ABOUT THAT THING CALLED "CLEANING"

by Mary Elizabeth Raines, © 2021

Even though I grew up in a spotless home, housekeeping has never been something for which I’ve had a strong instinct. I do love my home to be neat and clean though, and over the years, by gritting my teeth and going against my natural inclinations, I’ve gotten a little bit better at keeping things reasonably tidy. It was not always so.  

I went to a music conservatory for college in the mid-60s. In our freshman year, my delightful dormitory roommate, Marta, (who would later wind up as an assistant stage director at the Metropolitan Opera, a Broadway performer, and then as a script supervisor on TV shows like “Star Trek” and “ER”), began eating a particular brand of candy bar and saving the wrappers. She kept an untidy growing stack of them on her night table, along with a lot of other clutter.

“Marta, why are you keeping all of these candy bar wrappers?” I asked.
“Because if you collect enough of them,” she said, “you can send them in and be entered into a contest.”

“What’s the prize?”

“A pony,” she replied gleefully. “I’ve always wanted a pony!”
“But what if you win? Where would you keep a pony?” I cried.
“No problem,” she replied cheerfully. “We can keep the pony right here in our dorm room. Nobody will ever know.”

She said that because our room was always an enormous mess.

Marta and I had originally been assigned different roommates. I was in absolute awe of mine. She was immaculate. She could fold her panties into perfect squares,–I never figured out how she did that,–and she arranged her books in order of height, and her bed was always made, and she wanted the lights out every night at exactly 10 p.m., immediately after she finished reading her nightly devotions. Marta had a roommate with similar admirable qualities.

The two of us couldn’t have been more different from our assigned roommates. Not only were we supremely messy; we were also night owls. Night after night our roommates, needing to have the lights out, would banish us from our rooms to the small lounge on our dormitory floor. Marta and I soon discovered that we had a lot in common, and we bonded. It wasn’t long before we plotted a scheme to ditch our respective roommates and join forces; our only concern was that it might hurt their feelings. It turned out that our respective roommates had gotten the same idea, and before we could even broach the subject, they informed us that they wanted to swap. Fortunately, nobody’s feelings were hurt, and everyone ended up well matched and happy.

Marta had more money than I did, and she possessed an expensive and gorgeous wardrobe, most of which lay strewn across our floor. She would wake up in the morning and sit on the edge of her bed, tossing piles of clothing into the air with her foot and saying, “Which puddle shall I wear today?” She always looked fabulous, by the way.

In those days, there were weekly room inspections performed by a floor monitor, an older upper-classmate who got free room and board in exchange for being strict with us. If your room wasn’t clean, you would be grounded. Worse, if they found forbidden substances–specifically alcohol (pot & drugs were still a few years away)–you would be permanently expelled from the Conservatory! Marta and I were neither wild nor party girls, but, at age 18, that prohibition was far too tempting to ignore. There were a couple of popular shampoos in those days named Prell, which was green, and Breck, which was golden brown. We filled an empty Prell bottle with creme de menthe, and a Breck bottle with ginger brandy, set them out prominently on our bureaus, had a little sip whenever we wanted, and nobody ever found out.

Every week, only minutes before the monitor showed up for our weekly room inspection, Marta and I would desperately grab armfuls of our stuff, including candy bar wrappers, and shove it all helter-skelter into our closets; the stacks went up nearly to the ceiling. Only our booze stayed out. Then, during the inspection, we would stand to one side looking as innocent (and tidy) as possible, while praying desperately that the dorm monitor would not open our closet doors. She never did, and we never got grounded. (Well, at least we never got grounded for having a messy room. But that’s another story.)

And, although it distressed her, to my enormous relief, Marta did not win the pony.



Once, and only once, she and I went on an unprecedented cleaning binge. Afterward, we gave tours of the room to our dorm mates. They were all quite impressed. We heard comments like, “Oh, you have a radio? I never knew you had a radio,” and “Wow! So there was an actual floor under all that stuff?”

Over half a century later, Marta and I are still close friends.

AS I GREW OLDER
My habits did not improve quickly. When my son was three years old, I pulled out the vacuum cleaner one day. He began to jump up and down, clapping his hands in delight, as he cried joyously, “Company’s coming, company’s coming!”

DIRTY DISHES
My child may also have grown up with some confusion about the purpose of an oven. This is because for much of his childhood, I gave piano lessons in our home. My students would be accompanied by one of their parents. To my dismay, the kitchen could be openly viewed from the living room, especially from the couch where the parents sat. It was an unfortunate situation for someone who was not all that great at keeping up with the dishes.

Did you know that, with only a few minutes’ notice, a whole lot of dirty dishes, as well as miscellaneous food items, can be crammed into an oven? There’s just one problem. You must take care to remove said dishes when preheating the oven to bake something. I won’t bother to tell you how I learned that.

Following are some other useful ways to disguise messiness that I have learned over the years. Not only are these touch-ups speedy; in performing them, rather than being scorned by those last-minute guests, you will be admired for the fantastic energy they think you are putting into housekeeping. Read on.


MESSY HOUSE
When the house is a total wreck and you discover to your horror that someone is going to pop in soon, here’s what you do. You quickly pull out the vacuum, the mop, and a caddy full of cleaning products: furniture polish, windex, paper towels, that sort of thing. Leave them lying around randomly. It will look as though you have been caught in the midst of doing deep cleaning.

STREWN CLOTHING
If there are piles of clothes lying around, I have two solutions, both of them simple and fast.
1. Place a big open suitcase near the clothes to make it look as though you are packing for a trip,
     or
2. Open an ironing board and stick an iron on it. Bundle up the clothing and shove it all into a laundry basket. If you have time, for a perfect finishing touch position one of the garments on the ironing board as if you were caught in the midst of ironing it.

BATHROOM
When the bathroom is icky and company is arriving, the solution is simple. Sprinkle a whole bunch of cleanser, like Comet, into the sinks and tub, and for a finishing touch, leave a cleaning brush inside the toilet, which makes it looks as though you were caught in the middle of scrubbing. You can do this in under a minute, even while someone is knocking on the front door. Before you open the door, muss your hair a little (not difficult for me to do), quickly don rubber gloves, grab a broom  to hold, and, for the finishing touch, look as weary as possible (also not difficult for me to do). Gets ‘em most every time.

FAILSAFE SOLUTION
If all of that doesn’t fool them, you can take on the attitude of one of my friends, Peggy, who is a warm human being and talented writer (her articles have been published in places like Reader’s Digest and the Chicken Soup inspirational book series), but also a sloppy housekeeper. Adding to Peggy’s overall untidiness, she has lots of indoor cats and possesses no sense of smell. You get the picture. She tells me that when people visit, she never cleans up ahead of time. Rather, she says, as her guests enter her home, they look around, sniff the air, and immediately feel superior to her and thus very good about themselves. She considers it her contribution to humanity.
 

I Heart Hippos (and lounge jazz)

Hey, guys, I just watched the most gripping nature documentary about hippopotami! My goodness! I did not know that hippos are the nearest relatives of whales, and like whales, chatter to one another almost constantly when they are underwater. What fabulous mothers these talkative gals are! Their fellows, on the other hand, are into–well you know–things that fellows like. Fighting and yelling and stuff. Each hippo must eat about 80 pounds of grass a day, making me wish I could import a couple, just for a day, to rid my yard of invasive and unwanted foxtails.

Anyway. It seems de rigueur for the narrator of nature documentaries to be a mature man with a British accent. The main commentator for Indycar races, also a man with a few years under his belt, speaks with a similar accent, which may be why I am inordinately fond of Indycar racing, but not of Nascar, where the announcers usually sound like hillbillies. (I write this with profound apologies to my hillbilly friends).

Back to the hippos: as I watched the show, I had to applaud the person who selected the music tracks. There was brittle martial music when the guys fought, desperately dire music when the waterways dried up and fires came, sad and drawn out cello notes when one of the hippopotami died, quirky-but-elephantine music when the bull hippo scattered his dung (I frankly thought that they might have taken that act a bit more seriously; certainly the bull hippo did)...and then, for the lovemaking (which, with hippos, takes half an hour!!!), the song choice was some slow, sensuous lounge jazz that seemed absolutely appropriate. But since, other than having been a good mother and occasionally carrying a few extra pounds, I am no hippo, what do I know?

(Another similarity is that birds like to ride on top of hippos. Welcome to my world.)

PINDELL HAS DIED

 

AN OBITUARY BY MARY ELIZABETH (LEACH) RAINES

© M. E. Raines, 2017

A while ago I got one of those phone calls you dread receiving. It started out, “I have some sad news…”

My caller told me that Pindell* was dead. He had died of a heart attack shortly before Christmas.

Here’s what Pindell’s obituary said: “Rick was a graduate of New England Conservatory of Music. He was a scholar, musician and a gentle soul.”

Rick? Who is that? We never, ever called him Rick. We always called him by his last name: Pindell.

Pindell was the first genuinely crazy person I ever befriended. We were students at the New England Conservatory of Music together. I was a piano major, but I hung out with his crowd—the composers. This small knot of composition students at the conservatory were all guys, and they were all brilliant. Geniuses. While we did not have the words “nerd” and “geek” in our vocabularies back then, that’s what my friends were.

Pindell was the nerdiest and geekiest of them all. He was, as his obituary stated, a scholar, a musician, and a gentle man. He was also big, clumsy, funny looking, and weird, a guy with a complete lack of social graces who wore ill-fitting plaid shirts and thick glasses that were, just like the old movie cliché, taped in the middle to hold them together.

I have no problem with this. The reading glasses I am wearing right now as I type are duct-taped together.

Pindell and his friends, you see, were My People.

There are a few snippets about Pindell that stand out above all the rest. One memory is of a party at my sister’s apartment. At a time when most of us were still living in dorms, my older sister came to Boston and moved into an Actual Apartment. We all thought that this was quite glamorous.

For some reason or another, she invited my friends to this party. I need to interject here that our parties were not anything like the college parties today. First of all, we rarely had alcohol. Secondly, while we did listen to a lot of music, the speakers weren’t very loud. Back then a person could always have a conversation in a normal tone of voice when music was playing, even at a prom. It was the mid-60s. Our music was on vinyl, and what my friends and I ordinarily played were things like symphonies and operas. We didn’t smoke pot, either. We knew very little about it. The first time I ever heard someone say that she had smoked marijuana was in 1967 at the end of my sophomore year. I scarcely knew what the word meant; I had a vague idea that it was something illegal that the beatniks did.

Ours were the last of the days of innocence. The huge demonstrations and riots that welled up against the Vietnam War were still a couple of years away. The nearest we got to a riot was when a downtown Boston theater scheduled a 2:00 a.m. showing of the exciting new James Bond film, “Casino Royale.” As a publicity stunt, they announced that anyone wearing a trench coat could get in for free. Pindell, along with several of my other nerdy friends, donned their trench coats—because everyone had a trench coat back then—and walked to the theater. I had to get up early to open the school’s switchboard the next morning, and I remember how depressed I was that I could not accompany them.

Unfortunately, the theater had miscalculated, never guessing how many students would show up. Boston was a college town, the showing took place during a semester break, and there wasn’t a whole lot to do back then. Fifteen thousand kids, all wearing trench coats, showed up! Although I doubt that it was more than a little scuffle between a few of them, the newspapers reported that a riot broke out. My friends later told me that they were unaware of any riot. They were just standing in a massive crowd outside the theater, hoping against hope that they could get in to see the movie. They really liked James Bond. I still have the newspaper from the following day. On the front page of the Boston Globe is a picture of a police officer, his legs braced, holding back a snarling police dog who is standing on his hind feet, trying to lunge at a few of my terrified composer friends. The rioters. Including Pindell.

Back to my sister’s party. As glamorous as I thought it to be, her sparsely furnished apartment had a bed in it and not much else. We all stood around the bed being jolly and party-ish. Pindell asked someone for a match, lit something that was not a cigarette, and began shaking it around. To my amazement, I saw that it was a sparkler. (A sparkler is a hand-held firework that emits flames and sparks.) One imagines that Pindell, party guy and former rioter, believed that playing with sparklers would be a festive thing to do. I can still see him standing at attention, expressionless, dully waving his sparkler back and forth over my sister’s bed with the flames reflected in the thick lenses of his glasses, completely oblivious to the fact that several people were screaming at him to stop. The sparks from Pindell’s sizzling party toy burned several large holes in my sister’s bedspread, and the sulphurous smoke filling the room made us cough, but luckily the building did not catch on fire.

Another outstanding Pindell snippet occurred when a few of us went to a tawdry cafeteria across the street from the conservatory called Hayes Bickford’s. We went there often to hang out and chat. It was our version of a coffeehouse, decades before there were places like Starbucks. It would still be a couple of years before hippie coffeehouses came into their own. Hayes Bickford’s cafeteria was the one place in Boston where street people, addicts, bums, the most wretched of the wretched, and, of course, students like us could go to get a cheap meal.

All of my friends were poor, and even at Haye’s Bickford’s low prices, we rarely ordered food; usually all we could afford would be a cup of coffee. We would stretch our cups of coffee out for hours on end as we sat at the cheap little tables and discussed music. The composer crowd always discussed music.

On this evening, our group sat down at a table that had not yet been cleared. In front of  Pindell sat a sloppy plate of someone's leftover spaghetti and meatballs. Pindell picked up the used fork and began eating.

“Pindell,” I gasped. “What are you doing?”

He looked at me quizzically. He did not understand. “Eating,” he replied seriously. Then he turned his attention back to the plate in front of him, shoveling in forkfuls of the contaminated spaghetti with great gusto.

When he had cleaned the plate, he put his fork down and sniffed his armpits. Sniffing his armpits was something he was known to do. He didn’t try to hide the fact or to be sneaky about it. Pindell would raise one arm high in the air, duck his head, take a good strong whiff of his armpit, and then move to the other arm. Once again, it would have bewildered him had someone pointed out to him that this was just not done, so we didn’t bother. I will say this: his attentiveness paid off. He looked strange, but he never smelled bad.

I believe that, perhaps in compensation for some of his social difficulties, Pindell had a touch of the savant in him. Here’s an example. Like most of the rest of us at the conservatory,—especially the composers,—he had an enormous record collection. Once he and another friend named Herman were scheduled to give a talk in an advanced music theory class. Their presentation involved references to excerpts from a large number of compositions. In planning the talk, Pindell said that he would bring along his record player and records so that they could play the excerpts they would be discussing. Herman protested. He told Pindell that finding the exact spot to play on the record would chew up way too much time. One of the numerous short excerpts of music that they were going to reference in their talk, for instance, was from Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung,” a five-and-a-half-hour-long opera!

Nevertheless, Pindell showed up on the day of the talk carrying a huge stack of records under his arm. Herman began to speak to the class, and when he mentioned the first musical excerpt, Pindell, who already had the record in question spinning on the turntable, lifted the needle and miraculously placed it on the precise spot where the measures being referenced began. Herman was astonished.

After Pindell repeated this feat with five or six different records, the teacher exploded. “What is going on? A magic show?” he demanded.

Pindell did not understand the instructor’s excitement. Afterwards, Herman said to Pindell, “That was amazing! You must have spent a long time practicing where to place the needle for all those different pieces.”

Pindell was bewildered. “Why would I need to rehearse something like that?” he said. Locating exact segments of music on a record was something he had always been able to do. He was quite surprised to learn from Herman that not everyone possessed this ability!

The most poignant memory I have of Pindell occurred at that same party with the sparklers. When it was a little later in the evening and the smell of sulphur had dissipated, Pindell took me aside and told me that he had something to say. He then professed that he was romantically attracted to me. His words sounded stilted and rehearsed. Stunned, I told him the truth as sweetly as I could: I was not interested in him that way. He took it well and it did not interfere with our friendship. While I was a little disturbed by his revelation—Pindell was crazy, after all—I was also moved and flattered. It took immense courage for him to share his feelings with me.

We lost touch after our conservatory days. Several years passed. The world began to change. Almost overnight taking drugs became commonplace, there were massive protests against the war in Vietnam, boys let their hair grow long, profanity became commonplace, kids largely stopped bathing, and a new group of people my age sprang up called hippies. It was then that I bumped into Pindell. It would be the last time that I ever saw him.

I was walking down Newbury street in Boston. He was on the sidewalk going the opposite direction from me. He looked wildly different. He looked, well…normal. He had lost weight, he was dressed neatly in professional clothing, his hair was expertly groomed, he had on a nice pair of glasses that were not taped together, and his eyes no longer darted here and there in the glazed, crazy way I was used to. No, he made pleasant eye contact and there was expression on his formerly wooden face. Even his voice and posture had shifted. This was not a man who would interrupt a conversation to sniff at his armpits.

“Pindell,” I exclaimed. “What’s happened to you?!”

He smiled in a benign, knowing way. “Two things,” he said. “Both of them have completely changed my life.”

“What two things?” I asked eagerly.

“I began taking LSD regularly, and then I discovered that I am actually a transvestite,” he confided. “I’m a different person now.”

Pindell is the only human male on the planet who has ever became normal and sane by taking LSD and wearing women’s panties.

Rest in peace, Pindell. I’m glad I knew you.

------

*Pindell's name has been changed out of respect for the family that survives him. All the incidents and places related, however, including our friendship, are true.

Please enjoy Mary Elizabeth Leach’s newest collection of short stories, now available in paperback and for Kindle, “The Man in the GPS and Other Stories”

THE MOVIE STAR WHO WANTED ME, AND HOW I WAS SAVED BY COMMUNISM

Written and Illustrated by
MARY ELIZABETH (LEACH) RAINES

 

Wow! A movie star wanted me. Me! 

And yes, I mean “wanted” exactly in the sense that you’re thinking.

I had never thought anything like that could happen to me, although I’d certainly dreamt about it. All of us—at least those with normal hormones and reasonable imaginations—have entertained the fantasy of having a romantic encounter with a movie star. Even movie stars themselves sometimes get crushes on other movie stars.

     Robert Redford (you’ve heard of him, right?) tells of a time when he was a starving young artist in Rome, before becoming an actor. He spotted Ava Gardner and her entourage in a restaurant, and went a bit gaga over seeing the famous temptress. Gardner noticed, called the smitten young man to her side, and gave him a little kiss.
     In the films he's made since that time, Redford has kissed many of the world’s most desirable actresses, and in his private life he is happily married—yet, what does he talk about with a moony smile and a far-away look? Having a crush decades ago on a movie star who acknowledged him and actually gave him a smooch! We can all fall prey to fantasies about those we see on the silver screen, you see.
     And now it was my turn.

 I had become the object of desire of my very own bona-fide movie star, whom I shall call Chad. Chad was a genuine star, too, not just some minor actor who’d spoken a few lines in a B film.

    Maybe you’re thinking Chad was ugly, and thus easy to get. I’m not superficial in the least, but hey, let’s get real: being attractive increases a person’s odds. Ava Gardner would probably not have summoned an unknown Karl Malden and given him a kiss. (For those who don't know, Karl Malden was a first-rate actor, now deceased, who possessed a bulbous nose and an unfortunate face.) Not every lead actor is good-looking, especially if he’s straight. 

   My movie star, however, was both beautiful and completely heterosexual. In fact, he was so handsome that there were stories of women who’d keeled over and fainted when they saw him take off his shirt on the giant screen. Maybe a few guys, too. I presume that they fainted from lust, although, to be fair, the theater might have been overheated.

     All females know Chad’s type. You usually see him on the covers of romance novels: that kind of chiseled, masculine man who makes any woman passing by want to drop both her grocery bags and her pants, fling herself down on the sidewalk, open her legs and cry, “Take me now!”

 

     When he fell for me (hah!), Chad was definitely not a kid any more, but still gorgeous enough to cause massive major-league drooling. His thick hair was perfect, tousled to just the right aw-shucks degree, yet fitting for the finest black-tie affair. His clothing revealed just a bit of bare chest here, just a ripple of an arm muscle there. His lips seemed designed to curl around the rim of a champagne glass, and his charming grin revealed luminous white teeth befitting a toothpaste commercial. If he chanced to glance at a woman, his bedroom eyes twinkled as if he knew all her secret fantasies—and liked them.

In Chad’s most famous film, he’d had numerous love scenes with a well-known and very beautiful actress, whom I shall call Linda.

“Chad,” I once asked him, “what was it like kissing Linda in all those romantic scenes you had together?”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” he replied slowly, a great big likeable grin spreading over his face. “The very first scene where we were supposed to be in a clinch was when we were sitting in a car. The cameras started to roll, so I kissed her. After the director yelled ‘Cut,’ Linda looked hard at me, looked again, and then turned to the cameraman and hollered, ‘RETAKE!’”

By this point, you are probably frantic to know all the finer details of the affair I had with Chad.

The movie star.

Except that I didn’t have one.

You see, by the time I knew him, Chad was nearly 90 years old. Granted, he was the hottest nearly-90-year-old man I’d ever met, but the age difference was still daunting. He could have been my grandfather.

     He had reached the pinnacle of his stardom during the 1940s. This explains why women in the cinemas fainted when they saw him shirtless. Women tended to do that more in the 1940s than they do now. Today a shirtless man would have to be playing a guitar and screaming into a microphone to get that kind of attention.

     Chad’s Hollywood career had been cut short because he was a member of the Communist party; he had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era, and no one would hire him to star in any more films, or so he claimed.

     In addition to being a Communist, Chad tended be a little quirky. He was, for example, the only self-proclaimed nudist I have ever met. I personally never saw him strip down, but in his younger years, he apparently frequented nudist camps. (Which makes me wonder if Communists have nudist camps…hmm.)

     Another quirk was that Chad had once been what they called a Muscle Man. He worked out and lifted barbells long before it became popular to do so, and it certainly served him well in his senior years. His excellent physique was one of the reasons the producers wanted him to take off his shirt in the movies; he was just about the very first actor who ever did that.

 

I’d met Chad through our mutual friend, Bob, who happened to be my landlord in a funky little compound in Hollywood. A group of unusual film people lived in this compound, including a world-famous porn star, a professional Santa Claus, cameramen, actors, script supervisors—and me. We were all friends. There was a shared central patio where we would have picnics and parties. Chad, being Bob’s best friend, was welcome to any event we held.

Even from inside my house, I could always tell when Chad had arrived, because I could smell the pot. Among his quirks, you see, my would-be boyfriend was what they call a stoner. An inveterate pot-smoker, he proudly grew his own marijuana and he would always light up a joint the moment he entered our patio. I personally hate illegal drugs, and am not even all that crazy about the legal ones. Everybody else in our compound pretty much stuck to booze to get their jollies.

Except for Chad.

Who was almost 90, remember?

 

He continued to smoke pot until one eventful Labor Day, when he showed up late for one of our festive outdoor potlucks. Squeezing into a seat next to me on the bench of the picnic table, he silenced everyone and then he made a dramatic announcement to the group: 

“Guess what, guys?” said Chad.

“What?” I shouted. (Chad didn’t hear too well.) 

“I’ve stopped smoking pot!”

“You’re kidding me!” I said. 

“Why would I be hitting you?” he replied, confused.

I raised my voice, shouting directly into his ear, “You really quit?” 

“Yeah, I did. I found out smoking pot is bad for my health.”

We applauded boisterously, and everybody fawned over him for awhile. Meanwhile, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a big white handkerchief that contained a strange loaf wrapped in tinfoil. Was it some kind of weird hors d’oeuvre for the potluck? 

While I was still wondering what this foil-wrapped goody was, Chad stuck it in his mouth and took a huge bite.

“Yup, I stopped smoking pot,” he continued, looking very self-satisfied and chewing voraciously. “Now I eat it instead.” 

As the 13-year-olds say: Eeew. 

Perhaps Chad had misinterpreted the term POT-luck.

Chad and my landlord, Bob, were about the same age. Like Chad, Bob was a vehement Communist. The two had been friends for decades and both were deeply entrenched in the film business. Bob wasn’t a star, though. He had only done a little acting; his main job was as a script supervisor. He had been trained to do this by John Ford, and had worked with a long list of the giants of film, including John Wayne, Gregory Peck, Joan Crawford and Jimmy Stewart. And Chad, of course.

     Years ago, someone had given Bob a huge paper-mache head of the actress Bette Davis. The piece was worth a great deal of money, but Bob, being a good Communist, made a deliberate point of not paying attention to the material value of things.

     We had a metal stake in our patio garden and Bob worried that someone might trip and fall on it, so one day he brought out the huge Bette Davis head and placed it on top of the stake, kind of like a protective knob.

     “Bob,” I cried, “it looks like you’ve impaled Bette Davis’ head on a pike in the garden!”

     Bob had known the actress well. A strange smile crossed his face.

     “Good,” he said, and walked away.

Chad and Bob were quite serious about their Communism. They used to get together with a couple of other Hollywood geezers—a famous photographer and a well-known set designer—and the four old men would have meetings that involved a lot of lengthy and intense conversation, head-shaking, wine (pot for Chad), despair, and occasional yelling.

     These aging cronies, all of whom had been blacklisted to some degree or another by Hollywood, embraced Communism with the idealism of fresh-faced freckled Cub Scouts. I always suspected that if there were ever to be a Communist takeover, Chad and Bob would be among the first to be lined up against the wall and shot. Having a Communist for a landlord was very handy, however, so I didn’t complain. Communists—at least the naïve ones—feel guilty if they charge too much for rent, and they readily share things like appliances and household tools. I wasn’t about to rock the boat.

     Besides, it was Communism that saved me.

  

Let me explain. Chad still hadn’t asked me out. He had told Bob of his lusty intentions, but I wasn’t supposed to know anything about his longings yet. I dreaded the day when he would reveal his passion to me, because then I would have to reject him. For all his quirkiness and marijuana, he was sweet and I didn’t want to hurt him.

Chad, it turns out, had been taking prescription pills for high blood pressure. The medicine had an unfortunate side effect. It made him impotent. He confided in Bob that he was planning to discontinue his medication so that he could fulfill his manly duties with me. Unfortunately, doing so would seriously jeopardize his health. What to do? It was a dilemma.

  After Chad shared his secret with Bob, the latter naturally ran straight away to knock on the door of one of my friends in the compound and tell her the whole story. She, in turn, came right over to my house and told me.

  This is how I learned that a movie star wanted my body.

 

A week passed, and the day I’d been dreading finally came. Chad stopped by and asked if I would come outside and sit with him; he said that he wanted to share something with me. I walked to the patio with a sinking heart. Rejection stinks no matter which side of it you’re on. Bob was also waiting there. I sat between the two of them.

Chad began to court me in earnest. His way of doing this was unconventional. As soon as I sat down, he grabbed a long, musty, yellowing piece of paper and thrust it under my nose. 

“Read this,”  he demanded. Then he sat back with an anxious sigh and waited.

   

The paper he handed me must have been well over 50 years old. It had been painstakingly mimeographed, which is the way documents were duplicated in the days before copy machines, and it was crammed with columns of words, words and more words that had been typed in tiny crooked print extending nearly to the edges of the page. There were capital letters and exclamation marks sprinkled excessively throughout the narrow columns. I’d guess that about 2,000 words had been jammed onto that one page.

While Chad squirmed with anticipation, I politely scanned a few of the sentences. Now, I am a good reader. I will happily read Thackeray or Sir Walter Scott, for example, and enjoy them. I have a volume of Melville on my night table. Trying to make sense of this stuff, however, made my head ache. It was incomprehensible. Typewritten letters formed shrill, ranting sentences that were both illogical and mad. The experience was as unpleasant for my nose as it was for my brain, because the paper beneath my gaze reeked of mildew.

When I looked up, I saw with dismay that Chad had brought along a huge cardboard box full of similar decaying papers. They had been stored in his garage for years. The poor man had carried all of these tedious, tiresome manifestos to the patio in the hope of sharing his beliefs with me. He imagined that after I read them, I would be inspired to see politics in his way, and become an ardent convert to Communism.

He was deluded, of course, but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Before I could figure out how to tell Chad diplomatically that it just wasn’t going to happen, Bob reached behind me and nudged him. The two began conversing over my head as though I wasn’t even there. 

“What’s the matter with you? Are you f**king nuts?” yelled Bob, who did not endorse diplomacy in the same way that I did.

He yelled because of Chad’s hearing loss, although Bob was somewhat prone to yelling regardless.

“She doesn’t want to read them,” he shouted. “You’re never going to get her that way.”

“I’m never going to get her in the hay?” replied Chad.

Close enough. 

“She doesn’t want to read them,” repeated Bob in exasperation.

“Need them?” asked Chad.

“READ them. She isn’t going to READ them,” screamed Bob. “Look at her. She doesn’t like them!”

“No?” Chad seemed surprised.

“NO!” Bob shrieked.

“Oh,” said Chad sorrowfully. “That’s too bad.”

He paused to think for a moment.

“Well,” he finally said, speaking over my head to Bob as though I weren’t present, “I can’t be with a woman who doesn’t believe in the Party.”

As easily as I had been snagged, without even saying a word, I was off the hook. Like I said, I was saved by Communism.

Although it may have been absurd to consider having an affair with Chad, I did enjoy him. He was easy on the eyes, and he told good stories.

Like this one. When he had been a muscle man, he used to own a gym. His clients had included the movie stars Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas in the days before they became famous.

Chad fondly recalled a time when he was giving Kirk Douglas a rubdown and, as a practical joke, applied kerosene to Douglas’ testicles. Apparently his poor victim had run naked through the gym, screaming at the top of his lungs.

Chad laughed and laughed as he told that story. It made me wonder what would have happened to me had I been naked and at his mercy.

Fortunately, that never happened, although I confess that my heart always beats a little faster whenever I watch him take off his shirt in his old movies.

© 2010, Laughing Cherub & M. E. Raines
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