Brown ribbon, its shiny surface spinning, a neon crimson bead the size of an insect eye
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| “This is no joke. She wants the money from us or you.”
“I haven’t got $500.” I haven’t even got enough money to pay for this hospital visit, much less a sarcastic off-the-wall statement of credit to a stranger who sees me with a camera and tape recorder and thinks I’m J. Paul Getty. “Well, I ain’t got $500. I told all those people the same thing, and nobody else had a problem with it.” There were more beeps. It was finally settled. Double trouble, boiling baubles of heated plasma. My eyeballs were popping blood vessels. I felt like shaving my toenails with rusty razor blades. I was being pushed to the limit. That night as the doorbell would ring at the house we rented, I’d walk to the door, and when the candy finally ran out, I’d give out possessions, cute trinkets or knick-knacks while Diane dozed in unshakable slumber. The sleep of sleeps. “Trick or treat!” a kid said. One stumbled as he descended the steps into the brown and orange leaves and green swamp lizards, and I was wishing he’d break his frigging neck. I used to love Halloween. It never was a scary holiday until this one. I never knew what Halloween was really like until October 1996. There is a phone call. We’re on deadline at the office, and it’s Wednesday, the day a sign is on the door, “LAYOUT DAY - Please be quiet. Thank you.” It’s 2:30 p.m., and there’s only about 90 minutes to get the paper out the door. Beep from home. “I’ll be right there.” I typed a few gobbeldey goop words at the computer as everyone at the office yelled at me to churn out some more stories, but I exited, saying, “I’ve got to go. Diane’s having a miscarriage.” There’s a foolproof way to get out of work. She was in the car crying at the hospital. An X-ray showed no heartbeat. Just one more day of carrying around an extinct portion of ex-life. It was the worst Halloween of my life, and I used to love it as a holiday. Parents just ate with us at Applebee’s after visiting to the cottage in North Myrtle. I cried when my brother and his kids left today. I already miss them. They used to be the ones to cry. Good thing I decided to cry on the job when I did today, instead of in front of a bunch of businessmen in the Republican party, it happened in the middle of a press conference on the Holocaust. The rabbi looked at me like I was a real champ. “This fellow is important,” the rabbi said his assistant about me. My boss is crazy. she had an investigator from the solicitor’s office in her office today talking about god knows what...maybe about me blowing up when she messed with my AP book the other day, putting a rubber band around it and asking me not to take it out of the office since it was company property. I blew $15 on it, and I had to rip the company sticker out of it, messing it up. Some cocaine addict who had shot up the drug into his vein had a carbuncled arm with an abscess a plastic surgeon was going to work on this afternoon. It’s a Friday. Payday. I remember in Florence you couldn’t get an advance. The advance is what keeps all working journalists in working order. Two patients were held up by a reporter needing an interview with a doctor, so I totally obliterated the schedule of two physicians today, one a cardiologist who I don’t think bumped anybody, but he saw me after finishing with his last patient. Juggling the wounded. Man. My boss now gets real ticked when I’m late for or blow off an appointment, even if there has been a hastily called staff meeting that everybody has to change their interviews over. I think this plastic surgeon was getting me back for a civil case I reported on after going fishing one afternoon. In Conway at the county courthouse, this old brick statuesque old fire trap, I had burrowed through stacks of files, you know. They are the files with numbers to the end of time that you have to use a calculator to figure out. “Case No. Docket 10293894-595932843-22903yourfanny.” The case I had stumbled upon was a case of an allegation over a crummy titty operation or something. I think it was this firm. “You’re not queasy, are you.” He had his secretary sit on the interview with us. She must be his confidant or witness. They sat there and stared at me, so I had to up the pace with more rapid-fire pick- me-up questions to hurdle the lulls. “We have some photographs here. I hope these don’t bother you.” They meant for them to bother me. Eyes, four of them, bulleting through my chest and eyelids. I kept the forehead wrinkles still. “No. Go right ahead. I’m fine.” “Are you sure?” Red. Glossy, shining bloody flesh, hanging off a fractured bone. “Yes, a gentleman, he’s a patient, you know. He’s a fantastic person. He was on a construction job and a hook....” Here we go. Payback time. Go ahead. Batter up! Fast ball, low and inside. “This is the eye he lost.” I have never in my entire life ever seen an eyeball which was totally ripped to shreds like that. Telegraphing no effect, I remained cold as a cucumber, the kind I can’t eat with my diverticulitis. The seeds. No popcorn. I snuck some the other day when I went to see “Primary Colors.” Here was a baldheaded Joe-Ree, this Roscoe, man alive, he looked like something out of a Clive Barker movie. Freddy Krueger. They had actually ripped back his skin, layers of epidermis along with muscles and nerves. The before picture and after picture this doc was admiring like it was the Mona frigging Lisa, and the fixation became so intense for him and his assistant that they abandoned all pretense of ever trying to discern my horror. “This is the metal we use. It’s a strong alloy. Titanium.” Ooooh. Tough stuff. Every photo of the man looked like Dorian Gray on a fast strike in prison. “We have a Jacuzzi. And weight room, as you see,” the secretarial nurse instructed me. The tour of the place was like the tourism attraction of the Tower of London. It was l like a skin museum. A very attractive stripper looking broad in the outer office had entered the patient entrance. Her thin tanned frame, gauzed in a see-through light fabric frail enough not to withstand a grandparent’s nasty odor, was obviously in bra and panties, white in color, as every one of the weird looking patients could see with no problem. The final photograph of the patient, who had been in a truck when a large hook crushed through his truck and face, was amazing. The talent that this doctor possessed was unbelievably perfection. The man’s face was totally reconstructed, and he even looked like he had a twisted sort of smile on it, pasted like a fading placard, the yellow, green and pink wrestling sign out on a rural countryside’s road sign. Down time. Sophisticated repetition. Case numbers. I hope that fellow had some sedatives of a strong nature while he was being operated on. He looked like he had been hooked by about 26 or so guys out on the Garden City pier drinking Stroh’s and casting into a surfer’s nostrils. Pinhead Smith. A doctor once told me that in medical school that they had a cadaver which someone may have used. “Mr. Bill.” His name was marked in black magic marker on his forehead. “Oh Lawsy!” Fainting cafeteria workers. I think they had placed Bill’s arm on the conveyor belt which rolled into the kitchen, and between a Coble’s chocolate milk carton, crushed by a student partying after a football game, and a half-eaten tray of Salisbury steak, the food of the poor. Boy, I’d hug Steve Allen’s wife in a heartbeat. She’s asking me where I got that Southern accent from. Petula Clark said the same thing two weeks ago. I’m on the phone with Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows on a conference call. There is an interruption. My boss calls me in. She asked me if I am still on the conference call. I go back to save the interview. She doesn’t want to do any more interviews, just reviews after the show. The boss said to can the interview. We ran too much of that stuff, she said - more politics. Once I was checking my messages at home, and I hung up, but before the receiver hit the hook, I heard a beep, so I picked it back up. My boss was punching buttons to try and listen to my private home messages. “Ah Debbie? I was just trying to listen to my messages.” She tried giving away my Letterman tickets once too, and I started getting calls from chamber of commerce folks, asking for them. “Ah, they’re non-transferable, you know? Ever ridden on a jet? Same thing. I’m planning on going. Sorry.” Jayne Meadows had many jokes played on her on “I’ve Got A Secret,” and when she and husband Steve Allen visit The Palace this weekend, residents will get a dose of comedy from days gone by when television was clean and the dirtiest word you heard broadcast was “mud.” Allen created and hosted “The Tonight Show” and has authored 48 books. He starred on Broadway in “The Pink Elephant” and starred in movies like “The Benny Goodman Story.” He has written more than 7,000 songs, including “Impossible,” “Gravy Waltz,” “This Could Be The Start of Something,” “Picnic,” South Rampart Street Parade” and “Pretend You Don’t See Her.” “Steve Allen does so many things, he’s the only man I know who’s listed on every one of the Yellow Pages,” said Andy Williams. Allen also starred in the NBC series “The Steve Allen Comedy Hour.” He is married to actress-comedienne Jayne Meadows, and they have a son, Bill.. Meadows won an Emmy in 1990 and has been nominated five times. Allen and Meadows performed “Love Letters” in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Salt Lake City. She has been on “I’ve Got A Secret,” “Medical Center,” “Meeting of Minds,” “It’s Not Easy” and “High Society.” Meadows received a Grammy nomination in 1985 and the Susan B. Anthony Award for portraying women in positive roles. “I open my mouth, and words come out, and people laugh at them, and I play piano and sing,” said Allen in a telephone interview. The show will incorporate question cards from the audience in a “Tonight Show” format. The couple was saddened at the loss of Red Skelton. “I worked with him more than any other actress, I think,” said Meadows Monday in a telephone interview. “I was under contract with MGM, and he was too. He was a talented painter too.” Allen likes “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.” “He does it very well,” said Allen. “I’m on the show once and a while.” “He does a wonderful job,” said Meadows. Meadows was the target of practical jokes on the TV classic “I’ve Got A Secret,” which I used to watch. “I was the patsy, really, because I react to everything so emotionally,” she said. “I think they played the biggest tricks on me. I always have to think of the one where they had the rat in a cage, but I didn’t know that. It was somebody’s secret that there was a rat under my chair because they knew that I just loathed rats and snakes. When the secret came out, all I had to do was hear the word ‘rat’ and ‘Jayne Meadows chair’ and I pushed Henry Morgan right off his chair and jumped on top of him, screaming at the top of my lungs.” Once she was put in an old taxi with driver Ernest Borgnine, driving her in the wrong direction. “I got more and more annoyed with this stupid cab driver,” she said. “Once they had Fabian of Scotland Yard trail me for a whole day around New York City. Gary Moore told me that the week after I left the show, it went out of the top ten and was never in the top ten again.” Sonny Drysdale will perform with Allen and Meadows at The Palace. Louis Nye popularized the boorish, snobbish character on “The Beverly Hillbillies.” His “Hi-Ho, Steverino!” became a household phrase on Allen’s TV show. He and his wife filmed an episode for the NBC series “Homicide: Life on the Street.” Rita McKenzie will also appear. Her recreation of Ethel Merman was immortalized in “Ethel Merman’s Broadway.” I met Hank at the office one day. Henry “Hank” Alexander of Myrtle Beach was cutting up during Jackie Gleason’s big party, and Alexander was making a face behind a blonde.. It was Gleason’s season finale party at Toots Shores celebrity sports bar in New York City as baseball legend Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe sat in front of the Myrtle Beach resident and some CBS executives. This extremely rare photograph has never been published, and it is one of dozens he has, including shots of him and Gleason, Tammy Grimes and actor David Wayne. You can count dozens of freckles on chest. Former CBS Cameraman Hank Alexander, now of Myrtle Beach, has shared late-night drinks Jackie Gleason. He’s worked with Arthur Godfrey, and now he’s working at the Grand Strand Senior Center, producing “Fiddler on the Roof.” The scrapbook of Alexander, an Albany, N.Y. native, contains proof of his work with more than 300 performers, including “The Great One,” a.k.a. “The Poor Soul.” “I worked with Jackie Gleason for five years,” he said. “I was on the staff of CBS also and with Arthur Godfrey for nine years. Gleason was thinking of going to California, and he wanted to take a few key people with him.” He stayed put because Gleason went on hiatus in the summer. “The day I met him and was assigned to his show, he said to me, ‘Pal, listen.’ I learned how to drink with him Saturday night after the show at his penthouse three blocks away. It was beautiful. I had to be up at six o’clock the next morning to do a religious show. Not fun. He (Gleason) knew what he wanted. “He said to me, ‘Pal, listen. If there is anything that you don’t understand about lighting, come and talk to me about it. I’m going to remember that.’ It actually happened one day. He knew if a ‘Honeymooner’ sketch was going to work or whether it wasn’t working. If he found he was uncomfortable with one of them, like during rehearsal all of a sudden this was wrong and that was wrong and this was wrong, and he started screaming, and they’d throw the sketch out.” At the year’s end Gleason would throw a party at the sports bar (Toots Shore) where sports celebs hung out. “It was a good watering hole. We go over one night, and the CBS photographer was there. Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio were sitting there. So we decided to do a gag shot. So I’m with the producer standing with another guy in back of them.” Arthur Godfrey owned about five percent of a hotel in Florida called The Kenilworth, Alexander said. “It’s not longer in existence. It was a beautiful hotel, big patio outside. We did the daytime shows and our nighttime shows there. He decided to have some fun with the agency.” CBS has purchased a television manufacturing company with a poor project, so a commercial was needed. They wanted a TV set on a tower for a live commercial in which it would fall with an underwater camera, but no one told the advertising agency rep. “It worked beautifully. He almost had a heart attack when he saw the set fall in the pool. The thing never sunk. This is why Godfrey, in his day, was the highest paid performer in the business. He made $55,000 a show in those days, which would be worth $2 million today.” “Snooks,” the stage manager, found the TV was still working, so Godfrey summoned the TV set to future The Ed Sullivan Theater where a kinescope was played of the commercial, and the TV was turned on again. He also worked for Sullivan. “The guy had bags under his eyes. One of the lighting directors went on vacation, so I filled in for him, like they’d fill in for me. I put a special little light under the stage to lighten up those bags. Somebody came to him and said, ‘You really look great.’ And he said, ‘Well, who’s doing the lighting tonight.’ And they told him. He came over and said, ‘Hank, do you play golf? I want you to come play golf with me.’” Alexander started out as a photographer, and in World War II he was a training film cameraman at the Signal Corps Photographic Center. He was offered a job by Hal Rossen, Jean Harlow’s husband, in Hollywood after the war, but he stayed in New York. Alexander has worked with the best. Remember Lux Radio Theatre with host Cecil B. deMille? On Lux Video Theatre Alexander was working on a scene for an actress and Basil Rathbone when the actress forgot her line. Rathbone gave her a hint, and she rebounded, he said. Director George Cukor brought Ingrid Bergman in for some shorts, industrial incentives, for Americans to stay on the job. “We had a big indoor stage. Bill Cosby does his shows there. I take a look, and here is a six-foot tall gal with jaws out to here. I said, hey. There’s got to be a way to light her. ‘Casablanca’ had just opened up. So I went to the movies that night and saw ‘Casablanca,’ and could tell by looking at it how they lighted her. She never, except in a long shot, ever had a full face shot. She was always turned one way or the other. She was lovely, great. You know, most of the actors and actresses, most of them realize that they can’t do it all alone.” When Adlai Stevenson in 1956 ran against Eisenhower and opened the campaign in Harrisburg, Alexander recalled, and the teleprompter corporation had new 45-degree mirrors with a lighted script on the ground, using reflection. “He wanted to stand at the lectern and just read his speech. And they convinced him, naw, it would be more human. He opened, and they took two 10,000-watt spots and came right through those outriggers, and he couldn’t see a thing, and it was a disaster.” Alexander was offered a job with the campaign. That’s show biz, folks. His favorite food is pasta. He likes A&E movies. The last movie he saw was “A Star Is Born,” the Judy Garland version by George Cukor, and the last book he read was “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” by John Brendt. *************************** TO: Mark from aol. aloha...butchered any good copy lately? went to aids careteam inc. fund raiser at hard rock last night. it was fun...good feeling...free food and booze...band...saw a lot of community people who i had suspected were gay and finally realized they were....one guy was dressed as carmen miranda with a tree full of bananas around his head..... nobody hit on me....darn. Subj: Re: sweet Date: 98-04-19 13:00:52 EDT From: markk@onslowonline.net (Mark) To: Bulltim@aol.com (Bulltim) i don’t butcher copy, i fine tune it. like an engine. we don’t see many gays here.don’t here about aids benefits either. lots of domestic violence, women’s rights, not much about children. homeless have lots of support. a childhood friend of my stepdiddy died. they’re going to the funeral. may go to charlotte next weekend. gonna lead local front today with a story about health department wanting to spend health and hospice money - $300,000 - to help - HELP - build an animal shelter. hmmm. ******************* If you can’t beat ‘em, kill ‘em. Or at least write enough pro-life stories to undermine their contemptuous love of the death penalty. On Saturday a workshop was held at St. James Catholic Church to organize a prison ministry to J. Reuben Long Detention Center in Conway. There is “nothing worse” than being “in the cage,” said a Mr. Mannix, 73, a resident of Myrtle Beach National, who has counseled prisoners. Mannix said that between 1982-92 that spirituality returned to the prison system. “There’s nothing for them to do,” he said. Mannix doesn’t use the term “rehabilitate” - he says “habilitate” because he doesn’t want them to return to their previous state. Participants learned about resources like DSS, the Alston Wilkes Society and assisting agencies who help empower them, affirming responsibilities as a Christian, spouse, parent, adult child, sibling, citizen and prisoner. Pat Millus, pastoral associate, facilitated a session on how to conduct a Bible study within a prison with curriculums. She’s helping conduct the R.C.I.A. program I’m in now to become a Catholic. “I didn’t know what was wrong. And I didn’t know I didn’t know I didn’t know I was wrong,” he said. A lack of trust is a trait prisoners share, he said. “They weren’t even able to trust themselves,” said Mannix. “Never mind not having any faith. We cannot feel the way they feel.” Bauhaus. Ga-ga. It’s true. Page two. One tip: Don’t use the term “guard.” Prison officials and employees prefer the term “correctional officer” as a more politically correct terminology. A summary of the statewide activities included on Dec. 14, 1997: Piedmont Deanery: Sr. Joan Kobe at McCormick Correctional Institution with communion services and Bible study; Darlene Langley, a parishioner at Our Lady of Lourdes in Greenwood with adult education; Patricia Holsomback, a parishioner of Our Lady of Lourdes in Greenwood with counseling at Leath Correctional Institution for Women in Greenwood; and Father Gene Leonard at Cross Anchor Institution. Midlands Deanery: Deacon Roland Thomas of St. Martin with Mass and sacrament of reconciliation; Srs. Maigread and Colleen with the ecumenical Kairos Ministry for women; Father Schwab at Broad River Prison with John Rives at the Lexington Jail; Phyllis Homer at St. Martin; and Father Louis Kennedy and Brother Jim Connolly at Allendale Prison. Pee Dee Deanery: Dee Gunsalus at Evans Correctional Institution in Bennettsville with weekly prayer group and Father Patrick Cooper; Paula Loehr and Lisa Treese at St. James Catholic Church in Conway advocating for prisoners. Coastal Deanery: “We have a Catholic service every Tuesday night, a liturgy and a faith sharing,” said Gunsalus. Why does she do it? “That’s hard to answer. I just see the need,” she said. “We can go out and hear confessions. Previously our priest had gone out and done Mass. Our population varies so much. I think they would prefer a priest.” The percentage is half Catholic, half non-Catholic. “I’ve had an incident or two but nothing that can’t be dealt with,” she said. “You will have some who have psychological problems. My best advice is you gain as much as you give or more. It can be a very uplifting ministry. I’d like them to go home closer to the church than when they went in. I’d like to see more people get involved. Kairos is a prison ministry that is ecumenical.” Fund raising is being sponsored to try to build a dedicated chapel for Evans. The ecumenical fund is the Evans Chapel Foundation. “We’ve got to raise $250,000, and we’ve raised about $47,000,” she said. “This county is not easy for that, and the institution serves the entire state, so we’re appealing to whoever we can.” The prison serves 1,100 inmates, and expansion is planned, she said. “It’s been a very beneficial thing,” said Sister Nancy Purdue of St. John the Beloved in Summerville. “The prisoners certainly appreciate the visits. Some of the prisoners have Download 2.99 Mb. Share with your friends:
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