I'm so old that I remember when Game Shows ruled the afternoons and Jack Narz' Beat the Clock was on around supper time.
Close ups of Groucho's expression when his contestants would hit the inevitable idiot bump. Ernie Kovacs and troupe serving up more polished absurdities all black and white and streaming into a nearly empty bucket of self evolving into an infatuation with his widow, Edie Adams, hawking Muriel Cigars to the music of Cy Coleman and my playing the 45 of Peggy Lee's cover of `Hey Big Spender' on the RCA turntable until my ma hid the record, though I kept worrying that Fidel would kidnap Miss Adams. So, yeah, cut me in half, count the rings, don't bother x'ing out the knots - degrade the warped board footage into bags of chips and spread `em in the coop. Rig up an old Zenith in the rafters and entertain the girls with a Ray Harryhausen festival so's all the snarling rubbery clay beasts and baddies scare off the predators and, Art, I'll take infinity for $100
Maybe just a gram of Aspirin and a little phenylbutazone (they dope horses don't they?) to mediate all this calcification and allow me to open up in the back stretch leading the field into the `good old days' when gas was twenty-five cents a gallon and a fill up earned the pumper eight leaded glass tumblers and my brothers and I could ride our bikes a couple blocks past all the pastel stucco and oleanders to the Monkey's Hideout bar on Highland Ave. in San Berdoo on the last Friday of the month where we'd make sure our neighbor, Charlie, a locomotive engineer long retired from the Union Pacific, wouldn't lose his way going home while weaving slurred visions of his past for us `yeah, boys' the `rounder' who, on a `leg' over the Sierra Nevada, in the dead of winter, froze solid still gripping a handle in one of the cars `imagine, boys' hack sawed at the wrists and laid out atop a crate of bearings where he clattered along, unhanded and sightless, with the wheels, while awaiting the thaw in thicker air
His wife always gave us a dime out of gratitude, as Charlie would follow us and not wander off to a more florid establishment with denizens greedy for the remains of his pension check. And, Leefa, his wife, disgusted with Charlie's indiscriminate imbibing, consulted a psychic who, she excitedly confided in my mother, read entrails, crystal ball, or maybe her navel, and confidently predicted Charlie would die in the spring. My mother, a very practical woman whose only chiffon was sewn on her Singer, asked Leefa if the psychic had included a year as well as a season
The last time I saw Charlie he was being carried, screaming, dentures in the grass, from his house by the boys in blue. Apparently he had sobered sufficiently to become aggravated by his Gallo loot being doled out by she who wished to switch him onto the very last abandoned siding, and had punched her out, menacing the arriving officers with a hacksaw
He left the station and disappeared into the marshalling yard of lost souls at Patton State Hospital. Leefa died, of an infection, from the bite of one of the Black Widows that grew fat and glabrous on tiny fry under the ledge of Charlie's goldfish pond. The lily padded death trap was adjacent to the ramshackle little greenhouse in the backyard where Charlie had been exiled and we had, as his guests, sat listening to fevered reports, from a pirate station in Mexico, detailing the nefarious activities of several divisions of The People's Army that, having debarked from a fleet of ChiCom subs, had formed up and were racing across the Baja to sack and pillage the Greater Southwest.
But I wouldn't listen to Chuck's old glowing-tube Hallicrafter for long as I believed I'd hear the screams of Miss Adams being transmitted as beeps from some Sputnik or other as I just knew Fidel would kidnap her and force her to hawk his Havana Stogies, all the while conspiring with his Maoist buddies to force me onto diet of cane sugar and rice
When our folks would haul us out into the desert proper, along the Colorado river, where my ma would hand feed the Chuckwallas shreds of lettuce from her sandwich before they'd scurry into the water, ballooning up their bodies with air, floating south with the current, I just KNEW the mess kits of the `Yellow Horde' would be brimming with lizard that very day
Thank goodness, for Soupy Sales and the Stooges (they always made sense!) and that Castro never succeeded in rubbing his commie beard over Miss Adams' furs
Now, Get Off My Lawn or get a pie in the face
(J'accuse Spotted Crow! - `Thanx, for the reverie' - though not much has changed - was sent out of the house to hunt down Purple People Eaters in the Crepe Myrtles - and never did go back in)... Sometimes I think our current neighbors might be trying to broadcast but, alas, they're too laid back to bother...
A part of it was filmed in Philly and I heard a person on a tour saying that it was filmed in this graveyard we had just walked by...and my batteries were dead in the camera.
