I hope he is, says the other Metaphysical Winehead, ‘cause they done gone and buried him. Oh, my, ain’t I a stitch? Ain’t I a caution?
Naw, says the other winehead.
It is precisely then…
That a touch of the mystic and unexplainable, of the awesome and of the pure enters The Commodore’s Blue Note.
The door swings open. No one sees a human hand upon it.
And if there is no human hand, then there is no human being attached to that no hand and so no human being enters The Commodore’s Blue Note.
What flies in is a white dove.
Get it?
A bird comes flying in.
Say what you want about the brilliance of Yardbird, the creative genius, the inspired lunacy, but the man was not always subtle.
Everyone is silent. Even Jelly Roll Morton stops noodling on the battered old upright in the corner of the joint. That’s about all he can do these days, about all that gives him comfort. He is convinced that there is a serious hoodoo on him and that is why nobody wants to hear his music anymore. Mr. Jelly Lord’s music is called moldy fig music. Moldy oldie. Moldy Mush and Moldy Gramma. Aw, that is stale, that is square, that is… Moldy. The A and R man at RCA told him, “Well, you and your Hot Peppers, you ain’t so hot now. So toot sweet, and write if you get work, but I bet you won’t.”
Whoo! And how’s that for a hurt? Whoo! And who was it that just plain invented jazz? Why none other than Jelly Roll Morton, and if you don’t believe it, just ask him.
But now we are back to smoky silences and a white dove winging its way to the bar. For a moment, it hangs suspended in the air. Some that were there that night swore the dove glowed brilliantly, as though it were becoming a halo, needing only an angel beneath it to complete the religious experience. The Commodore, trying to remember lines his mother and her faith used to inflict on him, thinks The Kingdom of Heaven has come, and he says, in a reverential whisper, “Blow me down.”
Then the dove alights on the bar. He is strutting as though he is the literal cock of the walk.
Everyone is saying it, not quite simultaneously, but saying it. “It’s Bird. Bird’s here. Bird lives.”
“Horse manure,” is what Jelly Roll Morton says.
Now what some folks don’t know, because Jelly told a lie or two in his time, is that Mr. Morton’s claim to have been a sharpshooter with the carnival was 100% veritas.
These days, not knowing if the hoodoo would come at him like a Swamp Dog or a Dhambala bat, Jelly Roll has taken to carrying around an 1873 Colt Peacemaker.
Which is what he yanked out.
He let fly.
And anyone who saw that shot does not dispute the Jelly’s claim to have been a carnival sharpshooter. Because in one bang and one burst there is nothing but some splatter on the bar and a feather in the air.
Then Jelly Roll Morton says, “Bird’s dead.”
He sets the Colt on the piano and, grinning his diamond tooth grin like he has not since being given the RCA heave-ho, he starts in playing “Graveyard Blues.”
And there ain’t one moldy thing about it.
Dreaming Robot Monster
By Mort Castle
Boy, was that a dream, or was it!
-Johnny, protagonist of ROBOT MONSTER
PROLOGUE
OBOT MONSTER: A guy in a gorilla suit and diving helmet portrays Ro-Man, who has come from outer space (or possibly our moon) to destroy all the inhabitants of Earth. Film critic Leonard Maltin described the 1953 film as “one of the genuine legends of Hollywood; embarrassingly, hilariously awful.” It was directed by Phil Tucker, with a screenplay by Wyott Ordung.
I saw ROBOT MONSTER in 1954 when it was shown in 3D at the Alex Theater on Madison Street in Chicago. It scared hell out of me.
DREAMING ROBOT MONSTER
OUR CAST
JOHNNY: Eight years old. Slap him a good one and Child Welfare won’t call it abuse.
CARLA: Johnny’s younger sister, five or six years of premeditated cuteness.
ALICE: Johnny’s older sister. Stacked. When she becomes a scientist in Johnny’s dream, you don’t buy it. Not with a rack like that.
MOM: Mom has problems not even hinted at in the film. (When the films of all of our lives are produced, I think this will also be said of us.)
THE PROFESSOR: Claims to be an archaeologist. Commie? Note the accent.
ROY: THE PROFESSOR’S assistant. Quite good looking. Too good looking, if you catch my drift.
RO-MAN: Space Alien from the planet Ro-Man, according to Johnny.
THE GREAT GUIDANCE: Ro-man’s boss, leader of the Ro-men. As seen on television.
««—»»
ALICE
Robot Monster was not a robot. That is a misconception. That was the name Johnny, my obnox little brother, gave him, or really, what Johnny called the story.
ROBOT MONSTER! Credits roll over a background of violent science-fiction and gruesome and subversive horror comic books. Once every kid in the United states read comic books. Good kids read Archie and Little Lulu and Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories. Then there were the rest of us.
This explains a great deal.
Oh, he was not of our world. He was Ro-man, not Human – but he was not a monster.
He wasn’t.
I know.
Alice sighs.
Robot Monster was my brother’s dream.
But what of me? Have I no dreams?
I am 11 years older. Do my dreams matter less than those of a juvenile delinquent and socially warped OBNOX of an eight year old boy?
ONE
JOHNNY
Alice is smart, okay, reading books all the time. She’s got big torpedoes and I don’t care what she thinks, she is NOT the boss of me. I know Alice kissed Sidney Gerstein behind the garage. Sidney’s a Jew with glasses and he’s a sissy. The Italian guys three blocks over beat him up all the time. That’s the kind of guy my sister kisses. A creep.
I tried to tell Mom about Alice and sissy Sidney, but, well, Mom is strange. She never gets mad, not really. You ask Mom “How are you?” and she maybe says, “Hello” or “Tuesday” or “That’s just fine.” Mom, to tell the truth, is Weirdsville. Not Daffy Duck Weirdsville or Clarabelle Clown Weirdsville. Quiet Weirdsville. Very strange.
Some of the kids at Christ the Comforter say Mom is “like from outer space, man,” and then they snap their fingers like beatniks and laugh. Bastards. Alice the Smart says I have to just ignore those “dolts who cannot appreciate or comprehend divergent thinking.” Yeah, that’s some kind of big tickle, all right. Alice is as full of good advice as a prune is full of pruneiness.
Smarty-smart Alice was not around when everything got started. It was me and Carla. I had my space helmet and Carla had her stupid doll.
(Robot monster got Carla, but that’s later. It bothers me. Carla really wasn’t all too bad. I don’t know what happened to her doll.)
So we were out playing. Mom and Alice had taken us on a picnic somewhere you could call the Valley of Bad Shaped Rocks. It was the kind of place you go on picnics when you’re dreaming crazy stuff.
We spread out this itchy old green army blanket on a place that didn’t have any big rocks and was only a little bit lumpy. Mom said Dad brought the blanket home from the army. I know Dad was a soldier. Once he let me play with a cigar box full of ribbons and medals. They were neat. Then Dad started to cry for no reason and he hugged me and he didn’t say anything and I said, “Men don’t cry,” and he said, “Jesus wept,” which is what you figure one of the nuns at Christ the Comforter would say. Then Dad wrapped his long, long arms around me, and he told me to be quiet, just be quiet, and he said he loved me very much. Then he did his Mr. Monkey face with his lips all pooched out and eyes bugging and made the ape sound that’s pretty funny even if doesn’t sound too much like an ape.
Dad is dead now.
Mom made the usual for the picnic. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Baloney sandwiches. We had Kool-aid. Kool-aid
’s cheaper than soda. Kool-aid even tastes cheap.
Some fucking picnic, huh?
So then Carla and I go exploring, I guess you could call it, and I have my Captain Cosmos space helmet and my Zeta12 ray gun that shoots bubbles. Most of the kids at Christ the Comforter want to be cowboys like Hopalong Cassidy or Gene Autry or Roy Rogers. Cowboys are okay or even cool, is what the nuns think, and Sister Mary Loyola is always telling us about how she went to the Catholic Charities Hour radio show in New York and saw Bing Crosby, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, and Singing Cowboy Bob Atcher. This kid, Billy Svoboda, said he wanted to be Dale Evans and Mother Cordelia smacked him.
I don’t know why nuns hate spacemen, but they do. Sometimes I think Jesus was a spaceman who landed here and got all messed up. Next time Jesus comes, He better bring an atomic ray gun.
The Valley of Bad Shaped rocks is bad news for picnics, but it’s real good for SPACEMAN because it looks like Mars or some other outer space planet.
Of course Carla wants to play HOUSE.
I tell her no and shut up.
She goes sniffle-sniffle and I’m not sure if she is going to cry or if it’s asthma because she’s coming down with a rock allergy or something. She yaps some more that we have to play HOUSE.
I tell her to cast an eyeball on all the neat rocks. Cool, huh?
Carla says if I don’t play HOUSE she will tell about that time in the bath tub.
I shoot some Zeta12 ray gun bubbles POP right in her eye and she yells and makes like she’s going to cry but I tell her she better not so she doesn’t but she tells me she hates me and I tell her ask me if I care. (Because I DON’T care. I don’t care if everyone hates me. They can all go to hell, but first, let them just take one little minute to KISS my ASS!)
That’s when we meet Roy and The Professor. They’re at the entrance to a cave, chipping away at rocks.
Roy is young and he’s got dynamic tension muscles like Charles Atlas (Charles ASSLESS, that’s a joke) but Roy’s hair is greasy-curly like he gave himself a Toni perm like a lady. Roy is pretty va-va-voom – if you can say that about a man.
The Professor is saggy with a turkey neck and turkey eyes. (What a turkey!) He turns into my dad (but that’s later). He talks in a funny way that’s like English but with something stuck on his back teeth and his throat. The way he sounds, well, he sounds like a Red. (But my dad, my real dad, wasn’t any Commie.)
I tell them I want to blast them with my Zeta12. You can see they both think I’m just one cute little tyke, a regular little rascal, aw shucks, the bastards. The Professor tosses me this jive about Roy and him: “… archaeologists”:
People who try to find out what men were like way back before they could read or write. Then he tells me, wouldn’t it be nicer if we could live at peace with each other?
Pinko, what’d I tell you? Uh-huh, that’s Bolshevik boushwah. Commie prick.
(You go to Catholic school, by the time you’re second grade with Sister Mary Loyola, you learn all about the Red Menace. They don’t always have Jewish names, either. Communists hate Catholics. Communists torture priests and rape nuns and kill little kids before their first communion. Then kids go to Limbo because of the fucking Communists. That’s how it works.)
Then Mom and Alice show up. You can never know if Mom’s upset. It’s usually like someone’s gone over her brain with Johnson’s wax (Stay tuned for “The Mom from Outer Space” on the same channel!), but Alice is definitely bent out of shape, because … Carla and I were supposed to take a NAP right after lunch!
(See what I mean about this picnic? A NAP? Give me a break.)
Roy gives Alice the once-over and then the twice over. Maybe he likes her. Or maybe he’s worried she’s prettier than he is.
Then, or in just a little bit, Ro-man destroys the earth – pretty much, anyway.
TWO
MOM
Before I drowned, when I was a little girl, I was really quite wild. Yes, I was. It was like my mind was carbonated, filled with this frantic loud and wet buzzing that spread downward, made me vibrate and tingle with wicked energy. And grownups would speak to me, they would always tell me what to do, and I would maybe not quite understand, maybe, I don’t know why, but I would maybe get the idea of what they were telling me to do – and then I would buzz-buzz-buzz not do it and would instead buzz-buzz-buzz do the direct opposite, if there was a direct opposite, and if not, I might do something slantwise or catty-corner or at the least, different.
Go to bed now, Mother said, and I took the box of kitchen matches and set the bed on fire and got so close to it that my hair burned. It made a sound that I can think of sometimes but cannot quite hear.
I would sing a song backwards and very loud then, if Uncle Peter or someone asked me to stop, I would start screaming and I could not even stop myself from screaming until I hit someone or bit myself.
Once I tore all the shades from the windows because the spring rollers made this twangy noise that made me laugh and my father picked me up and slapped me on the legs and shoulders and the back of my head all the way down the hall and threw me into the front closet and locked it and I ripped all the clothes from the hangers and peed on the whole pile with that twanging noise inside my head inside my head inside my head.
But then one day we went on a picnic. I still like picnics very much. If you ask me to go on a picnic, why, I will make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and I will make baloney sandwiches and I will fill Thermos bottles with Cherry Kool-aid and Grape Kool-aid and Orange Kool-aid and we will just go on a picnic, that is what.
The picnic when I drowned was a picnic with my mother and father and Uncle Peter and Aunt Alma and all my cousins and there was beer and a portable radio with Hank Williams and softball and sweet humming mosquitoes and the smell of Lucky Strikes. Then I went down to the lake with my cousins and the next thing that happened was I was in the water.
I went down and down in the water.
I went down slowly. Even though the feeling of slowness was new to me, not part of my life, not the way I was, I was not scared. It was cool and silent and soft in the water and everything seemed to wave all around me, waving silently, and I kept my eyes open and I could look right up through the water and see the sun and almost see worlds far off and after a while the sun froze and everything in my mind froze.
And I thought, I like this. I like this and this is the way it should be. I heard a nice sound way far away and it was the slow-stretched sound of the steel guitar on the portable radio. I did not hear Hank Williams and The Drifting Cowboys, just the steel guitar.
I drowned, that’s what everyone said. And when they took me out of the lake, and I opened my eyes, and someone yelled, “Jesus saved her,” and it was like everything in the world was just light and as perfect as it should be, so I thought maybe Jesus did save me, which is what a Savior would do.
I was not wild any longer. I was slow. I could feel the spaces in between deciding to do something, like waving hello, or blowing my nose, or turning on the radio, and my actually doing it. I could feel spaces when people said something to me and then I answered them. Or maybe I answered a question they had asked before, sometimes a long time before.
I liked being the way I was, the new way.
I grew up.
Tom came along. He was quite a pleasant man and strong. He had very long arms and fuzzy black eyebrows. He walked with a stoop and his long arms hanging. Once he told me when he was a boy other children used to call him “Monkey Boy.” He said he used to make himself laugh at them and tell them they were wrong. He was no “Monkey Boy,” he was Mr. Monkey, and then he’d make this sound like he was a man and an ape.
This is what Tom said to me: “You used to be a nervous girl. But now you’re not nervous. You’re all peaceful. Sometimes you’re so peaceful that people do not take the least notice of you.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I notice you,”Tom said.
Maybe it was sometime later, he asked, “Are
you lonely?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I think you are lonely,” Tom said.
“All right.”
“What if I marry you?” Tom said. “How would that be? You wouldn’t be lonely then.” Then he smiled. “Mr. Monkey won’t be lonely either. Maybe you can teach Mr. Monkey how to be peaceful.”
Well, I did marry him. We had Alice and then Johnny and then Carla.
What happened next was Tom went away to be a soldier.
Then he came back.
He was different. He said he had to cry sometimes. He said he had too many bad pictures always running in his head. He said he wanted to really be a monkey and he not a person because people did terrible things to each other, just terrible things, and he said he needed me to hold him and bring him peacefulness and I did.
Then Tom died. One day, when he woke up, he started to cough. He said he was not worried. He said nobody ever died of a cough. But he did die of a cough, you could say, but it wasn’t on the day the cough started. It was later.
After Tom died, I got a job at Bell and Howell as “projector tester.” (Projector Tester are words you can say over and over in your mind, aren’t they, like a sweet lullaby about colors or something that tastes very good. They are slow words. I think they may be words that come from outer space.)
Projector Tester is a good job. You have to give new Bell and Howell projectors a three-minute test. If you turn them on and the bulb doesn’t pop right away and you can show your film all the way through, then the Quality Control department will certify the projection lamp for a year. If a bulb is going to go, it goes quick: POP! That is how people should die, I think, only not with the POP!
So here is what I do. I line up 12 just manufactured 8mm projectors on the test table. Then I plug them in to the 12 outlet silver metal electrical outlet strip. Next I click a little reel of film on the upper spindle of each machine. It’s the three-inch reel with 50 feet of film. On our newest model, the top-of-the-line Bell and Howell 8mm Lumina, the threading of the film is fully automatic and you never have to touch the film or the filmgate. You put the film’s leader here and zip-click-clich, the film is automatically threaded!
Mighty Unclean Page 19
