No Reason. Not New. No Big Deal. Just Fine.

Incantation (Still Fresh)

I can’t think of anything else.

We’re going to be out on the Banks for another week, easy. I’ve got to get it out of my mind.

I can’t. I keep rolling it around in there, like a prayer or nursery rhyme. I can’t think of any damn thing else. It’s a haunt.

How could I be so dumb? What made me do that? What was I thinking?

Chaves was talking to me. Man, that guy talks all the time. I wasn’t thinking straight. He distracted me.

Nah, it’s not Chaves fault I did it. It’s Chaves mother’s fault he’s a yammerin’ fool. It’s my fault I listened.

The easy rhythm is gone. Left foot finds the deck, in a spot the ice didn’t find yet. Plant it firm. Right hand pulls hard. Left hand guides. Spin it. Show the hoist the fist. Dump the scaly prize. Step back straight, now, and watch the roll. Ready again.

All I can think of is my hand. Who puts their hand on a frozen line without a glove on? Bring a woman on a boat for bad luck, stand in the bight of the bowline, play mumbletypeg with a blind man, but don’t take your glove off.

It’s nothing but pain. It won’t scab over until we’re back in New Beige and I have a glass under my nose. I don’t care about pain. It’s the shame of it I can’t stand. My hand is like a bad wife. It stands off to the side and reminds me how dumb I am. It never shuts up. It hasn’t got the mercy to get better or worse. It’s just the same, over and over and over until I want to kill the world with the noise in my head.

“Gangi! Pay attention, you ass, you almost put me over!”

I went forward. I took a pail of ice, and a pail of salt. I dumped the salt on the ice. I pulled my glove off and plunged my raw, bleeding hand in there.

There, that’s better.

I Got My Mojo Too (Slight Reprise)

Bad luck and trouble.

I used to hear about bad luck and trouble a lot when I supervised many people. After the total of persons who are supposed to call you when they can’t come to work that day reaches about a dozen, pretty much every day you get at least one telling you about bad luck and trouble.

I’m a soft touch in action, and have a very hard heart in my very hard heart. That is to say, I’m likely to give a bum five bucks, and think he doesn’t deserve it the whole time. It ain’t about deservin’.

Bad luck means something different to me than other people, I gather. Bad luck to them appears to mean that the eminently predictable results of their endless foolish behavior is impinging -finally- on their 24/7 self-gratification. To me, bad luck is being hit by a meteorite.

I was hit by a meteorite once, sorta. I was driving to a job I had. I drove a van. I was driving on a large highway early in the winter night, doing the speed limit with my seat belt buckled. My vehicle was in good repair. I was paying attention. I was sober.

On the other side of the road, a battered pick-up truck was approaching. It was not in good repair. The driver, who was not sober, was likely not driving in a safe manner. And his left rear wheel left his axle. Not the tire. The whole wheel.

Now, I know he was drunk because he fled the scene on foot, and the policeman and I found a whisky bottle on the front seat of the truck. But what maneuver he was trying that elicited the loss of a wheel from the axle beggars imagination.

Anyway, that wheel kept rolling along at 65 MPH, right across the grass median strip, and straight down the lane I was in. It was dark, and the tire was black, of course. Do you think you’d see that coming? Since I was going 65 MPH in the opposite direction, I imagine it was coming at me at around 120 MPH. A meteorite.

I’m a funny person. I have a tendency to freak out over small annoyances, and yet am calm generally when all others are panicked. A character defect of some sort. And seeing that object at the last second before I hit it, or it hit me, didn’t faze me. I didn’t swerve — just as well, as it was too late and my truck would surely have overturned. I didn’t do much of anything, as there was nothing to be done. I held on to the wheel, and whoop-de-do.

I remember distinctly what seemed like a long time spent in the air, the nose of the truck finally arcing to face the windshield down at the pavement, the wry feeling of watching the pavement pass by on the glass like movie credits. Then the front hit the ground again, and I was suspended in the seatbelt like a parachutist, the huge yellow and purple welt already rising across my shoulder from the strap stopping me from being launched through the windshield to be mashed between the truck and the pavement. I held the wheel straight, and thought: if the airbag goes off, I’m dead.

I bounced down the road like a hobby horse for a good long while, the heel/toe gyrations slowly abating, until all four wheels were under me again, and I drove to the breakdown lane and sat for a minute to collect myself.

A policeman came, and asked me why I was just sitting there. I told him to look at the front of my truck. The truck looked fine from three sides, but on the front, there was a sort of trench burrowed out of the undercarriage from bumper to bumper where the wheel had hit and I’d rolled over it.

We walked across the highway to where the three wheeled pickup truck was, and saw the whisky bottle on the front seat. The policeman declined to pursue the driver who had run away on foot.

The policeman inspected my driver’s license and registration for any flaws, and finding none, insisted that I make arrangements to remove my truck before I could leave. I called AAA, and my wife.

They arrived about the same time. I loaded my equipment into her car, watched the wrecker hook up my truck, and I went to work.

I have no doubt, the driver of the other truck called his boss the next day -late- and told him all about his bad luck.

Listen, It’s Not Bahstun; It’s Bawstin!

You know the places that end up in movies. Los Angeles and New York and Chicago and Miami and did I mention New York and Los Angeles? Hell, nowadays it’s Toronto more often than not because it’s cheaper to film there. The Farrelly Brothers have a sort of Providence, Rhode Island franchise going now, but that’s just a cool icy rock orbiting around Boston.

Let’s have a list, shall we? VERY BOSTON MOVIES.

The rules:

“Rules? In a knife fight?”

Sorry, wrong area, wrong movie. The only rules are that the movie encapsulate the local vibe here, with bonus points for local sights and extra special bonus points for successfully attempting a local patois; or more likely to be efficacious: avoiding attempting a local patois without drawing attention to yourself. John Ratzenburger need not apply.

Let’s make it an even ten:
10. The Thomas Crown Affair– It’s a lousy movie, really. But it absolutely looks like Boston and environs in the sixties. It’s mostly of places the vast majority of working class people in Boston never dreamed they’d be allowed to sweep, never mind mingle at, but what the hell. Faye Dunaway eventually married local favorite and J Geils Band frontman Peter Wolf. Steve McQueen wisely avoided attempting a cultivated Boston accent. His face would have broken.
9. The Boston Strangler – When I’m done with you, you’re going to figure Boston is the most depressing place in the world. Let’s get the mass murderers out of the way, right away. Albert DeSalvo sums up the crime in Boston forty years ago: There’s plenty of it, and we have no idea what to do about it. My friends and I always do imitations of Tony Curtis in Spartacus and The Vikings, talking like, well, Tony Curtis the whole time. Yondah is da cassool ov my faddah. He makes a surprisingly believable weirdo murderer, which might tell you something. All kind of Boston area in there.
8. Tie
7. Tie
Paper Chase
Love Story – You know, before Al Gore invented the internet for me to make fun of him on, he went to Harvard where the Socratic Method is used and had the greatest love story ever told about Ryan O’Neal based on Al’s life. Some persons who are of a more skeptical bent than I doubt the likelihood of these happenings. I don’t. Al Gore is just as big a self-absorbed and shallow jerk as the people portrayed in these movies. Enjoy.
6. Jaws- Boston’s no where near Martha’s Vineyard, where they filmed this thing, but who cares? Everyone in Boston goes down Route 3 every Friday in the summah and goes to the crummy cold beaches on Cape Cod. Who cares? They don’t go anywhere near Martha’s Vineyard, which is just a pile of rocks and t-shirt stores out in the Atlantic. Who cares? No one has a Massachusetts accent of any kind in this movie. Who cares? They caught that tiger shark, the one they hang up on the dock and do an impromptu autopsy on, off Montauk — and that’s Long Island! Who cares? It’s a good movie. The only part that strains credulity is where they get all those people in the water at the beach. On Memorial Day. Try it. There’ll be some shrinkage.
5. The Last Hurrah –Not much Boston to look at in it, and they changed everybody’s name, of course; but you’re never going to understand Boston until you understand James Michael Curley. Curley the mayor used to get kickbacks from contractors for public works projects. Once, a highway overpass collapsed, and his “partners” were in trouble. Asked about the calamity, hizzoner calmly remarked that it appeared to be “an injudicious mixture of sand and cement.” Anyone surprised that the Big Dig tunnel fell in on some poor woman and crushed her to death must be new around here.
4. Charly – Made that street in South Boston famous. It didn’t help. The trajectory of every poor Boston schlub: Born dumb, get a little education, lift your eyes up from the mud to gaze for a moment at the bright horizon, and then land face-first back in the mud again. They blame it on mental retardation in the movie, but I think it’s the Guinness, myself. Triple points for the scenes in the Kasanof’s bakery.
3. Good Will Hunting -There is manifest affection for the whole of Boston and Cambridge in this movie. It’s silly, but who cares? They understand the local zeitgeist. Around here every airhead thinks they’re a genius, so why not run with it? I punched my fists right through the drop ceiling in my basement room when Fisk hit that home run. A sterling moment in an ultimately losing effort (The Reds beat us the next day to finish it.) — yeah, that’s Boston. Lose proud. I’ve heard rumors that Robin Williams is a skilled mimic. Where did he find a mentally challenged Vermonter to imitate for this one? One of life’s great mysteries. Gives Cliff Clavin a run for his money for crash and burn attempts at Bawstin Tawk. And Will is always on the wrong train. No wonder he doesn’t show up on time for work very often.
2. The Verdict –Sidney Lumet made this movie, and you could see he hates Boston. He even drags the characters to New York City for no discernible purpose; maybe he wants to get decent deli or something, which is impossible in Boston. David Mamet’s screenplay has people saying very Boston things. The seedy bar where Newman hangs out across from the common is perfect. Pre-Cheers Boston was just like that, trust me. Newman doesn’t even attempt an accent, thank god, but Milo O’Shea, the judge, is the ne plus ultra of the successful rogueish Irish twang. The whole mess of a proud city gone to seed is in there; the scene of trying to pull a grip and grin at a funeral is very Boston — it’s usually a politician, though, not a lawyer. They even got the Sarni dry cleaning bag hanging behind Newman while he slurs his words into his apartment phone exactly right.
1. The Friends of Eddie Coyle –Everything about Boston is small-time, except our egos. Small time crooks with small-time concerns and small-time dreams drift around a bunch of small-time Boston area haunts. Robert Mitchum tries a mild local accent, and doesn’t sound like he’s from Nebraska. The bowladrome’s still there; the Garden’s gone.

Honorable Mentions:
Moby Dick – We’re all that crazy in New Bedford.
Malcolm X – I was born in Dorchester, too, but I’m keeping my last name, thank you.
The Last Detail – They’re all drunk in Boston, for a while. Aren’t we all?
The Brinks Job – Looks like old Boston, sounds like old Peter Falk.
State and Main – Supposed to be New Hampshire, I think; screams Manchester-By-The-Sea to me.
Outside Providence – That’s where Massachusetts kids go to meet girls with big hair, when Saugus is too far to drive.