Edd Byrnes

            On Tuesday morning the short plump brown lady in the white car who opens up the Dollarama was late, so the skinny white guy that I assume was a courier waiting to make an early delivery there rode his bicycle around in circles in the parking lot about a hundred times. He might have given up and rode away because I didn’t see him there when she arrived. 

I practiced playing my song “Insisting on Angels” four times that afternoon. It seems that I play it better when I only do it once every four days. The chord changes for that song are so fast and varied that it’s hard to make it organic.

That night I tried to post a blog link on Facebook but I clicked “post” too fast and it didn’t show up properly. I deleted it and tried to repost it but Facebook kept saying that I couldn’t post it because it was identical to my last post. I had to delete my blog and repost that before Facebook would accept the link.

I watched an Alfred Hitchcock Hour teleplay starring Edd Byrnes, who played Kookie on 77 Sunset Strip. He plays a prisoner named Paul who is doing hard labour in the branch of a state prison where the convicts cut lumber and build the coffins in which the prisoners are buried. Paul is there for having robbed nine banks for altogether $500,000 with a partner who’s still free. The story opens with Paul having escaped but gets caught right away. The captain in charge of the work camp is a hard case who takes a disliking to Paul. The captain also likes to drink and has a sort of manipulative friendship with an old trustee named Doc who is allowed to make his own booze. Doc is in charge of building the coffins and the markers for each grave and he’s also the one that places the markers. Paul is given a job as Doc’s personal assistant and he learns that Doc has a young granddaughter that needs money for a special operation. Doc knows that Paul has money hidden on the outside and offers to help him escape if he’ll give his son $5000 for the surgery the little girl needs. The plan would be for Paul to be smuggled out of prison beside the next corpse in a coffin. The coffin would be buried but, Doc always comes alone to place the marker after the burial detail leaves. He would then dig Paul up in plenty of time before his air runs out. Paul agrees but as they make preparations a couple of the complications are that Doc is always getting drunk and he has a bad heart. When the next prisoner dies Paul sneaks into the morgue and slides into the pine box beside the dead body. The next morning the detail comes, nails down the lid and takes the coffin to the gravesite. They bury it and then Paul waits for Doc. But Doc does not come. As Paul begins to panic the shroud falls away from the corpse he’s lying with to reveal that his companion in the grave is Doc.