fiction: My Life On Hollywood Squares

I know this can become tiresome, some person's private reflections, like radar beeping across a web of B-list Hollywood personalities, but I'm in a protracted emotional  choke slam with memories right now.  I need in the worst way for people to listen.  And to care.  I need people to care about this a fuck-load.

I need to tell everyone that it was straight talk only between me and Wally Cox.   This was in the 1960s.  Two men didn't talk about things unless there was a ritual, a code word, you know, guys would keep a cheap ass wedding band in their wallets, and whip it on when some asshole was about to say you were not heterosexual.  Two guys wanted to blow each other, they'd give this hand signal.  It was no problem.  I was straight, and Wally and me didn't do the hand signal.

The four months I was a regular on Hollywood Squares were like four miles of psychic I.E.Ds on a country lane in Libya.  There were innuendos, vicious rumors.  You have to be ready for it when you wear a tawny fright wig and novelty glasses.  They made me hold a little guitar with sequins glued all over it.   So what if Wally wants to talk to some one  about the inside track on what could have been some really outstanding entertainment vehicles!  Wally was a brilliant individual.  And an outstanding conversationalist.  He was the kind of man who doesn't have to agree with you.  I admire that.   Paul Lind was the type you're always agreeing with, because he's picking up the check.

I still wear a fright wig.   The novelty glasses still release two spring loaded hollow plastic eye balls.  Unlike some famous health gurus I could name, my health care products actually work, which is why I'm wiggling close to age 100.  I sold this health potion for decades after that star dust four months I spent as a regular on Hollywood Squares.  I'm a survivor.  I will survive.  97 y/o and I can still pole vault.   And there was nothing between me and Wally besides normal guy talk.  We didn't get queer with each other.  It was innuendo. 

I Love To Make A Fuss When I Must

The coffee smelled like a studio wrestler's undergarment.  Names of offending eating establishments are always omitted because I'm too fucking nice to inflict harm, such as by describing the food, but you can't be sued too easily for suggesting the places on Wood Street, downtown, serve coffee that can etch glass, like Theresa May's pee.   

Caffeine  is at least one of the four food groups, by necessity, much in the way opioids become a food group to people hooked on them.   There's only one bus route that can possibly kick off a longer bus ride anywhere outbound, from my slummy home turf, and it dumps my ass off on Wood Street, where coffee is like a compacted world of underarms on a dog day.

Shit like this happens to locals who live in the outer urban boonies, the bus trips have the property of defining people, in the fresh coined memes one hears in a slum.  I often stop for coffee, no matter how bad, first thing off the bus from my hell hole in Perry South to where ever.  When doing so, virtually no one can not be struck by the Invisible Pendulum, just like the big brass bastard in the flick 'The Pit and the Pendulum.'  Or like the huge pendulum in the motherfucking book.  It swings back and forth from above, and eventually hits you with the fact that you drink putrid coffee in putrid places downtown. 

Seen from above, like in a helicopter, the streets downtown, in heavy traffic, with its swaggering dyskenetic flow of pedestrians,  buildings clustered like quartz, are laid out in  a pattern that resembles a line drawing of Lou Reed shooting smack into the crook of his arm. People live and breathe on a map, and the way they get around defines them.  Bad coffee  is like drinking a slum. It becomes part of you.   We are what we ingest.  Life is putrid.

Beefing. Beefing.

I wear exactly the same clothes as the character on the show I'm watching now, while typing like a chicken eating corn kernals.  I've watched the show several times before, starting at least three years back, maybe more, forget,  was still enjoying it last night, or early in the morning, as we all prefer, when I wanted a black bomber jacket like the one the character was wearing.  I almost clicked screens over to online shopping outlets for the gratifying impulse buy, hesitated, let my mind continue clouding, then noticed that I was already wearing a black bomber jacket exactly like the one the character was wearing in the scene I was watching, and I bought the accessory while watching the same episode of the same series at least a year earlier.  No bother.  I'm happy.   I have what I want. 

 Mildly disturbed that perception of having something can suck a big fat cock.  In the future I'm going to try to overcome this toxic effect of media and materialism, mind control, patterning, profiling, being an operative in a city full of flesh robots.  Don't bet the farm on my luck with this shit.

Poem: Stuck Here

Stuck Here


hold me back, Matilda 
a bud may get awfully bothered by sounds like this
this was pulled against a classic hero
with piney  outcome
they lulled the old sprout
now here's:
schools of herring and birds harmonizing
plantation chairs filigree  striking wicker 
gold lame' curtains folded for pungent mystery
tiny cups of yogurt in
a pressurized court yard people can greet in
they're getting:
enshrined sweetened whole grains in bubbly glasss bowls
I never saw anything like it
nondairy creamer
aerator making bubbles size of bowling balls
I barely just came into the place and a person 
sits on my lap 
jumps up and down
folds the yard long  balloon into a dachsund 
I would like to escape from this excess of kindness 
Possible
but it isn't possible 
the sound of organized compulsions gets hypnotic
once the curse is set
 there is no going home to the uncles 

fiction: My Position in Life

(this is total BS.)

Paul was hostile and inebriated. Hours earlier he was charming. Handsome, in a camp group of mannerisms composing the finest Hollywood Square who ever lived. I've come to believe in destiny, like the moon is some type of luck fob. One of the reasons I remained a friend to Paul, even at his worst, is because I know what it is to be on the B-list. And I only know this because when people fall out of it, they wind up seeking emotional support from people two or three notches below the A-list, which is like saying I'm dead and still able to speak. Once you accept your own social death, it is possible to make yourself useful while living with everyone else's stardom.

You can't let on you have feelings when a man like Paul Lind shows up at your apartment drunk and angry. I just pretend I'm a professional of some sort and let people like that make snide remarks. He paid for meals and drinks, like he was paying for mental health service. There were some good times, between us, and it meant something. When I tried to explain that Wally Cox has been able to accept his position in the industry, Paul snorted an expression of scorn. "This isn't about accepting," he retorted, "it's about being."

Everyone is an existentialist when they feel like a snubbed genius with a hare lip. You have to remind a lot of people that they are celebrities, and fame is the Scylla and Charybdis so hairy to fall into when you are drowning in the River Styx. No one can be a Hollywood Square without fighting with these sorts of feelings. I went through it when I was a Hollywood Square. Now I'm back to being a folk singer. It's how I started. A producer saw my act, we had an affair, and I got what I thought was a break. Ha! Four months of celebrity then nothing.

Nothing's lower than folk singing. You can't explain a thing like that to people like Paul Lind. Fame is worse than Michael Row The Boat Ashore. You have to suffer through it, knowing other people benefit from it. It's not your song. It's theirs. Your job is to support the values other people wallow in, like pigs.

Desperate Fiction: Monopoly on Ventnor Ave.

(Some explaining is in order.  Writers are sometimes at a loss for meaning.  There may be no way of coming terms with the times in which we live.  There may be answers,hopes or methods, but the laziest way of dealing with the problem is to take banal BS and fabricate it into a story that the writer hopes will amuse you, and thus justify his/her lousy little existence.)

Monopoly on Ventnor Ave. 

Christopher Lee and Vincent Price stopped by, and we wound up looking at each other in my bungalow, like we didn't really belong together. I'd heard they acted the same way at Charles Nelson Reilly's place. Really. This was before I became a regular on Hollywood Squares. I still had my place on Ventnor Ave. People were giving me short shrift.

I was in no position to make them leave. Every time one of them would roll the dice, he'd pull the old hurry up and wait, rattling and stopping, knowing how I am with anticipation. Christopher is the worse of the two when it comes to probing for weak points. Always saying that people from New Jersy are common. He would have to rethink that. I know he did. I was a regular on Hollywood Squares for four straight months.

But I was still on Ventnor at the time. Still playing board games with the B-List. It's no different than being on the A-list. I don't think it is.

fiction: Friendship Pills

Bastard told me it was X, so I handed the portly young neck-beard my twenty dollars, and I couldn't stand waiting, so I popped the pill at the bus stop. The salesperson stands up the block from this lovely antebellum funeral parlor, where all the gang folk go after a shooting. The older I get, the less this differs from playing bridge at the nursing home just another block down the pike. I'm planning to retire there. Then croak. But for now I have few lean battles left inside the rotting, worm eaten Trojan Horse of flesh.

Took a while for the crap to kick in, and it sure as hell wasn't X. I was watching my shows, like I always do. Sometimes it's a biography of Del Shannon. Or it's a true crime show in which the Unibomber brings one home again. Same bombs against the same alma maters. I mostly watch half hour biographies, as if people from What's My Line are just as important as George Washington or Chairman Mao, who also does a nice half hour biography. I was into my third half hour show when the crap kicked in. I'd seen the show before, and this time it came clear just how beneficial illegal drugs are.

This time I know Paul Lind, personally. I already knew the story. Great character actor for sit coms. Fantastic panelist on Hollywood Squares. ETOH abuse. Some mental problems. Repressed animosity about being a B-lister. This time I was in his apartment. We were sort of like friends. More so than when you just watch the computer screen. He paid particular attention to everything I said. Makes sense. Sometimes it's best to listen to an outsider. Your closest friends might be blowing smoke up your ass. The word 'friend' seems to have changed from red to green and then to blue and yellow over the last sixty years. Paul and I are in the yellow zone for now. There is some type of relationship. Hope the neck-beard is at his post next time I head out by the funeral parlor. Hope he has more fake X.