Prohibition Was Stupid

            When I got up on Thursday I got up with one of the worst backaches that I’d had in years. I was fully functional but mildly uncomfortable for most of the day.

            I published “Women Love Neanderthals”, my translation of “Les filles n'ont aucun dégoût" on my blog.

            I finished the “Victoria” section of my poem “The Street Sucks the Sandman’s Bag”:

And then Victoria responds

to my psychic mayday

For just a mouthful of seconds

she stops off to save me

while on her sexual confection

enterprise work break

She clips his bonds of verbation

kills his Achilles wavelength

cools down his non-concentration

as his seat becomes shady

He knows he’s no competition

for my Africadian baby

so he and his apparitions

vamoose to the halfway

She deals a dose of aspiration

from a slow day in the jade trade

to fill an illicit prescription

for an illness that’s homemade

She borrows one hundred dollars

for an eightball of cocaine

just to leave me on a forlorn

limb until payday

She saved me from this guy

but I should’ve realized

she won’t do anything for free

            I cleaned the bathroom and vacuumed the kitchen floor for the first time in several weeks.

I had a can of tuna with salsa and potato chips for lunch.

            Nick Cushing was supposed to come by at around 14:00 but he’s usually later than he says and so I went to bed for a siesta at 14:11. He called up at my window at around 14:45. He brought me a couple of fenders for a mountain bike. We chatted for a little while but he didn’t stay that long. He invited me to come to the east end with him for a beer but I didn’t feel like going.

            I did some exercises and then took a bike ride up Brock where I found some dishes and glasses in a box on the sidewalk. I took two beer glasses. I turned right on Dundas and then went south on Gladstone where I stopped at Freshco. As I was locking my bike a woman was walking ahead of two little boys, each bouncing a basketball. One of them said, “Mommy, is my face all bloody?” Freshco’s grapes were fairly cheap but this week they are only $1.93 a kilo at No Frills, which is more than half off the Freshco price and so I bought six bags and did a price match. I also got a pack of strawberries and four red cluster tomatoes and I grabbed a pack of fourteen hot Italian sausages that were on sale for $6.86.

            My back discomfort was pretty much gone in the late afternoon.

            I’d been struggling off and on all day with the first stanza of my poem “Victoria”. Albert Moritz thought the poem was good but that the first stanza was weak:

I can’t find any sign of Victoria

She’s hiding far beneath her low profile again

It amazes me how easily she slipped across my border

threw a ball inside my heart

only to leave it before the last dance

            He said that starting with “border” I used three incomplete and unconnected metaphors. I only count two but maybe Albert didn’t get the idea of throwing a ball or dance being like throwing a party. But I see how “border” is unrelated to the dance and ball metaphor so I tried to find an alternative. This is the only thing I could think of:

I can’t find any sign of Victoria

She’s hiding far beneath her low profile again

It amazes me how easily she slipped across my border

colonized my interior

but left before the cultural exchange

            I boiled two potatoes, heated the last of my chicken breasts, warmed up some gravy and watched the first half of  “The Scarface Mob”, the pilot for “The Untouchables”.

The story begins with Al Capone doing a short time in prison for a weapons charge. Frank Nitti has been left in control of the organization, which mostly makes and sells illegal beer and booze. Elliot Ness is a Prohibition agent raiding a speakeasy only to find no alcohol at all because bribed cops have tipped the gangsters off about the raid. Frustrated, Ness suggests to his superior that they find six incorruptible men to form a squad that can’t be paid off. Ness goes to Washington to look through the agency’s files in order to find the men he’s looking for. Apparently it only took him a week to go through thousands of files and find the six men he was looking for. LaMarr Kane is a law school graduate; Eric Hansen is a former death row prison guard; Martin Flaherty is a former cop with an outstanding arrest record; Jack Rossmann is a former telephone company lineman; William Youngfellow is a Cherokee, a former football star and now a cop who broke up an Oklahoma City booze ring; Tom Kopke is a WWI hero and Joe Fuselli is a driver who knows every street and alley in Chicago and speaks several Italian dialects. He also served time for armed robbery.

The squad begins by wrecking Capone’s stills but these are easy to set up again. They need to find and destroy his breweries in order to do any real damage to his organization. Frank Nitti gets his man Johnny to pay the squad off. Pretending to be corrupt, Ness demands a fee ten times more than is offered and finally Johnny pays. But Ness keeps on wrecking the stills. Nitti beats Johnny up because he thinks he must have held back on the bribe. Ness tells Johnny that he’ll bust him for bribery if he doesn’t tell him where the breweries are. Johnny says he only knows one. Ness and his squad go there but there’s a steel reinforced door. By the time he can shoot it open the staff of the brewery have gone down the escape hatch. Johnny turns up dead.

The squad begins an intensive search for the breweries by following trucks carrying sugar and grain. They find one on the south side. They use a special truck with a battering ram to smash into the building quickly.

George Ritchie, who is married to Brandy, the niece of Capone’s bookkeeper, comes to Ness’s office because he wants to join the squad. Ness uses him to help put a wiretap on Nitti’s office. Flaherty poses as Frank Morris and flirts with Brandy at the Montmartre Club. He gets in good with the manager and arranges to use the phone in Nitti’s office because in order to tap the phone Rossman needs to hear a familiar voice on the line at a certain time. Betty pretends to be Flaherty’s girl at the other end and Brandy gets jealous, trying to interrupt the call. The tap is successful and with its help they are able to locate and wreck four more breweries.

There’s a scene in which Ness proposes to his fiancée Betty in a fancy restaurant and they have cherries jubilee, which contains rum and brandy. They decide that maybe the booze is legal from before the war. Betty says she wishes they had champagne. Ness says, “So do I, but it’s my job to see that we don’t.” She shakes her head and says, “What a business!”

I couldn’t agree more. What a stupid waste of resources and human life to fight so hard just to shut down breweries! The untouchables weren’t heroes they were idiots!