Requiem for a Heavyweight

            My hip muscles were still sore when I got up on Monday morning. It feels like the discomfort is slowly easing off though.

I started working out the chords to Serge Gainsbourg’s “Les petits ballons”.

I began to go through Albert Moritz’s notes on my manuscript and started making the changes that he’d suggested.

Of my poem “Me and Gravity” he commented that it has great rhythm, rhyme and stanza use. He suggested that might need to capitalize the beginning of some of the lines. Of the fourth stanza:

Well, some have stayed a night or two

some even stayed the whole month through

but those few must have gotten lost

or fallen in the well

where some carved their names in its smooth sides

or used it for an alibi

but only one reversed that hole

to ring it like a bell

Albert posed that the logic of line seven might be better with “and once one even reversed that hole …” But that would throw the rhythm off, so I changed it to, “But one turned that hole inside out / and rang it like a bell”.

            In the fifth stanza I had the lines “But even in that state of grace / between transplants of love’s glass embrace / no surgery can split this waltz / of me and gravity” he wrote of the second line that it was “both a little obscure and a little clotted in its rhythm”, so I changed it to “But whether in that state of grace / or grafted to love’s glass embrace”.

Of “Instructions for Electroshock Therapy”, in the seventh stanza said of the line “

but if convulsive codes have not been breached” that it wasn’t clear. He felt the line was distorted for rhyme. I changed it to “but if a convulsion has not been reached”.

Of the eighth stanza:

If unconsciousness follows the charge a delayed attack will come

but if you’re looking for a grande mal seizure just raise the voltage some

Two hundred and fifty volts

at point-one seconds could deliver some jolt

so it helps us to remember it’s the patient’s fault

in shock therapy

To get a grande mal seizure

shock therapy

you know it couldn’t be easier, reach it right away

Shock therapy

Just two hundred volts

at point-fifteen seconds makes them shake like Jell-O

though for the rest of their lives they might be walking slow

from shock therapy

Of the lines: “Two-hundred and fifty volts / at point-one seconds could deliver some jolt / so it helps us to remember it’s the patient’s fault”. He said, “Make this a little fuller and stronger” but I don’t know exactly what he means. I did change it to “Two-hundred and fifty volts / at point-one seconds brings a hell of a jolt”.

            Albert found this stanza confusing and wrote of lines 7-14, “Something seems to have gone wrong here – This seems to be just another, slightly different version of lines 2-6”. He didn’t get that the voltages and the durations of shock that I put in the poem are the exact numbers that I’d taken from the original “Instructions for Electroshock Therapy” manual. 250 volts at 0.1 seconds results in a lower shock than 200 volts at 0.15 seconds, which will bring on a grande mal seizure.  I tried to make it a little clearer by changing "if you’re looking for a grande mal seizure" to “if you’re edging for a grande mal seizure" and changing "To get a grande mal seizure" to “To push a grande mal seizure".

            On my poem “Random Discipline”:

Implosion of nothingness today

and no one was ploughed under

by great drifting dunes of emptiness

Implosion of nothingness today

Invasion of constables last night

and Parkdale was swept over

by an angry wave of nervous cops

Invasion of constables last night

Albert wrote “This poem is very good but I doubt the ending”:

In the aftermath of the raid

The dark, nervous streets are quiet

Cooler and calmer but uncollected”

He asked, “Besides playing on the common phrase, does it really do anything? Say the streets were now collected – What would that even mean?” It seems obvious to me that if the streets are uncollected they are distracted, so I don’t know what Albert is expecting but his comments have made me look at this poem a little closer. I tried to rework the last stanza:

In the drug raid’s aftermath today

the nervous streets are speechless

still quite distracted but cool and dead

in the drug raid’s aftermath today

but I’m still not happy with it. The first verse is really good but the second and third one don’t have the same depth, so I’m going to need to try to bump them up.

            Of my poem “Paranoiac Utopia” Albert wrote, “One of your best – or at any rate, one of my favourites … not necessarily ‘better’ than others”. He especially liked the last verse and added, “Sometimes, as in this poem, you come very close to the tone and manner of great poems by Attila József”. I looked Attilla up and sort of see what Albert means. A lot of his poems are dark ballads. He’s referred to as a transrealist.

            Of my poem “Junk Shop Bizarre” he only had a couple of small word-change suggestions, but added a note, "As a Parkdale collection, the group needs a scene-setting poem – or several- other than “Me and Gravity". This poem is a good candidate to stand first, in my view”.

            Of my poem “The Street Sucks the Sandman’s Bag" his only comment was on the seventh stanza:

and then Victoria responds

to my psychic mayday

just to leave me on a lonely limb until payday

She saved me from this guy

but I should’ve realized

she won’t do anything for free

            Albert wrote, “Victoria is sudden and unexplained here. This isn’t necessarily bad. But also, what happens here, what she does that 'saves' the speaker is vague. I'd like to see more narrative fact at this point.”

            I tried to remember the event of me sitting on the bench in 1989 and listening to Carlos talk and why I felt that when Victoria arrived it was a rescue. I shotgunned some ideas as to how to expand on that verse.

            Also on the page on which this poem is written Albert made a tentative list of the order in which he might like to see me present the poems in my collection. He recommends starting with the three Parkdale street poems, then the two Victoria poems, the friendship and romantic poems, The poems by the speaker on his own psyche and relationships with women, and finishing with the rest of the Parkdale poems.

            It’s been a week and a half since Facebook unpublished my Serge Gainsbourg Facebook fan page and there’s been no response to my appeal. I noticed someone in a forum write that Facebook did something similar to him and eventually sent him a message that his page would never be republished. It’s frustrating because I’ve put a lot of work into it and gathered over 250 followers. I don’t run it any differently than my other fan pages so I don’t know what triggered this abating of the page. I suspect that if I was one of their paying customers this would not have happened.

I cleaned the rest of the wooden framework that covers my living room radiator and extends into a bookshelf on the left. I removed all of my philosophy, psychology and mythology books, washed the shelves for the first time in years and then put the books back. It's all clean there now but if I were to take a picture it wouldn’t really show it because it’s all faded white paint with dark wood showing underneath that makes it still look dirty. It’ll look better once the floor is washed in front of it.

I had tuna and salsa for lunch.

             “You know what your problem is? You’re too beautiful!” A large middle aged man in a scooter had said to a henna haired middle aged woman shaking her head and swinging her red-ribbon tied pony tail before he drove away and she walked away in white pants while pushing a rolator that had two zebra striped shopping bags hanging from the handles on either side of it.

            I took a bike ride around the neighbourhood and then did some exercises for my butt muscles.

            I boiled two small potatoes and sautéed the rainbow chard that I’d gotten from the food bank. I had to throw away about half the leaves because they were going bad. Once one sautés the rainbow chard with onions and garlic it’s pretty hard to discern the rainbow so it makes me wonder what’s the point of the different colours? I heated a slice of roast beef with gravy and watched a great Playhouse 90 made for TV live theatre production from 1956 called “Requiem for a Heavyweight. Of the three Playhouse 90 plays I’ve seen this was the best. The teleplay was written by Rod Serling and it was his personal favourite of his work.

            It begins with a 36-year-old heavyweight prizefighter named Mountain McClintock being helped out of the ring after being knocked out. Mountain has been a fighter for 14 years and at one point in his career he almost won the heavyweight championship of the world. The doctor examines him and tells his Mountain’s manager Maish and his cut man Army that if he takes one more punch he will go blind or worse and declares that he's finished. Mountain is Maish's only fighter and his only source of income. On top of that Maish is deeply in debt to loan sharks and so thugs are often showing up to demand their boss’s money. Maish seems more upset about his own situation than he is about Mountain. Army is much older and less selfish. In fact the actor that plays Army, Ed Wynn is the father of the actor that plays Maish, Keenan Wynn. Army takes Mountain to an employment office where he is interviewed by a sympathetic social worker named Grace who takes a special and personal interest in the childlike Mountain who doesn’t know how to do anything but fight. Later she seeks him out in the bar nicknamed The Graveyard where ex-fighters drink and tell stories about fights they’d been in. She tells Mountain that she thinks she can find Mountain some work coaching children in summer camps. There also seems to a romantic interest developing carefully between the two. Meanwhile Maish has a scheme to make money by turning Mountain into a professional wrestler as the character The Tennessee Woodsman. The problem is that Mountain would have to throw fights and Mountain’s greatest source of pride is that he never threw a fight in his life. He let’s Maish down and walks away. Some thugs approach Maish and he thinks he’s about to be beaten up for non-payment of their boss’s loan but it turns out that their boss has a young fighter that he wants Maish and Army to train. Army has bought Mountain a train ticket back to Tennessee and on the train a little boy guesses that he’s a boxer. he wants Mountain to show him how to fight and as he gives him pointers he realizes that he loves working with kids and will be going back to New York and to Grace.

            The performances were outstanding all around.

            Mountain was played by Jack Palance, who was an experienced boxer, as was Rod Serling.

            Grace was played by the great Kim Hunter.

            The production won a Peabody Award and six years later was made into a movie starring Anthony Quinn, Jackie Gleason and Mickey Rooney.