What We Must Know About Communism

I stepped out of McGovern for President headquarters on Garnet, walked across the street and beheld a world gone dark, moist and very strange...

I stepped into the American Opinion Bookstore on Garnet, next to the barber shop that had the toy hair clippers still in the package yellowing in its front window, and looked at the 80 year old matron, a riot of wrinkles and mystery creases, who wore a Goldwater sun visor. I asked if they had any books by Gary Allen. She said yes. "God damnit all the fucking hell" I said, "is this the American I know, when I man can walked into a store and get served bullshit brisket at the nod of a head? You make me sick, Madam" I informed her, and then walked into the night air, which was dark and wet and filled with gas fumes and traces alcoholic drink .

Walking briskly towards the Licorice Pizza, I brushed past John G. Schmitz, who was engaged in executing a meaningless hand gesture in tandem with Phyllis Schlafly. He gave me a crazy cockeyed grin as he crinkled up his thin black moustache, mumbling, "We must stop Socialism one twitch at a time..."

I was having none of this flatulent version of righteous backbone and poked this guy in the shoulder, smack dab in the middle of the recycled Zoot jacket he took off a stoned JiveFiver in 53. " See that billboard across the street" I asked. His gaze drifted from my punishing glare and tried to focus on the billboard through the streaking blue and gold trail left by Detroit's wretched progress. He nodded. "See the building under the billobard" I asked. "Fuck you" he said, "all I need to do is get five more signatures and the RotoRooter guy next door to me is a cinch for the school board". He tapped his pencil his legal pad , his face resembling something more in the line of a sunday crossword puzzle done in a blunt magic marker. I decked him,."I AINT GOT NO USE FOR YOUR RED APPLE JUICE." The slobering cretin collapsed like ten stories of glass tile. I looked up from the mess thsi messenger had become and spotted the masses, the Doodletown Pipers, marching up the center of the otherwise dark Garnet avenue."Do you know the way to Maynard"s?" Maynard's was, of course, reserved only for Gus Hall Marxist Scrimshaw gnawing internationalist scrone bags, so I stopped the mass of inane folk music and directed them instead to Cap'n Bs Old Place, where they could find the Cap'n himself gurning for drinks from a from plaster Clydesdale.  

Down at Tug's, the Sam Yorty Caucus was planning a putsch of the local Democratic Party that would begin when everyone put down their fork at the upcoming Cobb Salad Social. Hesitant to alter the course of history, I went over to the Big Bear and stocked up on Ruskets Cereal, Squirt and Jonny Cat, preparing for Richard Nixon's second term. On my way out I ran into the old lady I'd encountered at the American Opinion Book Store. Her eyes glinted hard and sharp like tiny flecks of mica; tiny fountains of spittle foamed at the corners of her mouth. "I was just kidding earlier," I said. "Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice..." I then pulled down my pants and blacked out for something like 42 years.

• Ted Burke Ted Hughes hits up Basil Bunting's grand son for a Five Spot and hand dried cat.

  
  

  

  Barry Alfonso Since you last noticed what time it was your brother has been taking care of your white bulldog for two weeks and the waitress has converted entirely to the metric system and five ancestors have had flat tires on the bridge to the 21st Century and you, you just inhaled that piece of rhubarb pie for Chrissakes…

  Ted Burke This it! Thing! The Only Way!

  
  
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  Barry Alfonso A thing in and of itself, TRULY doing nothing...

  
  
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  Ted Burke This is what I call an Empty Signifier

  
  
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  Barry Alfonso Erving Goffman's abandoned retail outlet.

  
  
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  Ted Burke Excited Mandrill fans were desperate for momentos after the concert

  
  
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  Barry Alfonso That's why they tore down Exuma's franchise HQ.

  
  
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  Ted Burke This is where you can buy the Malo backlist

  
  
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  Barry Alfonso The backlist is muy malo. The front list also.

  
  
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  Ted Burke The front list features the obscure album "My Fist in a Glove Box" by Skeeter Davis and the bass player from the Banana Slugs

  
  
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  Barry Alfonso The Front List was a club on La Jolla Blvd. next to the White Whale; the Blitz Brothers played their first gig there, opening for Jamul before they started on their tour with Trampoline. You needed hydrogen peroxide by the gallon to get the grease out of your ears.

  
  
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  Ted Burke Raf Algren put pepper into his bottomless cup of coffee as he sat at the counter of the Colony Kitchen at the bottom of La Jolla Shores Drive, plotting a move that would make those girls drawing chalk circles in front of his house sit up and take notice.

  
  
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  Barry Alfonso Just then, my mind went blank at John's Waffle Shop wondering how many votes Barry Commoner would take from Jimmy Carter when I noted the faux-maple syrup collecting around my feet and the next Century burning on the griddle..

DRYING THE CAT BY HAND: an exchange

• • Ted Burke

    

    
    

    Monday near San Diego, CA

    I AM TIRED OF DRYING THE CAT BY HAND

     

    Barry Alfonso In Santee, "drying the cat by hand" means taking a single woman out to dinner, saying flattering things to her, picking up the check and then giving her the phone number of your brother-in-law, I understand.

    9 hours ago 
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    Ted Burke It has been said that "drying the cat" means mispronouncing the names of jazz musicians like Theolonious Monk and Ornette Coleman in an Telegraph Avenue methadone clinic. "Drying the Cat By Hand" is a variation heard in the Tenderloin and up to North Beach, meaning that you announce to Amiri Baraka that Boots Randolph played better sax than Coltrane or Shorter.

    6 hours ago · 

     

    Barry Alfonso I've also heard that it is a derivation of the old blues expression "shave 'em dry," meaning to cut off the head of a glass of beer with a straight razor before attacking someone in the solar plexus over a Stetson hat.

    6 hours ago ·
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    Ted Burke I've heard tell of that as well and it makes me wonder if that is related to the practice of ordering a shot and beer and dry towel twisted into a rat tail and snapped cruelly to the back of the drinker's bare neck by everyone in the bar named either "Earl" or "Ondine".

    6 hours ago ·

     

  Barry Alfonso A lot of this has been lost and confused over the years, I suspect -- a "dry cat" used to be slang for a guy with a flat top and bad dandruff. It was a custom to rub scalps like that for luck before a dice game or before rubbing spices into a jerk chicken leg, or both. It also relates to martinis and obscene gestures while sinking a putt.

  6 hours ago ·
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  Ted Burke There was the habit among dairy farmers of rubbing their bovines with mewing kittens for no real reason; "drying the cow" became "drying the cat" over time, an understandable conflation, and the implication of the phrase is that one is standing around irritating another living creature for no good reason. But since when does anyone need a good reason to irritate someone?

  6 hours ago ·
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  Barry Alfonso That's right! Now I remember. Will Rogers did a bit about this and in fact got arrested in Tulsa for demonstrating how it was done. There's a famous photo of Junior Samples from Hee Haw "drying the cat by hand" behind Stringbean's back when he thought the cameras were off.

  6 hours ago ·
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  Ted Burke *Absolutely! This in turn inspired Pynchon's famous opening line of his magnum opus 'The Crying of Litter Box 29". "A dry cat came screamng across the sky..."

  5 hours ago · 
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  Barry Alfonso Right, that was a literary in-joke for many years standing. Hemingway took a swing at Frank Yerby after he wrote that Papa had been drying the cat with both hands for years...

  5 hours ago · 
• Ted Burke On a related note, Norman Mailer misunderstood Russell Kirk when he announced that what really wanted was a "cat dried by hand". Mailer took this to be a translation of Parsian street slang used among working girls meaning that the person who uttered the phrase was in desperate need of being buggered, but that lacked the needed ticket for admission.Mailer told Kirk that he had his ticket "right here" and demanded Kirk "give up the cat." William Buckley was amused by the whole thing and had Mailer on his tv show several times.

  5 hours ago · 
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  Barry Alfonso Well, I do remember Gore Vidal giving Buckley the hairy eyeball on TV during the '68 Democratic convention and saying, "You really are drying the cat by hand a little hard tonight, old boy" while Buckley let something moist and shiny collect above his upper lip.

Easter Dinner

"Your lips are too loud and make me want to lick the crust of a rusty file". Stevie Hokum jabbed his best pal MarkDanger!!! in the ribs with a hard elbow. MarkDanger,who was playing a guitar solo he learned note for note from an old CornMeal Country anthology of shaving jingles, bashed Hokum in the side of the head.

Steve Hokum fell to the floor from his chair. MarkDanger!!! tossed a rusty file down to him. 

"I told you to play nice or get whumped by a whammy bar" was what MarkDanger!!! said.

"What???" was what Lucy??? asked , coming into the living room with a gray full of icecubes and cupcakes.

"Shut up Lucy???" said MarkDanger,"Steve Hokum is about to get busy"

Barber Shop

Somewhere south of University Avenue and east of 30^th Street is a mysterious barber shop in a white stucco box-shaped storefront with a dirty window and a striped pole that doesn’t turn. There’s an old barber sitting in a wooden chair along the wall facing the big barber chair which has never been occupied since I first noticed the place 19 years ago. The old barber wasn’t as old then, but he wasn’t young, either – his skin has always been a dull orange, creased by long wrinkle-lines, giving him a basketball look. He wore then and wears now a neat black moustache, making his constant frown look even more hangdog and severe. His hair is perpetually neat, which has always made me think he somehow cuts it himself, probably every day. The barber doesn’t look dexterous enough to do that, which is one reason I consider him and his shop to be mysterious.

Another point of mystery is how he keeps his shop in business. I may have seen one customer in there over the past 19 years, but he wasn’t sitting in the barber chair, so he was probably a bill collector or an election canvasser.

Many times, I’ve thought about going into the barber shop and getting a haircut. It gives me a weird feeling to consider doing this – it would be like going to a strange church and taking part in the ritual of a faith I know nothing about. But who would do a thing like that, for no good reason? So I stand on the other side of the street and I stare into the barber shop for a half-minute or so.  Nothing ever changes as time goes by. Of course, I have and still do, which makes the barber shop more and more mysterious.