Column of Light

After I left the food bank on Saturday I took my food home, put everything away and then headed down to No Frills for fruit. I got two bags of cherries and a couple of baskets of nectarines among some of my usual other purchases. There were no great deals on meat but I already had some chicken and so it wasn’t a concern. I remembered to buy a new can opener.

For lunch I heated up the double cheeseburger that my upstairs neighbour David had given me the week before. I added more cheese, ketchup, mustard, tomato and cucumber and washed it down with some lemonade-ice tea.

In the late afternoon I took a bike ride. I called out to another cyclist on the Bloor Viaduct that I was passing him on his left and he moved over. When I passed and said “Thanks!” he said “Cheers!”

Once again I avoided the Danforth festival by riding up Broadview to Mortimer. This time I went down Donlands to get back to Danforth on the other end of the fair. I went to Warden and then north to Malley Rd, took that past a mountain of broken concrete to its dead end, then came back to Warden and went up to Comstock, which carried me east to Birchmount.

I stopped at the Starbucks on the way back and even at that end of the festival it was crowded. The fruit stand near where I locked my bike was doing very good business selling drinks, watermelon slices and cherries this time compared to the night before. There was another long line-up for the washroom in Starbucks.

On my way back west I went a little further north than last time but still had to weave north and south a lot just to get through to Broadview.

I stopped on the Bloor Viaduct to take some pictures of a column of light that was sandwiched between greenery and clouds on the northern horizon. It didn’t look as interesting in the pictures though.

On my way west along Queen the clouds over the sun were so black that it was like the sun had already set and much darker than it should have been for this time of year.

When I got home I was surprised that it was so late. Trying to find a passage around the festival had probably cost me half an hour and then I’d stopped to take photos but I hadn’t thought it had been that long.

I went out to buy two cans of Creemore.
            I fried my eggs and had them with toast and a beer while watching the 1982 version of  “I, the Jury". It was the same basic story with the same characters but they changed the details to an extreme degree. First of all they set it in 1982 and put in car chases, explosions, a soft porn sex scene. They expanded the plot so that the jewelry racket of the novel was a Mafia scale organization but with a tremendous amount of hi-tech weaponry. They tried to make Mike Hammer into more of a cross between Rambo and James Bond when he single handedly stormed a heavily armed compound. Plus, though Armand Assante is quite natural on the screen, he looks a little too Italian to be Mike Hammer. The mastermind was still a beautiful psychiatrist but they changed her name to Charlotte Bennett and had her played by Barbara Carrera, who is very beautiful but not a great actress. Instead of just being a psychiatrist she's a sex therapist and her institute has orgies as therapy. The twins are far less interesting in this movie. They are played by Leigh and Lynette Harris (who are not very good actors) and instead of being old friends of Hammer’s murdered friend, Jack, they are two of Charlotte’s sex surrogates who meet a horrible end because another added plot element is a psychotic serial killer who is being mind controlled by the organization. He puts red wigs on his female victims, cuts their clothing off with his switchblade and makes them tell him "I love you” before he kills them. If they don’t say it in a sincere enough tone he tortures them. He kidnaps Hammer's secretary, Velda, who is blonde in this story, whereas in the novels and in all the other movies she has short, black hair.

Barbara Carrera was offered the role of Octopussy but she turned it down because she wanted to work with Sean Connery when he returned as James Bond in Never Say Never again. I’ve always gotten Carrera mixed up with Laura Gemsler, who played Black Emmanuel.

First Come, First Served?

            The food bank line-up was a bit longer than usual when I got there but all of the regular early birds were there. I found my place behind the blue gym bag and began reading “The Legend of St Julian the Hospitaler” from where I’d left off as the young Julian continues to slaughter every animal he finds. Finally he comes across a majestic black stag with its mate and their fawn. He murders the fawn first and then the doe. The stag charges him and with his final arrow Julian pierces the beast’s forehead, but it keeps on coming. Just before reaching him though the stag stops and says to Julian, “A curse on you! One day you will murder your own mother and father” and then the proud animal collapses and dies. Holy Catholic Oedipus Stagman!

            Speaking of parents, Tammy was telling someone, “My mother spit me out and there I was, the image of her.” This sounded so mythical I had to look it up. The Egyptian creator deity, Atum was said to have sneezed or spit out his offspring, Shu the god of air and Tefnut, the goddess of moisture.

            When Valdene and Martina arrived in the food bank van, Valdene gave out muffins to those that were willing to come to her and get them. The reviews I overheard were that they were fresh and very good.

            Besides me there are only two or three food bank clients that read books while they are waiting. One of them is a woman that always carries the Bible. Angie was having a smoke on the steps of 1501 Queen and greeted the Bible lady, “Hello sister!” She smiled and called back, “God loves you!” Angie responded, “And you too!”

            I heard Valdene mention that they’d be starting a little later than usual but most of us got into line at 10:30 anyway. A few places ahead of me there was a dispute between a man and woman over which was ahead of the other. Valdene came over to ask what was going on and after hearing what the disagreement was she said to the man, “As a gentleman, shouldn’t you let the lady go first?” I exclaimed “What?” and then said, “Why not as a lady shouldn’t she let the gentleman go first?” Valdene responded, “In a perfect world, yes!” whatever that was supposed to mean. I meant that things shouldn’t be solved according to gender. I told her, “This wouldn’t happen if you brought back the number system!” She said, “A lot of people don’t like the number system!” I asked, “Do you want people lining up here at 6:00?” She answered, “No!” “Then bring back the number system!” “I will, eventually!”

            A few minutes later Valdene came out with a piece of paper and a pen and, I guess based on our exchange, she began to ask each person in line, “Numbers or line-up?” and then she’d check off one of two columns. When she got to the guy with the prematurely grey hair that was ahead of me, he told her with a warning tone, “You don't want to hear what I think!" "Yes I do actually!" "No you don't!" “So you don’t want to answer?" He shook his head. After she'd polled the whole line-up, as she passed me on her way back she said, “It’s three to one for the line-up!" I said, “Meaningless!” She said, “Whatever!” Martina, the doorkeeper mentioned that more people would be coming later. Another volunteer, who may be a co-manager, suggested that the vote might be different if it was wintertime. I was quite surprised that people far back in line would vote for the line-up system over the random numbers, since for someone at the end of the line the random numbers give them better odds than the line-up. If someone is the 30^th person in line the downside of not getting a lower number is that they would end up pretty much where they are already and so they couldn’t lose. It made me wonder if they fully understood the question. I guess for a lot of people it may be that they simply do not like change because what they are used to gives them a certain security. 

            There are some other factors that contribute to a poll like the one Valdene took being flawed. One is that while there is a core group of regulars every Saturday, there are more that don’t come every week and a few that are new each time. Another is that the first ten people in line have a better chance of losing from the random number system, which means that they most probably would have all voted for the first come first serve arrangement, and so their votes shouldn’t really be counted in a poll.

            When the line started moving the guy in front of me would sometimes wait until there was a large gap between him and the person in front of him and then he would pick up his blue gym bag and violently throw it down to remark his spot.

            I got downstairs at around 11:00 and I noticed right away that there was one shelf that was entirely empty and another that was only partially stocked. I heard one of the people at the computers tell someone that they had more perishables than non-perishables this time.

            I noticed that they still had lots of boxes of Atkins peanut butter fudge bars that are sweetened with sucralose and I realized that I’d forgotten to bring my box back to re-donate.

There was nothing in the cereal section but on the top shelf there was a small package of chocolate coconut artisan granola. I got a few granola bars and a juice box. I could have had two juice boxes but decided that I’d liked the single one better because I misread the pack of two, which I figured out later, was the exact same thing. But only taking one juice box instead of two cuts my chances of getting turned into a girl in half, according to Alex Jones, who thinks girls are a bad thing to be.

There was no canned tuna but there were canned beans and so I got a tin of chickpeas. I reminded myself to buy a new can opened because opening one of those cans with the one I’ve had for ten years is like trying to strangle an armadillo to death. It makes one wonder what’s the point of life if every ten years one has to spend another $5 on a manual can opener.

Angie gave me a 750-gram container of sweetened, plain yogourt; three eggs, one of which broke before I got home, but I managed to pour most of it out of the bag and into the frying pan later that night. She offered me the usual frozen ground chicken, frozen chicken wieners and bologna but I turned them down. She also had some frozen beef hot dogs but I didn’t want those either so she dug into the fridge and dug out two burger patties. I asked if they were veggie burgers but she assured me they were the real deal, so I took them.

Sylvia had so many vegetables this time that she didn’t want to bother going through each item. After giving me a 5-kilogram bag of Yukon Gold potatoes from P.E.I (I wonder if one can get P.E.I. potatoes from the Yukon), two plums and two nectarines, she just said for me to take what I wanted. I grabbed a head of leaf lettuce, a package of tomatoes and a seedless cucumber but not the yellow zucchini.

The bread section had a very good selection this time and the person minding the shelves assured me that it was all fresh. I got a loaf of protein bread and some crumpets.

The two nectarines that I got were from the States, seemed like they’d been shipped frozen and now tasted like plastic fruit. It seems weird that one never sees Ontario peaches or nectarines in the food bank this time of year when they are so abundant and delicious.

The Junkyard at the End of the Universe

            On Friday I added a new pose to my yoga routine in which I lean back on the left or right hand with the corresponding foot on the floor and raise my opposite arm and leg in the air. I think I could do it in my 20s but right now I last about a second.

Since there was very little chance of rain I took a bike ride in the late afternoon. I knew that because the Waste of the Danforth festival was going on I'd have to make a detour, which meant there was no reason for me to time my trip and so I went without wearing a watch. That's one of the reasons I felt okay on the Bloor bike lane with stopping in the Annex when I saw that one of the plastic posts that line the path had fallen over and was blocking half the lane. I pulled over, leaned my velo against a pole and kicked the fallen post out everyone’s way before continuing on. There was another post that had gone down a little further along but it wasn’t very much in the way.

Two times along the bike lane a pedestrian stepped in front of me without looking and I had to slam on my brakes to keep from hitting him. The second time it was a postal worker walking to his truck near Avenue Rd.

At Broadview I went north to Mortimer and across to Greenwood before going back down to Danforth and continuing on to Warden. I rode north past St Clair, skipped the first couple of streets because they led into a community of identical new townhouses which are boring to ride around because every street looks the same. I did though turn right on Deans Drive, which skirted the top of that neighbourhood, because to the north was an industrial area consisting of rows and rows of skids. The area was flooded in several places after the recent rain.

I went back to Warden and went north one more block to Upton, which is a fully industrial street. I passed the Stock school bus company:  "A Journey in Learning". Shouldn't it be “A journey to and from learning”? It's not like one learns on the bus. I passed “Scrap My Junk Car" where I stopped to take a picture of an antique Oldsmobile  Futuramic 88, probably from 1950. Many claim it was the first muscle car. At the end of the street was The Canadian Fire Company. On top of a building near the fence was the red fuselage of what looked like a WWII era plane. An image search of the picture I took came up with a Russian single-seat WWII fighter plane called the Lavochkin La-5 but they don’t look exactly the same to me. It’s probably a Canadian plane but I don’t know what kind. The Canadian Fire Company seems to mostly serve film sets, providing safety personnel and props. I guess some action movies sometimes make big fires that need to be controlled during filming and put out when the scene is over. I think that they are all ex-firemen.

The next street north was Hymus where one auto repair company had an antique yellow Checker Marathon cab on its lawn, maybe from the 60s but they didn’t change much into the 80s.

I rode up to Comstock, crossed Warden and headed back down to Danforth Rd and took that to Danforth Avenue.

On Danforth just after Donlands I stopped to use the washroom at Starbucks. The fence for the east end of the Taste of the Danforth festival was right there next to the place where I locked my bike. Next to the Starbucks is a fruit and vegetable stand owned by a couple that looks Ethiopian. Trying to cash in on the festival, instead of the usual display of fruit outside the store, they had it set up more like a kiosk for drinks, slices of watermelon and little trays of cherries. There weren’t a lot of customers when I was there. There was a long line-up for the washroom at Starbucks though. They have three washrooms including the one for the disabled and so it didn’t take long.

I tried to take mostly alleys on my way west and so I was able to take in some of the audible flavour of the festival without getting caught up in it. At least two subway stations and a church cut off a straight laneway route to Broadview and so I had to go north sometimes one or two blocks.

As I got closer to Broadview there was a young guy with a fluorescent green backpack also taking the alleys. He was ahead of me most of the time. Once we were on the Bloor Viaduct he was riding in the middle of the bike lane without using his hands. I caught up with him and asked to pass. He acted like he’d just been caught with his pants down, grabbed his handlebars and shot ahead. I passed him around Sherbourne but when I got to Yonge I stopped because I wanted to go south and he sped past me to go west on Bloor.

I had a chicken leg for dinner and watched the first ever screen adaptation of a Mickey Spillane novel, “I, the Jury” from 1953. “I, the Jury” was also Spillane’s first novel. It was pretty complicated and hard to follow at first. Jack, an insurance investigator and buddy of Hammer’s who lost an arm during WWII saving Hammer’s life, is mysteriously murdered. Jack had thrown a party the night before and Hammer’s secretary got him the guest list. One of them was a beautiful psychiatrist named Charlotte Manning. Another was a wealthy fight promoter named Kaleki and that’s whom he goes to see first. He tells Kaleki that he’s a suspect for him even if the cops don’t think so. He grabs him and threatens him with death if he had anything to do with Jack’s murder. Just then another guest from the party, Hal Kines comes in and tries to stop Hammer but Hammer punches him and leaves

Next Hammer goes to see Charlotte Manning. Manning knew Jack because she treated Jacks wife Myrna for drug addiction. She’s very charming with Hammer and they flirt a bit. At the same time he reminds her that she’s a suspect and leaves.

Hammer goes to Hal Kines’s hotel room and begins snooping around but Kines walks in with a gun. Hammer beats him up and leaves. He goes to the hotel room of the Bellamy twins, who had also been guests at Jack’s party. Only Mary, the one with the strawberry birthmark is in the room because Ester has gone down to see Hal Kines. Mary knew Mike was coming and begins flirting with him immediately, saying, “How did you know what I wanted for Christmas?” The twins knew Jack from when he was a guard on their father's estate. He asks a few questions and then as he's about to leave Mary gives him a long, sensual kiss in hopes that he’ll stay, but he leaves. Then she laughs.

Hammer spends a lot of time going around town and asking questions about Kaleki but no one wants to talk. He goes to see his friend Manuel, who owes him a favour and is pressuring him to say something but some thugs arrive that don’t like Hammer asking questions. They beat him up and leave him lying on the floor. Hammer goes to see Charlotte Manning and she administers first aid. They discuss Kaleki and how he runs a numbers racket. They kiss for a while but then Charlotte suggests that Jack might have left Hammer a message in his place that the cops wouldn’t have noticed. Hammer goes looking for Jack's diary and finds it. Inside there is the name Eileen Vickers and a note that she’d changed her name to Mary Wright and was in bad shape and that he would ask Charlotte Manning for help. He also wanted to raid the place where Eileen worked. Hammer goes to see Eileen’s father who tells Hammer that he'd asked Jack to help Eileen because he'd known her since she’d been a baby. Hammer goes to see Eileen, who is teaching at a dance school run by Carlos and Bonita. The lessons take place in private rooms and there is the implication that the whole thing is a front for prostitution. Hammer later finds that Eileen’s boyfriend, John Hansen is really Hal Kines. Next Eileen and Hal are found murdered at Carlos and Bonita’s dance studio. Hammer asks Carlos a question in Spanish and he says “Si”. Hammer then realizes Carlos can’t even speak Spanish because he’d asked him if he was the murderer. Carlos starts suddenly talking in a Brooklyn accent and says, “Nobody wants to take rumba lessons from a guy named Charlie from Coney Island!” When Hammer goes back to his office, Charlotte is waiting for him. They leave to go for a drink and someone from a passing car shoots at them. Later Hammer is sleeping and his friend Bobo wakes him to tell him Kaleki is gunning for him. Hammer goes to see Ester Bellamy because he knows she’s a shooting champion and he thinks she might have been the one that shot at him. She says she wouldn’t have missed. Then she begins to kiss him and he knows it’s really Mary because she doesn’t have the birthmark. He leaves again and she cracks up laughing again. Next Bobo turns up dead in his Santa suit right next to the chair where the children sat on his knee.
            Hammer goes to Hal Kines’s room at Parkdale College and finds Kaleki with a gun trying to burn a document. There’s a shootout and Kaleki dies. Hammer gets put in jail. Captain Chambers lets him out and they go together to look in Kaleki’s safety deposit box where they find a treasure trove of jewels. Jack’s wife had been involved in jewel theft in addition to having been a junky when she met Jack. Pat thinks Myrna might still be part of the gang. Hammer goes to Charlotte to ask if that’s possible. While he’s there he gets a call that Myrna is in a bar going back to her old ways and so Hammer an Charlotte go to get her. They take her to Charlotte’s place where Charlotte puts her to bed and tells Hammer to leave. He goes and then Charlotte puts something in a needle that she injects into Myrna’s arm and tries to get her to say whether Jack spoke about her the night of the party. When she gets nothing she slaps her.
            Hammer calls his secretary and Velda tells him to get back to the office because it’s more than important. “More than important” is their code that he should come up the back way because there’s trouble. The same guys that had beaten Hammer up in Manuel’s place are waiting. Their leader figures that Velda gave Hammer a signal and they are ready for him. Hammer is tortured for a while until he’s unconscious. They try to drop him over the stairwell from several floors up but he begins to fight. He takes out three guys but their leader has a gun on Velda. She struggles with him long enough for hammer to reach him and he breaks the guy’s hand.

Charlotte comes to tell Hammer than Myrna is gone. Myrna is found dead from a hit and run.
            Hammer goes over what he’s learned. Kaleki had a million dollar jewelry racket, but his “playmate” Hal Kines decided he needed psychoanalysis. Charlotte hypnotized Hal, found out about the racket and wanted in. Then she wanted to be in charge. He goes to Charlotte’s place and waits for her. He’s pointing a gun when she comes in and confronts her about killing Jack. He tries to be seductive and then scared to get through his defenses. She comes to his arms but reaches for a gun behind his back. A shot goes off and she falls dead. “How could you?” she asks. “It was easy,” he says, and she dies.

I haven’t read the whole novel but based on the first few chapters this movie was pretty faithful. The actor that played Hammer, Biff Elliot was a former boxer and the fight scenes were quite authentic. He was actually from the US side of my neck of the woods as he was brought up about a half hour’s drive away in Presque Isle, Maine, though that was before I was born.
            Charlotte Manning was played by B movie actor Peggie Castle. She finished her acting career playing a dancehall hostess for three seasons on the western drama “Lawman”. She died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 45. 

            The Bellamy twins were played by Tani Guthrie and Dran Hamilton, or Tani and Dran Seitz who were actually twin sisters. They did some work on Broadway and in horror films. They changed their names a lot. They also used Phelps and some others. 

Sondi

            Thursday there was a 60% chance of rain in the late afternoon so I didn’t take a long bike ride. I did pedal down to Freshco though where I bought more peaches, cherries and raspberries. There was also a good deal on grapefruit so I got a bag of six for $3. I picked up some milk and yogourt too. The cashier asked me three times if I wanted bags, I think because she'd been flustered by the guy in front of me who after paying for some stuff suddenly decided that he wanted his money back for some of the items. She sent him to another cashier because she was at the express.

It didn't rain after all but I got caught up on my writing.

            I heated a chicken leg, boiled three small potatoes and sautéed a vegetable marrow for dinner.

            I watched the last two episodes of the Darren McGavin Mike Hammer.

            The first one had one of the best titles I’ve ever heard for a show: “Siamese Twinge”. Hammer has been hired by the wealthy Mrs. Milford to offer some money to a Siamese nightclub singer named Sondi as long as she signs a paper saying she will not marry her son, Gary. Sondi tells Mike to assure Mrs. Milford that she will not marry Gary but she refuses to take the money. Later that night a sailor named Slade steals a picture of Sondi from the sign just inside the club. Slade shows the picture to another sailor named Sam who later follows Sondi home and forces his way into her room. She recognizes him as her husband whom she ran from many years ago. He reminds her of how he found her in Singapore and threatens to reveal details about her past unless she comes up with some money. It’s never revealed what was so bad about her past but one assumes that she’d been a prostitute. How else would a sailor have met her in those days? Sondi calls Mrs. Milford and agrees to sign the paper in exchange for the $5000 but when she gives the money to Sam on the stairway leading up to the club he tells her that he will be asking for more and also tells her that she’d better be nice to him and grabs her. She pulls his gun out of his pocket and shoots him. He tumbles down the stairs as the money falls about him. He’s still alive and tries to climb back up the stairs as Sondi escapes into the club. Sam collapses and Slade comes out from where he’s been hiding. At first his intention is to help his partner but then he looks at the money and sees the state that Sam is in so he decides to finish him off by slamming his head several times into one of the steps and takes the cash. Sondi is imprisoned for murder but Hammer is suspicious when he hears about the money when there was no money found on Sam’s body. He finds out from Billy, the hatcheck girl at the club about the man that stole the picture and when he finds out he was a sailor he figures he must be with the same ship as Sam. He gives Billy’s description to the captain of the vessel and he identifies him as Slade. Hammer intercepts Slade before the ship sails and makes him confess. Hammer becomes the best man at Sondi’s wedding.
            Sondi was played by Sondi Sodsai, who was Miss Thailand of 1959 and competed in the Miss Universe pageant of 1960. She won the title of Miss Congeniality, which came with scholarship money that she used to enroll in drama at UCLA. She worked a lot on the show Adventures in Paradise and recorded one album of cutesy novelty songs with Asian themes before returning to Thailand where she eventually founded the dramatic arts department at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, which is the oldest and best institute of higher learning in Thailand. Admission requires test scores in the top ten and diplomas are traditionally handed out by the king of Thailand. Formal education in dramatic arts did not exist in Thailand until she founded the program. She wrote and directed several plays and also translated many classic western dramas like The Glass Menagerie. She is considered to be the most influential woman in the Thai entertainment industry.

            The last episode of the series had an old gambler named Al call Hammer to get him to ask a mobster to whom he owes money to be patient rather than to come after him. But Hammer refuses to help him and so Al lams it out of town. Two weeks later Hammer stumbles on a small report in the paper mentioning that Al had been charged with murder in a small New England town. Hammer feels somewhat responsible because he’d refused to help Al in New York, plus he knows Al was not a killer, so Hammer makes his way to Forge River to find out what was going on. He visits Al in jail and Al tells him he's innocent. The woman that was killed had been an old friend of Al’s from when she'd come to New York a few years before. In Forge River he'd worked at her diner up until she was shot and robbed. The gun was found in his room but he tells Hammer that Janet lent him the $2500 that the police found. Janet had gotten the money from a man named Striker who's wife owns the Forge River lumber company and Striker runs it, making him very powerful in the town. Upon leaving the jail Hammer immediately encounters Striker, who makes it clear that he wants Hammer to leave town. Hammer fights off Striker and two of his men before the sheriff breaks it up. Hammer goes around asking questions but no one in town will cooperate. When he returns to his hotel room there is an attractive, middle-aged woman waiting for him. She explains that everyone’s key at the hotel fits everyone else's room and suggests that it would explain how a gun could be planted in someone’s room without them knowing anything about it. She says her name is Kate and she hasn't been in town long, explaining that in her line of work she never stays anywhere for long. Hammer asks Kate what her line of work is and she answers, “I’m aahhh, a waitress?” The implication seems to be that she’s a prostitute. She tells Hammer that for $2000 she can tell him who planted the gun in Al’s room. He agrees but first wants a sample to show she’s got something worth buying. She offers, "Do you think Janet Price could get $2500 out of Todd Striker just cause he liked her blue plate special?” The next day Hammer is on his way to meet Kate when the sheriff approaches him to tell him Kate has disappeared. Later Hammer gets a call from Kate telling him to meet her in a lumber camp outside of town. It’s a trap but she's been coerced by Striker. When Hammer gets there he's roughed up for a while but then Striker offers him $5000 to leave town. Hammer refuses and so they are about to send him to the bottom of the lake when the sheriff intervenes and he and Hammer win the day.

            Kate was played by Melanie York, who was married to Darren McGavin from 1944 to 1969.

Yvette Vickers

            The sky was dark well after sunrise on Wednesday morning. It rained a bit but it was a gentle rain and nothing like the torrents from the night before.

            It rained around the time I would normally go for a bike ride and so I stayed home. I only stepped out to buy a can of Creemore. As I was walking in a guy in his 20s who was engaged in eating some kind of curried dish with rice out of a Styrofoam container, stepped in front of me. When I was standing in line he stepped in front of me again and went to the front of the other line-up to ask the next guy in line if he could go ahead of him. The man at the front said he was in a rush because he had to meet someone and so the guy with the food calmly stepped in behind him, in front of the other people in line, who said nothing. As he was buying his 6-pack he continued to eat his rice as if that was the most important thing at the time and handed the cashier a $10, immediately asking for a bag. The cashier said I can’t get you a bag and make your change at the same time. She removed the beer cans from their connected plastic rings for him and put them one by one in a bag. She gave him a dirty look as he walked away while still hunching over his meal.

            I ate blue corn chips for dinner with salsa and refried beans and a beer. The beans were a bit heavy and I felt bloated afterwards. Meat is so much easier on the body.

            I watched two episodes of Mike Hammer.

            In the first story a washed out and somewhat brain damaged former boxing champion named Kid Dakota visits the restaurant that he used to own with his ex-wife Julie, which is now owned by Julie and her second husband Mitch. The Kid has been hearing rumours that Mitch is abusing Julie. He gets into a fight with Mitch but Hammer breaks it up before the Kid does too much damage. Later Mitch turns up dead and the police are looking for the Kid but Hammer thinks he's innocent. It turns out that Julie has been feeding the rumours to the Kid through a third party named Doc Badger in hopes that the Kid would kill Mitch so she could take over the restaurant alone. When the Kid doesn’t do as she’d planned she arranges for Mitch to be beaten to death and pins it on the Kid.

            Julie was played by Mary LaRoche, who did quite a bit of work in Broadway musicals. She played the mother of Ann Margret’s character in Bye Bye Birdie.
            In the second story a businessman from out of town named Robert is lured by an attractive young woman named Ellen to a bench in Central Park where he is mugged of his money and an important briefcase by her boyfriend Brownie and their partner, Hill. Robert goes to Hammer to ask him to try and get the briefcase back. Hammer takes Robert to the police files and manages to find a one on Ellen with a picture that Robert recognizes. She’s already spent a short time in prison and her sister Myra is trying to help her go straight. Hammer confronts Ellen and she promises to give him the briefcase. But instead she contacts Robert and sells it to him for $1000. She tries to leave town with the money but her partners catch up to her as she’s waiting at the bus station and she’s stabbed to death. The thugs go after Robert and Hammer stops them.

            Ellen was played by Yvette Vickers who was a supporting actor in a lot of horror films like The Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. She was the July 1959 Playmate of the Month and her shoot was photographed by Russ Meyer. She didn’t get much work after posing for men’s magazines.

            Myra was played by Irene Vernon who played Louise Tate on Bewitched.

Sue Ane Langdon

            I had a pretty good song practice on Tuesday morning and my guitar stayed in tune longer than usual. I was belting out the songs, I felt connected with the lyrics and I made fewer mistakes. It’s interesting how some days just pop up like that.

            There was a chance of rain in the late afternoon and so I decided that I wouldn’t take a bike ride. The Weather Network switched the time of that possibility to after I would have gotten home but by then it was fifteen minutes before I would have wanted to comfortably leave. Since I had writing to do I decided to just stay home. I’ve managed to avoid getting soaked all summer and I like being dry.

            I looked out my window and saw Du Juan, whom I hadn’t seen for a few months. He stood underneath my window while I leaned out and we chatted. He told me that he’d had a nervous breakdown four months ago and hasn’t worked since. He’s living off Employment Insurance right now.

I got caught up on my writing.

I had a chicken leg for dinner and watched two episodes of Mike Hammer, during which the rain came down hard for a while.

In the first story a guy named Gus that Hammer had put away for eight years has just gotten out of prison and has sent Hammer a tape promising that he is going to kill him. Hammer has a good laugh and then leaves for the vacation on the beach that he’d been on his way to when he got the tape. But when Hammer gets back, the word on the street is that Hammer turned chicken and ran when his life was threatened. Hammer wants to settle this once and for all and so he tries to track Gus down through his estranged wife Gladys, who runs an arcade. She arranges for Hammer to come to the arcade after closing time to meet Gus but when he arrives he is ambushed. Hammer ends up shooting Gladys’s boyfriend Max and finds Gus tied up in the back room. The plan had been to shoot Hammer with Gus’s gun and then to shoot Gus with Hammer’s gun. Gus had not really planned on killing Hammer but when he’d heard that Hammer was scared he started bragging around town and Gladys thought she’d take advantage of it.

Gladys was played by Barbara Stuart, who played Bunny, the girlfriend of Sergeant Carter on Gomer Pyle. She was married to Dick Gautier, who played Hymie the robot on Get Smart.

In the second story a showgirl named Ruby Duval comes to Hammer for help because she’s been assaulted by her future sister in law, Joyce Conroy, who does not want her brother Phillip to disgrace the family name by marrying someone like Ruby. Hammer goes to the Conroy mansion to tell Joyce to lay off and finds her to be the dominant figure of the family and she refuses to back down. Phillip, on the other hand is meek and his only act of defiance ever against his sister has been his decision to marry Ruby. Joyce has offered Ruby $5000 to give up on Phillip and Ruby calls Joyce to meet her at the club and talk it over. But later that night Hammer comes to see Ruby and finds her dead in her dressing room. Of course Joyce is the prime suspect and she is arrested for murder. But as Hammer thinks about it he sees Joyce as someone that might have hurt ruby with her bare hands but not shoot her. He suspects that the stage manager, Hugo might have let someone else back to see Ruby. He drops the bate to Hugo that he suspects someone else to be the killer and then outside the theatre he hides because he knows Hugo is going to meet the killer. In an alley outside the theatre Hugo meets someone we can’t see and asks for money but he is attacked. Hammer opens fire on the attacker and puts a bullet in Phillip’s leg. At the police station and in a wheelchair Deforest Kelly, the future Dr Bones McCoy of Star Trek, refuses to make a confession until his sister is present. When she arrives he rolls around in his wheelchair and gives a striking performance as he confesses to having only romanced Ruby just to hurt Joyce. Everything that has happened to him and will happen to him is worth it because he will be satisfied to know how thoroughly he’s soiled the Conroy family name.

Ruby was played by Sue Ane Langdon who had a respectable career as a sexy comedic actor in film and television. She was a regular on Arnie for two years and had a shot at her own sitcom called When the Whistle Blows in 1980 but it failed, one of the reasons probably being that it was an hour long sitcom.

Joyce was played by Frances Robinson, who was apparently one of the most sought after acting coaches in her time. Katherine Hepburn would not begin a role until she’d first rehearsed it for a week with Frances Robinson.

By the end of the second story the rain was falling again, but this time like an avalanche. It must have knocked some branches down around the city. It was so thick it was almost like looking through fog and for some reason two small geysers were shooting out of the manhole cover in the middle of Dunn Avenue until a car ran over it and the little waterspouts stopped.  

Linda Lawson

            There was a lot more squirrel traffic than usual on the power lines outside my window than usual on Monday morning. Usually I see two or three squirrels during song practice between 6:00 and 7:45 but this time I was seeing sometimes three at a time of both black and grey squirrels, sometimes chasing each other away. It was like they were all busy getting ready for some big event. Maybe they were predicting rain. We’ll see. There were also a lot more seagulls than usual outside doing pigeon work further from the lake and I suspect that also indicates approaching rain.

            I cleaned the kitchen while listening to a live recording of a Beck concert. I guess this was shortly after Prince died. As a tribute he played “Raspberry Beret”. He also covered Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean”.

            I looked outside just around noon and saw a GFL garbage truck stopped with cops and ambulances around and more and more arriving. It looked like someone had been hit by the truck and was underneath it. It was taking a long time to get the person out because they were waiting for the right kind of equipment to arrive. They put wooden wedge blocks against the tires to keep them from rolling. Traffic was blocked in all four directions with cop cars and then yellow tape. After at least half an hour I saw that the person was out from under the truck and on a stretcher I couldn’t make out whether the victim was a man or a woman because the face was all puffed out and bloody but I noticed the person was conscious. I read later that it was an older woman in a wheelchair that had gotten hit. The garbage truck had to sit there for another hour before it was allowed to drive away.

            I washed a pair of shorts and put them out back to dry and so of course it was going to rain.

            I mixed some tuna with mayonnaise and paprika and ate it with celery sticks for lunch.

            I was working for a farmer mostly mucking out stalls and it seems I was living in a small stall myself. I was looking at another farmer working and commented that the stall he was cleaning was bigger than the bedroom I’d had when I was a kid but he equated it with the small stall in which I had been living on this ranch. He told me that the other hands make jokes about me in my small stall and that some are even carved as graffiti in the wood. I complained about the tea I’d been drinking and he showed a table at one end of the stall that was suddenly more like a kiosk at a country fair and out in the open. He shared with me a special blend of coffee and tea that he’d invented. The tea bags had their own specially designed logo that was some kind of drawing with writing that I couldn’t make out before I woke from my afternoon siesta.

            When I got up I found that the squirrels and maybe the seagulls had been right and there’d been a rainstorm. There was a chance of more even though it was hot again and the sun was shining and so I didn’t take a bike ride. Outside my window there was another ambulance and a guy that looked like he’d fallen and scraped his arm and other parts were being administered to. He looked like he might be drunk but of course there are conditions that produce that effect too. He got into the ambulance without help and they drove away.

            Later that afternoon the air cooled and I had more energy to write.

            I roasted four of the chicken legs I’d bought on Saturday and had one while watching two episodes of Mike Hammer.

            In the first story an old man with only a few months to live hires Hammer to track down a woman that he used to know named Sally because he wants to give her $20,000. He’d tried the hotel that had been her last known address but the clerk gave him the bum’s rush. Hammer goes to the hotel and meets a nasty woman named Bonnie who is the owner and the wife of the clerk, Duke. She brushes Hammer off and he begins to suspect that Bonnie is Sally. Duke also suspects that his wife might be Sally and he plots with his stripper girlfriend Ginger Snap to find out what his wife is hiding so they can blackmail her. Ginger tries to seduce the information out of Hammer but he won’t give. Later back at the hotel as she and Duke are discussing how to get at Bonnie in Ginger’s room, Bonnie is listening in the hall. When Ginger opens the door to leave Bonnie comes in and stabs her to death. Duke puts the body in her closet and Hammer finds it. Duke tells him that Bonnie killed Ginger. Hammer takes the old man to see Sally, he hands her the cheque and walks away. She realizes that she went to all that trouble to kill just to hide her identity from him and all he’d wanted was to giver her $20,000. As the cops are on their way to arrest her she crumples the cheque in anger.

            Sally was played by Doris Dowling, who worked a fair amount in Hollywood in the 1940s but moved to Italy to work in film there. She had some success but came back to the US in the mid 50s where she did a lot of theatre and TV work.

            In the second story Mike Hammer falls in love at first sight with Kathy Dean and she with him. After a quick romance he proposes. All of Mike’s enemies are making book on the wedding not taking place. The day of the wedding Kathy is found dead and Hammer goes on a rampage, almost killing some innocent suspects before he catches the killer.

            Kathy was played by Linda Lawson, whose career spanned 49 years and included music recordings. She was bizarrely crowned Miss Cue by military personnel participating in a nuclear test called Operation Cue at a base in Nevada. The crown was shaped like a mushroom cloud.