Foster Brooks

            On Wednesday morning I ran through the fifth and sixth verses and the third chorus of “Arthur, où t'as mis le corps?” (Arthur, Where’d You Put the Corpse?) by Boris Vian in English. I should be able to finish it in the next session, but that will probably be on Friday since I have to work on my essay tomorrow.

            I think I’ve finished working out the chords for “Malaise en Malaisie” (Malaise in Malaysia) but I’ll have to listen to the recording again to hear if I’ve missed anything. 

            I weighed 86.6 kilos before breakfast. 

            I worked a bit on my essay on the keyword “Monstrous” as mentioned in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and in William Rubin’s study of Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. 

            I weighed 87.4 kilos before lunch. I had a slice of toasted Bavarian sandwich bread with melted five-year-old cheddar and a glass of raspberry lemonade.

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride to Bloor and Bathurst. It was nine degrees above zero and so the strips of puddles were now wider than the ice strips that they came from. There were some little lakes on top of what used to be the snowbanks and sometimes small islands of ice in the middle of the lakes. I wore my Blondo boots instead of the Kodiaks for the first time since the big storm last month. I also wore less layers and it was liberating to be so unburdened.

            I weighed 86.5 kilos at 17:00. I got caught up on my journal at 19:00. 

            I worked for almost an hour on my essay. It’s due in 28 hours and unlikely that I’ll be able to meet the official deadline, but I asked for and was given an extension until Sunday. It would be ridiculous if I couldn’t have it done by then. 

            I made pizza on naan with marinara sauce and extra old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching an episode of Adam-12. 

            In this story Walters and Brinkman in Adam-41 are getting all the most exciting arrests and it’s bothering Reed because they like to brag about it. Meanwhile, they have to deal with an irate citizen to whom they’ve just given a ticket for illegal parking. 

            An elderly woman calls about a sixteen-year-old girl who’s been living with hippies across the street. She saw the girl run out looking sick and one of the men dragged her back in. They find Karen Anderson with needle tracks from shooting speed, but she is also ill, and Malloy thinks it’s hepatitis. They send for an ambulance and arrest the guy for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. 

            Their informant Teejay gives them a tip on a big drug deal going down in a certain parking lot that night. They tell their sergeant, and he says to pass it on to the detectives. The dicks ask Malloy and Reed to help with the stake-out at 22:15. Meanwhile some kids call about a burglar. The youngest boy is a genius who brags that he’s the only five-year-old in Grade three. He says the burglar knocked over the bookshelf looking for a wall safe behind it. But Malloy finds a baseball inside and figures rightly that the boys were playing while their parents were out, knocked over the shelf and then called the cops as a cover up. When he tells them he’s going to bring them in for questioning they backtrack on their burglar claim. They leave the boys for their parents to deal with. That night at the stakeout Malloy and Reed wait in their car at the end of the alley but nothing happens. The next morning, they learn that just before the drug deal was supposed to happen, Adam-41 stopped the buyer and gave him a traffic citation, thus causing him to not show up to make the deal. 

            The sixteen-year-old Karen Anderson was played by the twenty-one-year-old Cynthia Hull, who starred in “High Yellow” in which she played a light-skinned black teenager trying to pass as white, and in “Attack of the Eye Creatures.” 

            The irate citizen was played by Foster Brooks, who started working in radio at the age of 21 as a newscaster and disc jockey. He then became a TV newscaster until he started acting on television. He became famous for playing a drunk and was popular because of this in nightclubs, on late-night talk shows like Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show, and in celebrity roasts. He was nominated for an Emmy for one of his appearances on The Dean Martin Show. Even though he played drunks he became a spokesman for MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Drivers). He himself stopped drinking in the 1960s. He was the uncle of Randy Brooks who wrote Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer.