Driving Blind

“My valise.”

“My overnight case!”

“Do you realize this is the first time we’ve met in the middle of the street since Halloween twenty years ago?”

“Hell, this is Halloween!”

“Yeah! For what? Trick or treat?”

“Let’s go see!”

And unerringly, with no chart, map, or menu, they turned with military abruptness and headlong sparked Kit Random’s yardwide cement with their heels.

In the next week the sounds that abounded in Kit Random’s abode might as well have been a saloon bowling alley. In just a handful of days, three various husbands visited at nine, ten, then ten after midnight, all with smiles like fake celluloid teeth hammered in place. The various wives checked their breaths for liquid sustenance but inhaled only tart doses of medicinal mint; the men wisely gargled mid-street before charging up to confront their fortress Europas.

As for the disdained and affronted wives, what culinary battlements did they rear up? What counterattacks ensued? And if small battles, or skirmishes, were fought, did victories follow?

The problem was that the husbands backing off and then headlong racing off let all of the hot air out of their houses. Only cold air remained, with three ladies delivered out of ice floes, refrigerated in their corsets, stony of glance and smile that in delivering victuals to the table caused frost to gather on the silverware. Hot roast beef became tough icebox leftovers two minutes from the oven. As the husbands glanced sheepishly up from their now more infrequent meals, they were greeted with displays of glass eyes like those in the optician’s downtown window at midnight, and smiles that echoed fine porcelain when they opened and shut to let out what should have been laughter but was pure death rattle.

And then at last a night came when three dinners were laid on three tables by candlelight and no one came home and the candles snuffed out all by themselves, while across the way the sound of horseshoes clanking the stake or, if you really listened close, taffy being pulled, or Al Jolson singing, “Hard-hearted Hannah, the vamp of Savannah, I don’t mean New Orleans,” made the three wives count the cutlery, sharpen the knives, and drink Lydia Pinkham’s Female Remedy long before the sun was over the yardarm.

But the last straw that broke the camel herd was the men ducking through a whirlaround garden sprinkler one untimely hot autumn night and, seeing their wives in a nearby window, they yelled, “Come on in, the water’s fine!”

All three ladies gave the window a grand slam.

Which knocked five flowerpots off rails, skedaddled six cats, and had ten dogs howling at no-moon-in-the-sky halfway to dawn.

A Brief Afterword

In a long life I have never had a driver’s license nor have I learned to drive. But some while back one night I dreamed that I was motoring along a country road with my inspirational Greek muse. She occupied the driver’s seat while I occupied the passenger’s place with a second, student’s, wheel.

I could not help but notice that she was driving, serenely, with a clean white blindfold over her eyes, while her hands barely touched the steering wheel.

And as she drove she whispered notions, concepts, ideas, immense truths, fabulous lies, which I hastened to jot down.

A time finally came, however, when, curious, I reached over and nabbed the edge of her blindfold to peer beneath.

Her eyes, like the eyes of an ancient statue, were rounded pure white marble. Sightless, they stared at the road ahead, which caused me, in panic, to seize my wheel and almost run us off the road.

“No, no,” she whispered. “Trust me. I know the way.”

“But I don’t,” I cried.

“It’s all right,” she whispered. “You don’t need to know. If you must touch the wheel, remember Hamlet’s advice, ‘Use all gently.’ Close your eyes. Now, quietly, reach out.”

I did. She did. “There, see?” she whispered. “We’re almost there.”

We arrived. And all of the tales in this new book were finished and done.

“Night Train to Babylon” is an almost true story; I was nearly tossed off a train some years ago for interfering with a three-card monte scam. After that, I shut my mouth.

“That Old Dog Lying in the Dust” is an absolutely accurate detailing of an encounter I had with a Mexican border-town one-ring circus when I was twenty-four years old. A dear-sad evening I will remember to the end of my life.

“Nothing Changes” was triggered when one afternoon in the twilight stacks of Acres of Books in Long Beach I came upon a series of 1905 high school annuals in which (impossible) the faces of my own 1938 school chums seemed to appear again and again. Rushing from the stacks, I wrote the story.

“If MGM Is Killed, Who Gets the Lion?” is another variation on an amusing reality. During World War II MGM was camouflaged as the Hughes Aircraft Company, while the Hughes Aircraft Company was disguised as MGM. How could I not describe the comedy?

Finally, “Driving Blind” is a remembrance of my acquaintance with a Human Fly who climbed building facades when I was twelve. You don’t find heroes like that by the dozen.