kraus

editorial consultant emeritus: Prof. Dan Leo

for complete episode, click here

tales of the hotel st crispian: chapter 88

2012-12-26T23:31:00.000-05:00

"it had come to this"

by Horace P. Sternwall

edited by Dan Leo*

illustrations by roy dismas and rhoda penmarq

*Associate Professor of Ancient Greek and Latin Literature, Assistant Table Tennis Coach, Olney Community College; editor of Say Hello to All the Gang: the Prison Letters of Horace P. Sternwall; Olney Community College Press; made possible in part by a generous grant from the Reliable Floor Covering Company of Philadelphia PA: “Our Name Says It All!”

And so it had come to this.

Landon (unfortunately nicknamed “Rooster”) Crow waited with Alice “Sniffy” Smith in a booth at the back of Bob’s Bowery Bar, waiting for “the two Bills” (Grey and Leighton) to return from God knows where with an ounce of marijuana, an ounce which Rooster and Sniffy hoped to parlay into a twenty-five thousand dollar profit.

Rooster sipped his tepid flat Rheingold beer, then he stubbed out his Philip Morris, and quickly lit another one, not so much because he wanted a cigarette, but because this bar smelled like the interior of the most vile men’s room in the world. If it smelled like this in the barroom, what could it possibly smell like in the bar’s actual men’s room?

(Kindly click here to read the entire sordid chapter.)

“Christmas Among the Damned”

2012-12-22T01:11:00.001-05:00

As a special holiday treat for the fans of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train to Heaven, we present today a never-before-published poem by Schnabel, only recently discovered in a cardboard box under a stack of copies of The Catholic Standard and Times in the basement of the house formerly owned by Arnold’s mother at B and Nedro, in the Olney section of Philadelphia, right across the street from where the Heintz metalworks factory used to be before it was demolished and turned into a shopping mall. This is one of the very few poems of Schnabel’s to exist only in his holograph — written, as was his custom, with a Bic pen in a black-and-white marble copybook. The poem is undated, but carbon dating of the paper indicates that the poem was probably written sometime during his stay at the Philadelphia State Hospital at Byberry in early 1963, following his complete mental collapse in January of that year. The poem is probably unfinished, lacking as it does the formal perfection of the great bulk of poems that Schnabel published on a weekly basis for some thirty years in his neighborhood paper, The Olney Times, but nonetheless we feel it worthy of sharing with his many readers, even if he chose — undoubtedly for his own good reasons — not to submit it for publication.

“Christmas Among the Damned”

Their eyes blear,
their voices coarse,
they wander from tavern to bar,
full of fear
and cheap remorse;
they know death is not far,
and that the Lord on high
will not come for them;
He would rather drop
a bomb on them;

He does not heed their grumbling,
He does not hear their curses,
He does not hear them mumbling
as they scrabble through their purses
and their wallets made of plastic
for the price of a glass of Ortlieb’s
or, tripping the dark fantastic,
perhaps also a shot of Schenley’s.

These are the damned, these
who seek but know not pleasure,
damned once,
damned twice,
damned thrice,
and damned once again for good measure.

Their eyes bloodshot,
their noses bulbous and red,
their flesh carbuncular,
where it is not the color
of the belly of a week-dead
flounder,
yes,
these,
these are my friends.

I see them at Pat’s,
at the Huddle,
and at the Green Parrot;
I see them at the VFW,
and at the Knights of Columbus;

some of them even have wives
or husbands as the case may be;
many of them have children,
even grandchildren
(unlike bachelor me);
they all have homes of some sort
a rowhome, apartment, or rented room,
most have jobs of some kind,
working at the Heintz factory
or at Philco or Tastykake,
but this is their real job,
sitting in a bar, staring at
the TV playing I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster,
sitting silently,
or talking petulantly,
this is their calling
and their place,
in the legions of the damned.

Yes, some sit silently on their stools
but most will talk at the slightest
provocation, or even if there is none,
even if they have nothing to say
which is nearly always,
because the hell they carry within
loves to overflow into the hell
outside them.

At last the bartender, last call
long called, stands in his coat by
the door. “This is not a hotel,”
he yells. “You don’t have to go
home, but you can’t stay here.”

One by one they shuffle through the
door and out into the cold,
into the night, from one hell
into another, and off they stumble,
to rowhome, apartment or rented room.

Gay colored lights are strung
outside the windows of the modest homes,
and along the shops on Fifth Street,
for it is Christmastime,
the anniversary of the birth
of the Savior, of someone’s savior,
but not theirs, not these,
who are beyond saving;
no.
It’s Christmas on the streets of Olney,
and a gentle snow begins to fall,
on these the damned who have
nothing to look forward to
but another hangover.

It’s the eve of Christmas Eve,
the cold wind licks their faces,
the snowflakes find their way into
the collars of necks whose scarves
have been left in the sawdust of the
barroom floor.

A shortcut is taken through Fisher Park,
but the scrubby grass is slick and wet;
a fall is taken down Dead Man’s Hill
where the children love to sled
on their Flexible Flyers:
down, down he tumbles, down and down,
until finally he lands at the bottom,
in the slush and jagged ice,
where, in pain,
which means at least not dead,
not yet, he lies on his back,
howling at the universe,
the snow rushing down
heedlessly into his face,
and somewhere among the rowhomes
on Nedro Avenue, a dog replies,
howling also, and then another on
Sixth Street, and yet another on Spencer,
and soon a whole chorus of dogs join in,
drowning out the screams of the human,
or of what once was human.

Yes, it’s Christmas,
for God and man and dog,
for those who are heaven bound
and for those forever banned
from paradise.
This is Christmas,
Christmas among the damned.

(Also published in The Collingswood Patch: "New Jersey's literary island of civility.")

(Kindly scroll down the right hand side of this page to find a listing of links to many other classic poems by Arnold Schnabel. Our serialization of Arnold Schnabel’s Gold View Award™-winning 67-volume autobiography, Railroad Train to Heaven, will resume, God willing, next week.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 326: go already

2012-12-15T12:04:00.001-05:00

Our hero Arnold Schnabel has assumed the corporeal host of “Porter Walker”, a preposterous young poet in Ye Cannot Quench (Houghton Mifflin,1960), a sadly-forgotten Bildungsroman by Gertrude Evans, author of many other unfortunately out-of-print novels, such as A Handful of Infinity, Night Bus to Tallahassee, and He Said His Name Was Gerard.

Let’s rejoin Arnold and his deific friend Josh just as they are about to re-enter a peculiar basement bar called Valhalla, on Greenwich Village’s MacDougal Street, on a hot and rainy night in August of 1957...

(Please click here to read our previous chapter; the morbidly curious may go here to return to the misty beginnings of this Gold View Award™-winning 53-volume memoir.)

“I keep telling myself it’s time to go back and re-read Proust in the original just one more time before I kick the bucket, but all I do is read Arnold Schnabel. I know, I’m crazy.” — Harold Bloom, in The Cape May Star and Wave.

I pulled the door open, and, a gentleman to the end, I waved at Josh to go first, and he did, and I followed him.

Somehow the barroom had gotten yet more crowded, more noisy, even though no one new had entered while Josh and I had been talking outside. Perhaps people had come in from the back room, or from the sub-basement, or from hidden doorways I knew nothing about. I didn’t care. I just wanted to make it to the men’s room before I peed myself.

The small dance floor — or rather, that small space between the booths and the bar in which people were dancing to the juke box music, or not so much dancing as thrashing against one another — presented a packed churning mass of humanity, and within it I could see the dark airborne hair of Carlotta and her face and her almost bare shoulders and the thin straps of her red dress, and the blond hair and the face of Pat in her black dress. They were dancing side by side, and then I could see first Sam Clemens and then those other two guys Walt and Edgar, all of them dancing, if not exactly with the girls, then at least very close to them.

And finally — although I knew who Sam Clemens was, because he had told me — it dawned on me who this Walt and Edgar were, somehow I hadn’t quite put it together when I had been here earlier this same night which felt to me like approximately twenty-seven months ago — the bearded grey-haired guy was none other than Walt Whitman, the poet they named the bridge after, and the other dark-haired guy with a moustache was the famous poet and author Edgar Allan Poe. I must admit here that I was not familiar with the work of either of them, because even though I am addicted to writing bad poems myself, I find the reading of poetry, even my own, especially my own, to be well-nigh intolerable. I know that Poe wrote short stories also, but the few I had attempted to read struck me as just as boring as the few of his poems I had glanced at, although I did enjoy that movie The Raven with Vincent Price and Peter Lorre, which I saw at the Fern Rock shortly after my release from Byberry.

Thurgood and that fat guy Henry were standing with their drinks at the end of the bar right near the entrance.

Henry. Henry James was it? Yes, and now I got it, finally, another one of those famous dead authors I had never really read, although I did get through a few pages of The Turn of the Screw one time in the army because it was available in one of those free Armed Services Editions paperbacks and the other guys had already grabbed up all the good ones about guys trapped in webs of passion and betrayal and violence. I had thought this Turn of the Screw book wouldn’t be so bad because at least it was short, but I was wrong.

All these thoughts passed through my brain in a matter of perhaps two seconds, during which Thurgood and Henry James saw me and Josh and descended on us.

“Porter,” said Thurgood, “you simply must try some of Henry’s private stock fine malt whisky!”

“Where have you two been all this time?” said Henry. He pronounced “been” bean, even though I think he was American, but what do I know, that’s the way Fred Astaire and Bette Davis used to talk in old movies, so maybe it was just an old-fashioned way of talking. Or maybe it was pretentious. I didn’t really care either way, I had to go to the bathroom.

Then things got very complicated. All of a sudden there was a shrieking, a dual shrieking over the shrieking of the jukebox music, which, if memory serves, was “Good Golly, Miss Molly", and Carlotta and Pat were pushing and elbowing their way ruthlessly through the crowd toward us, with Sam and Walt and Edgar in their wake.

Carlotta kissed me on my cheek, while she looked past me at Josh, Pat kissed me on the other cheek while she looked askance at Thurgood who was leaning close in to me, maybe trying to get a free kiss himself.

I won’t even attempt to transcribe the dialogue that now transpired. Everyone was talking at once anyway, except for me, the words and the surrounding music and noise lapped up against me and around me and into my ears, making little intelligible impression, as has so often been the case in my life, in any of my lives, in all of them.   I suppose I was rude, but I really did have to go to the men’s room, and so after a minute of this babble I said, “Well, look, everybody, I really have to go.”

“Go?” said Henry. “You just got here!” 

“Yeah,” said Thurgood. “Don’t be such a wet blanket, Porter. Wait’ll you try this private stock fine malt whisky of Henry’s!”

“No —” I said.

“Mr. Dramatic Poet,” said Carlotta. “Always gotta be someplace, huh? What is it, a date with another swooning frail?”

“Porter’s a dog,” said Pat. “Bow wow wow.”

“Where are you goin’, Porter?” said Sam Clemens. He had a cigar in one hand, a glass of what looked like private stock fine malt whisky in the other, and he was sweating profusely, well, everyone was sweating profusely, more or less. “Maybe I can string along. I’d like to see what the young people are up to nowadays.”

“I should like to come, too,” said Walt. “That is if I may. Might I suggest if you have no other destination in mind a stroll down to the docks and to one of the taprooms down there which cater to hearty stevedores and seamen and the bold strapping barge boys of the great river Hudson?”

“Ya know what’s a good stop?” said Edgar. “That Bridge Café over to Water Street. Many’s the late night I whiled away there absorbing endless drams of hot spiced rum back in the good old days.”

“But,” I said.

“Look,” said Thurgood, “before you go, I wonder if you could spot me a tenner?”

“But —” I said.

“A fin’ll do,” said Thurgood.

“Listen,” I said.

“Anything at all, really,” said Thurgood.

“But,” I said.

“He’s not going anywhere,” said Josh.

“He’s not?” said Thurgood.

“No,” said Josh.

Suddenly the song on the jukebox ended, and into the attendant silence he spoke loudly and clearly:

“He has to urinate.”

“What?” said Thurgood.

“He said he has to urinate,” said Henry.

“Why didn’t you just say so in the first place?” Thurgood said to me.

“I, uh,” I said.

Another rock ‘n’roll song came onto the jukebox, and Pat let out a shriek, and then yelled, “Train kept a-rollin’!” She jumped up and clapped her hands, and the black shiny purse she had on her arm hit me in the belly, but it didn’t hurt, too much.

Carlotta grabbed Josh’s arm.

“Let’s dance!” she screamed.

“Who’s gonna dance with me?” yelled Pat.

Sam and Walt and Edgar all shouted in unison: “I will!”

I didn’t stick around. I followed my alleged friends back into the crowded tiny dance floor, and shoved my way past them and through the mass of other dancing people, getting elbowed and kicked several times, and in turn elbowing and kicking some other people, not necessarily the ones who had elbowed and kicked me. When I got to the far side of the room, where the cigarette machine was I almost bumped into the waitress, Harriet Beecher Stowe, carrying two pitchers of beer in one hand, and a tray of drinks in the other.

“You again,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Where are you rushing off too?”

“Um,” I said.

“Hotshot. Always in a big hurry to get some place, aren’t you?”

“Um,” I said, again.

“I know your kind. I’ve seen you come. And I’ve seen you go. Sure you’re young and handsome now, with your first book coming out with a fifty thousand dollar advance, but just remember, bub, your day in the sun is fleeting. Before you know it you’ll just be another tired old has-been dreaming of his glory days over a dirty glass of Carstair’s whiskey.”

“I have to go to the men’s room,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. “Great. Thanks for sharing. That news really made my night.”

“Hey! Harriet!” yelled some skinny guy with a droopy moustache at the nearest booth, sitting with some other people. “Where’s our drinks? It’s like the goddam Gobi Desert over here we’re so dry!”

“Keep your goddam shirt on, Crane,” she yelled right back at him. And then to me: “Stephen Crane. He used to be a hotshot, too. Used to be.”

“Uh,” I said.

“You said you had to use the men’s room,” she said. “So go already. You’re hopping up and down like a three-year-old.”

Without another word I went, past the cigarette machine and the back of the last booth and the door marked “Private” on the right and the one marked “Basement No Admittance” on the left, then right into that narrow hallway, past the pay phone and the door marked “Ladies” on the right and finally to the one marked “Gentlemen” on the left.

I pulled on the handle and went in.

(Continued here, without shame.)

(Kindly look to the right-hand column of this page to find a listing of links to all other published chapters of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train To Heaven©. Now also appearing in the Collingswood Patch™: “South Jersey’s crying voice in the wilderness.”)
  

tales of the hotel st crispian: chapter 87

2012-12-14T16:15:00.002-05:00

"instinctive player"

by horace p sternwall

illustrated by roy dismas and rhoda penmarq

editorial consultant: Prof. Dan Leo

for complete episode, click here