Bobby Bunting
When I was nine my mother, from time to
time,
dumped me off with strangers,
one
of them being one of my recently deceased father’s patients
who
lived fairly close by
and
had a boy about my age
named Bobby.
The
first time I was there
Bobby
invited me to go down to play in the cellar.
Sure.
Why not? Cellars and basements can be fun places.
It
was wash day, and Bobby matter-of-factly
went
to play in the newly washed clothes and stuff.
I
thought this was odd,
and
glanced somewhat longingly
at
all the cellar-appropriate junk here and there,
but
was curious about this clean-clothes game.
It
involved dressing up.
It
involved dressing up in his mother’s undergarments.
I didn’t think
that was much fun, but he did.
The
second time my mother dropped me off there was another washday,
and
Bobby took me down to the cellar again to play.
The
same game.
It
didn’t make sense to me, and I asked my mother about it later.
It was the last
time she took me there to play.
That
was in early 1956. As Bobby grew older,
I
hope he managed not to learn to hate himself.
I
hope he managed to avoid serious bashings.
I
hope he managed societal disapproval with style.
I
hope he managed latex girdles’ fall from fashion in the 1970s
without
undue inconvenience.
I
hope frilly, satiny ladies’ undies, bras, stockings, and such
have
brought him life-long fulfilment.
Isabel
I was seventeen.
I’d been drinking
raw local rum
for hours, it seemed,
dancing through the streets
of Christiansted
even cluelessly trying to play
a steel drum myself
for a while after a Cruzan
slung its strap around my neck
so he could concentrate
on the rum.
Then a shortish, blond-haired girl
with a round, spotty face
dancing between
two huge Cruzan men
somehow induced me
to join them –
I don’t remember how.
Later we descended
to a below-street-level bar
to drink
better rum.
Her name was Isabel.
She lived in DC,
where I was going to uni soon.
Contact info changed hands.
When sober I learnt
that her father,
Count Knuth-Winterfeldt,
was the Danish Ambassador
to the US
were her
police bodyguards.
We had fun for about a year,
hanging around the embassy,
raiding its kitchen for snacks
and plenty of Danish beer
before diplomatic functions –
friends but not lovers.
She invited me
to embassy young-people parties,
where I hung out with nobs.
Then the Danish government
transferred her dad to Paris
and I hung out
with nobs no more.
About 45 years later
we reconnected on facebook.
A countess herself by that time,
she was running an equestrian school
in the mountains
of southern Spain
a particularly healthy outdoor lifestyle,
judging by the posted photos.
We became compadres again,
both of us dog people –
a strange but good friendship,
despite living, as I googled it,
at almost exactly the opposite
sides of the
Earth.
Then, the day before
her sixty-seventh birthday,
one of her daughters
posted a status on facebook
saying that she’d died –
no explanation included
or cause of death mentioned.
She was only a few months
older than me.
Zoe Watt
I was maybe nineteen or twenty
the first time I met a stripper.
She was a friend of one of my fellow stoner students
who took me to her apartment to get stoned.
She was about the same age we were,
and really gorgeous, of course,
but in her t-shirt and jeans just another hippie, really,
and despite being light years more mature than I was
she treated me just like a friend
as we sat there toking in her kitchen.
That impressed me.
Her stage name was Zoe Watt.
That impressed me even more.
I never saw her again,
and I never saw her dance.
I wonder if the sophisticates
who frequented the downmarket clubs where she worked
appreciated how the beauty of that name
enhanced her physical beauty.
Hank & Me & La
Hondureña
I’ve met a few noted poets,
but been friends with only one.
An ex-groupie junkie friend of mine
had a groupie friend from her groupie days
who somehow had a connection
with Bukowski.
My friend knew how much I loved Bukowski’s prose
and wangled me an invite.
Hank and I –
the ‘Charles’ was just for print –
drank beer together
two or three nights a week
from March through August 1972.
He gave me some good advice:
“It’s all mateerial,
baby,”
“Wine’s the best thing to drink when you’re broke,”
and some bad:
“She dumped you? Go over and hit her.” (I didn’t.)
Then I got a roadie job with a management company
that ran club tours headlined by
has-beens and C-listers-who’d-been-on-TV,
and fell in love with a Honduran woman
who was the desk clerk who checked us in at the Sheraton Biloxi,
where we played the penthouse ballroom.
After my employers went belly up we moved into New Orleans
where we got married and I found out that she suffered
from schizophrenia.
She destroyed my address book,
cutting me off from contact with Hank.
Mental illness doomed that marriage, of course,
and in the decades since I’ve bounced around,
any chance of really connecting
with anyone else
being really only a doomed illusion.
Thanks, Hank – you lived longer than you had any right to,
and I’ll live longer than I really want.
Police
Authority
He was fairly tall and not all that old,
but his face was sagging prematurely,
accentuated by a pale, thin, drooping moustache,
thin, straight, colourless hair
hanging lank to below his collar,
and his gently paunchy body
sloping down
from narrow shoulders.
He played drums in a working band from Indiana
that at the time was backing
a zoftig, forty-something chick singer
who seemed to exude all the desperate flashiness
and bourgeois vulgarity masquerading as hipness
that stereotypes
everyday Las Vegas
He told us in his soft voice
over beer and doobies
about how as a teenager
he’d enlisted in the Air Force
because he’d wanted to play in the Air Force Band.
They’d assigned
him to the Air Police instead.
Almost as if in a daze, he recalled how,
before his first police patrol of an air force base,
he’d donned the white helmet,
Sam Browne belt,
holstered handgun, billy club,
and white
armband with “AP” on it:
“It was against my will,”
he told us with his voice almost quavering,
“I didn’t want to, but so help me,
I swaggered.”
Two Texas
Cheryl came from Clarendon, a
tiny two-horse town
out in the Panhandle, about 60
miles from Amarillo
as the pickup rattles.
She had that twanging-banjo West Texas accent
accentuated by a voice that’d
shatter glass.
Her grandfather – or maybe it
was great-grandfather –
was John Wesley Hardin, the
legendary outlaw.
She was a serious alcoholic
and prided herself
in being able to drink me under
the table.
By profession she was an
on-the-ground
disaster relief provider with
the Red Cross –
tents, blankets, bottled water
– that sort of thing
for victims of tornadoes,
hurricanes, floods – that sort of thing.
She’d seen my picture in the
paper,
was breaking up with the man
she’d been living with,
and had asked her next-door
neighbour,
who worked at the paper and was
a close friend of mine,
for an introduction.
Cindy came from New
Braunfels
a tall, blond ex-cop with big, strong hands,
having left law-enforcement
to work in a department store
to which I sold newspaper advertisements.
She told me that the best thing about being a cop
had been working the night shift
and ripping off drunk drivers for their weed.
She admired the way I drove,
from her
professional perspective.
Early one evening I was expecting the ex-cop
when the outlaw’s progeny came by
to give me a kitten.
That was the end of it with both of them.
The Wisdom of Al
He’d been an adventurer,
a teen-aged pilot in the Amazon in the
1930s
and then a combat pilot in the Pacific
Theatre.
He’d worked as a reconstruction quantity
surveyor in the Occupation,
became fluent in Japanese,
then became involved with the, um, State
Department,
who arranged for him to become fluent in
Russian.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis he worked
as a translator
of intercepted Russian military radio
messages,
amused by the Russian pilots’ penchant for
singing lewd songs over the air.
Of course he was in Vietnam
living with some hill tribes along the
Laotian border,
providing the US
about materials the villages needed for
fortifications and so on,
learning their languages,
and, in order to secure their confidence,
marrying the women each offered him
(but not telling this to his
Irish-Catholic wife during visits back home).
He was himself a secular humanist and a
closet socialist.
After
retiring he went back to school and became a teacher,
eventually
teaching world history, Japanese, and Russian
to
high-school kids who were absolutely unable
to
recognise how cool he was.
I
did my student teaching in the next room.
We
became great friends, and I spent some time chilling with him
at
his comfortable house in the country.
He
tried to steer his luscious daughter in my direction,
but
she was married to the Navy, for which she piloted helicopters.
He
was addicted to gummy bears,
and
by his mid-sixties had put on some weight.
Referring
to this, he told me, “Y’know Richard,
men
my age tend to get fatter and fatter,
until,
of course, they get cancer,
after
which they get skinnier and skinnier,
and
then, just when they start looking good again,
they
die.”
Saying
this made him chuckle with impishly twinkling Irish eyes.
Gangsters to God
The last season that I coached
basketball,
some time in the late nineties,
I struggled with Hamilton
Girls’ High School’s
team in the local premiere
league.
Once, when I was driving three
players
to a tournament in Rotorua,
as my contribution to the car
pool,
they played gangsta rap on a
boombox
the entire way there.
No ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ for
them.
“It’s what,” the point guard
explained, “gets our juices going.”
Well then, okay.
About a dozen or so years later
that point guard and her three
children
moved into a place in
Claudelands,
and I began seeing them around
the ’hood.
She was always smiling and
friendly,
as if we were old mates, when I
did.
Her oldest boy had a job
delivering something on his bike,
and she often helped him,
or serviced his route when he
didn’t do it,
peddling her bike when she did
with glossy, athletic legs that
emerged from white short shorts.
She almost always stopped to
chat with me,
her smiling, full-lipped mouth
distracting my attention
from those somewhat-less-than-half-my-age
legs.
The major problem was that
she’d found Jesus – fanatically,
and after I politely declined
to see her boy’s performance
in her church’s xmas pageant,
even though she’d brought him
by my house
to invite me personally,
she stopped dropping by.
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