Allen Kopp – Page 60 – Literary Fictions

Cigarettes

Cigarettes ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

When Lester Bright awoke on Monday morning, he thought about how he might skip school that day. He could say he was sick, but he had used that excuse—when was it?—not two weeks ago. He groaned and rolled out of bed. After performing his morning ablutions, he dressed himself in the same clothes he wore on Friday and went downstairs.

His mother, Loyce, was sitting at the kitchen table, a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. She barely looked at him when he came into the room.

“I sure do have a headache this morning,” he said, as he poured cornflakes into a bowl and splashed some expired milk on them. “I’m sick at my stomach, too. I think I’m going to vomit.”

He looked at her to see what effect his words might be having, but she was ignoring him. Her eyes were baggy and she hadn’t put on her wig yet or any makeup. She looked like a scary old man. Was it any wonder his friends were afraid of her?

He sat down at the table across from her and eyed her Pall Mall menthol cigarettes while he chewed. Three of them were sticking up invitingly out of the pack. When she got up from the table and went to the sink to rinse out her cup, he reached across and took two of them, sticking them in his shirt pocket.

She turned around from the sink, or maybe whirled around from the sink would have been more like it. “I saw that!” she said. “Put ‘em back!”

“Put what back?” he said.

“Those cigarettes you just stole from me.”

“I didn’t steal any…”

She was on him before he knew what was happening. She moved across the room awfully fast for such a big woman. She grabbed for his pocket and took the cigarettes, ripping his shirt. Any defensive movement on his part would have been useless.

“Have you been smoking?” she asked.

“Of course not!” he said. “I would never smoke!”

“You’re stealing cigarettes from me but not smoking them?”

“I didn’t think you’d mind!”

“What do you mean taking my cigarettes when my back is turned? Are you insane?” She began slapping at him with both hands.

He tried to cover his head with his arms. “You’re hurting me!”

“If I ever see you smoking a cigarette, I’ll cram it down your throat! You’re thirteen years old!”

“I wasn’t taking them for me! I was taking them for a sick friend.”

She stopped the slapping. “Who?” she asked.

“You don’t know him!”

“I want to know his name! Now!”

“He lives down by the river. His name is Harry Burgess.”

“Well, you tell Harry Burgess to get his own damn cigarettes or he’ll be a lot sicker than he ever imagined!”

“I’m going to the school nurse today and tell her you beat me! I’ll have bruises to prove it!”

He had some money he had found on his mother’s dresser, so he stopped at the mini-mart on the way to school and bought a doughnut and a pack of his own Pall Malls. After eating the doughnut in three quick bites, he wiped his hands on his pants and went on to school.

It was still a few minutes before first bell, so he unwrapped his pack and lit up just outside the school gate. His friend Harry Burgess had just stepped off his bus and ran over.

“Where’d you get the cigs?” Harry asked.

“Bought ‘em.”

“I bet you stole them. You never have any money.”

“You don’t know anything.”

“Well, are you going to offer me one like the gentleman you are?”

Harry took one from the pack and was about to light it when the bell rang. “I’ll smoke it during third period,” he said, putting it in his pocket.

At the beginning of third period, when they were supposed to be in study hall working on their American history project, they went to the boys’ restroom on the first floor. After the other boys had gone on to their classes and they were alone, they went over to the row of windows beyond the stalls and lit up, first Lester and then Harry from the same match.

“Oh, tastes so good!” Lester said.

“I’ve been dying for a fag all morning!” Harry said.

After a couple of minutes they were engulfed in a cloud of smoke, so they opened a window a few inches to let some of it out. They were each on their second cigarette when they heard a sound behind them that told them they were not alone. Mr. Phegley, the school principal, had just come in and was looking at them. He had a look on his face that neither of them would ever forget.

Lester didn’t mind the three-day suspension so much—he was always glad for a reason to not go to school—but the bad thing about it was that he was going to have to tell his mother. There would be no way to make a three-day smoking suspension sound like anything other than what it was.

When he got home before noon, she was dozing on the couch. He stood looking at her until she opened her eyes.

“What are you doing home from school so early?” she asked.

“I have something I have to show you,” he said, holding out the letter detailing the terms of his suspension.

“Oh, no!” she said, pulling herself to a sitting position. “What have you done now?”

She reached for a cigarette, lit it and blew a big cloud of smoke in Lester’s face. He inhaled deeply and experienced a few moments of absolute giddiness before she took the letter out of the envelope and unfolded it.

January 22, 2014February 1, 2014 by allen0997

My Antonia ~ A Capsule Book Review

My Antonia ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

I first read My Antonia (pronounced An-to-NEE-ah) in my youth and recently read it again. It is the venerable American classic novel by Willa Cather, first published in 1918, about life on the prairie in Nebraska in rough pioneering days. It is set in the late 1800s, when all the farm work had to be done by hand, there was no electricity yet to speak of, and cars were still mostly only a figment of the imagination. The story is told in the voice of Jim Burden, a young boy from Virginia who goes to live with his grandparents in Nebraska after his parents die. His grandparents have been farming for a long time and are fairly prosperous and comfortable for the time and place.

Jim Burden befriends a girl a few years older than he is named Antonia Shimerda, whose family has emigrated from Bohemia. They live in a mud hut in the side of a hill and don’t seem to be able to adapt to farming life on the prairie. Antonia’s father, seeing he has made a mistake to bring his family to such a hard life, commits suicide, leaving Antonia, her mother, sister and two brothers to manage on their own. Antonia has no other choice but to do the work of a man to keep her family going. She endures many hardships but survives her youth and grows into adulthood.

Eventually Jim’s grandparents give up farming and move into the Nebraska town of Black Hawk. Jim and Antonia remain friends, as she becomes a sort of servant girl in town to Jim’s neighbors, the Harlings. There is never any sort of “romance” between Jim and Antonia; they are more like brother and sister. Soon Antonia disappoints those who know her by taking up with the wrong kind of man. After she runs off with him and he abandons her, she finds herself with an illegitimate child. She bears this burden as she has all the others in her life. In later years, after Jim Burden has been away to school and becomes a lawyer, he returns to find Antonia married to a not-very-successful but kind man named Cuzak, with a large brood of children. They are happy, although still struggling.

My Antonia is steeped in time and place (isn’t that better than steeped in vulgarity?) and is about a way of life that no longer exists. Its themes are friendship, growing up, overcoming adversity, and holding onto memoires long after one has moved on. It’s one of the most readable classic American novels, for younger and older readers. There’s a reason it has endured for almost a hundred years while a lot of other books have fallen into obscurity.

January 19, 2014January 19, 2014 by allen0997

August: Osage County ~ A Capsule Movie Review

August: Osage County ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

August: Osage County is based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Tracy Letts. Meryl Streep plays Violet Weston, the foul-mouthed head of an unhappy Oklahoma family. She has “a touch of cancer” and for years has taken far too many pills. Her husband, Beverly (Sam Shepherd), is an alcoholic, an intellectual and a used-to-be poet. They have three daughters in their forties. Barbara (Julia Roberts) is the oldest of the three. She has marital problems and a smart-mouthed fourteen-year-old daughter named Jean. Barbara can match her mother blow for blow in the bitch department. The two of them are so much alike they can’t stand each other. Ivy is the plain middle daughter who has never found the right man but has somehow latched onto someone that, for reasons that become clear, she can’t have. Karen, the third daughter, left home years ago and never looked back. She enjoys the fast life in Miami.

Unhappy Beverly (not often a man’s name in the U.S. but is in this instance) disappears and then is found dead. (Was it an accident or did he kill himself?) With his death, all the wayward family members come home: Barbara with her daughter and estranged husband, Karen with her fifty-year-old adolescent boyfriend, Violet’s sister, Mattie Fae, Mattie Fae’s husband, Charles, and her son, Little Charles. Johnna, the Indian woman that Beverly hired as a maid right before he died, lurks in the background, a mostly silent observer until something happens that riles her. There is an ugly confrontation at the funeral dinner, with Violet and Barbara almost killing each other. One thing you can say for these family members is that they aren’t repressed. They don’t bother themselves too much with tact or diplomacy in their dealings with each other.

Meryl Streep is superb, as always, as Violet Weston. She dominates the movie and makes the part her own. You can’t imagine anybody else doing it any better. She won’t win an Oscar because she’s already won three times and won two years ago, but for my money she should win. Other standouts in the cast are Margo Martindale as Violet’s sister, Mattie Fae, who has carried around a secret far too long; Chris Cooper as Mattie Fae’s kind husband, Charles (his rambling grace at the dinner table is a highlight); Benedict Cumberbatch as Margo’s man-child son, Little Charles, who has always been a disappointment to his mother. (“He watches so much TV,” she says, “his brain is soft.”)

August: Osage County is funny and dark with memorable characters and dialogue. It’s not for everybody, of course, but the serious moviegoer who appreciates a fine movie adaptation of a great play should find plenty here to make the trip worthwhile.

January 18, 2014January 18, 2014 by allen0997

I’ll Do It but I Won’t Like It

I’ll Do It but I Won’t Like It ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

I wonder about people who work in offices, and I especially wonder about people who work in offices and like it. I’ve worked in quite a few offices over the long years and I guess I can say I’m stronger for having done it. (That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger). I have to admit, though, that most of the time I didn’t like it. It has mostly been my experience that “office” is just another word for “hell” or “prison.” The best offices to work in are the ones where you have lots of freedom and the worst are the ones where freedom, as a word and a concept, is completely unknown.

I’ve worked at a number of contract positions, meaning that I was part of the organization but not “altogether” a part of the organization. I was, of course, expected to abide by all the rules of the company (start times, codes of conduct, breaks, dress code, etc.) but was excluded from company benefits, social functions and perquisites. If the company was closed for the afternoon so employees could attend the funeral of a fallen executive, for example, I would, as a contractor, have my pay docked, while the regular employees didn’t. Also, being a contractor means that one is completely expendable. If a contract employee’s work is in any way unsatisfactory (and even if it isn’t), he can be removed so fast he won’t even know what happened, with as little fanfare as the changing of a light bulb. So, in a phrase, being a contractor means I am a disposable commodity. If I have human feelings, they’re going to be trampled on.

The best contract position I had lasted for three years. I know I was a fool for hanging around that long, but I was promised a permanent position that never happened. I liked the job—or anyway, could tolerate it—because we had a company cafeteria and a four-day work-week, but also because I had a boss who didn’t much care what I did as long as I did the work I was supposed to do. It was a congenial—some might even say permissive—environment and I probably would have stayed until I died in harness, but my boss (the man who hired me and authorized my pay) was fired for some naughtiness or other, and the corporate robot who took his place decided there was no room in the company for me. (He never liked me, anyway, and the feeling was mutual.)

If you are NOT a contractor, of course, that means you are a “regular” or a “permanent” company employee, which in corporate language very often means “slave” or “possession that we can do with as we please.” At company XYZ, for example, I was never supposed to think for myself or make decisions—that was done for me by a person far superior to me, a manager. I almost felt like I was in third grade again because the manager was breathing down my neck all the time, watching my every move, chewing me out for any little thing. (When I was on kitchen duty, for example, I was chewed out for going to the kitchen to clean up too early, because the three of us who were assigned were supposed to do it as a “team.”) We had endless meetings, some of them conducted over the phone, where we had to sit and listen to some blowhard gasbag of a manager (one of those “superior” people) think out loud, sometimes for as long as two-and-a-half hours. (Of course, nothing was ever accomplished at these meetings.) When the meeting was finally over, I found I had fallen behind on meeting my “deadline.” Guess what the solution was to that? I was supposed to catch up on the work on my own time! (Why else did I have that laptop computer that I was supposed to carry around with me all the time?) If they could figure out a way to get people to work in their sleep, they would do it. They’re working on it, I’m sure.

Of course, managers are notoriously cloven-hooved nincompoops who have no clue about human psychology or how to deal with people. (Some of them don’t even know the difference between “there and “their,” let alone “affect” and “effect.”) They don’t seem to realize that if they treat people like shit, they will get shit in return. You reap what you sow. The good manager, and there are a few of them, knows to treat people the way he himself wants to be treated. It’s so simple. If a manager is liked and respected, he will get so much more from people than if he is hated.

The office, for me, is a very unnatural environment that brings out the worst in people. When you are thrown in with a bunch of office people, strangers with whom you have nothing in common, you learn almost by instinct which ones are to be avoided. You are naturally distrustful of the people who “love” their jobs (or say they do) and believe the company is sacrosanct. (I call these people “abiders”—for them there is no other religion.) They have usually been brainwashed to the point where you can no longer have any possible human connection with them. They believe that every company rule, no matter how stupid, is to be obeyed. If they see you committing some minor infraction or other (he took two ink pens instead of one), they will more likely than not tell on you, just like on the playground in second grade. They cringe if you indulge in any kind of bitchy humor at the expense of the company or its management. They take their jobs so seriously that they become overwrought and face potential nervous collapse if something isn’t done the way they think it should be. They are the watchdogs of those of us who don’t give a shit. Stay away from these people. If you ever hand one of them a knife, you will be sure to find it sticking in your back.

A common question that’s asked in job interviews is, “What is your ideal work environment?” One time when I was asked this question, I said to the female interviewer, “Freedom.” To which she responded, “We don’t have any.” I didn’t get the job, even though I was well qualified for it.

And that brings me to my favorite kind of job, the job where there are no ringing phones, no yak-yakking people, no meetings with a nauseating number of clichés and buzz words spoken, no people (mostly women) complaining about how cold they are while I am dying from how hot it is in the place, no getting up extremely early in the morning, no traffic jams going to or from work, no petty jealousies, no backbiting, no whining, no adult babies, no wishing I was someplace else, no clockwatching, no pretending to be busy when I’m not, no pretending I like something or somebody I don’t, no “Sunday blues” because I have to go to work on Monday, no evenings getting ready for—and dreading—the next day of hell. I control the temperature (a little on the cool side, summer or winter). If my phone is ringing, I don’t have to answer it because it is, after all, my phone. I can work in my bathrobe all day, take extra long lunches, and can take a nap whenever I feel like it. I can have music playing (Mozart, Bach, Glenn Miller, Peggy Lee, Paul Whiteman, or whatever) while I work—or not—and I control what kind of music I listen to without having to defer to anybody else’s preferences. This sounds like heaven, doesn’t it? It sounds a lot like home.

January 16, 2014January 16, 2014 by allen0997

Lone Survivor ~ A Capsule Movie Review

Lone Survivor ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

Mark Wahlberg plays Marcus Luttrell, one of a group of Navy Seals sent on a dangerous mission in Afghanistan to remove a terrorist who routinely kills U.S. marines. Five of the Navy Seals are cut off in rough mountainous terrain and find themselves outmanned and outgunned by Afghan Taliban fighters. (When they encounter two young boys and an old man, apparently innocently herding goats, they are faced with the difficult dilemma of killing them because they are the enemy or letting them go, knowing they will alert the enemy of their presence.) Lone Survivor is based on a book of the same name by Marcus Luttrell, the only Navy Seal to survive the ordeal. After the others have been killed one by one, Luttrell, himself wounded, is taken in by non-Taliban Afghans acting in accordance with an ancient code of honor. He would not have survived otherwise.

Lone Survivor is not exactly “enjoyable” in the usual way. It’s grim and bloody and might give you a headache. We get a glimpse in the beginning of the movie of how Navy Seals are trained for the difficult missions they will undertake. Being a Navy Seal takes a special kind of person, especially the part of the training where you are tied up, thrown into a pool and told, “Now you’re going to see what it’s like to not be able to breathe.” (Do something to help me!)

Lone Survivor, like other realistic war movies before it, shows us how hellish war is and what a toll it takes on those who fight. It’s not just a bunch of pouty Calvin Klein models playing soldier-boy dress-up for the edification of the gals back home.

January 12, 2014February 4, 2014 by allen0997

Mr. Woodbine is Here

Mr. Woodbine is Here ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

The nurse came in and took Erwin’s blood pressure. He opened one eye and looked at her and asked if he was dead yet. She ignored him and a little while later she was back again, fussing with the equipment beside the bed, turning dials and flipping switches and writing things down on her clipboard. A clear bag of liquid hung on a pole beside the bed and drained into his arm. He wanted to ask what it was but he was too weak to get the words out. He was sure he was dying, but he told himself he didn’t really mind. Life was far too much trouble, anyway.

In between times when the nurse was fussing someplace else, he saw people in the room with him. They moved quietly around the bed, as if they were keeping watch or waiting—for what he didn’t know. He couldn’t see them very well, but he knew they were there. (Sometimes one of them would lean over and look closely into his face.) If he tried to speak to them, they withdrew. He wanted only to say hello.

One morning after he had been given a sponge bath (he was beyond embarrassment), he opened his eyes and saw a strange man standing at the foot of the bed looking at him—strange because Erwin had never seen him before but strange also because he was wearing a double-breasted, pin-striped suit with a red carnation.

“Who are you?” Erwin asked in his faint voice.

“How are you feeling, kid?” the man asked.

“Feel stupendous.”

“You know you were shot three times?”

“Feels like more.”

“You know who did it?”

“Not telling.”

“You had surgery to remove the bullets.”

“They didn’t need to bother. I know I’m going to die.”

The man shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not here to say one way or another.”

“You a doctor?”

“No, my name is Mr. Woodbine.”

“You the angel of death?”

“No, but I appreciate the compliment.”

“The undertaker?”

“No, no, no.” He took a cigar out of his pocket, rolled it around between his fingers, and lit it.

“You’re not supposed to smoke.”

“Well, I won’t tell if you don’t.”

“You’re police, aren’t you?”

“No, but I will tell you that I’m closer to being the angel of death than an officer of the law.”

“I give up then. I don’t feel like guessing anymore.”

“You give up too easily,” Mr. Woodbine said with a little laugh. He puffed on the cigar and blew a big cloud of blue smoke out over the bed.

“That ugly old nurse with the red hair is really mean,” Erwin said. “If she comes in and sees you smoking, she’ll probably stab you.”

“I’m not worried about her.”

“Who are those people standing behind you?”

“Oh, they’re nobody.”

“Well, if they’re there, they must be somebody.”

“They’re just curious. They don’t have much to do with their time and they want to know what’s going on.”

“That doesn’t tell me who they are.”

“They’re people you don’t ordinarily see unless you’re in the state you’re in.”

“Dying, you mean?”

“You said it. I didn’t.

“Tell me more.”

Mr. Woodbine opened his mouth to speak again, but the ugly nurse with the red hair came in and he left. When she pulled back the sheet and started poking at Erwin’s legs, he said, “Do you smell cigar smoke?”

“Why? Have you been smoking?”

“Not me.”

“If you smoke in this room, you’ll set off the sprinklers and that will make certain people very unhappy.” She pointed at the ceiling.

“I’ll tell him.”

“Who?”

“That man that was just here.”

“If anybody was smoking,” she said, “I would know it. I’ve got a nose like a bloodhound.”

“Am I going to die?”

“You don’t think I’d tell you, do you?”

He went to sleep again and a large, indeterminate chunk of time passed, maybe days or maybe only hours. Once when he awoke, he was aware of rain pattering against the window and then of Mr. Woodbine sitting in the chair beside the bed smoking his cigar.

“How are you feeling now, son?” Mr. Woodbine asked.

“How do you get in here all dressed up like that, smoking that cigar? Don’t the nurses try to stop you?”

“They don’t see me.”

“Well, that must be convenient. You’ll have to let me in on some of your secrets.”

“There’s nobody around. I thought we could talk a little more.”

“What time is it?”

“Does it matter?”

“No.”

“Tell me how you came to be shot.”

“An argument over money.”

“Ah!”

“And not very much money, either.”

“Not worth dying for?”

“If I live, I’m going to go find the rat that shot me and shoot him. Only I’m going to do it right. I’ll make sure he’s dead.”

“How do you know he’s not in police custody already for shooting you?”

“Maybe he is. I don’t know anything about what’s going on out there.” He pointed feebly toward the window. “The police were here asking me questions but I wouldn’t tell them anything. I want to take care of that rat myself. I never liked that guy anyway.”

“Revenge will be sweet?”

“It already is, just thinking about it.”

“What if I told you he’ll be taken care of and you don’t need to bother yourself?”

“I’m still going to kill him, except I’m going to make him suffer.”

“The way you’re suffering now?”

“Only worse.”

“Even if you live, you might not walk again.”

“I can kill the son of a bitch from a sitting position.”

“I have no doubt.”

“Why am I telling you all this?” Erwin said. “I don’t even know who you are!”

“It’s all right, because I know you.”

“I never saw you before in my life.”

“You have, many times, but you aren’t able to remember. I was there the time you nearly drowned in the swimming pool in high school. Remember?”

“I remember the incident but I don’t remember you.”

“Some of our memories are blocked out. The ones we’re not supposed to remember, for one reason or another.”

“You’re talking nonsense.”

“Not the first time and certainly not the last.”

“Tell those people to stay away from me. They’re getting on my nerves.”

“You just rest now. I think I hear that mean nurse coming.”

Anytime he was conscious, he expected to see Mr. Woodbine again, but Mr. Woodbine came no more.

Finally the day came when he arose from the bed on his own without any nurses fussing around him. His clothes were there, draped neatly over the chair. His wallet, glasses and keychain were on the table beside the bed where he would be sure to see them. He knew that he was being allowed to leave the hospital. Everything that was wrong with him had been fixed. He was renewed. He was going to have a fresh start. All his thoughts of revenge were gone. He didn’t even remember what had brought him to the hospital in the first place. He couldn’t wait to get outside and breathe the fresh air, even if it did smell like bus fumes. He jumped into his clothes excitedly.

He was going to tell the nurses goodbye as he walked past, but they were busy and didn’t look at him. Instead of waiting for the elevator, he walked down the five flights of stairs to the street. It felt so good to use his legs! Who said he might not ever walk again?

It was a brilliantly sunny day. As he walked down the broad steps of the hospital, he saw Mr. Woodbine waiting for him at the curb. They got into a waiting car and, as the car sped away, he lowered the window to feel the rush of air in his face. He was leaving pain and suffering behind. His problems, at last, were at an end.

January 10, 2014January 16, 2014 by allen0997

People are Talking

People are Talking ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

It was a slow day. A boy came in to buy a reed for his clarinet. A woman brought her daughters in to look at pianos with no intention of buying. A man came in to inquire about selling a violin he had that belonged to his brother who had just died. A couple of other people came in looking for certain classical recordings, one Bach and one Sibelius. Then it was time for lunch.

Roberta was alone in the shop, so she couldn’t leave. She sat on a high stool behind the counter, where she could see the door, and ate the lunch she had brought. While she ate, she looked over the morning paper. When she was just about finished, the wife of the store’s owner came in.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Doheny,” Roberta said pleasantly.

“I want to have a talk with you,” Mrs. Doheny said. “I’m glad there’s no one here.”

“Whatever would you want to talk to me about?” Roberta asked, her smile fading because Mrs. Doheny seemed angry about something.

“I’ll bet you already know.”

“Why, no, I don’t!”

“You know, of course, that my husband is a married man?” Mrs. Doheny said. She leaned forward on the counter, her face uncomfortably close to Roberta’s.

“Yes.”

“I just wanted to make sure you are aware of that fact.”

“I’ve worked for him for two years. How could I not know he’s married?”

“And we have two children in high school.”

“Yes.”

“I own half of this store. I have as much say over what goes on here as my husband does.”

“Yes?”

“I could fire you without batting an eyelash but I thought it only fair to warn you first. If you don’t heed the warning, then I fire you!”

“Warn me about what?”

“Your relationship with my husband is to remain purely a professional one. If it goes any farther than that, I have no other choice but to take action.”

“What action? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You and my husband were seen together, more than once, outside the store.”

“Seen by whom?”

“Never mind who it was. You just need to know that people are not as stupid as you seem to think they are.”

“What makes you think I have any interest in your husband?”

“People are talking!”

“What people?”

“Those in a position to know.”

“Oh, I think I’m starting to see it now. I’ll bet it’s that girl, that Stephanie, that he fired a while back for stealing things when she was alone in the store, isn’t it? She’s your niece or something, as I remember.”

“You don’t think I’d tell you who it is, do you?”

“I knew she was stealing and I told her if she didn’t stop I was going to tell on her. The next time I knew she was doing it, I went to Mitchell and told him about it and he fired her, niece or no niece.”

“Oh, it’s ‘Mitchell’ now, is it?”

“If you’ll excuse me, Mrs. Doheny, I’m not going to talk to you any further. This conversation is at an end.”

“You’re not going to get rid of me that easily!”

“If you have suspicions about anything, why don’t you talk to your husband about it and leave me out of it?”

“You don’t think I’d believe his lies, do you?”

“You’re a very disturbed woman, Mrs. Doheny. I feel sorry for your husband. He’s a nice man.”

“Why, you stupid little bitch! I could buy and sell you ten times over!”

A customer came in and Mrs. Doheny went into the back of the store where no one could see her. When the customer left a few minutes later, she re-emerged, her face pale and puffy from crying.

“You don’t look very busy,” she said as she prepared to leave. “I don’t think you’re earning your pay.”

She pushed over a display case with glass shelves, causing a tremendous crash. The display case broke and the merchandise scattered over a good part of the store.

“That will be deducted from your pay, of course!” she said, as she went out the door.

While Roberta was sweeping up the mess, she cut the first two fingers of her right hand. She went into the bathroom to hold her hand under the faucet, not caring if anybody came in or not—if they did, they could help themselves to anything they wanted as far as she was concerned.

The rest of the afternoon passed slowly. Right before closing time, Mitchell Doheny came in. He noticed right away that the display case was gone.

“What happened?” he asked.

“It fell over and broke,” Roberta said.

“By itself?”

“I was nowhere near it when it happened.”

“I’ll have to order a new one,” he said.

As she was preparing to leave for the day, he came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. She wasn’t used to being touched and flinched.

“Would you like to have dinner with me to celebrate?” he asked.

“Celebrate what?”

“The end of the week, I suppose.”

“I have nowhere else I have to be,” she said.

Instead of having hamburgers at the diner, they went to an Italian restaurant with real Italian cuisine, live music, and checkered tablecloths.

“How did things go for you in the store today?” he asked, as they sipped wine and waited for their food.

“All right,” she said. “A little slow.”

“I’m thinking about opening another store across town. How would you like to manage it?”

“We’ll see. Could we talk about something other than business?”

“What else is there?”

“I want to show you something,” she said.

She opened her purse and held up the small handgun she always carried, wrapped loosely in a headscarf.

He laughed when he saw the gun. “Are you planning on shooting somebody with that?” he asked.

“Only if I have to.”

“Be sure and tell me if it’s going to be me,” he said. “At least give me a chance to run.”

It was just starting to rain when they left the restaurant. She could easily have walked home, but he insisted on taking her.

When they pulled up in front of her building, she turned to thank him for the ride.

“I could really use a cup of coffee,” he said, “to clear my head.”

“You know I don’t drink coffee,” she said.

“Yes, I know, but you keep some on hand for guests, don’t you?”

“Guests like you?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like to come up?”

“I can see we’re thinking along the same lines.”

She turned on all the lights in the little apartment and turned on some music they both liked, a small ensemble with Benny Goodman so mellow on clarinet. While the coffee brewed, he made himself comfortable on the couch.

She went and sat beside him. He put his arm around her and started to pull her toward him, but she disengaged herself and got up and went back into the kitchen. When she came back with his cup of coffee, he took a sip and set the cup down. He reached for her and began kissing her, hurting her in a way, but she didn’t make him stop as she had always done before.

January 3, 2014January 16, 2014 by allen0997

Inside Llewyn Davis ~ A Capsule Movie Review

Inside Llewyn Davis ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

From the creative genius of Joel and Ethan Coen comes Inside Llewyn Davis, a story about a down-on-his-heels folk singer in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1961. Oscar Isaac (who I’ve seen in other movies, usually a villain) plays Llewyn Davis, who, despite his obvious talent as a singer, is in no way a “success.” (He was part of a singing duo but his singing partner committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge.) He doesn’t have a winter coat in the freezing New York winter, but a coat is not his most pressing need. He doesn’t even have a home, so he sleeps on the couches of “friends” until they get tired of him and kick him out. He is irresponsible and, in fact, hardly seems to be able to get along at all, especially in a profession that has as high a rate of failure as his does. A sort of girlfriend named Jean, who he may or may not have impregnated, tells him he’s “King Midas’s idiot brother.”

He does, in fact, seem hapless in everything he does. He has a misadventure with a cat belonging to an acquaintance on whose couch he spends the night. He loses the cat, of course, and picks up a cat on the street a day or two later that he thinks is the cat but in fact turns out to be a different cat (a female). He argues with his sister, who tells him she doesn’t want him in her house. He takes verbal abuse from Jean, while making plans to abort the baby she’s carrying that might be his, but, then again, probably isn’t. On the way to Chicago to see about a job, he ends up in a car with the strange Roland Turner (played by John Goodman), a dope addict who can’t walk without the use of canes, and Turner’s “valet,” named Johnny Five (Garrett Hedland), a Jack Kerouac-like character. The job in Chicago doesn’t work out, so he hitches a ride back to New York with a New Jersey boy who hasn’t had any sleep. (I’m not sure what the animal is that he accidentally runs over in the car at night, and I’m not sure what it means, but I found that episode a little unsettling.)

Inside Llewyn Davis has to be one of the most interesting and original movies of the year, told in the inimitable Coen style. (Nobody else even comes close.) I was glad that the cat, named Ulysses, makes it back home (no thanks to Llewyn), but I was sorry for the other cat that Llewyn had to leave behind. Let’s hope that everything turned out well for her.

December 31, 2013January 1, 2014 by allen0997

New York Mosaic ~ A Capsule Book Review

New York Mosaic ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

Her name was Mary Britton Miller but she wrote under the name Isabel Bolton, a little-known American writer who lived from 1883 to 1975. She wrote children’s poetry and stories and a handful of novels. Three of her short novels (Do I Wake or Sleep, The Christmas Tree, and Many Mansions) have been collected into one 400-page volume under the title New York Mosaic.

Not much happens in Do I Wake or Sleep (first published in 1946), the first of the three short novels in New York Mosaic. The story (or what there is of one) centers around an “older” woman named Millicent. She has come from humble beginnings but has somehow managed to live in a luxurious New York apartment amid the skyscrapers. She and all her friends are angst-ridden because World War II is in progress and they are all worried about the fate of the world. Millicent’s friend Bridget has a retarded daughter living in Vienna (“my little cretin”) who might be in danger because she’s living with Jewish relatives, and the Nazis…well, you know what the Nazis were doing. In spite the danger that Bridget’s daughter might be facing, Bridget is “gay” all the time, attending parties in her fancy clothes and running around with the smart set. Bridget tells her friends that being a society girl is the only way she can deal with the problems of the world. Then there’s Percy Jones, a novelist of some renown and a drunkard. He is fascinated with Bridget and everything about her, but he is so much older than she is and knows he doesn’t have a chance with her. Millicent is concerned about Percy and is thinking about marrying him herself to get him to “settle down” and stop fussing over Bridget. There is an altercation at a cocktail party that comes about as the result of a misunderstanding. Percy is injured when he is knocked to the floor. That is the big dramatic moment in the novel.

The Christmas Tree (first published in 1949) is my favorite of the three novels. It has much more “bite” than the other two. Hildegard Danforth, another New York matron, has a young grandson named Henry and, since it’s Christmas, she wants to give him a beautiful Christmas tree. Larry, Henry’s father and Hildegard’s son, is gay. Anne, Henry’s mother and Larry’s ex-wife, sends Larry a telegram telling him that she has just married a flyer and they are on the way to his mother’s apartment in New York to spend Christmas. (The reason for the telegram isn’t clear, unless it’s to taunt him.) For some unexplainable reason, Larry also heads for New York for Christmas. He has just left his gay lover, Gerald Styles, and doesn’t seem to know where to go or what to do. Gerald follows Larry to New York without Larry knowing. All the characters converge on Hildegard’s apartment on Christmas Eve. When Henry sees Larry, his father, he wants nothing to do with him and tells him he hates him. Larry is crushed while the stepfather seems very smug. The tragedy that occurs on the terrace, sixteen flights up, is probably not what you would expect for a novel from the 1940s.

In Many Mansions (first published in 1952), an eighty-year-old woman, Margaret Sylvester, is re-reading a novel she wrote about her life when she was younger and is reflecting on all the things that happened to her in her life. She is born into a wealthy New York family where everybody has plenty of money and plenty of leisure to do as they please. When she is a young woman, she has a summertime romance with an uncle by marriage and finds herself pregnant. Her family is forgiving, but they whisk her off to Europe for a year or so, where she gives birth to the baby without anybody knowing. The baby is put up for adoption and it is as if the entire episode never happened. (The baby’s father, her uncle, never knows.) Her life after the baby takes a different course than what is expected of a girl of her class. She has plenty of money to live on, but she takes up with some radicals and union organizers and becomes politically active with the intention of ending war, improving conditions for workers, and making the world a better place. Her family doesn’t approve. During this time, she has “very close” relationships with other woman (read into that what you will). Years later, after she has moved on from political activism, she buys a large old house, which she renovates to her own use. She rents her basement apartment to a young man, who promptly, against Miss Sylvester’s wishes, moves his pregnant girlfriend in with him. By a quirk of fate, she discovers that the young man was the baby she gave up for adoption all those years ago. He never knows that she is his mother, but she settles a large sum of money, apparently anonymously, on his child, her grandchild.

Isabel Bolton’s writing is dense, wordy, old-fashioned by today’s standards, and not easy to read or digest. She loves the compound-complex sentence with many clauses. With a lot of her sentences, you have to go back and break down the various clauses to figure out what she is saying. For the serious reader, New York Mosaic is engaging enough to recommend it, but the casual reader will probably find it not worth the effort.

December 31, 2013December 31, 2013 by allen0997

American Hustle ~ A Capsule Movie Review

American Hustle ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

American Hustle lays bare all the tackiness of the 1970s. Irving Rosenfeld (played by Christian Bale) has the ugliest men’s hairdo of the year (it must be seen to be believed). He owns a chain of drycleaning stores, but his real enterprises are loan sharking and art forgery. He promises desperate people that he will try to get loans for them (these are people who can’t get loans anyplace else), but he doesn’t even try—he only takes his “non-refundable” fee of five thousand dollars and lies to them. His motto is that desperate people will believe what they want to believe.

When Irving meets Lady Edith Greenleaf (Amy Adams), an English woman with “London banking connections,” he has more than met his match. (She’s not English and her name is not Edith Greenleaf, but we don’t know that until later.) Edith is smart and just as conniving as Irving is. As a team, they can fleece millions from unsuspecting suckers. The two of them fall in love, but Irving has a problem: a volatile wife, Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence), who says she will never divorce him because there has never been a divorce in her family. She has a son, Danny, whom Irving has adopted as his own. She uses Danny as leverage in her battles between herself and Irving. Appearances to the contrary, Rosalyn is smart and, although very odd, she has a streak of decency. She is, in a way, Irving’s conscience. It’s ironic that the two women in Irving’s life are both smarter than he is.

Enter Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), a hip young man with gold chains and permed hair. (He puts his hair up at night in little curlers.) Irving and Edith take him into their confidence; they believe he is one of them. When Richie finds out enough about Irving and Edith’s crooked enterprises, he reveals himself as an agent of the FBI. He threatens to expose them unless they will help him bring down the nest of vipers that is the New Jersey political machine. His target is one Carmine Polito, the mayor of Camden. Mayor Polito is interested in revitalizing and restoring Atlantic City and he doesn’t much care how corrupt the enterprise is. At this point, organized crime enters the scene. There are payoffs and bribes to be paid, some involving members of Congress and the U.S. Senate.

American Hustle is about human failings, such as greed and incompetence, but also about people’s willingness to be “conned,” even when all the indications are there that things are not what they appear to be. (“People believe what they want to believe.”) Although a fictional story, American Hustle is based on the Abscam scandal of the late 1970s. If scandal involving high-ranking members of government makes good material for movies, future filmmakers will have a mother lode of material to draw from, what with current and ongoing government scandals. I don’t know about you, but I love seeing sleazy, self-serving politicians getting what they deserve.

December 21, 2013December 21, 2013 by allen0997