Sally Todd

         
            I normally have to pee once or twice after going to bed but in the early hours of Wednesday I had to get up several times. On top of that my hip was bothering me.

            I finished posting “Di doo dah” by Serge Gainsbourg on my translation blog. The next song on my list is “Help camionneur”, which is from the point of view of a hitchhiker who seems to have a fetish for truck drivers.

            Speaking of Serge Gainsbourg, it’s now been 40 days since Facebook unpublished my Serge Gainsbourg fan page. There's still not word back about my appeal. If the world were run like Facebook my landlord would be able to tell me what to wear in my own apartment. If Mark Zuckerberg had been Canadian, Facebook would be a much less uptight social media service.

            I had an appointment with my social worker for 15:00, which is a time when I would normally be taking a siesta. I decided to go to delay lunch until after my meeting and to take an early nap so I’d be fresh.

            I’d been dreading my bike ride up to Social Services because it had been raining all morning. But when I woke up from my siesta the sun was shining.

            The left turn from Lansdowne onto Dundas often makes me nervous but this time there was no oncoming southbound traffic.

            I was twenty minutes early. I did a French grammar exercise in which I had to arrange scrambled words into their proper sentence order. I got two wrong out of eight but this was my third try.

            I also jotted down some notes for my review of a book called "The Patient English" by David Jure. David is a friend of Nick Cushing's from out west and Nick had told him that I write poetry reviews and so he requested that I read his book. I’ve read it twice.

            My worker Janet is pleasant and made the meeting painless. I just had to sign the usual bi-annual forms. I will see her again in six months and maybe one more time before I go off Ontario Works and start collecting my pensions next year.

            I rode east along Dundas to Dovercourt, south to Queen and then back west to home.

            I had a green salad with cherry tomatoes and three corn crackers with cheese for lunch.

            I got caught up on my journal.

            I worked out a third line for the first stanza of “Mooning the (M)(P)atriarchs" and so the first three lines are now: “

If we’d rattle rod and chalice / draping the hardware with a valance / in rite of matrondor and bull”.

            I think taking an early siesta threw off my rhythm because I still felt like sleeping in the afternoon. I lay down again for 40 minutes.

            When I got up I did some exercises.

            I did some more work on my poem and rewrote most of the first four lines of the second stanza:  "But if you grab a wer or wyf / after the wolf comes out to bite / they’re not as strangled by the tangle of brain / Catch a knave or maid ...” Albert Moritz suggested that I should scrap the second verse entirely but I’d rather try to revise it.

            I’ve known for a long time that the word "man" originally referred to both sexes but I found out that in Old English the word for a male man was “wer”, which is why the legendary half man, half wolf creature is called a "werewolf". The name for a female man whether she was married or not was “wyf” and so technically a half woman, half wolf creature might be called a “wyfwolf”. Up until a few hundred years ago the word “girl” applied to children of both sexes. A male girl would be called a "knave girl" and a female girl would be either a "gay girl" or a “maiden girl”.

            I made a burger with some ground pork and had it on a bagel with ketchup, mustard, hot sauce and a beer while watching two episodes of The Untouchables. It was a two-part story and I had only planned on watching half of it but I hadn’t realized both were in the same file.

            One annoying thing about the Untouchables series is that they bounce back and forth in time. Some stories take place during Prohibition and some after. It would have been a better show if they’d had an unfolding narrative in real time.

            This story takes place just after the election that brought Franklin Delano Roosevelt into the White House. On of his promises is to end Prohibition. Al Capone is in prison in Atlanta and Frank Nitti is in charge. Chicago is planning a big World’s Fair and the mob wants a piece of it but Mayor Cermak can’t be bought. They decide to assassinate him.

Meanwhile in Miami, Florida a mentally ill man named Joe Zangara is planning on killing Roosevelt when he comes to Miami. He’d originally wanted to assassinate Hoover but he wants all the bosses dead.

Back in Chicago, Dodo, one of Nitti’s collectors tries to get fresh with a married woman named Sally Jansen who runs a tailor shop with her husband Tom. But Tom happens to be home and beats Dodo up. Seeking revenge Dodo sews a heat activated explosive into a pair of pants and pays a boy to take them to Tom to say his old man needs a quick press. As soon as Tom puts the hot press onto the pants the explosion kills him. But the boy identifies Dodo to the feds. Eliot Ness tells him he’s going to get the chair but Dodo says he wants to make a deal as he can provide information about the assassination attempt on the mayor. Ness agrees and Dodo tells him a car will drive by the café where Cermak has lunch every day and shoot as it passes. Dodo asks, “What happens to me?” Ness says, “You go up for murder, first degree”. Dodo exclaims, “It’s a stinking double cross!" Ness says, “That's what it is. How does it feel?” What an asshole!

Ness gets everybody in the café to hit the floor just in time. The assassins are killed.

Nitti’s crew plots another assassination. This one will take place when the mayor is on vacation in Florida. A sharp shooter from New York with no criminal record is hired to kill Cermak at a rally where he will be meeting Roosevelt. One of the mobsters is so excited he starts writing a letter to Al Capone in prison to tell him all about it. That seems stupidly unrealistic. While he’s writing the letter the feds burst in. Nitti puts the letter in his mouth. He pulls a gun but he is shot and wounded and the letter is retrieved before he can swallow it. They learn that they’ve hired an assassin to kill Cermak. They trace the most recent call from Nitti's phone and found it was to Fred Croner. He has no record but he was an expert rifle marksman in the army. After a while the feds figure that he must be planning to shoot the mayor from the hotel that overlooks the rally. They find his room and shoot him. Thinking they have averted the assassination they are not aware of Joe Zangara’s plan to kill Roosevelt. When Zangara fires he accidentally kills Cermak instead of his intended target.

Sally Jansen was played by Sally Todd, who started out in her teens as a beauty contestant, became a fashion model and then a men’s magazine model. It was after being featured as the February 1957 Playboy Playmate of the Month that she started getting work in films such as Frankenstein’s Daughter.

            Anton Cermak was the first of the anti-mob Democratic mayors of Chicago and served from 1930 until 1933 when he was assassinated. All of Chicago’s mayors have been Democrats since him. He became very popular with African American Chicagoans.

            When the real Joe Zangara was trying to shoot Roosevelt he was standing on chair to see over people’s heads because of his diminutive height. A woman in the audience struck his arm to stop him and he hit Cermak and four others instead. He said from jail, “I kill kings and presidents first and then all capitalists.” Although he was anti-capitalist he also condemned anarchism and communism. He’d had a pain in his stomach ever since he was a child and it might have contributed to his mental instability. He was executed in the electric chair ten days after being sentenced to death. He said he didn’t care.