2 poems

by horace p sternwall

pictures by rhoda penmarq

the ice cream man a million jobs and it's just my luck mine was not to drive an ice cream truck but to sit all day behind a desk dealing with the mad and the grotesque but o how much more satisfying in the soft twilight as day is dying to bring smiles to children and take their pennies joy in their lives they hardly had any until they hear the longed for bell announcing that now - now all is well as they stuff their metabolisms with slush over the world there falls a hush o wise men in your chambers and courts with your investigations and reports will you deny the occasional spark that lights this universe so dark? i'll never tell many strange dreams i tried to weave into what i really believe but something always broke the spell so now - i'll never tell

they didn't live happily ever after...

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Once upon a time, there lived a long time... he happened to fall in love with a short time... before he could prepare his long love proposal, the short time passed by...

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The Invisible Horizon

After coming from Logan’s tree-house, Charlie and I drink coffee in the pavilion’s garden. The horizon’s practically invisible at midday: sky and ocean are the same bright blue. Without a word, we’re comfortable—like our best times together. Not sad to be leaving, either. We’re ready.

The yoga class ends and Charlie bounds up, serving the dewy yoginis and swearing his love. Emma and I eat at the round table, extending from the supporting beam.

We hear Charlie making jokes about his two black eyes. “I’ve heard girls love panda bears. Got the physique and the ears, just needed the eyes.”

(click here to read the first episode and here  for the previous one)

Emma touches my forearms. “It’s not funny, Scott. It’s gotta hurt like hell.”

“Charlie and I beat each other up all the time in high school. Sometimes we were just slugging at each other, because of testosterone. And if we did have a grudge, nothing solved it like a good punch out. But that’s when we were tough kids. Last night I acted like a punk. I told him I’m sorry. Now I’m telling you, Emma: I’m sorry; it won’t happen again, I promise.”

“Did you promise him?”

“I told him I was sorry but even talking about it—apologizing outright like that—made him suspicious. It’s not how Charlie and I do stuff. Except this was extreme; I felt awful. Sorry and mean and mad at myself. That’s what I told him. But, he still thinks you made me do it.”

“Did I? I mean,” Emma asked, “are you really only sorry because of me?”

“Speak of the devil and sit down.” Charlie couldn’t have been standing there long; his tray is piled precariously high. And even if he overheard every word, so what? I was telling Emma what he knows are my honest to God feelings. Nuff said.

We clear the table to make room for Charlie’s enormous meal. He’s got a full platter of bacon and sausage that he brings in just for himself—the yogis don’t eat it. Cheese and pepper omelet with hash browns, two huge squares of cinnamon coffee cake, two more of pineapple upside down cake, a big bowl of caramelized flan, fresh foamy coconut milk and a tumbler-full of papaya nectar.

 Emma’s the one who says, “Pig.”

“Tomorrow,” he answers, mouth full, “is a cleansing fast. You know those planes. Snacks for ten bucks that might satisfy a bug.”

“Yeah,” Emma says. “But I’ll be watching if you’re gobbling up airport junk food every chance you get.”

Charlie says, “I’m much less likely to use drugs from questionable sources if my metabolism’s in massive digesting mode.”

“Really?” Emma looks at him and then me to see if it’s true. “Then by all means, eat up.”

He’s chowing down and taking girls by the wrist to say good-bye.  After he’s swallows, he asks them, “Won’t you miss me?”

They all kiss him good-bye. Of course they’ll miss him.

The mysterious frustration between me and him has vanished. I’m happy he’s sweet-talking the girls. He hasn’t mentioned the band but if he does, that’s fine, too. It’s sure not what I want, but why I was fighting him puzzles me. Charlie’s hit-or-miss theme bands rarely last a season.

So Emma calls him a pig and I’m the one who wants to walk back along the beach, so we can stop at Pedro’s on the way. Folded in my pocket are the papers for a trust accessible to Pedro’s baby girl the day she turns eighteen.

The light and heat are so intense that Emma clings to the shade. But Charlie plunges into the ocean. I wade in, telling him to wait. We’ll go swimming later. Midday’s not the time and he knows it.

(click here for the next episode)

the waitress and the satanist, chapter 16: road to yucatan, part 2

click here for complete episode

“A Town Called Disdain", Episode Twenty-Four: Dick and Daphne Ridpath make their way --

Our serialization of this great American epic by the legendary film-maker and raconteur Larry Winchester continues with another abrupt shift in voice, to that of the mysterious Dick Ridpath:

(Click here for our previous episode, or go here to return to the first chapter of A Town Called Disdain, previously only available in drastically cut form in a long-out-of-print Avon paperback original.)

And what did I know? Only that Daphne’s little transistor had started to talk to me that night in Singapore at 4 AM.

“Commander Ridpath, please leave on the 9 AM United Airlines flight for San Francisco.”

Daphne snored gently through it all. I had been lying awake, smoking and reading Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour. Unlike me she always sleeps like a rock.

I closed the book over my finger and looked at the little radio. Daphne sometimes liked to lie in bed with the radio on by her head, and I always turned it off after she fell asleep. I tried the dial, and sure enough it was off.

I’m sleeping, I thought. Or I have been sleeping.

And then the voice came on again.

“It will be very much to your benefit, Commander Ridpath. This morning, the 9 AM flight. We will talk to you further in San Francisco. Please book rooms at the Belvedere Hotel. Thank you and good night.”

Well, I’d really heard that.

I had often heard faint voices in my head -- didn’t everyone? -- and I’d gotten used to that, but this was different. This was real.

And I had no idea who or what it was. Was it one of my old supposed friends from Q Section having fun with me, trying out some new piece of equipment? It had to be someone from the old days; no one called me Commander any more. Hardly anyone had called me Commander when I was a commander. I could not place the voice at all. It was clear but somehow alien, with an accent I couldn’t place. It was like a combination of Afrikaner and Burmese, and for all I knew it was.

But, okay. What the hell. Let’s go to Frisco. Or try to go there, anyway. As good a destination as any, and God knew we had to get out of Singapore.


Against my advice Daphne had wanted to go into that hat shop in Saigon. Her mother’s boyfriend had assured her on the highest authority that the war would end that year, that Saigon would return to its pre-World War II glory, and that a high-tone millinery was “just the thing”.

Well of course the shop had been bombed the third week we were there, a time bomb set to go off at eleven AM, and the only reason we weren’t both killed was that we had been up all night playing baccarat, had slept until noon, and hadn’t even opened the shop.

Another fiasco, like the inn in Cyprus, like the safari service in the Congo, like our “American Bar” in Prague.

Like the sushi restaurant scheme in Chicago which had fallen apart when we had taken out the Japanese backers during the Democratic Convention and the cops had beaten them up.

Or like that Desert Rat Girls movie Daphne and I wrote with that Larry Winchester guy and we were just about to start filming near Gaza when the Six Day War breaks out...

But after the hat shop blew up I met a Special Forces captain named Shackleton at the Lovely Bar who connected me to someone who needed a skipper to take a 60-foot yacht from Singapore to New York by way of the Canal.


Now I knew very little about yachts of any length, but I figured my good Annapolis training would come back to me. Besides, we were practically broke and the money offered was more than generous. It all sounded too good to be true, and this turned out to be the case.

When we went down to the dock in Singapore to see the boat (twenty minutes late for our appointment because Daphne had insisted on going back to the hotel for her sun hat) we found the yacht swarming with police. Needless to say we beat a hasty retreat, and we later found out that the boat had been impounded along with fifty-nine kilos of heroin.

Two police detectives came to our hotel (the Palm Grove) the day after and asked us about the yacht. I claimed complete ignorance of the whole affair; we were merely tourists, ha ha. The detectives left and didn’t return, but afterwards I had the feeling we were being watched.

The thing to do obviously was to get the hell out of the country quick, but at this point we were down to less than a hundred bucks. We decided to stay on at the hotel and put up a brave front while we tried to raise some money.


Daphne’s mother proved to be unreachable, on assignment in Biafra. My dad was drinking when I finally got him on the phone at the Union League and would only tell me that Daphne and I should ship out on a banana boat. My dad had money, but he had never forgiven me for retiring from the navy, and he didn’t like Daphne. And she didn’t like him. And, in fact, my father and I didn’t really like each other.

Daphne always let me handle our finances, much as they were handled at all, and I hadn’t let her know exactly how dire our straits were. If she had known she would have been quite likely to set about raising funds the easy way from the wealthy businessmen who craned their necks to stare at her at the swimming pool or in the cocktail lounge. She would have led them on and maybe let them paw her a bit, and then have asked for a “loan”, or perhaps she’d just beat them with a belt for a flat fee. All of this would be against my wishes of course, but I knew when I married her that Daphne does just exactly what she wants to do and that’s all there is to it.

An agonizing week passed. The weather was absurdly hot and humid, and except for the odd swim in the pool we rarely left the air-conditioned confines of the Palm Grove. Our room, the lobby, the pool, the bar, the restaurant. The restaurant, the bar, the pool, the lobby, our room. Drinking way too many cocktails and signing bills like mad...

It would have been nice if that voice from the radio had said something about tickets waiting for us at the UA desk, but it hadn’t.


Came the morning, rarely an energetic time for either of us, and I dragged Daphne out of the hotel after first dropping our luggage from a window and down into an orchid bed. Wearing our bathing suits so as not to arouse suspicion, we sneaked into the garden, pulled on shorts and shirts we had secreted in our towels, grabbed our suitcases, dashed out to the street, hailed a cab and told him the airport and step on it.

We passed through some sort of political demonstration or riot, people pounding on the cab. I handed the driver a wad of Singaporean one-dollar bills, just about the last of our kitty, and the guy sheared through the mob like a knife through warm butter.

Maybe for once we’d get out of a country before all hell broke loose.

I tried the United Airlines desk and sure enough there were no tickets in either my or Daphne’s name. Swell. I wondered what the penalty for bolting a two-week luxury hotel bill in Singapore was. Probably a thousand lashes and life imprisonment.

We went to the cocktail lounge and ordered drinks.

At the bar I saw an American naval captain smoking a pipe and drinking a martini. It was Huey Gregg, an old classmate from Annapolis. I got up and went over. He was reading a paperback, The Rare Coin Score by Richard Stark.

I pumped his hand frantically.

“Huey, please tell me you’re taking a military flight out of this joint.”

“Sure am, Dick. Got a flight at oh-nine-thirty hours. Need a lift?”

“I fucking love you.”

“Easy there, big boy.”

“Not that it matters,” I said, “but where’s the flight headed?”

“How’s Frisco sound?”

(Continued here.)

Coming soon from Ha! Karate [Yokohama]: The Complete Larry Winchester, Vol. 2, a budget-priced DVD box set comprising Race to Rangoon, Hot Rod Hooligans, and The Joey Bishop Story, plus a special bonus disc of all six episodes of Larry’s 1962 TV series Heintz Factory Days. Includes voice-over commentaries from Larry, his longtime collaborator Tommy "Legs" Larkin, and the actors Carolyn Jones, Nehemiah Persoff, Edd "Kookie" Byrnes, and Richard Beymer, as well as the feature-length documentary Larry Winchester: Hollywood Renegade, directed by Buddy Best, narrated by William Shatner.)

the clown, chapter 3: the mill burned down

to begin at the beginning, click here

words by genghis and rhoda

pictures by rhoda

"she's a reporter." billy freed squinted at geraldine through his dark glasses. "from the local paper?" he lowered the tent flap and came into the tent. "right now i'm freelancing," geraldine told him. "trying to sell to places like the all-world journal. but i was with the minsk times before." billy made a show of scratching his head. "minsk - where's that? somehere between peoria and cairo. illinois?" "no, it's in -" "ha ha, we know where it is, don't we joe? listen, there's no friendlier people than the belarussians anyhere, except maybe in mongolia, wouldn't you say?" "i'd have to agree," said uncle joe. "but don't forget the people in uruguay, especialy way in the backlands." "i see you gentlemen are true citizens of the world," geraldine noted politely. "that's right. say, did you ever go too mimi's in minsk? i remember they had great pelmeni and chips. and the buraki was pretty good, too." "oh yes, i used to go to mimi's all the time." "what was the name of that accordion player there? the one with the cork leg?" "mike." "mike, of course! so he's still there?" "last i heard, he was carrying on." "great. well, what exactly can we do for you?" "she's doing a story on the clown," uncle joe told billy. "the clown!" geraldine had the impression billy wasn't as surprised as he pretended to be, but smiled politely. "i'm attempting to do a story on the clown," she told him. "and you've been filling her in?" billy asked uncle joe. joe shrugged. "as best i can." "did you tell her about the manuscript?" "no, i forgot all about it. i thought you gave it to that detective in liberia." "no, he mailed it back to me. i'm pretty sure i still have it somewhere." "what is it?" geraldine asked. "some kind of confession?" "no, it looks like stuff he just made up. a made up story, you know? but this detective in monrovia, he thought it contained psychographic clues or some such." "you mean it's a novel?" "it's a made up story." "well, can i look at it?" "you can have it, if i can find it." geraldine had planned to drive the rental car back to heidi's place in the north woods, but decided to turn it in and take the bus instead, so that she could read the clown's manuscript on the way. the man at the ticket window at the bus station scratched his head when she told him her destination. "we don't have a bus that goes that far." he looked at geraldine suspiciously. "not too many folks want to go that far north." "well, then, just give me a ticket for as far north as you go." "and then what?" "well, " geraldine answered patiently. "i will either get a rental car or call someone to pick me up. how much is the ticket, please?" "i'm pretty sure there ain't no rental car place up there. couldn't swear to it, but i don't think there is. why not just rent a car here, the place is just next door." "i know, i just came from there." "pretty sure there's no rental car up there." "then i'll have to call for a ride, won't i?" "get there pretty late." "my friend won't mind if i wake her up." "must be nice to have a friend like that." "yes, it is." "if i woke my wife up to pick me up in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere, she'd like to blow my head off with a shotgun." geraldine took her wallet out of her handbag. as she did, the clown's yellow manuscript popped a little way out of the bag. "you know, cell phones don't always work so good up there." "i've never had any problems. how much is the ticket, please?" "three hundred and forty-one dollars and twenty-nine cents including tax." "fine." "paying cash, huh? are you a criminal?" "no." "hey, you're not very friendly, are you? with the one word answers." "i'm sorry. i've had a long day, i'm a little tired." "hey, the circus is in town, you know. if you need to relax and unwind, you could do worse than go see the circus." "i've just come from there." "pretty good, huh?' "yes, it was. an excellent balance of authenticity and professionalism, i thought." the ticket seller's eye fell on the clown's manuscript sticking out of geraldine's bag. "what's that you got there? that looks like some pretty old paper." "yes, i suppose it might be." geraldine stuck the manuscript down more securely into the bag. "i haven't seen paper that old since i don't know when. the mill burned down a long time ago that made that paper." the man handed geraldine her ticket. "thank you. when is the bus due?" "about an hour. it ain't always on time, though. don't get all in an uproar if it ain't on time." "i won't." "it's never early though. that's one thing you got to say for it, it's never early." geraldine got a can of diet mountain dew and a bag of fritos out of the machines. she settled down in the corner of the bus station to read the manuscript of the clown's made up story. the story was on lined yellow paper, mostly in various colored pens (or pencils?) but with some typing. some of the pages had writing or typing on both sides. a few sentences and paragraphs had been blacked out or typed over with x's. death of a clown. happy the clown was dying. in the rain by the side of the road lit a cigarette. joe wayne in a mist of stars was in charge of the circus, because bakunin was away with the chimp chasing folding dust. wayne pulled his chair a little closer to the door of the trailer. the clown was lying on a golden cot that almost filled the space in front of the door, so there wasn't much room to get in or out or see the rockets. the rain was washing the night air clean as a plate in mrs miller's boarding house. "julie," mumbled the clown. "julie." wayne flicked ashes out the door. "julie - is julie there?" "i don't know who julie is, happy. there's nobody named julie in the circus. and there's nobody here but me and you." "that's just what i called her, it wasn't her real name. i don't think." "oh. i see." rockets across a single blue star in the waiting silence. red sparks and orange ribbons. "she was wonderful." "but you didn't know her name." "and she didn't know mine." "just a girl you saw once?" "i saw her all the time. they called her rockets and the star jumped up the rain across the highway. but they didn't know what they were talking about." "give a dog a bad name and hang him," wayne agreed. "or give a bad hang a good girl and raindrops." once upon a time there was a beautiful young princess and then the wanderer came to a high hill "relax, happy. look out the window. out the door. see the stars. one of them is your star." "they are all my stars." "that's a good attitude." a booming voice in the darkness in the mud. "wayne! wayne!" wayne didn't answer. the voice kept calling, fading away and then coming closer. kropotkin, the chief roustabout, crossed the shaft of dim light from the trailer. wayne lit a new cigarette from his old one and snapped the old one out the door. the clown fell sleep. his breathing was fading and misfiring across a gray and white rocket rainbow. kropotkin watched wayne's glowing cigarette butt fall at his feet. he went over to the trailer. raindrops bounced off his hat. "where you been, wayne? the place is falling apart." "i've been sitting here with happy. he's dying." "again?" "it's real this time. he's had it." xxxxxxxxx . at this point the manuscript was heavily x'd and blacked out. geraldine folded it to mark her spot and put it back in her bag. she took a sip of diet mountain dew and looked out the station window. the bus was pulling in.

chapter 4: the headliner