All My Guitars

            On Wednesday I finished working out the chords for “Les filles n'ont aucun dégoût" and started posting it on my translation blog. It takes a while to reposition the chords in HTML so they match where they are in the original document.

            I worked a little more on the new section of my poem “The Street Sucks the Sandman’s Bag”.

            I washed another section of my living room floor.

            I had a slice of pizza for lunch.

            I used the tablet that my upstairs neighbour David gave me to take pictures of all of my guitars. I’m still close to the bottom of the learning curve of working this device. I had to cycle through several steps to take each photo although I’m sure there is a direct way to do it. At first I couldn’t control whether the photos were landscape or portrait but I finally figured out that I have to hold the tablet straight up and down either vertically or horizontally for the little camera icon to match each position. Otherwise a vertical photo might come out as landscape or vice versa.

            For each picture I took a matching one with my Kodak digital camera.

            I flushed the wax out of my ears.

            I did some exercises for my piriformis muscles. I’m starting to think that I might have sciatica. I’ve read that piriformis syndrome can cause sciatica. My back has started to ache a bit where it didn’t when I started to feel the hip discomfort and all the symptoms seem to point to sciatica.

            I wore sandals for the first time this year and took a bike ride. I rode up Brock to Dundas. There were busses replacing the streetcars. A young woman passed me at a light and I passed her a little later. At Dufferin she came up beside me and said of the bus behind us, “That’s one of the nicest bus drivers ever! He waited for me until I passed!”

            I went down Gladstone and stopped at Freshco to buy milk. While I was there I also grabbed some Earl Grey tea and a jar of honey.

            I added some old cheddar cheese to my last three slices of pizza and heated them for ten minutes in the oven. I had them for dinner with a beer while watching the first episode of the first season of the Untouchables TV series from 1959. I realized afterwards though that I’d yet to watch the 99-minute long pilot for the series since it had been labelled as “The Scarface Mob” and not “the pilot”. I can start watching that tomorrow.

            This story begins with Al Capone getting charged with income tax evasion and being sent to prison. My cousin was at Alcatraz when Capone arrived there. What takes place after Capone is gone is people jockeying to fill his chair. Frank Nitti, Capone’s enforcer has already taken his first steps by rubbing out some of the competition. But Capone’s bookkeeper, Jake Guzik proposes a more socialist approach. He wants to use brains rather than muscle. He wants the organization to move from being a gang to an association. First of all he ensures that none of them will get charged with income tax evasion again. They all start legitimate businesses and are able to account for all of their money. Elliot Ness is foiled by this ploy because he’d been hoping to get them all or income tax evasion. Next he tries to divide and conquer. He orders a series of raids only on Frank Nitty’s establishments in order to make Nitty wonder why no one else in the mob is being hit. Nitty comes to Guzik ready for a fight but Guzik calms him down and explains that Nitty has been a victim of Ness’s strategy. So Ness is foiled again. His next strategy is to get to Brandy La France, the widow of George Ritchie, who has been mourning in black for a year. She’s obsessed with finding out who killed her husband. Ness contacts her and convinces her that the information she needs could be found in her uncle Jake’s books. Jake’s sister Norma catches her in his office and then Jake arrives to admit that he was the one that ordered Ritchie killed for being a stool pigeon. She attacks Jake and he knocks her down. She pulls out a gun and wounds him. Ness’s men come in and Guzik is busted. Norma reveals that Guzik’s book is hidden at George Ritchie’s grave. Ness thinks it’s in code but Norma explains that it’s just Polish written backwards.

            Brandy is played by Barbara Nichols, who was usually cast as sexy dumb blondes in comedies.
            Norma was played by Betty Garde, who won a play writing contest in high school, worked in theatre and made it to Broadway when she was twenty. She expanded her acting to radio and wrote and produced her own drama series. She also directed and starred in a radio soap opera called “My Son and I”. In the late 1940s she began working in television and film. She starred in the film noir dramas “Call Northside 777” and “Caged”.  She was in the original Broadway production of Oklahoma.

            The real Jake Guzik was a Jew from Poland. He started out running a sex trade business in Chicago and then became a political fixer who arranged for payoffs to the cops and to politicians. In the early 1920s he started working with Capone and became the treasurer and financial wizard of the organization. Capone valued Guzik’s advice and he protected him. He once emptied his gun into a man’s face when he heard that he’d roughed Guzik up. He spent a few years in prison for income tax evasion but died of old age in Chicago. At his funeral the synagogue was packed with Italians.