It Goes On

Take-out Asian food tonight, of the Korean variety. There's this dish that's cooked in a stone bowl with steamed vegetables and a fried egg on top. Douse it with Asian hot sauce and mix the whole shit up. Amazingly good. Only you don't get the stone bowl in a take-out order, but what the hell. Mood music for my dinner: Impossible Germany by Wilco. Made me lonely in a happy tolerable kind of way. Check it out and you'll see what I mean. Okay. So now we'll move into the religious material. Mack and the boys are on their way in a borrowed truck to catch frogs in order to sell them to Doc in order to get money to throw a party for Doc. The truck breaks down. Gay, the best mechanic of the bunch, says that it needs a needle valve for the carburetor. He takes off hitchhiking to go fetch a new one after saying that he'll be right back: 

"He thumbed three cars before one stopped for him. The boys watched him climb in and start down the hill. They didn't see him again for one hundred and eighty days. 

Oh, the infinity of possibility! How could it happen that the car that picked up Gay broke down before it got into Monterey? If Gay had not been a mechanic, he would not have fixed the car. If he had not fixed it the owner wouldn't have taken him to Jimmy Brucia's for a drink. And why was it Jimmy's birthday? Out of all the possibilities in the world-the millions of them-only events occurred that lead to the Salinas jail. Sparky Enea and Tiny Colletti had made up a quarrel and were helping Jimmy celebrate his birthday. The blonde came in. The musical argument in front of the juke box. Gay's new friend who knew a judo hold and tried to show it to Sparky and got his wrist broken when he hold went wrong. The policeman with a bad stomach-all unrelated, irrelevant details and yet all running in one direction. Fate just didn't intend Gay to go on that frog hunt and Fate took a hell of a lot of trouble and people and accidents to keep him from it. When the final climax came with the front of Holman's bootery broken out and the party trying on the shoes in the display window only Gay didn't hear the fire whistle. Only Gay didn't go to the fire and when the police came they found him sitting all alone in Holman's window wearing one brown oxford and one patent leather dress shoe with a gray cloth top."  (from Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck) 

Next I'll write about the great frog hunt or maybe skip right to the party. We'll see. 

Today's LITERTURE

Day Four of Hibernation is going very nicely. Cooked a nice vegetable soup with chorizo (Portuguese sausage) and parmesan cheese. Took two hot baths in my new jetted tub (one of the best investments I've ever made), with a cheap tea candle and a couple of ice-cold bottles of Spaten beer. Here's the latest from page 20 of the bible of J.S.: 

Doc asked, "How are things going up at the Palace?"

Hazel ran his fingers through his dark hair and he peered into the clutter of his mind. "Pretty good," he said. "That fellow Gay is moving in with us I guess. His wife hits him pretty bad. He don't mind that when he's awake but she waits 'til he gets to sleep and then hits him. He hates that. He has to wake up and beat her up and then when he goes back to sleep she hits him again. He don't get any rest so he's moving in with us." 

"That's a new one," said Doc. "She used to swear out a warrant and put him in jail." 

"Yeah!" said Hazel. "But that was before they built the new jail in Salinas. Used to be thirty days and Gay was pretty ho to get out, but this new jail--radio in the tank and good bunks and the sheriff's a nice fellow. Gay gets in there and he don't want to come out. He likes it so much his wife won't get him arrested any more. So she figured out this hitting him while he's asleep. It's nerve racking, he says. And you know as good as me--Gay never did take any pleasure beating her up. He only done it to keep his self-respect. But he gets tired of it. I guess he'll be with us now." 

Frank's Annual Hibernation

Every year when the weather turns to shit I hibernate. Two solid weeks. Call in sick or take some stress leave. It is good for you and you should try it. Here are the ingredients for an enjoyable and rewarding hibernation: 

• beer (both dark, and amber for variety)
  
• wine
  
• benedictine and brandy
  
• stuff to make caucasians (kahlua, vodka, milk)
  
• homemade soups
  
• homemade stews
  
• take-out menus for when the soups and stews get old
  
• netflix
  
• a woodstove (I recommend the giant Cawley 800 with cast iron beavers and deer on the doors - none of those fancy enameled things)
  
• a kindly outdoorsy neighbor to split and deliver wood to my door each day (bless his backwards country soul!)
  
• a single incredible, life changing book that you will read slowly, only pages per day, in order to appreciate and savor the inexorable goodness of it  
  

So, for this year's rest I chose one of my all-time favorite books: Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck. If you haven't read it, no need; over the course of my two-week boozy retreat I will blog a few choice passages (though there are really too many to narrow down). And if they do not move you to get your own goddamn copy and read it, then piss off. No, I'm kidding. But seriously, you should piss off then. 

"Cannery Row in Monterey California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing."

Sleep well,

Frank

Frank's Wild Years

Problem solved: new editor is cool. I can continue with just a couple of "Ithaca references" per column. Thanks to all who emailed their pledges of support and willingness to take up arms. It's nice to know that people have my back and are skilled in the use of nunchucks and throwing bricks. You're a good bunch.

Ithaca Rules

I try not to let things get too personal about writing, but like The Godlfather said, "It's all personal." So here goes: I've been getting some flack from The Ithaca Times about the column. The deal is that it (the column) must be more focused on Ithaca. While it's not a bad place to live (so long as you don't ever have a craving for a decent bacon cheeseburger or a beef on weck sandwich), it is certainly not the beginning, middle, and end of all things holy. For a couple of months now it have been kosher to write in briefly about an Ithaca bar or restaurant, but now... well, I'm not exactly sure. And so I ask you, three loyal readers, what do you think? Thoughts, ideas, threats? 

- Frank

Literary Tattoos are Cool!

I'm going to get a literary tattoo. Only problem is, I can't decide exactly what should grace the ample contours of body. And then there's the questions of location, font, etc.  Here are some possibilities. Feel free to pony up some suggestions of your own. Get out the books. 

The world must be all fucked up when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Certain things they should just stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone. I know that's impossible, but it's too bad anyway. 

- J.D.S.

Justice is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with ah kmnife brought up down on the magazine of a battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning. Garroting. That's what justice is. 

- Joseph Heller

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. 

- Joseph Heller

Continued

To make a long story short, Myron was doing okay. He met a nice girl, Reba, who was into an organic lifestyle, and they started eating healthy food and doing yoga together. Myron changed quite a bit; I was truly surprised: he bought organic hemp clothes, drove a Toyota Prius, and drank only fair trade coffee. Only problem was, being an addict, Myron pushed things to the limit which, in this case, meant bizarre tantric sex with Reba.  Luckily, I never got the details aside from a text that said he was in the middle of a three hour orgasm. I got the message in the middle of a meeting and risked sidelong glances to write back and say, "good for you, asshole, but why are you telling me?" 

And, like the old joke, Myron replied, "because I'm telling everyone!" 

So I forgot all about Myron and his three hour orgasm... until the frantic phone call.

Myron said, "Frank, something's wrong. You need to get here and take me to the hospital." 

"Okay Myron. Tell me?" I said.

Myron proceeded to tell me about the three Viagara pills he popped before having tantric sex with Reba. Everything was great except that, after half an hour, Reba got bored and went out to do some shopping. And Myron was left in their beautiful townhouse with a developing case of ischemic priapism (a really serious condition from long-term erections that can result in permanent damage or even death). After a little bit of scary research online I called an ambulance and, 2.5 hours later, met Myron at Erie County Medical Center where he was undergoing what is called therapeutic aspiration. Don't worry: I won't explain what it is and how they insert a needle to drain blood and then flush it out with saline. And I won't tell you about the emergency shunt they had to use when the aspiration didn't work. Let it suffice to say that Myron got fixed up with no permanent damage. But I spent 3 days taking care of the poor bastard. To add to Myron's troubles, when we returned to the townhouse Reba was long gone. She had packed up almost everything in the condo and left only the briefest note. It read: "Myron I hope it fell off, you selfish asshole. Go fuck yourself with your 3-hour erection." 

Pretty crazy, but true. If I could make up shit like that, I'd probably be going places...

- Frank 

A Night in the Ruts

You won't believe the night I had. Seriously. It's so fucking crazy that it's almost not even possible. Imagine me sitting in my apartment with Gene, my roommate, playing Scrabble for points to see who is going to buy dinner at Maxie's. I'm beating Gene soundly and looking forward to ordering half the damn menu to punish his cheap illiterate ass. I'm going to order appetizers and fried chicken and gumbo and several pints of beer. Plus desert. And coffee. Just as I lay down the tiles to nail Quixotic off of the C in Gene's Socks, the phone rings. It has that indescribable bad news quality, but I answer it anyway, on account of just earning 69 points on my last turn. How could anything go wrong? Easy. The voice on the end is frantic. It's my younger cousin, Myron.

"Frank? Frank? Frank, is that you, Frank? Oh shit, man, I'm in big trouble, Frank. You got to help me."  

Myron is a big-time fuckup, but a pretty decent human being, these two things not being exclusive as I'm sure you know. He developed a pretty bad coke habit in the 90s. It was crazy because he was on the chess team and headed for an Ivy League school to study physics or recombinant gene technology or something. But he fell hard for Cindy Mortellaro, this trashy girl who chain smoked Newports, drove a Camaro, and hung out at the bowling alley. Two months later, Sandy had taken up with Kevin Piworski, a bowler who was supposedly "about to turn pro," and poor Myron was left heartbroken, scoring drugs behind the Armory on Niagara Street. He had cashed in all the Google  stock he had purchased with his Bar Mitzvah money and was living large, but in a bad way. So, after rehab and all the other "interventions," Myron eventually straightened out, made it through college, and fulfilled his destiny as some kind of engineer, designing water pipe systems for cities.  

Sorry cut things off in the middle of the story, but I put a nice olive pizza on the stone in the oven and it's about done. I'll be back tomorrow night...

Frank