Brute Cojones

Anthony Quinn had been an overly familiar figure for a long time by the time I came to know his face, and it is an insult that he was cast for Zorba the Greek, whatever argument you want to feed me about bankability, or whether or not he passes for Mediterranean, with Spanish blood running in his veins. Man from Del Rio translates as follows: peasants want the good life just like anyone else. It is an early version of his mentally disabled boxer in Requiem, except that in Rio he is allowed his heritage, and sexually kept in his caste, learning lessons about the battle scars of dueling contests. The dowager is not quite sold on Quinn who taught himself how to be a gunfighter who escapes the vortex of destruction, but when you look at his casting, it may make you wonder: he played a founding Arabic tribal leader (against O'Toole), a fascist, a CIA administrator, various godfathers, the scapegoat Colonel in Lost Command, and exactly who-the fuck buys Quinn as a hardened French officer who prevailed over the Vietnamese?

It is a business, I know, but it doesn't mean I am to be denied the pleasure of a certain degree of annoyance. I also hated him as the mayor of Axis collapsed Italy after Mussolini, not that he didn't fit the role. Zingaretti might have given Quinn a blood transfusion during the older actor's end of life respiratory failure. Where is the substance in celebrity? Why is the Screen Actors and Screen Writers Guild so powerful? And why do I enjoy an abstract straight to syndication thriller like The Marseille Contract of 74? I like this transitional movie for its veracity in the realization that scores need to be settled outside of legal frameworks. Quinn and Caine are intermediary figures here, certainly not the black irony of Hannibal Lector, for this is Jeffrey Dahmer territory, now an inside joke on HuffPost Live, our relationship to the worst aspects of our own predation (why not feed people like Dahmer to lions?)

The Marseille Contract is mostly chic brutality-- not entirely-- Quinn is now the old man who is supposed to diddle his dick under a desk--and there is actually a transference. The star on the rise, as represented by Michael Caine, nothing special in his Cockney blood, but Hollywood now controls who exactly is a pedigree, transfers to Quinn's Old Bull a sense of how to be cool, with the requisite distance to drop James Mason like a rack of seasoned ribs to be smoked. Violence is an argument, despite my predicament, my scars inflicted from it, and my likely probability of collapsing under pressure to it, in its fatalistic, reverberating consequences. How Presby has treated me is also a force of argument. A simple eviction notice is more straightforward, hence what do these HUD protections amount to? Look at how fearful I am of their next move, how much pressure I'm putting on myself to say I want no more.

This isn't about housekeeping. I never denied I need assistance, but a Medicaid paraprofessional and a good domestic aren't one and the same. There may be more about Del Rio later. It is a marque role for a player already seasoned by 58.

Malicious

My ex-fiance, for those of you not following along, is a bed ridden 5'6" King Kong, maybe 450 lb when he moved in and was more hopeful then of some physical recovery. He fell once, only once, in my bathroom, due to singular distinctions for which I am seemingly fated. Why I initially agreed to marry him? I thought my control would be reward enough. I was wrong, and hurt big ugly burly baby spic/dago from the Bronx whose intelligence is keener than my own on certain things. He was a Bronx cop, coke addict and he thinks Karina falls under the same rubric, and he may be right. My instincts about the woman were that I was being played, not that she hurt me, not yet.

She somehow was let in the building yesterday and came pounding on my door, like so many menacing drug users of my past, and telephoned twice, looking for a reference, which, perhaps to you may seem petty, but I refused her. This isn't simply about my personal correspondence. She may have discarded official documentation which may cause me undue hardship down the road. I'm worried now, and I hired her, using Craigslist on the advice of my veterinary technician. This is why I've kept myself off the Medicaid system, to stay away from this.

Lenny Bruce in candor

This morning at my best hour I was alert and energized and desirous of working and instead of plunging ahead, made myself go to sleep in order to throw my money away on Karina, my 21st century Shirley Booth, except Karina's mother is dying from a melanoma and so once again we play the bitches wiggle out game, and I am tired, gassy, impacted, wondering why I wasted my fucking time on Tarantino's expensive cartoon. Carradine does a beautiful take on reminiscing, but there is absolutely no point to this damn project, while I'm running around pretending my indictment of the country matters. I could just put my foot down Wednesday and defy the exterminator's 30 second incursion. I've done it before. I'm not mad at the girl, though it is probably best if I let her go; I am not being helped by her inability to keep a schedule, terminally ill parent non withstanding. Exasperated, my entire life doomed via reneging and an utter lack of Google's vaunted efficacy.

Of the essence

Yet even at that late stage, there was a level of our society which managed to live as if nothing much was happening--nothing irreparable. -- The Memoirs of a Survivor, almost half way through.

I forced myself to stay up yesterday to watch Mizumono, only to discover WCAU, the local NBC affiliate, had a rain delay for a Phillies Dodgers game. Piping mad, as I might have rested earlier, been ready to drive out sooner. Jugular piercing, gut thrust, and now Abigail Hobbs must truly be dying, I would have rather seen it full screen. The Swedenborgian I hired got lost earlier in the week, Thursday, trying to find her way back to my building, and I have been plagued with significant bowel evacuation ever since. She was on Bainbridge when she pinged like the fourth time to inform me she got called in for a death watch. I have not quite let her go, and it actually matters little, whether she turns her cell back on and I kindly tell her, with little perturbation as possible, that it isn't working, as powerless as I am, struggling with near cold turkey because I am trying to stretch.

Enough cash on hand to roll to bodega later to mitigate my withdrawal, hoping to have enough time to dash to Joe's as well, surrounded by utter silence, not a friend in the world, a former neighbor from Page Street told me "marriage does not complete you," and there is certainly enough evidence for that, Jace not unique with his impulse control issues, only recognized within the industry.

Loneliness isn't a salve either, despite my activities, even my exasperation with people: On my very first day as Jerry's student, I thundered at him in modulated deference, "Newspapers don't publish good poetry," and he bitch slapped back, "Newspapers publish perfectly good poetry."

33 years later, post his myocardial infarction, my major depressive episode burn injuries, I am still right. He's not. Newspapers publish typical American double entendres of the sort which can't take risks in the public square, like the rough and passionate sex an R rating gets away with suggesting every so often. David Slade must be hot.

Crabs

I am not on this morning, and since I am not on, debating the worth of tweeting a youthful aging cripple's shrinkage, my drying up scurrilous sentiments. Not that I'm the first to worry brain plasticity once it is over the age of 50. What I am going through now is what Jerry was going through when I was his student who wanted to fuse herself to his corduroy blazer in my own quite tortured psychic guilt for wanting to sleep with him. I was nineteen when I first met him while Susan sat in the car. Nineteen, and I still can't shut the fuck up about my aging Shakespearean post modernist whose intellectual force wasn't enough to maintain the decency of my conscience.

Jerry: "Joanne, what the fuck do you want from me? I was kind. I encouraged you as best I could to imitate me. I am sorry your path was more obstructionist than that. I am old, and as I've written you, had a heart attack. You're over 50, presumably frigid over a duress you've struggled with for years which had nothing to do with me. I kept my mouth shut. Your former supervisor did not. That is the price you've paid for using words to get you from A to B in deploying subversive behavior."

Joanne: (sniveling): I wanted to be happy being loved by someone like you. I subjected myself to date rapes trying to find you in men who approximated your appearance. I sublimated our necessary detachment to my career and that died, fast and furiously.

Call in Smokey's commercialization of French baroque, hey? The tracks of pork like collagen. Toni Morrison's work angers me, and I meant my damning praise against the herd to be angrier than it turned out in barreling my dissatisfied sentiment, delayed over my domestic assistance anxiety. I found a woman, white, whom I like. We'll see.

Queer Eye Decoder, Doris Lives!

“All I ever wanted in my life was to get married, have kids, keep house and cook, and even though I did all these things, I still ended up in Hollywood.”-- the grand diva of more idyllic days

Only bits and pieces of Pillow Talk can be visualized, the confetti of its time. It may be a stretch, the notion that Rock Hudson was taking a mild enmity-riddled jab at la grand dandy in that scene with Doris, their little coffee klatsch, and then the staid post-Commissioner wasting away before our eyes at a Hollywood press conference. This was the Hudson I knew, the one trying to be the daddy wise ass. Even in death, in the grip of the worst disease to pass from bush hunters to queers, Hudson was reluctant to deconstruct himself along Clifton Webb's lines. Webb was the studio caricature of  Oscar Wilde, Proust, Henry James, their social milieu, but Hudson was the more clever chameleon, *the gay bachelor,* wasting away in public, exciting plague memories, mob panic, quarantine. We haven't  removed ourselves so far away from that vociferous social fear. We'd all love to believe otherwise, taking yet a new set of faggots on good faith (sigh).

I'm getting too old for volleys, and this bores you (or bores me), my adult settings that have taken only a few truly graphic turns, and most of those in a spittoon around a graphic temper which isn't really genocidal. I mean, come on. Caliban is only playfully demonic.

My back up kicked in, the Haitian at my adopted franchise, and I am supposed to meet with an Italian CNA the afternoon of 4/11. Female. You'd think it would please me, but it does not, 95% of my mind has already rejected her without a real interview so much as a confessional stress complaint over my decoupling with Jesse. 

I am slightly too overwhelmed to make our rendezvous; this post has nothing to do with it. Power chairs need to be charged, writing, reading, or throwing a load of laundry in the machine, teaching the cleaning lady about the Paperwhite, and the miraculous ability to utilize Amazon's book loan while some senile fucker sets off the fire alarm. I cannot fight Presby solely on the basis of my own legal acumen. Yet this doesn't seem to stop me.

I'll admit privatization causes mobility impaired individuals as much grief as the state system. Within plateaus of stability, I've failed. Sometimes the solutions simply aren't there.

Iron Necessities

Let me hit the pause button. You might infer from Carcano that I'm a duplicitous schemer, but that isn't quite the case. Political aides who work for my state representatives advised me not to place a classified on Craigslist, and after trying cleaning businesses which weren't suitable, using Craigs was a last resort which worried me. I am not infallible, and I daresay I do function savant at times, so I was scared. The Web is a pornography shallow troll riddled junkyard to which I'm contributing like catacomb of ghoulish delight, and the new guy got the job because the other interviewee I telephoned without the appropriate judgment at first glance. That takes patience. 

I did not know he was gay, but I know the terrain, and in terms of what I might have gotten, feeling that I could be safe, this counted. The safety factor won, in essence, despite the fact my hostility toward homosexuality radicalized equality is genuine. And it was, in fact, extremely difficult to be civil to Erik in front of s/his brother "in the life". The flesh fair freak happened to be on the pavement outside the vestibule when I introduced J-- to the building. My show of civility vanished when my new assistant headed home. Erik and Jimmi are a significant factor in my need to get off this corner. Dealing with the two of them feels like rust eroding my esophagus. I'd enjoy beating them into a pulp.

Erik von Schmetterling did not know I was pleading with Linda Dezenski as a last resort to avoid calamity those years ago, but that doesn't absolve him. They don't like each other that much, Linda and the regional shim, and Erik is in fact a sick bangle of nerves on its last legs. I hate the two of them equally for being corrupt and necessarily vicious when it suits them. The bitter transvestite failed intern and the gloating Jewess I transformed into an icon with her own hagiography. Back biters, allies by necessity.

We'll see how it works. J-- is nice. I selected him on my own terms without imposition from regulatory authority. He is better looking than Alan Gordon, and I am not going to see him daily unless I surrender to Medicaid waiver and he wants that position. My social fear is not ignited and we aren't going to swap sexual escapades and stories.

Pinata Reel Change

I am really not much better for my herring and succotash, hands shaking, hypertension swirling in circulation, feeling it behind my eyes. First she is in physical agony from her hip, father's sister, and when I ask what I can do, not meaning a damn word, she wants to hire Tim. Marie seems far more sold on Tim's insolence than I, and his rebuff, when I telephone him to query, "You know I'm here eleven to seven," indignant that I pitch extracurricular activity between the two of them, Italian crone and African road runner, and then "Call me back, it is urgent." She wants to be my long long long long sick uncle's attendant now, and there is one for independent living, Uncle Joseph, the Marinelli spit ball from my days as a child, my father's favorite pinata joke that my Roman Grandmother kept Quiet. I and my fourth cousin were the family spaz'es, and my youngest uncle was the off turd. Sometimes I wonder what Lillian the belle brought over from the old country. The fault more accurately resides with the patriarchal sperm of brow beaten grandfathers who died young. At least I tried to live a life, struggled to have victories and pride, vanquished now. Joe never did. Sat in his chair, sullen, anti-social. This distant fourth cousin, Richard, is a faithful ADAPT activist, marching to the orders of Cassie James Holdsworth and I, well, you hear the scathing acid of my disillusion, the hard erosion into the pathology of a broken imagination, hollowed demonic interior seething poison, or maybe you don't. I would like to email my first cousin, also Richard, a contractual release on his mother, then fly to Roma so riot policia can pock mark my ass with bird pellets, but of course I will instruct the old woman on what she needs to do, involuntary tremors jerking my shoulder blades. Call it a night.