Zooetry and Untouchable Hair

            On Tuesday morning I spent more than an hour editing a three-minute section of my translation of Boris Vian's story "Le Loup Garout” because I wanted to read it that night at Shab-e She'r. I timed myself reading it but there was little need because one typed page of a story almost always takes three minutes to read.

            I spent some time updating my journal.

            In the evening I put on a few layers of winter armour and headed out into the snowy mess. The streets were slightly clearer than they had been on Monday but this time I was riding my bike after dark and so it was actually worse because I couldn’t see as well to manoeuvre over the rough patches. The Bloor bike lane was a lot smoother than the day before but it was very slushy.

            It normally takes me twenty minutes to get to the Tranzac but it must have been half an hour this time because as I walked into the main hall Bänoo Zan was already announcing that she was about to sign people up for the open stage. Terese cave me a warm hello as I passed the reception desk. I called to her that I'd be right back and headed to get my name on the list.

            There was curtain running across and separating the front half of the stage from the back. I went up to look behind it and I was Bänoo that it was something I could use next time if it’s still there when Colin Puffer, one of the Tranzac sound people, who also noodles the piano and almost always seems to be just on the manageable side of drunk, came up like a mother bear defending her cub and wondered if I had some question regarding the stage. When I asked about the curtain he gave a beer-odoured begrudging explanation that the curtain is always there but it's just been closed because there was a play put on recently and it just hadn’t been opened again yet.

            After I’d taken my scarves off, settled into a seat and began to write some notes, I suddenly realized that in all my efforts to get myself ready to face a snowy night ride the one thing I’d forgotten to do was to put in my denture so I didn’t look like Mike Tyson. The prospect of being in public for a whole evening with a gap in my front teeth was troubling because there was a good chance people would see it when I was reading on stage or if I accidentally were caught smiling. For a split second I considered riding home for my denture but the prospect of taking an extra two trips at night on those wintry streets put a quick end to the consideration. I would just have to not grin and bear it and hope that I wouldn’t get photographed with my hockey hole showing.

            Tom Smarda arrived and shared the bad news that Bänoo had informed him that she already had twenty performers on the open mic list and so he might not get a chance to play. I told him I’d be very surprised if Bänoo didn’t put him on, since the list has overflowed before and I’ve never seen her turn away anyone from the open stage.

            Terese Pierre read the land acknowledgement.

            The first open mic performer was Mugabi Byenkya, who was wearing a t-shirt with the words: “So Goth I Was Born Black”. Actually most non-black newborn babies are dark red to purple in colour and so everyone is born Goth.

            Mugabi said that most people write love songs for romance but that he’d written a “Love Song for a Friend” - “ … I asked ‘How bout them Lakers?’ You sat, shrugged, cracked a half grin, shoulders hunched, stared at your feet … I asked ‘How is your depression?’ You sat, pulled yourself up and stared directly at me.”

            Jade Wallace said, “All families grieve when their children die … Only rich families try to delegate their grief to the public … One of the roads was the inheritor of the child’s legacy … What is cruel is making people live in a graveyard.”

            Jonathan Freeman read “12 in February” – “ … I am following my sun-sharp shadow … Damocles icicle poised overhead … Time catcher … Dream fisher … reaching through the insubstantial veil of alternate histories … meet and melt into abstraction … In this glorious otherworld I hold hands with a boy … irresponsible with my heart … the other is just as scared … We are survivors of a broken ship … sunshine has blinded you … When I was young February knew itself … We waited for the thaw … so we could finally come out …”

            Afia reminded us that when she was there last month she had tried to recite a poem but had forgotten the lines and given up. She remembered it this time – “My mind’s playing a game … The way I feel is not the same … My mood changed just like the moon … Undying return … it’s the season that I yearn … this forest can’t be tamed … Fill my essence with the trickle of your presence … the guest of my request to alleviate the stress …”

            Even though Afia spoke her introduction in a Toronto accent, often during her performance she affected an African American inner city accent. Canadian country, blues and rock performers do the same thing but with a southern US accent, just like during the 80s Canadian Punk bands sang with working class British accents. I sometimes feel the urge myself on some of my songs to sing like I’m from the southern United States, but I resist the temptation because I think it’s a negative gravity. People are always truer to themselves when they sing with their natural voice.

            Emilio D. Puerta read an homage to Françoise Hardy, first in French and then in English – “Les vrais amis sont venus si souvent des nuages … Nous ne savons pas comment à dire adieu … Nous allons seuls dans les rues, notre coeur en peine … sentir une fois de plus les plaisirs que nous avons connus …”

            In English – “True friends have come so often from the clouds … We know not how to rightly say goodbye ... We roam the streets alone, our hearts in pain … to feel once more those pleasures we have known …"

            Françoise Hardy is a French singer-songwriter who became a superstar in 1962 when she was 18. Emilio’s poem seems to be a montage of adapted lines from various hits by Hardy. I wasn’t able to catch most of them but the line about “True friends” comes from her 1965 hit “L'amitié” by Jean Max Rivière; the line about not knowing how to say goodbye comes from her 1968 hit "Comment te dire Adieu” by Serge Gainsbourg and the line about walking the streets alone comes from her very first popular song, “Tous les Garcons et les Filles" for which she wrote the lyrics.

            Elisha Elise Alladina introduced her poem by singing the first verse and chorus of “Vision of Love” by Mariah Carey and Ben Margulies - “You treated me kind / sweet destiny /carried me … to the one that was waiting for me … somehow the one that I needed … a vision of love …”

            From Elisha’s poem – “What to write … another daily log … in need of grounding … Where is the design headed? We’ve shredded the stars … The wolf moon won’t allow it.”

            The first feature was Terry Trowbridge, who has a lot of frantic energy that he channels into comical energy between poems. He began by saying, “There’s a lot up here, I don’t know what I’m doing, let me look at the controls!

            While talking Terry agitatedly and repeatedly ran his hands along his necktie while pulling one end away from his body. He looked like he was masturbating his tie.

            “We live in a city … three million people … I’m not an newcomer … I’m an old-been-here … Being a newcomer is the same sensation if you’re taking your energy and working it up … We are not connected with the dirt … There are so many graveyards … The names that the churches have on their wall … What is it about graveyards? I have to find some kind of voice … We helped smuggle people out … who saw the Nazis coming … What we have to get really clear … there are Nazis in Queen’s Park … Take a hold of that Polish voice … We have to think about what we’re digging …”

            When Terry finishes reading a poem he often tosses it over his shoulder, or sometimes when looking for a poem to read from the pile of poems he would toss several onto the stage.

            From “Anxiety Disorder in Toronto” – “She told me her name was Hindi for ‘wishing’ … Less space … storefronts … nameless minimum wage workers … thought her car was better than their workplaces … When she drove she had to stay awake … anxiety that she thought she had to do something more.”

            From “Home Free” – “A conditional statement … If I am home then I am free … Either I am home or I am free … Home – noun, free – adjective … Rights to my own property.”

            From another poem – “The two pugs who live on the fourth floor … Now we know they make love … on the tethers of Aphrodite … Scan the world with your snorting laughter … deep oracular eyeballs … pleading for eternity … The streetlights … the low hanging fruit … of the night … You are the avatars of sarcasm … The chained partners … forever waiting for a sneeze … You cannot read the open portals … Brother Cerberus is taking Persephone for a walk … I will keep your telepathy a secret … Who took your tails in exchange for the golden apple you guard for the rest of the day?”

            From a poem about weather – “ … Tomorrow he will nail a blanket to the flame.”

            Terry announced that his next poem is “the most expensive poem I’ve got!”

            From “Coyote Mothers of the Niagara Region” – “The sun is out, the snow melts … the deep, hopeful heat … March is a soggy, barren, bitching month / to carry so much responsibility to / the back of the grocery store / A coyote sneaks from her home to find food … Beamsville’s criss-crossing streets … She waits for the last car to leave / then crawls from the ditch and sniffs at the dumpster … In May, walking her pups in the  … gullies of Vineland, a mother pauses to listen … the hidden conversations of humans … The coyotes here are the only Canadians who understand.”

            From “Pangolin Doll” – “A pangolin curls up on your plate … perfect green likeness called artichoke.”

            From “Hamilton Harbour” – “A harbour gull’s yellow feet cross the concrete shoreline … to a Stonehenge made from idle forklifts … steps into timorous puddles … a thousand industrial ways to break the spine of the sky … hollow bones falling like syringes on the beach.”

            From "Pigeons” – “Pigeons squabble onto the ground ... make pigeon mud ... one civilization ... just shitting everywhere.”

            Terry said that he has a running argument with Terese Pierre about his next piece because she says that it's a poem while he insists that it is prose. "If it goes to the edge of the page then it's prose!"

            From “Grieving and Ambivalent Relationship” – “Take orders as if sage advice ... Many animals find themselves on a new branch of an old tree … Do bears sleepwalk when they hibernate? … Let them make excuses for you … Do not argue with their excuses … The probation order was meant to take him out of your life … Those decisions you made are permanent … Now what?”

            From “That is Why They Shit so Much” – “They can see your twisted, tainted middle-class soul … half hidden behind furniture … The other one is hunting Charm … When you came home you made an ungodly stink … Emily Bronte … married the man who changed her father’s diapers … The other one distains Charm … She is ringing every last puttering note out of her spine … Charm deliberately digs three times in the cat litter … You flew home two days early … They love you as their mother … Charm hid behind the furniture … He hasn’t made the noise that says he is hungry yet … What in Charm decides he is in charge? You versus two quadrupeds … You’re a certified psychotherapist … getting schooled by a brain the size of a peach pit … He, like Emily Bronte is dying from a case of being English … Your sister moved to Utah … They slept on your sofa for eight weeks ... Both of them sat there massaging your hungry cats ... You love like a Buddhist cliché … unattached ... You've been placing the cat food on the floor ... Maybe you are a medium through which other people pass ... You will become a cat lady cliché … You are drawing a line in the sand while you are cleaning your own cat shit …”

            When Terry Trowbridge says that his long pieces are not poetry maybe he means that they are not very good poetry. His shorter pieces like "Hamilton Harbour" often show that he is an accomplished poet but for the wider writing, other than the occasional poetic line he tends to fall back on humour and his amusingly anxious performance style.

            We took a long break while Terry picked up all the pages he’d strewn all over the stage and down in front of it. I went to chat with Tom Smarda who looked kind of bored but he said his ennui was only partial and he’d actually enjoyed what people had been reading on the stage and had found Terry pretty funny. He observed that the audience seems to have changed since Shab-e She’r moved from the church. I said it tends to change every month depending on who the features are because they attract their friends and fans. Terry’s involvement with the Rat Bar reading series may be the reason a larger portion of the audience were poets this time. When I think about it now though maybe Terese’s addition as co-host has caused a change in the audience because she seems to have a circle of friends that have started to come to the event.

            Tom commented that everyone is suffering from information overload. I said there is certainly a lot of information from opposing sources. A gave an example of the confusion that followed the Right to Life March incident in Washington and the conflict between Kentucky Catholic schoolboys, the Black Hebrew Israelites and an indigenous American group. Tom had only vaguely heard of it. I told him that the BHI were absolutely toxic and were baiting everybody and even calling the indigenous people “savages”. But everyone involved had some culpability and it was a perfect storm of imperfection.

            Tom said he didn’t like using the terms “perfect” and “imperfect” because of what he’s learned from twelve step programs. I told him that “perfect” in this case is just an expression but I agreed that as an ideal it creates negative results, just as does the idea of “happiness”.

            I suggested and Tom agreed that he and I are probably less prone to anxiety compared to most people because we’ve both lived on the street.

            While I was standing and chatting with Tom near the edge of the audience seats, I glanced over at the seat two rows directly behind the front centre where I had been sitting and saw a very attractive young woman of African descent with a starburst of beautiful curly hair. She noticed me pleasantly admiring her and glanced back in a way that suggested she appreciated the attention.

            I hadn’t timed it but the break seemed to last even longer than the usual fifteen minutes.

            As usual an open stager was put in as a warm up act for the second feature. In this case it was Shab-e She’r’s photographer, Yecid Ortega, who said he’d just returned from Bogota, Columbia. Yecid read two poems.

            From “I Wonder” – “In a rainy afternoon I find solace … Everyone says love hurts but it’s not true … Rejection hurts … Love is the only thing that covers all the pain … keeps us apart from the knife … What is love? Who cares! Go on, love, before it’s too late.”

            From Yecid’s second poem – “We both invented the future … the colours, patterns, miracles … This machine was created to recreate ourselves … under our skin … We became everything.”

            Our second feature was Hana Shafi, who noticed that Terry Trowbridge had left his hone on the lectern. “I’m so messy!” he declared as he stepped up to retrieve it.”

            Hana said that it’s important to have physical spaces for artists now more than ever because there are a lot of elitist gatekeepers of the literary community.

            Hana’s first poem was called “Avocado Toast” – “We can’t afford houses because we buy avocadoes … Trampled to near death by wildebeests at Union Station … two jackals lunge cackling … She trips on an avocado plant … As she lies bleeding … Why didn’t I open a tax-free savings account?”

            From “This is Our Education” – “Remember the pink lockers … I learned to be a bitch … Those boys put laughter in the skin like a splinter under nails … Prank calls for my sweet sixteen … We wanted a boyfriend for four years … We had each other … On last day we left early … High school blew!”

            From “Severe Women” – “The feeling when you walk into a room and there’s so many beautiful women … and I feel so grimy … Who’s gonna love us? … Every night that I’ve been … dust coated … Steep dialogue … I laughed more at jokes of men … I’m ruined … I wanted to be smooth, jade and grass … Girls without chapped lips … I speak in tongues of ash … Who’s going to love … us stone women … rough earthbound girls … leaning over to shoot pool in the least seductive manner … Who’s gonna love us … I sweetly shout into my pillow.”

            From “White” – “White gaze … The desire of your blue eyes … I am enhanced under your watch … Squeeze the puss … Is he looking at me? What a feeling! What a sickness!”

            From “A Face to Pray To” – “I sometimes go to St James Cathedral … stare up at Jesus … I love the way he looks at me … violent … A certain blasphemy … I know / They don’t / that a Muslim is here.”

            From “Ritual” – “I stayed up all night writing poetry … I heard the wind like spirits in the trees … I made new castles of rage … I set fire to them … I stayed up all night thinking of men … They are breakable … I want to throw my fear into a casket of fire … All the secrets I give to god … ruins of scars … I knelt down … humbled in the presence of my own failure.”

            From “Minimum Wage” – “ … twerp … less integrity than my asshole … A deal, a condo, a car … girl with shiny pupils who says ‘I love Indian culture’ … I’ve been told I ought to see the world … I’m not as talented as they’d hoped … Somewhere right now some well-tailored prick is jerking off to ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’.”

            Hana said that she’s looking forward to The Lion King. She wants Beyoncé to play the lion and to do all the music.

            From “Cookies and Gold Stars for Your Support” – “He’ll wear a tank top that says ‘Feminist’ … He’ll give free shots to women … That’s not being an ally … He says he gets turned on by all women … That’s not being an ally … he says you’re brave … That’s not being an ally … He is nice to all women … That’s not being an ally.”

            From “What People Are” – “You should go to bars alone … down, down, down … You should laugh at your reflection … You should ask yourself why whiskey burns … Feeling around for purpose … You shouldn’t follow my advise … Every time I see the amber slipping down I think I understand what people are.”

            From “Fantasy Belt” – “ … if I have barbed wire hair it means no one can touch me …”

            Hana said that no one should touch anyone’s hair without their consent or even ask for consent. She said someone touched her hair once and told her that it felt like barbed wire. “That puts my body in a prison!”

            Hana’s final poem was called “Designated Bitter Time Slot” – “UV ray … You and me today … every message of pity … not happening to me … Isolation is the key to prosperity … Let me have this moment to be a petty bitch.”

            Hana Shafa’s confessional poetry is often like a more thoughtful, more literary type of slam formulaic writing, although she sometimes breaks free of the genre. She gets underneath the angst and on top of the anger of what it’s like to be an adolescent and a young woman. There’s some respectable poetry in her oeuvre but she doesn’t come up with a lot of original imagery or new ways of using language.

            We went back to the open mic beginning with Khashayar Mohammadi, who first did a translations of “Longings” by Constantine Cavafy – “Like the beautiful bodies of those who died / before they had aged … So appear the longings that have passed without being satisfied / Not one of them granted a night of sensual pleasure / or one of its radiant mornings.”

            From Khashayar’s own “Smog” – “The first breath of fresh air after clocking out … I’ve built routines around lost loves … browsed the scarlet Christmas trees … I felt more of you than I have felt in years … It strums the ego … It lets grief crystallize …”

            From “Half Dreaming” – “Your absence tickles my side … Limbs grow distant … I’m switching the main nostril I’m breathing through … Your absence leaves my side.”

            Redgina said this was her first time writing or reading and her poem was for her brother – “The trench coat … grey and course wool … cool shades … Radiant menacing Eden called golden … Costumes that grew thicker like molasses … Sometimes it’s Wu Tang or Black Sabbath … Sometimes it’s a red Ikea chair … Most days it’s silence … I’m late … I search … I’m still screaming”

            I read from my translation of Boris Vian’s “Le Loup Garout” but first explained the story up to this point. Dennis is a mild mannered wolf who was bitten by a werewolf and the first night of the full moon discovered that he’d been transformed into a human. Figuring it was only temporary, Dennis decided to make the best of a bad situation and hitchhiked to Paris. – “I'm sorry, sir said the waiter, but could you share your table with this young lady? / I would be delighted”, he said, half rising from his seat / Thank you, sir said the creature with the voice of a musical saw / Suddenly she dropped her handbag, which Dennis caught before it hit the floor / Oh! she exclaimed, you have extraordinary reflexes! Your eyes are pretty strange too! They look like garnets / It’s the war, said Dennis / I don’t follow you / As I was expecting you to say rubies and not garnets I came to the conclusion  of there being restrictions which led to the war by a causal relationship / Do you go out for Political Science?” asked the doe eyed brunette / If I did I wouldn’t make it back / I find you fascinating / She was someone with the habit of often either losing or misplacing her virginity …”  

As Uma Jama passed me while approaching the stage she ran her hand over my left shoulder. It was probably her way of saying, “Good going on your performance!” but it was hard not to associate the gesture with the eye contact we’d made earlier.

From “C” – “Your name used to start with a C … Now all I see is an A … for abusive … My heart no longer skips a beat for you … No more thoughts of love and healing … Life is trying to defeat me … so I rise … Maybe today I’ll remember my dreams.”

From “Free” – “You cannot break what the almighty blessed … Listen when I speak … I’m the part inside … I will you to be free.”

Daniel Maluka read two poems.

From “Mornings” – “A home so small we could hear each other’s breath … Too proud to speak commitment … I waited to hear it … Four letters wrestling on my tongue … Mornings are for messy hair and big t-shirts.

Daniel asked, “Do you remember listening to David Attenborough? I hunt alone.”

From “Unwashed” – “70% water / 30% falsehood … in our veins … whisper in the distance … unwashed … reused.”

Lady Light asked how many of us had been in more than one romantic relationship. I didn’t look behind me but I assume that everyone raised their hands.

She said, “If I’m lucky enough the kiss of death is a goodbye poem.”

She read two poems. From the first – “Even a mighty river, like a pen can run dry … I’m always searching for safe places … So much harder when we’re broken in the same spaces.”

From her second poem – “This body has fallen down endless corridors … has discovered dreams etched on its flesh with razors … has borne the unbearable … birthed mountains unbroken.”

Roisin read “Individuality” – “Time does not belong to mankind … One day I hope to see everybody free … We all have a dark, down day … Your head is the prison … so let’s all respect individuality … All walks of life live in this world … I can’t be you and you can’t be me.”

Bänoo announced that the next Shab-e She’r would be on February 26.

Leah read – “They have no homes but three hearts in their heads … where its mouth out to be … three lines and sex … grey hairs … Someone told me I should think about freezing my eggs … I’m 27 … I thought he was joking but it turns out he’s just a prick … a man filled with shattered glass … screaming through his suit.”

Gloria read two poems. From the first – “I feel like all I do every day is bleed … This blood doesn’t like its home … My blood has a hard time being in this body.”

From her second – “There’s been many times that I’ve had the opportunity to tell you how I feel … I just watch it until it dies.”

As usual, Stemond Pardy didn’t go up on stage but rather stayed at audience level. He remained mostly at the front but sometimes ventured down the middle aisle as he recited his poem – “Ah Toronto! My bereaved mariee … We were of one flesh once … Heaven for me was to be found in the midst of you … like Diogenes … with only my allowance and a joint … I wasn’t technically allowed to be downtown by myself … It’s better to be king for a night than a schmuck for a lifetime … I’m alone right now … Should I see a psychic … Despite the fact that I’m coloured … if I could have strolled down the year 1923 … Everyone that ever walked down this street is walking with me right now … Shut the fuck up Yonge Street … Jihad me at hello … I just passed an aggressive panhandler holding a sign … ‘I need money for?’ … It’s 2017 … It’s the April of our prime … walking down the world’s longest street.”

Sanja read two poems. From “Silver" - "Let's enter untrodden paths ... clouds upon never ending precipice ... meet a mirror for time's address ... visionless expanses … sublime chords announcing … back to front on beams of song ...”

From “Still” or "Entitled" – “The day comes to doorsteps … unmet by strangers ... Mouth undying words ... to give over to abandon … sustained with earthly pleasures ... consumed to feel you evermore ... Day comes to doorsteps and passes through windows ... unmet by strangers."

Bänoo said, “If your art only makes sense to people like you, it doesn’t make sense.”

Matt Cook read two poems.From “A Bag of Stem Cells for my Brother” – “I lie on the bed … My mom snaps a pic … Stem cells fill the bag … and I have to pee … They all think it’s a big heroic thing … cancer … Let this work … No guarantees.”

From “Leaving Damascus” – “In the beginning was the word … greedy grabbed my insides when Jesus came into my heart … We should go all the way and put gas on the fire of the desire to hedonize Christ … I’m still a Calvinist at heart … because you really can’t choose what you believe anyway.”
            Kelita read “For Andrew and for You” – “I hear it was the second shot … I was never a child soldier like him … I know something of needing rest … It was the same year I stopped taking the pale coloured pills … I heard he only wanted quiet … the power of myth … How does a person become a monster deserving three bullets?Wondering if the cop that killed him ever felt guilty.”

The final performer was Tom Smarda. He made it! He sang one of his standard songs – “If it’s good for us then it’s good for the Earth and if it’s good for the Earth then it’s good for us /  and if it’s bad for us then it’s bad for the Earth and if it’s bad for the Earth then it’s bad for us … If we dump toxis chemicals into the watersheds … If we eat pesticide free organic food … (He begins coughing) If we choke the air … If we’re killing off lifeforms chances are we’ll be killing ourselves … If war were good for us it would be good for the Earth … If it’s good for the Earth than it’s good for us … and here’s the kicker …. and those you love.”

As he finished I shouted “Good for you Tom!”

            Bänoo finished the night by reading one of her own poems. From “Fear” – “It is not that I have no fear … It is that I fear giving in to fear … Today I met the lake … She said ‘Dive into me’ … Courage is a poet.”

            Yecid handed me his phone and asked me to take a picture of he, the other volunteers and the features. I’m not used to taking photographs with telephones so I don’t know how well it turned out. I should probably have taken three to be sure.

            I chatted with Cy Strom and he suggested that I might have gotten my Boris Vian translation of “estampilles japonaises” slightly wrong and that the girl might have been asking Dennis to come up and see her Japanese print collection rather than her Japanese stamp collection. I can’t find any reference from any web sources or from my own very good Collins-Robert dictionary that says that it would mean anything other than Japanese stamps. “Estampes japonaises” translates as Japanese prints but Vian specifically uses “estampilles”.

            I told Cy about the Poetry Master Class that I’m taking with Albert Moritz and how we have to critique fifteen of other people’s poems a week and offer written comments and it’s actually a lot of work. Cy said that sometimes Bänoo asks him to critique her poems. I related how when my ex-girlfriend and I went to counselling one of her requests was that I critique her poetry once a week. It was actually the easiest request for me to fulfill. There would have been much harder things that she could have asked for.

            I told Cy about my Romantic Literature course and how we’d just studied Percy Shelley’s “In Defence of Poetry”, which could be applied to Terese Pierre’s argument with Terry Trowbridge about prose versus poetry. I think that Shelley is saying that all writing, all art, all religion, all language and indeed all civilization come from poetry.

            When I got home I was unlocking the front door of my building while a couple were doing the same for the door that leads to the apartments above the Japanese restaurant. Before I went in I noticed them giving me a funny look, turning to each other to whisper and then looking at me again. I was pretty sure that my penis wasn’t hanging out through all of the layers of winter armour I was wearing and so I couldn’t figure out why the gentry were agitated.

            I had a late dinner and watched an episode of Peter Gunn. This was the least likely story of any in the series. The beginning shows a man in an extreme state of hallucination, seeing toads all around his room and a tarantula on his forehead. Peter Gunn arrives and it turns out that the man is an alcoholic who wants Gunn to keep him from drinking for fifteen hours so he can be sober to go to the airport and meet his daughter whom he hasn’t seen for many years. The chances of this kind of a task being requested of a private investigator are incredible slim. Gunn ties the man to his bed and goes to sleep in his living room but the man chews open his bonds and knocks Gunn. When Gunn recovers he goes looking for the man, who has already all his money to Gunn and so he has no cash or change to buy booze. He tries panhandling and manages to scrape enough to buy a cheap drink in skid row but the money is stolen. He smashes a liquor store window but he drips after grabbing the bottle and it breaks on the ground. He’s picked up by the cops for the robbery and Gunn finds him in jail. Gunn gets him out and takes him to a Turkish bath to sweat himself clean before meeting his daughter.

            At the airport his daughter suggests he buy her a drink and they go into a bar. That’s the closing scene so what happens next is left up to the audience.