Actual People

                        Rosie

She picked me up

shortly after ending

a multi-year affair

with a Catholic priest.

She told me all sorts of things

that she’d learnt

from being an insider,

as it were,

in regard to the Church,

such as how the other priests,

once they found out

that she was shagging a Father,

assumed that she’d shag any priest

and hit on her constantly –

except for those who were gay

or too alcoholic to be interested.

She also told me

that what scandalised her the most

wasn’t Father Michael’s disregard

for his vow of chastity,

but his ignoring his vow of poverty,

that once he’d showed her a whole drawer full

of uncashed cheques

that he planned to use for travel,

and that when she asked him

why he didn’t give it to the poor,

he’d just laughed.

In addition to her affair

with Jewish moi,

Rosie herself had just started

a new job as a nurse

in an abortion clinic.

                                      Big Mike

At the start of the summer when I was fifteen

my stepfather, Howard, 
told me that he wouldn’t give me an allowance,

but that he would give me a job 
on one of his company’s land-survey parties

at the minimum wage.

One of the men in my crew

was a powerful old wide-body with a Polish accent named Mike.

With time off for the war, he’d worked for Howard maybe 30 years.

Unlike most of my other co-workers, who resented me,

Big Mike took me under his wing,

buying me beer at lunchtime,

placing bets for me with his illegal bookie,

teaching me to smoke cigars –

that sort of thing.

About once a month Mike and Howard would get into a shouting match

after work on the footpath in front of the converted old house

that was Howard’s business’s office.

I don’t recall ever hearing Howard swear at any other time,

but he and Mike would exchange high volume obscenities and insults,

culminating in Mike quitting and Howard firing him.

Mike always came into work the next day as if nothing had happened

and Howard would greet him good morning.

One day, years after that summer,

while chopping line through some scrub

for the transit to see through –

this was decades before GPS technology –

Mike’s brush hook went cleanly through the trunk

of a small tree and almost took his lower leg off.

He still managed to walk back to the van, someone told me,

for the ride to the hospital.

It was the first time he’d ever missed a day of work.

Howard visited him at the hospital every evening he was there.

                Mutzi

The mother of my children

freaked out

when we had dinner

at his River Road mansion

that reminded me of an airport terminal.

When I last ran into him

some years after we’d previously

run into each other again,

the first thing he told me was,

‘I haven’t killed anybody lately.’

He wasn’t joking.

               Buttered Steak

In 1972 I had a sort of a roadie job

with shows headlined by acts

that people who belonged to country clubs

in the American South

would have seen on TV.

My fellow tour technician was George McClughan,

who was thoroughly unlike me,

despite our enjoying getting stoned together.

He was

somewhat taller than short and built somewhat slightly,

blond, had a jutting jaw and a salesman’s smile,

and radiated self-confidence and the sincere conviction that

his way was the best way and that

his point of view was always correct.

Until the final couple of weeks before

our employers went belly up

we shared the hotel rooms where we stayed on tour.

George always went out and swam laps

if we had the time and the hotel a lap pool,

and ate thick, rare steaks from room service,

which he spread thickly

with huge amounts of butter.

When I tried to look him up on the internet

at the end of the century,

his father wrote back to me

that George had died of a heart attack

many years before,

when he’d been something like forty-four.

              Connie

She was twelve years old

and lived with her two little brothers

in a converted one-car garage

that I don’t think had running water.

Her mother showed up

once a month to pay the rent.

She brought her Care Bear to school.

             Frankie Levine

His name was

Frankie Levine –

pronounced LuhVEEN.

He was a hairdresser

from Miami – or maybe New York –

who’d come out to Hollywood in the late 60s

and fallen into

doing the hair

of people who appeared

in minor movies.

He was convinced

that every month

has exactly four weeks,

not just February

three-quarters of the time.

The people who hired him,

naturally,

screwed him out of almost a tenth of his pay

by hiring him at a weekly rate

and paying him twice that much twice a month.

I couldn’t convince him,

no matter how hard I tried,

that four times seven

doesn’t equal thirty,

let alone thirty-one.

Still, he was having an affair

with a busty Hollywood type

whose husband was fighting in Vietnam,

and I wasn’t.

         Iulia to Joolz

She arrived in New Zealand

when she was twelve years old,

knowing fewer than a dozen English words.

After three or four months, however,

her English was still minimal,

but she was entirely fluent in Teen-Ager.

                                 Mojo

After the estranged teen-aged wife of a soldier –

“He didn’t want me to go out with no dudes or nothin!” –

and her coterie of juvenile-delinquent friends and cousins

moved out of the other half of my duplex,

I was apprehensive about the next tenant.

Fortunately, Mojo moved in.

Mojo was a bullgoose biker,

the manager of the Harley place down on Broadway.

He’d brought a ramp with him when he’d moved in

so that he could keep his hog parked in his front room at night.

He called it his Putt-Putt.

Soon the woman he moved in with left

and his soulmate Celeste arrived.

She wore a ‘No Putt / No Butt’ t-shirt.

A former Army master sergeant,

he sold a bit of weed and ran a tight neighbourhood.

The elderly woman dying of cancer

who was my other next-door neighbour across the driveway

told me that she felt much safer with Mojo living there.

When one of the boyfriends of Little Mary,

the Chicana stripper who lived across the street,

parked his lowrider at the curb

and sounded his horn for her to come out,

Mojo appeared on the upstairs veranda brandishing a firearm

and ordered him to go to the door and knock like a gentleman.

On another occasion some bimbo I’d met,

and with whom I really had no chance,

showed up wearing a Harley-Davidson t-shirt

to buy a lid that I’d asked Mojo to secure for her.

“Oh!” said Mojo when he saw her, “Do you have a Harley?”

And then, his voice dripping with contempt,

“Or just a tee-shirt?” drawing out the last word

in a sneer I’ve never heard equalled.

He called me his pet beatnik,

and came by with Celeste to visit once 
years after he’d moved out.

He said that he was working as a cook on a shrimp boat

and that the shrimpers really loved his lemon meringue pies.

                   The Man in the Gorilla Suit

When I met John Kuehne his name was John London.

Hollywood crap.

John Ware’d brought him to my tiny flat,

which he just about filled,

being of more than ample dimensions.

Like most bass players he was tall,

“They always give the bass to the big boys,” he told me once,

and he clearly hadn’t missed many meals;

I later told him he had Dunlop’s disease –

that’s when the belly done lops over the belt.

He had a deep, rich baritone voice

and spoke with a Texas cowflop drawl.

When he talked Ware gave me signals

from behind his back

to take him seriously.

Over the years we became particularly close friends.

He’d grown up with Mike Nesmith of the Monkees,

and they’d been a folk duo for years

before Nesmith had struck it rich,

so Big John had gone along for the ride.

I particularly liked his opinion

of having been the man in the gorilla costume

in the Monkees’ working-hard-to-be-zany videos –

“They paid me $350” –

or however much it was –

“every time I put the damn thing on.”

We rode some life-rollercoasters together,

through umpteen jobs, from time to time with the same companies –

he was once my boss –

and various wives and divorces.

Then, just after the turn of the century,

Ware mentioned casually in an email that Big John was dead.

I demanded details.

It seems as if he and his second wife,

whom he’d divorced and remarried,

had gone out for some pizza and beer.

He’d come home, complained of indigestion, sat down, and died.

Never did win that battle with his weight.

 {As Performed Live by the New Millennium Beatniks}