Accideco

            On Tuesday morning I posted my adaptation of “Help camionneur” on my translation blog along with the chords. Next I have to find or try to transcribe the lyrics for Gainsbourg’s “Encore Lui" (Him Again).

            I finished re-writing the final two stanzas of “Both Sides of Love and Hate”:

Parkdale stumbles over me

as she’s blind in every other eye

and I’m sleeping in the middle

of her tunnel between lies

But as she crosses the border she

hits me hard with the back-swinging gate

and lava from my heart attack

spits on her ends of love and hate

            I washed my white mantle and the white dresser that sits in front of it. Because the wood and darker paint are exposed in patches underneath, neither of them looked that clean afterwards but the water in the pail was pretty dirty. On the next cleaning job I’ll tackle the floor underneath and behind the dresser.

            I had a can of chilli with potato chips for lunch.

            I did some exercises and took a bike ride to Ossington and Dundas. I guess because of construction somewhere along the route there are no streetcars along Dundas and so I had to follow a bus. I waited behind it at the light while three cyclists went right up alongside it on the left. I wouldn’t do that unless I was sure I could pass it. I got past the bus around Dovercourt and passed the other cyclists before Ossington. I rode south to Queen and then home.

            I wrestled with the last poem of my collection that Albert Moritz had critiques about. In "Our Less Than Solid Dude of Solitude" he thought stanza three was weak:

I still hope to find myself

a lover somewhere

who stares at the danger

of reality's teeth when they are being bared

and refuses to look down

            After over an hour of struggle I came up with:

I still hope to find myself

a lover somewhere

who stretches to the edge

of known reality and won’t even care

when all of the walls come down

            He also thought that “placid" the last word of the poem was anticlimactic. I might change it to “music” I'll have to change the line before it and I need to find the right word to counter “music".

            I grilled some chicken drumsticks but started half an hour later than I’d planned. Because I was distracted by the poem, when 19:00 came I thought it was time to start boiling a potato and heating some gravy for dinner. I didn’t realize I was an hour early until 19:30 so I turned the elements off and turned on the oven. I started the potato and gravy again at 20:15. I ate dinner while watching the penultimate episode of season one of The Untouchables.

            This was the weirdest story of the season. In some ways it was like experimental theatre. The gangsters were like cartoon versions of gangsters.

            A man sneaks into a small cafe where Eliot Ness is reading the paper and waiting for lunch after failing to convict mobster Johnny Fortunato. The man puts on a fake moustache and goes out to the kitchen. He comes out dressed as a waiter with some soup, starts eating Ness’s bread and drops his moustache in his soup. Ness finally recognize’s him as his old school buddy Franky Barber. Franky is a boxing promoter and takes Ness to the fights. It turns out that the fight is fixed by Johnny Fortunato who doesn’t show up with his men until the round he has bet on starts. The boxer takes his fall when Johnny blows up and then pops a paper bag. Franky takes Ness back to his place where he meets Frank’s very quirky girlfriend Chicky Bernstein. Frank sends Chicky out for sandwiches and while she is gone a truck pulls up in front of the building. Frank pushes Ness away from the window just as someone in the truck opens fire with a machine gun. Later Chicky brings Ness a piece of paper with nothing but “State 395A” written on it and then she leaves. US Route 395 runs from southeastern California north to the Canadian border but in this story it’s in Illinois. Based on the tip the feds set up a roadblock. They stop a milk truck and under the milk are canisters of booze. Frank and Chicky’s place is the victim of an arson attack but all evidence points to either Chicky or Frank himself having started the fire. Later still the prizefighter that is supposed to throw the fight for Johnny decides to win with a knockout and quits. Johnny is pissed off. Frank disappears and Chicky is fished out of a bullet-riddled car, barely alive. Johnny tells Ness that Frank threatened to use Ness against him if he didn’t pay out $24,000 and so he did. The money was picked up by a woman named Stella. Ness finds her at a dance marathon having not slept for 98 hours. She says she delivered the money to her ex-husband, Frank Barber. When Ness tries to question her she babbles incoherently because the speech centres in her brain have been injured. “Gaslight … ghost ... jolly celebration ... miracles in the parlour ... flytrap ... Nobody answers the front door ... Miracle, miracle, miracle, miracle … The king is dead … There's nobody at the bottom of the sea ... The bridge is falling down ... The bridge is falling down ... The skeleton's won the game … one, two, three O’Leary ... fell down Schenectady River … The church … the library’s closed …" He gets her to write on a piece of paper but she only scrawls "evil”. Later when Ness is trying to figure it out he turns the paper over and reads it from the other side. It says “live”. Ness goes to the boxing arena and finds a lame and shot up Frank living there like the phantom of the opera. There is the sound of someone else coming in but when Ness turns, Frank knocks him out with his crutch. We hear gunshots and then Ness wakes up to find Frank mortally wounded in the middle of the boxing ring holding Ness’s gun. Fortunato is severely wounded and calling out for help in the aisle between the seats. Frank dies as Fortunato shouts over and over again, “You got no heart Mr Ness...”

            It was certainly the quirkiest of The Untouchables stories of the first season.

            Chicky was played by prolific character actor Madlyn Rhue, who started out at 17 as a dancer at the Copa in New York. She played Khan’s love interest, Marla in the Star Trek episode, “Space Seed”. The director wanted her to reprise the role in “The Wrath of Khan” but she'd developed MS and couldn’t do it. He didn’t want anyone else and so the part was written out of the story.