The Angel of Death Strikes Again

Sometimes I get the willies.

Last Friday I was sitting here blogging away, and I happened to mention Beatrice Arthur, who played Maude on TV in the 1970s and later, Dorothy Zbornak on The Golden Girls in the 1980s and early '90s.

She died on Sunday.

Okay, she was 86. Still...

Folks, you are reading the words of the Angel of Death. That's me. I kill celebrities. I don't mean to do it, and as Garfield the Cat once said, I don't know how I does it, I jez' does it.

I have blogged on this subject before. Do a blog search on Eek, I Did It Again, and you will be taken to something I wrote back in the summer of 2006. I was driving on Interstate 90 between Spokane, Washington and Post Falls, Idaho on a standard booze run (the state liquor stores in Idaho have cheaper prices than those in Washington owing to fewer taxes), and I had the radio on in the car. I was listening to a program of popular songs from the World War II era. I began thinking about June Allyson, the petite little blonde movie star of the WWII period of whom they said she was the girl "every boy wanted to bring home to his family." I always thought my Aunt Jessie, my mother's sister, looked a little bit like June Allyson.

The next day I read her obituary in the newspaper. June Allyson's, that is, not my Aunt Jessie. My aunt had already died by then. But Aunt Jessie wasn't famous, just wonderful, so I can't be blamed for that.

You're not convinced. Ha, you're saying. Coincidence. Big deal.

As the French say, uh-uh. Search my blog again: It Ain't Over 'Til The Fat Guy Dies. How about him? Mitchell Rupe, on death row for murder, in Washington state. I haven't thought about this loser in years, not since reading a newspaper story in 1994 about how he had eaten himself off death row. He intentionally got himself so fat that his lawyer sold a Washington state judge the notion that hanging him would be cruel and inhuman punishment. He was so fat, you see, that hanging him might result in decapitation, which would be "cruel and inhuman." Great legal victory for Rupe.

But then I step in. I remember Rupe and his story one morning in 2006 while driving my car across Chula Vista, California ... an hour later I see his obituary in the paper.

This has happened over and over in my life. I'll start thinking about some famous person...and then I find out they quit breathing just about the same moment I was thinking about them.

My friend Diane thinks I have a form of extrasensory perception. I don't know. My own speculation has been that maybe the fillings in my teeth somehow enable me to pick up radio or television signals that go directly into my head, bypassing my ears. (This might explain my ability to recite lines from old reruns of The Andy Griffith Show endlessly.) TV Land broadcasts it; I pick up the signal somehow.

You think I'm crazy? Again, you think it's just coincidence, and that all of these old people are about to die anyway?

Check this out: Marilyn Chambers, the great porn star of the 1970s and former Ivory Soap girl, died on April 12 at age 56. She was a true classic, an American original. I'll never forget the afternoon some of my newspaper buddies and I crowded around the VCR in Vacaville, CA to share in the wonder of her Oscar-worthy performance in the classic '70s porno film Insatiable ("How lovely to have you back in London, my dear!") My journal records that on April 10 I was wondering whatever became of her. Two days later she was found dead in Los Angeles. And 56 ain't that old. I'm 53.

If you're in any way famous, you want to steer clear of me. I have the Evil Eye somehow when it comes to celebrities.

In light of this gruesome talent I seem to have, all of you Barack Obama fans out there ought to be grateful that I'm trying as hard as I can NOT to think about him. I haven't looked at a newspaper in nearly six months. That's why I go out to Dead-or-alive-info.org every couple of weeks or so, just to find out if anyone famous or once-famous has died lately.

By the way, has anyone seen Fess Parker around?

Miscellany

I had my first encounter with evil when I was 15.

It was the summer of 1971. I was visiting a friend in Spokane, Washington.

We were walking around late at night and we stepped into a public restroom.

Somebody had written the following graffiti on the wall:

"A little bird with yellow bill
Perched upon my windowsill.
I lured him in with crumbs of bread,
and then I crushed his fucking head."

Some low-life dirtball apparently thought that was funny. (You know the type of person I'm talking about: the kind who writes on restroom walls.)

I hope he's dead, and I hope his death hurt a lot. I'm putting the world on notice: anybody, and I mean anybody, who thinks cruelty to animals is funny should have his belly torn open and his entrails set on fire before his eyes.

...

I attended a meeting of Washington, D.C.'s Advisory Neighborhood Commission for Ward 5 last night. Councilmember Harry Thomas addressed the gathering. Let it be known that when my neighbor Donald L. Williams asked why the D.C. police are flouting the city's no-cellphone-use-while-driving law, (along with everybody else) he could not get a straight answer out of Councilmember Thomas.

I met Commmissioner Robert King at that same meeting. He looks like James Earl Jones and he's a brother Mason. Good to meet you, Bob.

...

I saw something on the street in downtown Washington, D.C. on Monday that made me wish I'd had my camera with me. It would have been a fabulous photo. A guy was lying flat on his stomach in the middle of the street at the corner of 14th and F NW, half his body down inside an open manhole. The only things sticking out of the manhole were his legs and feet. Apparently he was talking to someone down inside that manhole. God, what a great photo that would have made!

...

This time of year I always kind of miss being in California. May is coming up, just about the best time of year in San Diego. There's nothing quite like a bright, breezy day in May out there on the west coast. I used to love sitting on the porch of my family's ancestral home in Chula Vista on an afternoon in May, the Padres' game on the radio (usually they were losing) and the gentle May breeze ringing the wind-chime that my father fashioned out of an empty wine jug many years ago. Once May is over, though, things get pretty grim. Come June, the area is enveloped almost daily in a persistent marine layer that keeps the sky quite gray. You can set your calendar by it: San Diegans call it "the June gloom."

...

I got an e-mail this morning from Roxanne at Roxanne's Artiques Gallery near the Brookland/CUA Metro station here in D.C. The same Donald L. Williams who couldn't get a straight answer out of Councilman Thomas about cellphone use by cops approached Roxanne yesterday on behalf of yours truly. You see, in addition to all of the other wild n' crazy things in my quiver, I'm also a sometime painter. Donald thought that Roxanne might be interested in displaying some of my art work in her gallery. I e-mailed her digital photos of a few of my canvases, and she inquired as to the media I used. I combine oil-and-acrylic on canvas with pastiche, a sop to the fact that I can't draw worth a damn. And no, I don't do Elvis on black velvet or dogs shooting pool.

...

I was at the Brookland/CUA Metro station the other day, wearing my Boston Red Sox cap. I saw another guy on the platform wearing a Red Sox cap, so I gave him the "Go Sox" countersign. He returned it, then rolled up his sleeve and showed me the beautifully-executed Red Sox team logo that he had tattooed on his left arm. "Red Sox Nation is just amazing," I told him. Later that same day, Donald L. Williams and I got into a whimsical discussion of how we might manage as roommates, should we ever be forced by circumstances (we're both basically destitute) to share space. Answer: Felix and Oscar writ large. "Now, THAT would be a mixed marriage," I said in all seriousness. And it's not because I'm white and Donald's black. There are more serious issues than race here. I mean, can you imagine a Red Sox fan and a Yankees fan living under the same roof? As the Germans say, Ausgeschlossen.*

...

There's a stretch of South Dakota Avenue in Northeast D.C., a residential area, where the average motorist averages 70 mph. The police department keeps records of this stuff. It's the reason they're installing cameras on South Dakota Avenue. I hate these cameras, especially after getting nailed by one myself, trying to beat a red light on Rhode Island Avenue a few months ago. But in a neighborhood where there's a playground, people should not drive 70 mph. Sorry, I'm just an old stick-in-the-mud that way. And I don't even have any children.

...

My pal Chris down in North Carolina gave up bread for lent. He says he's lost 25 pounds. I haven't seen him lately so I'll have to take his word for it. But now that lent is over, I hope he hasn't gone back to the baguettes and the dinner rolls. Chris has a new girlfriend; maybe that will help his resolve. You know the old saying: behind every man successfully losing weight there's either a trainer in a smelly sweatsuit waving a six-foot bullwhip, or a woman reminding him of what wonders weight loss will do for his...uh, stamina.

...

We are now a mere six weeks and change from the Tour de Cure in Reston, Virginia, a cycling event for the American Diabetes Association in which I am slated to ride a "metric century," e.g. 63 miles. I have been steadfastly in training since February, and have received $340 in donations from my friends, which has been generous and for which I am grateful. However some of my other friends who promised donations months ago have NOT coughed up and are steadfastly ignoring my repeated e-mail pleas for redemption. I'm about to give up on this crowd, but let me do so with the immortal words of Beatrice Arthur when she was playing that old bag Maude on CBS television back in the 1970s: "God will get you for that."

...

(Drum roll.) Millions of people have started writing novels; a few thousand actually finish writing them. I'm at work on a novel that I began last June 15 when the aforementioned bread-avoider, Chris, and I returned from attending the 13th International Hemingway Conference in Kansas City. I have given myself a deadline of this coming June 15 to complete this novel. I'm going to meet that deadline, folks. I have written 136,000 words as of yesterday. Meanwhile my pal Tony out in California, who has been working on a novel for about the last four years when he isn't out doing contracting work, has about 200,000 done on his. That's already too long, and Tony knows it. He and I have an interesting reciprocal deal in place, though. I'm a good editor, and when Tony's finished with his manuscript I'm going to cut Fastglass (that's the title) down to size. In return, Tony, an on-again, off-again writer for movies, is going to adapt my first novel, Tower-102 (iUniverse, 2000) as a screenplay.


*Ausgeschlossen--"Extremely unlikely."

Otras cincuenta cosas sobre mí

Serendipity: A faculty for making fortunate discoveries. (Bobrow, Edwin. The Complete Idiot's Guide to New Product Development, New York: Alpha Books, 1997.)

A few months ago I posted a laundry list in this space of trivia facts about myself. 100 of them.

My pal Sasha looked at that this week and thought, hey, there's something that might be useful in introducing myself to my customers. (Sasha is an entrepreneur in Moscow.)He e-mailed me and told me so.

Now, it never would have occurred to me that anything so trivial as personal trivia could have any utility, so to speak. Not unless you're Justin Timberlake or Tyra Banks, and can therefore reasonably expect that some no-life pinhead out there who lives vicariously through celebrity magazines will be interested in what color coffee cup you use in the morning. (Speaking of coffee cups, the photograph above was taken a few years ago in of all places, Croatia. I was vacationing with my then-girlfriend Nadya on the Adriatic Sea. I liked the way they spelled out the word "Caffe" on the surface of my coffee.)

Anyway, I decided to add to the list of supremely uninteresting factoids about my sometimes-august, usually not-very-interesting self. Not 100 factoids this time; I have too much to do today. I'm going to shoot for 50, and see if I can get this done in the next 20 minutes. I have a project for which someone is actually paying me money, and it has to be finished by three O'clock this afternoon.

1. I just bought a baseball bat. Spring is here. I'm going to ask my friend Donald if he wants to go to the park and shag flies. I'm 53; Donald is 61. He has a glove, and now I have the bat. I have a baseball around here somewhere.

2. There are two bumper stickers on my 2006 PT Cruiser. Neither has anything to do with politics. One reads "Would You Drive Any Better With That Cellphone Up Your Ass?" The other speaks a cosmic truth: "Mozart Is God."

3. I shave the "old fashioned" way, with a stainless steel safety razor. Cheap disposable plastic razors are as much a hazard to your skin as they are to the environment. Also, I shave with lather worked up in a mug with a brush, not that mostly-air crap that comes out of a can. Ask any barber: lather actually worked up on someone's face gives you a closer shave than lather from a can.

4. My favorite brand of single-malt Scotch is Glenlivet. It's creamy-smooth, with a slight honey flavor. Delicious.

5. I have a ticket to see Richard Wagner's Siegfried at the Washington National Opera next month. I'm going alone. Nobody I know within the D.C. Metro area is as "into" Wagner as I am. (I'd love to see the whole Ring cycle sometime, but who has that kind of money?)

6. I have a scar on my throat from where I had the beginnings of a "turkey wattle" that I inherited from my father liposuctioned off two months ago.

7. I am now entering my sixth month of refusing to look at newspapers, watch newscasts or listen to newscasts. Whatever Obama and his little Politboro of Trotskyites are up to out there, I don't want to know. And it's working. Last week my sister mentioned somebody named Napolitano to me, and I had no idea who that was. Also last week, at Borders Books, one of the clerks said something to me about Slum Dog Millionaire and I gave her a blank stare. Turns out that's the movie that won Best Picture at this year's Academy Awards show. Who cares? I'm immersed in Proust, and will be until the Trotskyites are gone.

8. I have a tiger-striped tabby cat named Rageuneau who, I suspect, thinks I'm his mother. He slipped out into the rain yesterday, got frightened because he couldn't get back in the house, and began to cry. He wouldn't come to my wife Valerie, but he came to me.

9. I just became a Notary Public. Want to see my stamp?

10. Baseball season only started the day before yesterday, and I've already given up on the San Diego Padres for this year.

11. I have an unfinished novel-in-progress, with a self-imposed June 15 deadline for completion of first draft. This ain't no pipe-dream, folks. 125,000 words is not your average head-start. I'm about 75 percent finished with this thing.

12. First thing in the morning I take my coffee black. Later in the day I take it with hot milk, European-style. Of course, most Europeans do it the other way around, but I have a contrarian streak in me.

13. Of all the places I lived overseas during my 14 years in the State Department, Bad Godesburg, Germany was my favorite. Imagine waking up every morning just a stone's throw from the Rhine.

14. I'm in training to ride a Metric Century (100 kilometers or 63 miles) on my bicycle for the American Diabetes Association, in June. This event will coincide with the completion of my novel-in-progress. Go on line at www.tour.diabetes.org and contribute!!

15. I don't care what kind of wall-smashing sound it puts out, the Bose Acoustic Sound System is one ugly piece of machinery. I think it looks more like an espresso machine than a stereo.

16. The older I get, the better Frank Sinatra sounds.

17. I don't play golf. I could never get interested in it. I have two friends who are hopeless golf addicts, but I never did see the attraction.

18. Everyone who has read my blog, or my book Three Flies Up, knows that I'm a baseball fan. What fewer know is that I also follow IndyCar racing. Not NASCAR, Indycar. Aside from the World Series, the Indianapolis 500 is the only other sporting event in the whole year that I never like to miss.

19. One of the greatest cultural contributions my French ancestors made to the world was establishing which wines go best with which foods. Now if I could just get it straight...

20. There are few combinations on this earth that match that of a good cup of espresso and a really good cigar.

21. I have read all three books of Dante's Divine Comedy. Someday I want to read them in Italian.

22. Speaking of languages, Rosetta Stone (French) is on my birthday wish list. I have always wanted to learn French, and recently I had Rosetta Stone demonstrated to me. It works. I picked up several new words in the five minutes I stood there.

23. If I succeed with French, I'm going to take a shot at Greek. I have a slight leg up there -- I have studied Russian, and the Greek and Russian alphabets share certain similarities for the screamingly obvious reason that the Russian alphabet is based on the Greek alphabet.

24. I can make a delicious quiche out of just about whatever I find in the refrigerator.

25. I've been a Catholic for going on 35 years, but have scarcely been near a church in more than 25. I've been contemplating a return for three or so years now. If I only didn't have to unload a quarter-century's worth of confession! Can you imagine the kind of mischief a guy gets up to between the ages of 27 and 53, particularly if he has a contrarian streak in him to begin with?

26. Generally speaking, although April means the opening of the baseball season, I prefer March to April. March has an excuse for being chilly. It's March. April is supposed to be warmer, and I feel cheated when it isn't.

27. I seldom if ever write in longhand. It's not that I'm a high-tech geek or anything like that, and I appreciate the beautiful craftsmanship of a fine fountain pen. But I hate the sight of my own handwriting. (For all of his shortcomings, by the way, my father had beautiful handwriting. His was the last generation to be taught penmanship in school.)

28. I'm a lifelong fan of Ernest Hemingway's work, but I don't consider him a great novelist. He was one of the best short story-writers of all time, but he was a sprint-runner, not a long-distance runner. His fiction at its best combines the genius of poetry with the verisimilitude of good journalism. Fine, but journalism doesn't work on a big canvas. His novels are mostly self-indulgences and read as such.

29. The two most beautiful places I've ever seen (and I've been all over the western world) are western Montana and the central California coast around Santa Maria and San Luis Obispo.

30. I'm down to my last $1000. After that, Je suis me suis cassé.

31. I will not tolerate humor that is based on cruelty, whether to animals or people. When I first saw the movie Carrie, in which Cissy Spacek's high-school classmates pull an appallingly mean practical joke on her, I cheered like crazy during the scene in which she takes horrible revenge on them, using the telekinetic powers that Stephen King gave her in his novel. For this same reason British humor, so much of which centers around laughing at people's misfortunes, is wasted on me. Stanley Kubrick, whom otherwise I have always admired, was said to have started giggling while filming the gang-rape scene in A Clockwork Orange (1971). The British are just ugly people. Ugly in every way that it's possible to be ugly. They have rotten teeth and they think cruelty is funny.

32. I once took a few surfing lessons in California, and I really would like to get back to learning how to surf. (If I could just get to the point where I could stand up on a wave without falling off my surfboard, I'd be happy.)

33. Because I am from California, for a long time I thought that I'd seen all the sunshine I wanted to see in my life, and I hankered for four-season climate instead. While I still would not want to live in the tropics, (too hot & sticky for a warm-blooded French Canadian like me) the older I get, the more I incline toward wanting to live on the beach. But only on the Pacific Ocean, not the Atlantic.

34. I love children, but I seldom if ever regret never having had any of my own. I've had enough trouble taking care of myself; I'd hate to think what a lousy provider for a family I would have been.

35. My all-time favorite performance by an actor in a movie is Henry Fonda's in Mister Roberts, directed by Joshua Logan in 1955, the year I was born.

36. I wish the Dodgers had never left Brooklyn. Not because I have any great love for Brooklyn, but if they were still in Brooklyn I wouldn't have to put up with my friend Doug, a Bay Area native, hating them for no better reason than the fact that they happen to play in Los Angeles. (For an explanation of this, see my book Three Flies Up: My Father, Baseball and Me. Outskirts Press, 2008, pp. 85-86.)

37. The last book I read was the original scroll of Jack Kerouac's On The Road. I didn't much care for it. I love On The Road, but the original scroll (which Kerouac famously typed, in 1951, on one continuously-unrolling sheet of paper which, when he was finished, was 125 feet long)is a rough draft, and it reads like a rough draft. Not fun.

38. The Phil Silvers Show, aka Sgt. Bilko, which aired on CBS from 1955 to 1958, was the funniest sitcom of all time. The least funny sitcom of all time, and I don't give a shit what Jay McInerny says, was Seinfeld.

39. I love rainy days as long as I don't have to go outside. Nothing is more pleasant than a dark, wet, gray afternoon indoors, with a fire in the fireplace, a glass of red wine at your elbow and Haydn on the stereo.

40. The 1965 Ford Mustang was the most beautiful thing Detroit ever built. (Although I have a gut-level aversion to dark blue Mustangs, for reasons I'm going to keep to myself.)

41. I love to grind my own coffee, but as pianist Helene Grimaud accurately observed in Grammophone magazine not long ago, coffee never tastes as good as it smells.

42. Stat-for-stat, Stan Musial was a better ballplayer than Mickey Mantle. Mantle just got all the media attention because he played in New York, where all the media except CNN are headquartered, while Musial played in St. Louis, which was still considered the hinterland in the 1950s. (And CNN wasn't even created until after both Musial and Mantle had retired.) New York LOVES New York. Nobody else does.

43. The first time I saw Helen Mirren was in the lamentable 2010: The Year We Make Contact. She was playing, of all things, a Soviet colonel. I thought she was really cute. Still do. If I were at a cocktail party, with both Helen Mirren and Reese Witherspoon in attendance, Reese could wait. I'd go chat up Helen first. She'd probably have more interesting things to say anyway.

44. I love the music of Stan Getz. In the right mood, I could listen to Stan Getz recordings all day.

45. The paintings of Henri Matisse make me very happy.

46. All other things being equal, I'd rather see the sunrise after having had a good night's sleep than after having stayed up all night.

47. Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited is the greatest rock n' roll album of all time. Bar none.

48. I've always been a cat person, and never cared particularly for dogs until I married my wife Valerie, who has always had dogs. She brought two of them into our marriage, both miniature schnauzers: Jacques and Alexandra. I didn't get to know Jacques as well as I would have liked, because he died shortly after we were married. But oh boy, did I bond with Alexandra! She outlived Jacqui by almost three years, and when she died on July 30, 2008, after a horrible epileptic seizure, I cried my eyes out.

49. I hate basketball. A game played indoors, by men wearing knee-length shorts? Cable TV at its next-worst, after CSI and House.

50. As Henry Miller once said to the entire world....

Σ' αγαπώ ! (In English that's spelled, and pronounced, "S'agapo." It's Greek for "I love you." Miller had it scotch-taped to his door.)