Oh, Get Over It

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“I tried to stop. Honest I did,” the woman said.

“My car. My beautiful car.” The man was crying. “Look what you did to my beautiful car.”

Then she turned on him. “Oh, get over.” At that, she walked back to her Chevy. She was tired of men crying every time they got a little scratch. She waited for the police.

“She hit me,” the man said when the police arrived.

The cop said, “Oh, get over it. I hate it when men cry. Grow up.” He finished taking the man’s statement. The man’s name was Phillip Mason. The cop then rubbed the scratch on the man’s car. “Nice Porsche.”

“Not anymore.” He passed his insurance card over to the cop. “Give it to her. I don’t even want to get close to her.” He walked the card over to Jane Hughes, gave it to her and took her information. The cop walked her card back over to Phillip. Then he said to Phillip,” I’m going to have to write you a ticket.”

“What? But my car,” Phillip wanted to scream. Instead he cried the words.

“Seems it’s your car that caused the accident.” The cop pointed to all the people standing around. Then he passed the ticket over to Phillip and had him sign the paper. “Next time be more careful. You could hurt somebody with that thing.” He pointed to the Porsche.

The cop went back to his cruiser, then drove away.

As the crowd dispersed, Phillip got in his Porsche and cried out to God, “Why me?”

God whispered back, “Oh, get over. At least, you get to drive around in a Porsche. I’m still driving an Edsel.”

The Poker Game of 1776

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July 3, 1776. A tavern across the street from Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

John Adams couldn’t bluff at poker if his life depended on it. Thomas Jefferson knew it. Benjamin Franklin knew it. Old Stone Face, George Washington, sitting across from Adams, knew it.

Ben and Tom folded. Neither of them had any kind of hand to play. But Adams was staying. He didn’t believe Stone Face had a winning hand.

“I call you,” Stone Face said to Adams across the table.

John Adams, a big smile on his face, threw down three aces.  Stone Face threw down his full house, then reached over and pulled the wad of English pound notes toward him.

Adams’ face dropped into a frown. Lost again. Here he was doing the very thing Abby warned him against. Playing poker with Stone Face. Washington always won. Over the course of the last two months, he had just about wiped out all the delegates of the Continental Congress of their cash. But he had done it for a good cause. He needed a new set of false teeth.

Adams said, “I give up. I’m broke. So what are we going to do about John Hancock?”

“We should shoot the son of a bitch,” Stone Face offered. Washington seldom lost his cool but John Hancock had gotten under his skin in a way that British General Howe never did.

Jefferson followed up with, “That’s what we’d do in Virginia.”

“Now, boys,” Ben interjected, “let’s be serious. But not that serious.”

Washington said, “I can’t believe I came back to have to deal with this. My guys at Valley Forge are going to mutiny if we don’t get this settled once and for all.”

“Why don’t we just get him drunk?” Franklin suggested.

Jefferson said,” That is your answer for everything.”

“Just about,” Franklin answered. “How you think I survived that thing with the kite? Remember the old saying, ‘Three strikes you’re out.’ When that lightning bolt hit the kite, I was as drunk as Gulliver must’ve been the day he saw those Lilliputians. The lightning struck me three times, and yet, here I am.”

John Adams knew Hancock too well for that. “He’ll just fall asleep.”

Jefferson was miffed. “All I know is that I am not letting him put those words into the Declaration of Independence.”

Stone Face put in his two pences. “I agree with Tom. I mean, Hancock and his ‘when in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to kick King George’s butt because he is, and ever shall be, a pantywaist’ is a little too much. Even for this Congress. We all don’t like the king but that is a little too much. The British will never take us seriously.”

“Totally destroys the mood,” Jefferson added, “don’t you think?”

The Virginia delegation was unanimous about its approbation against John Hancock. Either the Continental Congress gave Hancock his walking papers or they would be walking. But everybody knew what would happen if Hancock went home. The whole New England bunch would leave with him.

From the beginning, Hancock had been cause for alarm. First he wore that pink outfit. Oh, my gosh. And the chicken costume. It looked like he was trying to out-Elton-John Lady Gaga. Then his proposal that the country use “We are the champions of the world” for its national anthem. It had taken months for John Adams to get his friend to calm down and be reasonable. Now this.

Ben had an idea. “Bet Betsy Ross could get him to go along with the program. After all, she’s his tailor.”

“You know what she’s going to charge?” John Adams inquired.

Stone Face, always a pragmatic man, said, “Yes, but can she get results. When she threatens him, he’ll cry uncle. After all, she’s the one who turned him into a fashionista. Says she has a flair with the silk pajamas”

“Ben,” Adams asked, “have you been able to get her price down? Last I heard she was charging an arm and a leg.”

Jefferson said, “Yeah, just look at Long John Silver.”

“On this one,” Ben said, “she knows she has us over a barrel. She wants the flag concession.”

“Can she get the job done?” Tom asked.

“I believe so,” Franklin said. “She has a long history with Hancock. Something about babysitting with his kids when they were just knee-high-to-a-grasshopper.”

Stone Face was satisfied. “I say we give it to her.”

Jefferson and Adams nodded their heads in agreement. But Franklin was not finished. “In perpetuity.”

“What?” the other three said as a chorus.

“No way are we going to go along with that,” Stone Face said. “John, can’t Abby help in this department?”

“When Hancock puts his mind to a thing,” Adams said, “he puts his mind to a thing. I’m afraid Betsy is our only option. If we want Hancock, we are going to have to give in to her demands.”

“Then,” Stone Face finalized the discussion, “Betsy gets the flag concession in perpetuity. But you tell her that I want a free ‘Don’t Tread On Me’ for each of my Regiments, and according to my specifications.”

John Adams breathed a sigh of relief. He was going to get his revolution, after all. The other three had given him a big thumbs up with their agreement on the Hancock Matter. “So, Tom, looks like you’ll be able to do a press release.”

Jefferson took out his pen and pad and began to write. Then he looked up at the others. “I just realized we have another problem.”

“”What now?” Stone Face was just about fed up with all the back-and-forth going on at the Congress. Why didn’t folks just do what they were told? It would be so much easier.

Jefferson thought so too but he didn’t say anything out loud. “It’s Tom Paine. He’s going to insist on editing my text and publishing it the way he wants.”

Adams was now in the fray. He didn’t like Paine. “Please. No more ‘These are the times that try men’s souls’ crap. God, that man has an ego.”

“Yeah,” Ben agreed. “He gets a fifth down him, and there is no telling what he will write.”

Stone Face had an answer. “We could just draft him. I need a good secretary and he does take shorthand.”

The others smiled. Stone Face once again came to the rescue. Guess that was why folks were calling him “The Father of the Country”.

“Glad we’ve got all that settled,” Stone Face said. “Now I have to go and kick some British hineys.”

“Don’t forget,” Adams requested, “to take a piece out of Cornwallis for me.”

The four men gathered up their things and made for the door, then John Adams said, “I just remembered. Just one more thing.”

“No,” the other three said.

“’Fraid so. It’s Paul Revere. Every time we get ready to attack the British from behind some trees, guerilla style, Paul shows up on his horse. He lets the Brits know where we are by yelling, ‘The Americans are coming. The Americans are coming.’”

The passing of Arthur

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It is evening and Arthur walks his rounds in his camp, speaking to each man with a friendly jest here, a smile there, comforting one, urging another he can bear up well. Then Arthur, king of the Britons, returns to his fire and warms his hands. His squire gives him a spit of meat. Arthur bites into the meat. It is tasty, roasted as he likes it. As he sits there, he realizes that he is a king without a country.

Soon, maybe tomorrow, he will join his friends and his family in the west where men sit by the hearth and tell their tales of great deeds. Tonight he thinks of what might have been. He thinks of how he failed all those who believed in him. He thinks of his two closest friends, Guinevere and Lancelot du Lake, and how they failed him. They didn’t fail him. Can those you love and those who love you ever fail? He failed them. Thinking upon these things, he drops off to sleep.

It is a night of fitful dreams, tossing and turning. He rises before dawn. He calls his squire, Richard, out of his sleep.

“Yes, sire?” the squire asks.

“It is time to ready for battle this one last time.”

The squire suits up his master and king. As he looks into Arthur’s eyes, he sees loss. When the king is completely suited in his armor and ready for the battle ahead, he turns to his squire.

“Boy,” the king says.

“Majesty?” the squire says.

“Kneel,” the king says.

The boy kneels. The king raises his sword and taps the squire on each of his shoulders.

“I dub thee knight,” King Arthur says, warmth in his voice. “Rise, Sir Richard Bonnesworth.”

The newly knighted rises.

“Today you will ride forth,” his king tells him, “from these battlements and tell the land of the great things you have seen. Never let the dream of Camelot, the dream of Justice and Compassion for all who are Weak, die. That is your charge. Now go.”

Then it is over. Arthur defeats Mordred. Arthur receives a mortal wound.

It was a marvelous dream, Camelot. And now we enter into the dark times. The long shadows at the end of the day are upon us. Who will hold back the night? Camelot and Joyous Gard are in flames. Arthur stands, watching the work of Mordred and his henchmen. Lancelot is dead and Guinevere has gone away to a convent. It is the time of the waning of the west. Arthur’s dream of being a just king has died.

The king is heavy with grief. How did it come to this? Where was Merlin when he needed the wizard most?

**********

We all know how Arthur passed into the West, how he was accompanied by three Queens, how Guinevere returned Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake. As Arthur sailed to the healing lands of the West, the evening set into the horizon. Soon there was the long darkness. But dawn would return.

As it has so many times before. With the defeat of Hitler and the Nazis, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, with the release of Nelson Mandela, with the shaking of the hands of Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin. The sun shall rise in the East and the day shall come again.

As Merlin once told Arthur, you can never determine the outcome of things. But, if you live with a pure heart, the dawn shall always bring in a new sun and the light shall return for a new day.  So do not despair.

Arthur sent forth his messenger to bring hope to all those who are dispossessed and might despair. That they know that hope is alive, that the King has not forgotten them. Arthur will return from the West and the days of Camelot shall be upon us again.

As it was written, so it shall be.

Film Noir Modern

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Alfred Hitchcock was one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. His name is up there with the legends. Directors such as Billy Wilder, David Lean, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick, John Huston. Many consider him not just one of the greatest but the greatest director of all time. His influence on everything concerning filmmaking from lighting to music pervades all genres of film today. Just the MacGuffin technique alone continues to shape storytelling plots.

Few directors have mastered the Hitchcockian technique to create movies that could be considered equal to the best of the master’s. Billy Wilder’s “Witness for the Prosecution”, J. Lee Thompson’s “Cape Fear”, the Coen Brothers’ “Blood Simple”, Lawrence Kasdan’s “Body Heat”, Charles Laughton’s “Night of the Hunter”, Stephen Frear’s “The Grifters”, Paul Verhoefen’s “Basic Instinct”.

The one thing all these movies lack, and why Hitchcock is so unique, is his sense of humor. What other director would have his characters trip over a dead body, then ignore it as the master does with “The Trouble With Harry”? Not many because it would be too risky.

Of all these movies, only one, Stephen Frears’ “The Grifters” (1990), falls just a smidgen short. “The Grifters” is based upon the Jim Thompson pulp novel and given the Donald E. Westlake treatment. John Cusack is all grown-up in this movie. He’s a grifter. A grift is a petty swindle. He does his daily bread by grifting from one small-time con to another. Only petty stuff. Nothing that would set him up for life. John is conservative. The Long Con scares the crackers out of him. He’ll stick with the Short Con, thank you very much. He may be a lot of things, but he ain’t greedy.

An example: A twenty-year-old John walks into a bar and whips out a twenty. The bartender sees the twenty when John orders a beer. The bartender grabs John a beer. John slips the twenty inside his palm and slips a ten in its place. The bartender doesn’t notice and hands John eighteen dollars in change. John moves on to the next sucker. Doing this and other tatts, he can easily make several hundred on a good day. Occasionally he hits the wrong bartender. This bartender takes out his baseball bat and punches John in the stomach. Hard. It puts him in bed with a lot of pain.

Anjelica Huston—yes, that Anjelica Huston, daughter of the world-famous director, John Huston—is his mother. Since she was a teenage mother, Anjelica is more John’s contemporary than a mom. One thing is for sure. John doesn’t celebrate Mother’s Day. He has not seen Mom in eight years, and hopes he won’t have to see her for double that many to come.

Mom has a job. She works for the Syndicate. She moves from race track to race track. Her job, to place bets to lower the odds on a long shot. On the side, she grifts too, skimming away a few bucks from each day’s take. A hundred here. A hundred there. Never going for the gusto. It’s expected by her boss. He wouldn’t trust an honest crook.

Mom and Sonny works by their wits. Annette Bening, The Girlfriend in this Triangle, uses her body to manipulate her prey whether he be a jeweler or a landlord. (This was Bening’s break-out.) She and Sonny have hooked up. She sees a Long Con in him.

As you can see, we’re in Alfred Hitchcock and Elmo Leonard territory.

As if they weren’t already, things get interesting when Mom shows up out of the clear blues and discovers Sonny in agony from the punch in the tummy. She calls a crooked doctor she knows. He rushes her to the hospital. Girlfriend enters his room, wiggling her little tushy. Mom can spot a vampire when she sees one.

She leaves Sonny in Sexy’s capable care and hurries to the races. Unfortunately she misses a race and the race has a 70-to-1 odds winner. She is now up shit creek without a paddle. Bobo is not going to be happy.

Shakespeare’s Lost Years 

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Sonnet 73.
That time of year thou may’st in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day,
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by-and-by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

This just in. Scholars discovered a treasure trove of manuscripts. They verify that Will was a Writing Workshop Leader during his so-called Lost Years. Some even indicate he taught at the University of Iowa. Yes, he might possibly have been one of the instructors at that famous Writing School.  

According to some of these manuscripts, Will was a founding member of the Ink Blots along with J. R. R. Tolkien, also known as Shorty, and C. S. Lewis whom everybody called C. S.. Chris Marlowe wanted to join. He got a thumbs down from all the members except for Will. Will thought the group was way too weighted toward the twentieth century. He was overridden by the twentieth century guys. Downright unfair if you ask me.

They wouldn’t let Marlowe in. They said, “No way, José.” Of course, we know that Marlowe’s first name was not José. Or maybe it was.

There are letters revealing that Chaucer hated Shakespeare. He was the top banana of the literary set before Will came onto the scene. Geoff went and wrote one mighty fine poem. Too too bad it was in Middle English. That’s another name for Almost Anglo Saxon. When Will came along, Geoff got frazzled under the collar and called him an upstart.

Geoff should have listened to Shorty. Shorty advised, “Don’t call the first chapter of your book, ‘Prologue’. Jump right in with your story. Try something fancy like ‘The Hobbit’. But don’t use ‘The Hobbit’. That’s already taken.”

Anyway there is evidence that Will was a very good workshop leader. Seems many of the found manuscripts were exercises his students turned in. As we can see from this early work, he workshopped a slew of writers who went on to fame. Folks like Ben Jonson. (That’s Jonson without the h. That distinguishes him from the other Ben Johnson who wrote shoddy fiction for the pulps.) John Donne (who gave Hemingway a hard time for using a line of his poetry for a title). John Milton (who turned in a text called “Tobacco Road”. He later changed it to “Paradise Lost”. Much better story. In his Tobacco Road version, Milton had Satan as a Georgia sharecropper.) There was even a Jane Austen. (The text she turned in was “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters”. The comment Will made on her manuscript, “Get rid of the sea monsters and I think you’ll have a winner.” As we know, Miss Austen did exactly that, and “Sense and Sensibility” became a winner.)

The scholars found letters between Will and Anne Hathaway (Shakespeare’s wife, not the actress). She kept begging Will to get a real job. She was having trouble making end’s meet on the stipend he was paid as a Workshop Leader. He wrote her back, “But, Anne, I know I can make it as a writer. Tommy Kyd says I have real potential. It’s just taking longer than I expected.”

It was during these Lost Years that Will tried his hand at short stories but tales like “The Pit and Pendulum” weren’t selling. He tried a novel. Turned out no publisher would take “Thomas Jones, A Foundling”. Too risque, the publishers wrote. Took almost two centuries for that one to catch on. Henry Fielding published it under his name and shortened Thomas to Tom.

Then Will finally hit upon his forte’. Phat Beats. One hundred and fifty-four of them to be exact. Shakespeare was an iambic pentameter man. He did phat beats better’n anybody. Iambic pentameter phat beats. That is five beats to a ten syllable line. And most of the time, they rhyme. Except when they don’t. Then they are blank verse. His phat beats became such a bestseller I think even Jay-Z and Kanye have recorded versions.

With that success, Will changed his name to William, and William Shakespeare was born. It was soon after when he had his first hit with the Globe Theater. Something called “Titus Andronicus, Or Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”. Later it spent several years on Broadway with sell-out performances.

So now you know. Shakespeare’s Lost Years are not lost anymore. I’m sure Will is glad of that.