Kitty’s Tale-‘s With Ava Gardner and Burt Lancaster’s Film Adaptation Of Hemingway’s “The Killers” In Mind  

By Si Landon

[Kitty Collins was a knock-out, was a gal who guys would jump through hoops for and not think twice about it, who would lie, steal and double-cross for just to get a whiff of that jasmine, or whatever the hell that scent was that drove guys dizzy when they were in the same room with her. This the way that Jim Reardon, the high-priced investigator for Acme Insurance described her in a note that he left in his records of the Ole Andreson case, the case that would make him that high-priced investigator back in 1946. John Colfax was looking through Reardon’s files one day trying to figure out how his mother Kitty had wound up doing a long stretch in for her part in a murder and robbery scheme, the famous Tip Top Hat Company payroll job. They had grabbed $250,000 cash, not a lot now maybe just walking around money in but a big number then-a number worth cutting guys up for and cutting guys out of. When the cops picked up Kitty at her palatial home outside of Philadelphia after his father, Jim Colfax, had been killed by one of his confederates, a guy named Dum Dum who was looking for the dough that went missing she was frantic that the dying Jim (everybody had called him “Big Jim” then) exonerate her, get her off the hook for the murder of the hat company guard and the dough. No dice. Big Jim passed before he could say word one, one way or the other.

After Kitty had been convicted of the felony murder and sentenced to that twenty to thirty year stretch her parents had decided that it was better to raise John without him, only two at the time, knowing too much about what had happened to his mother and father. Had told him early on that they had died in some car crash. Later when he was an adult somebody recognizing the name “Big Jim” Colfax when John was “in his cups” at Jimmy’s Grille in Pottstown where he had been raised and had mentioned that his parents had died in a car crash a guy put him wise, told him that was all hogwash and filled him in on the real reason that Big Jim had died-and his mother had spent her life in stir (she died there in some kind of poetic justice just before she was to be released some twenty years later). That night he confronted his grandparents about the matter. They confessed to what they had done without giving many details since they had forgotten many of them in their dotage.

They did tell him that if he was interested in finding out more details about what really happened that he should check and see if Jim Reardon was still at Acme Insurance in Philadelphia. As it turned out Reardon had retired some years before after a successful career and was living in Tom’s River over in New Jersey. A couple of weeks later he went to Tom’s River and met up with Reardon. Reardon had told him that he had too forgotten many of the details of the case, although he remembered without guidance or guile that John’s mother was a beautiful woman, a woman to twist a guy up. He offered to let John look at the files, his personal files of the important cases he had worked on which he kept in his basement. John eagerly agreed that he wanted to see the files. The next day he came back to Reardon’s house and spent the entire afternoon going through the papers at a table Reardon had set up down in the musty basement.

The key document that John found was a diary, no more of a journal that Kitty apparently kept during her younger days, had kept for several years before the robbery, and during the time of the robbery ending just before his father was killed when Kitty had placed a notation in the book that she was off to meet Reardon and was fearful that he was getting too close to the truth of what happened back then to Ole Andreson, to the Swede as everybody called him. The most startling news he received from his perusal of the journal was that despite her protestations of innocence she, not his father Big Jim, had been the driving force behind the robbery. Had spent the better part of her young womanhood plotting to “hit the motherlode,” her expression and take a ride on easy street (John’s term for what she had been looking for). He confronted Reardon with that journal and asked what he knew about it. Reardon confessed that he had picked up the journal from Kitty’s bureau drawer after she had been marched off to the police station but that he had never bothered to look at it since the case was now closed and he had about ten other cases that his boss was driving him crazy to finish up. The journal made for chilling reading, made John unsure about whether he would have wanted to meet his mother if he knew where she was and knew what was in the journal. Reardon let him keep the journal and a few weeks later he gave it to his newspaper friend, Larry Larson, to make sense of what had really happened in the famous, maybe infamous, Tip Top Hat company case. Here’s what Larry was able to do with the material. Si Landon]                            

Kitty Colfax, nee Collins, had been brought up on the wrong side of the tracks, Irishtown, in Pottsville, Pa and from as young age she could remember she had dreamed about escaping lie among the coal slags, among the dirty, drunken shanty Irish too. She was aided considerably in her dreams by her startling good looks, her long black at those coal slags hair, a tidy body and big ruby red lips. Early on she figured that she could use that beauty to her advantage. That and a cold, calculated sense that every man was nothing but putty in her hands once they got a whiff of that scent she was wearing that said femme fatale (the jasmine she wore from early on only added to the effect). Almost naturally she used sex, the sex act, acts to get something from a man (boys at first, that was how she got her first bottle of jasmine perfume, her “trademark”) losing her virginity one night when she was fourteen. Everything later flowed from that understanding of the world, the man’s world that she was going to trample on.

Kitty also knew she had to get out of Pottsville, get out fast so at sixteen she told her parents she was going to Philly to make her life (she told them she wanted to get married but not to anybody in Pottsville as a pretext). In Philly she went through a bewildering series of men [to John] who picked the up tab, kept her, paid her rent although nobody who had hit the big time, who had serious don’t worry about the future money. Then one night at a party where she was slumming (and kind of singing for her supper since they guy who was hosting the party was also paying her rent, paying for her voice lessons as well) she met Ole Andreson, the “Swede,” who had come in with a date but blew her off once he got a look at Kitty. Once he told his story-that he had been a boxer, had broken his hand doing so and so was moving on, moving into some connections he had with guys in the rackets, probably act as muscle she sensed that he might come in handy. He certainly had the built for some tough action (although she also noted that his “member,” his cock wasn’t that big and he wasn’t much of a lover, couldn’t give her an orgasm). She had him all tied up though and she knew it, he knew it too. One night she had been in Joey’s, a restaurant when pugs and other bad boys hung out, mostly cons and clip artists wearing a stolen brooch, a very expensive stolen brooch when a copper, a friend of the Swede’s came in to pinch somebody, to pinch her. The Swede walked in, glammed to the situation and claimed he had stolen the brooch to the copper after she begged him to do something. Yeah, he took a fall for her, did three hard ones. She had him down forever if she needed anything.             

Of course a guy doing three hard ones, even if for her, wasn’t getting her ahead in the world and so she started stepping out again (she had made it a policy from early on, except for an off-hand blow job if a guy was giving her something, to only deal with one guy at a time-unless she needed to use another guy for some caper and that was his price). That was when she met and shacked up with “Big Jim” Colfax, a guy moving up in the rackets and a guy who seemed to have a “front” unlike the Swede who was just a pug, somebody to be used. Funny this Big Jim was seriously into sex, seriously into kinky action and so Kitty let him have his way-for a while. A guy like Big Jim though was a guy who liked to lay back and take it easy-have his boys take up the “collections” on the numbers rackets his was running on the North side. 

That is what Big Jim thought was the big time but Kitty knew that serious money was not through some middle-level push in the cheapjack numbers racket. She would keep hammering away at him to listen to her plans about making a big score and then ducking out and become “legit,” make some real easy street money from a business start-up. She would go after him particularly when she had him tied up on the bedposts and she was ready to down on him. He kept putting her off though.

Kept putting her off until she heard that the Swede was getting out of prison and then she went full- bore, wouldn’t do the kinky stuff that consumed Big Jim unless he listened to her plan. The plan was simplicity itself and she had been working on a variation of the scheme for some time. Where was there serious money almost laying on the ground. Banks-or the payroll at some big factory. Banks were too risky but a payroll with little security and no vaults was a cinch. In Philly then right after the war when hats for men and women were a big deal the factory had to the Tip Top Hat Company with a big payroll and nothing more than a door to go through. They, Kitty figured they needed three other guys besides them for muscle and firepower if necessary, would be dressed as workers going through the single guard gate when the shifts changed. Then to the payroll office and the dough on a Friday morning. Big Jim started to show some interest once Kitty laid out the scenario and before the day was out they were casing the place (and it didn’t hurt when she let him do his thing with whips with her). Big Jim was in.

Of course the Swede would be in once he saw that she was lined up with Big Jim just so he could get his hands on the dough to take her away from him (little did the Swede know then that Big Jim whom she would use to front the whole operation was claiming half of the take for figuring out the plan). Yeah, Swede was in when he heard the plan with Kitty sitting provocatively on the bed with that come hither look that meant she was “available.” The other two guys were more trouble. There had been a dearth of firepower talent in the town since the war with first-rate guys heading to Chi town and the Motor City where there was more action. So Big Jim contacted the best available, the second best, a guy named Dum Dum and a guy named Blinky. Then Kitty went to work. Took Dum Dum up to her room and let him have his way with her. Blinky, an old time junkie but a great wheel man when he was sober, could have cared less about sex but a few bindles of smack, of boy, of heroin brought him on board (and the promise of enough dough to stay junked up for a year or two). So that had the five ready to go.

In the event the robbery went as planned except at the end some guard thinking the money being robbed from the company was his personal stash or something had started shooting and Dum Dum had wasted him. An overhead cost. The plan was to meet at a cabin that night after they had split up in different direction when the robbery was completed and they headed for the cars they had parked across the street from the plant. This is where things got dicey-or seemed to. They were all to meet and divide the dough the next morning at another cabin when the coast was clear. What had happened was that, by design, Kitty had gone to Dum Dum and Blinky and told them the meeting cabin had burned down and the new meet place was at a farm a few miles away.

She told the Swede that he was being cut out, that the others wanted him out but that she loved him, had always loved him so why didn’t he foul the boys up by showing up at the farm and grabbing all the dough and head to Atlantic City. She would meet him there. She left her calling card to make sure he was in-she let him have his way with her (although she made another note that prison had done a job on his sex drive and she had to pretend to have an orgasm). The next morning the Swede came through, grabbed all the dough and hightailed it to Atlantic City with a sack full of dough. Kitty showed up later in the day. A couple of days later she blew town-with the dough-leaving the Swede holding the bag. Classic fall guy.

Here’s the deal. The Swede was set up not only by Kitty but through her by Big Jim. Kitty had bet the farm that Big Jim had enough smarts to put together a legit business-with her guiding him. But she wanted all the dough to get the thing rolling. That was why the Swede was left with egg all over his face. So everybody, everybody being Dum Dum and Blinky, thought that Swede had crossed them up.

Big Jim, with Kitty in tow, did wind up setting up a big time construction company and Kitty finally had all the dough that even her black heart could use. The Swede, well the Swede figuring the others had him down as the villain disappeared, went underground in some small town in Ohio working as a gas jockey, all a washed up pug and robber was good for. Then one day while driving through Ohio on company business Kitty stopped at a gas station for gas and water. There was the Swede with a stupid sheepish grin on his face. Kitty was able to hold him off with a promise to show up at his room after she convinced him that Big Jim had forced her to betray her man-him. Yeah, this Swede had it bad. Once Kitty got back to Philly though she implored Big Jim to hire a couple of gunsels and get rid of the Swede for good.

Big Jim, for once, didn’t argue the matter. He hired a couple of boys to do the job, and they did it as neat as any hit job had ever been done. They killed him right in his crummy boarding house room while he was sleeping, an easy hit. That is where Reardon came in. Seems that the gasoline company that employed the Swede had life insurance on its employees, Not much but enough to have Reardon smell a rat. So Kitty and Big Jim would go down for a$2500 life insurance policy. Jesus. Reardon was a bulldog on the case once he saw that the Swede,  mere gas jockey, had been waylaid for no apparent reason. By dogging it out, by retracing some footsteps he found that the Swede was no mere gas jockey but a pretty good boxer whose hands went south on him. He had gotten mixed up with the local branch of the Philly mob, met the mysterious to Reardon Kitty, taken the fall for her, and then had taken part in the Tip Top Hat robbery.

The important thing though was that Reardon figured out that the Swede had been the fall guy-the guy who was supposed to have skipped with all the dough. That got the pissed off Dum Dum and Blinky thinking once they read that the Swede had been wasted under suspicious circumstances. Then the trail led back to Big Jim and Kitty who were now married and had a son. Dum Dum finally not so dumb wasted Blinky figuring he was the bad guy. When that proved not to be true he then went after Big Jim. In the meantime Reardon had figured out that Kitty had betrayed everybody. He had it almost right except that she one last plea-and that was where the journal ended. Everybody knows though that Big Jim and Dum Dum had a shoot-out and had killed each other with Kitty begging Big Jim to get her off the hook as he lay dying in a pool of blood. We already know Kitty’s end.

Larry thought after finishing up his piece figured that Kitty’s parents had been right to keep John in the dark. And after reading this article he was also sure that John would be glad that he had not met his mother later.                                        

The Lake Of Fires-When The Whore Of Babylon Strutted Her Stuff-A Cautionary Tale Of One Sarah Roe Sanders

By Leslie Dumont

[Thank the Gods I don’t have to be a free-lance writer these days because I am not sure I wouldn’t going into something safer and less anxiety-driven like being a safari guide or trapeze artist. Everybody who has read any of my columns in Women Today where I had a by-line for many years before knows even on the toughest assignment days, days when the irate editor screamed into respectively the telephone or cellphone wondering where my copy was and threatening bloody murder if it didn’t appear ASAP if not faster I would take my beating, grouse in public and secretly pray to some ancient press god for that steady job. The reason that I mention the whole question of free-lance is not only because I started out as such, including a short stint here when this was a strictly hard copy publication and only got out when it looked like I was going nowhere and Josh Breslin coaxed me into seeking more steady work but because my long-time companion and fellow writer Sam Lowell here happened to mention the trials and tribulations of one Hunter Thompson, the late Doctor Gonzo who for whatever reason committed suicide about a decade ago.

Sam had claimed that he was in need of a “hit” of Doctor Gonzo to try to figure out what the hell has happened to this country socially and politically and whether this Ice Age doomed denizens American world we live in had any previous such human sink periods. And of course all Sam had to do was grab Thompson’s General of Swine about the low-bar life of the Republic in the 1980s Reagan-Bush years when the country was first put up for sale to the low-bid junkies, the fixer men, the con artists and the voodoo economics boys who made it their business to sink the ebb tide. Junk bond artists, cowboys in the basement of the White House running foreign policy, political whores of all genders displaying their wares without embarrassment in the public square. All Sam had to say was that re-reading the columns from Hunter’s days as the gadfly outlier at the formerly staid San Francisco Examiner  was that seemed a “golden age” compared to now. Jesus.

All this prep though to wonder aloud about what made Thompson tick, why did he always seem to be on the edge of controlled panic when his assignments were due. Frankly unlike Sam (and Josh and Frank Jackman) who all worshipped at the Gonzo shrine I never paid attention to this Gonzo journalism then and the whole junkie, druggie, male dominant, weirdly out of step with the times and self-indulgent (a trait of all writers but Hunter had them on steroids) word games reminiscent of the Beats. What has recently perked my interest was that slavish devotion to “just in time” copy and his love of the Whore of Babylon.     

                 

I don’t think I need to go into the theory of Gonzo journalism except to say that its positive effect has been to break the silly journalism school nonsense about objective journalism, nothing but the facts Jack. In an age of “fake news” blather and alternate facts bullshit facts are under attack and need serious defense although that is not enough. Hunter Thompson got right down into the mud with his stories including his indulgences and his down to the wire way of operating in the publishing world. In an age of citizen journalism and expert channeling frenzies this is probably quaint now.   

  

What separated out Thompson and what has given me a bit more respect for what he tried to do was he fearlessness of going after the big guys and gals (Richard Nixon a specialty) and the foibles and follies of lots of people who back themselves or get backed into some crazy situations. With eyes wide open. That is where the imaginary of the Whole of Babylon is appropriate. My good friend and fellow writer here Laura Perkins has actually done some research on the subject via her series of articles about art that interests her. Without going into detail she has staked out a claim for the centrality of sex in 20^th art. I don’t know. What I do know is that she received all kinds of blow-back from evangelical types who have attempted to scourge her in defense of their children who might happen upon Laura’s articles. Yes, weird. What set her research up though was that they would call her either the Whore of Babylon or the devil’s servant for her activities. Laura was not familiar with that Whole of Babylon expression so when she looked it up she was surprised that all the blather was about some beautiful courtesan who used a wolf’s head and fur to advertise her profession. No big deal whatever the evangelicals thought.    

Where Hunter Thompson fits in, probably more accurately than the religious folk, is that he ripped apart the pretensions and predilections of the hustlers, con artists, fixers, junkies of all sorts, apologists for every angry yahoo and their enablers, objective journalists, White House cowboys, bottom dwellers, magpies, holy rollers and whatever other flotsam and jetsam crossed his path. He saved a special place though for what in his mind was the Whore of Babylon via the Book of Revelations and those dame lakes of fire and eternal burning of all the cretins mentioned above.]

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It is an awesome awful  fistful of horrible dreams to force a tiny six year old girl to read the Book of Revelation, yes, that hard-ass no holds barred barren section of the Old Testament, in front of adults just because she pissed her pants and lied about it to dear father, Preacher Roe. That stuff about the lake of fires and the devil’s 666 handiwork is tough enough for lonesome adults in some dry gulch Beat Western during a snowstorm with the electricity out and no other reading matter around except the leavings of the goodly Gideons who long ago left Gilead to spread what they called the good news once the Second Great Awakening burned over the rural upstate parts of the American Republic. But to under some wicked spell, and a sack full of dope and a keg of raw whiskey, do what Preacher Roe did , everybody called him that although who the fuck knew his real name except his benumbed daughter was beyond the pale even if it would explain why that vagabond frightened urine smelling rag doll turned herself into the Whole of Babylon’s unholy daughter when she came of age, and beyond. A lot of strange and awful things have been played out but Preacher Roe’s bloody sins will never be washed away even though he claimed he did those terrible things in the name of the Lord Zoroaster or whoever he was shilling for in his long hustle of a career.

See the Preacher, Preacher Roe had been “ordained” in the hard church of life which included a few necessary courses in not only scaring the Bejesus out of innocent daughters but how to keep the revenue stream flowing through good times and bad, jail time and freedom time, and how to scare the Bejesus out of the brethren, now the Brethren of the Fire in the Lake into that big new church edifice and television studio adjacent (along with other more personal items like those previously mentioned bags of dope and whiskey). Money no question. So six-year old let’s call her Sarah since that was her God-given name paid with her soul in the end for her father’s greed, avarice and incestuous desires.

That piss-induced stand-up for your sins had not been the first of the tortures Sarah went through but she always claimed that was where it started, where the lying started and the modern- day public stool-dunking as well. She told a fellow classmate once in third grade that she had seen the fires in the lake and that she had been beaten for lying about that by the old man in one of his righteous whiskey rages. The classmate had dismissed her thought except it proved true since Preacher Roe was “travelling the circuit” out toward Lake Erie way and the lake had actually been on fire for containing so many flammable chemicals. A few more incidents like that and it was no wonder that poor Sarah never could go forward either way, telling the truth or telling lies got so mixed up together she just gave up and decided Keil (the old name for the Whore of Babylon in Aramaic I think) was right to do her dirty work in public. Working behind her father’s rackets came easier than trying to figure out why her head ached so when she thought about the fires.

Almost the minute Sarah came of age, meaning turned from stick-like girl to shaped young woman she was a lure to all the boys in whatever neighborhood Preacher Roe happened to be working in (and not just boys either as she got just a little toward sixteen older and not without something from Preacher Roe along the way although she never would talk about it, never utter the word incest when questioned). We don’t have to spend much time on the details of where our Sarah fell down early on because where and how she wound up there is the real subject of our cautionary tale. Beside it has all the earmarks of story we have heard of and seen too many times beginning with that first dire understanding that what Sarah Roe had to give she would not give freely but make a profession out of in the time-honored way many young women with little or no resources except hunger for something different sought. Sought her version of the courtesan’s trade, the modern sordid way. Nickel and dime stuff until she got one of Jimmy Swag’s boys to pimp for her taking his cut and a cut of her. But Jimmy Swag and I think it was Balls Margene took their cut, took Sarah Roe down in sister cocaine land turning all her nightmares into dreams-they said. Courtesan pretentions or no she took the fall, took the path downward once Jimmy Swag’s had no more use for her wasted body at Madame Sonia’s high-end bordello in Santa Monica. Wound up doing the streets after some bum married her and took all her last dough, had a few kids by accident, had a few abortions by plan and was headed to be one more unwashed, unmoored, un-mourned potter’s field denizen like I said a not unfamiliar story.

Then like manna from heaven, a God send I guess somebody like Preacher Roe would call it in his sober moment fell down on Sarah Roe, now Sarah Roe Sanders she was calling herself after that deadbeat father and ex-husband combination exhausted other possibilities.  A self-satisfied businessman turned politician of a new sort from New York City, a guy named Donald J. Trump pulled lots of gags and gaffs and became POSTUS (you figure it out). His problem was that he needed to dump his current weak-kneed press secretary who would not absolutely toe the boss’ line, or rather lines, as fast as necessary and had turned into a donkey, an ass really. Trump, beautiful Trump called in his HR guy, a guy who used to be governor of New Jersey or some place like that and commissioned him to scour the earth, the American earth I guess I should say looking for somebody who could “take the dark out of the nighttime and paint the daytime black” without blinking. Everybody associated with the operation thought it was bizarre since the boss, unlike ghostly ex POSTUS Jimmy Carter was not known to throw out lines from king of the folk Bob Dylan’s playbook.       

                          

The connections are somewhat murky but somehow one of the that Jersey governor’s operatives had contacts with Preacher Roe who was working some “mission” scam in Arkansas and had asked him for references for that press job. Thinking of milk and honey he automatically thought of his daughter Sarah if only she could be found. One virtue of unlimited Executive office dough and connections is that almost anybody but a pure hidebound hobo can be found. And so Sarah was found working some dive whorehouse up in Half Bay south of Frisco where wasted whores have their last round-up.      

The rest of the story you know since Sarah Roe Sanders took the job (her father would ask her after a while to stop using the Roe maiden name since it was hurting his revenue flow at the Church of the Seventh Redeemer where he had been raking it in before all the media started calling his daughter Pinocchio). She lasted for a while, longer than most thought given her background but eventually the boss told some underling to give her the boot when even she couldn’t keep up with the bullshit. That’s the cautionary tale such as it is, even a bend whore has a hard time keeping up with “fake news” and alternate facts these days. As Hunter would say Selah.    

In The End Forgery My Friend, But Only In The End-With Melissa McCarthy’s "Can You Ever Forgive Me?” (2018) In Mind   

By Laura Perkins

When I was a kid, a young girl growing up in a heavy religious atmosphere Second Awakening “burned over” area of upstate New York and stuck, and I use that word correctly, on an isolated truck farm one way that I entertained was collecting stamps, postage stamps mainly U.S. postage and what were called First Day covers, meaning that you got an envelope with a stamp usually with a cachet postmarked on the first day of issue from whatever place it was issued. Very early First Day of Issues were much rarer and worth more although less likely to have a commercial cachet. My overall collection was based mainly on stamps and covers from the 1950s onward that were both inexpensive but also produced in enough qualities that they except for maybe printing errors to this day have had no serious appreciation in value. I kept those covers and stamp album and gave them to a granddaughter who expressed some passing interest in collecting such materials. That in itself is unusual since you hardly ever see or hear of young people, kids, getting into philately (that is just the technical name for stamp-collecting not some coded sexual reference for any evil-minded readers).

Many years later after my second divorce with two young daughters to raise on a fairly meager settlement I came back to philately (remember that is not a bad word) using part of my settlement to start a mail order (quaint, right) stamp and covers business via various stamp publications and doing weekend shows at places like hotels and stamp clubs. I would buy, starting out at least, stamp albums at auction or via dealers and break them up for individual sale of the stamps (and plenty of postage for the latter stuff that wasn’t worth selling). I would buy bulk First Day covers and do the same creating a tough but profitable little business which along with an occasional writing assignment or printing order would keep a roof over my head and my daughters until things stabilized. As I expanded my reach I would also scour out of the way flea markets and “antique” stores looking for postcards with interesting postmarks (not for the scene on the front buy for say a postmark from some railroad train or tram). That later expansion is important below in reviewing this film because along the postcard trail you would also find old letters and contents from various famous or well-known people. In those days I had a market for such material among certain types of collectors. I did that work for several years until the interest in stamp-collecting except for very rare investment type items dried up among the young. Also on-line operations like E-Bay and mainline auction houses were taking away mail order (remember quaint) business and shutting down physical shows when the customer based dried up. I haven’t been in touch with this field for a while so I am not sure about the condition of the industry except when I did a quick Google search again and didn’t see much market except for those rare portfolio items and one of a kind pieces which will always have some market.  

 All of this foreknowledge to address the main issue, the main criminal issue in the film under review Melissa McCarty’s Can You Ever Forgive Me? -the market for literary material from famous writers, a market I never got involved with but which the main character Ms. Israel in this based on fact story delved into in order to keep herself afloat when she was going under after having some early success as a historical novel writer. But fame is fleeing and so forgery became her friend (along with a mad monk gay con man and man about town Johnny Too Bad, take that as you will who glided the path for her). Frankly I do not remember being part of any stamp show or attending any auction where famous authors had their personal mostly typewritten notes and letters on sale but perhaps that was a separate market. I do know because I sold many such items that letters from Presidents or just their signatures had some value and formed a collectible market as did sports figures and celebrities.       

What joins my experiences and Ms. Israel’s conscious if seemingly minor criminal activity was around the question of forgeries, and its subset authentication. In philately there have been many such forgeries, some quite famous and stamp dealers have been known to do a few things to stamps to sell them as more expensive items like taking stamps you get by the sheet and turning them into coil stamps by cutting the perforations, adding so-called lines between such stamps which make them more valuable, things like that. Various fixes although for the most part with expensive items, and even not so valuable items but ones that should be authenticated there are agencies including the American Philatelic Society who for a fee will do the service. The almost shocking part of the Israel story in that the dealers she was dealing with took whatever she had to offer without much fuss until she went too far on a playwright Noel Coward intimate letter which had to be fake since it would have revealed too much about his sexual preferences when such knowledge would have subjected him to criminal sanctions.       

That is the technical part of Ms. Israel’s operation but the film is as much about her being on the ropes as a writer and desperate to keep herself (and a beloved cat) afloat even though she was not nature’s noblewoman by any stretch of the imagination. Mostly she had moped along assuming that having written a few successful works that she should have been on easy street and took her fall pretty hard. Things looked really bad until she “discovered” she could con supposedly sophisticated New York City booksellers into buying her forgeries. Thereafter she made a cottage industry out of it. Along the way the seemingly asexual Ms. Israel made what could only be called an association with one Johnny Too Bad who after she told what she was doing became something like her confederate. That is until the heat came down on his soft head and he ratted her out to save his own ass. She would take the fall although not serving any prison time but her operation was over if not in the end her friendship with ugly Johnny Too Bad. She was forced to write her own stuff and face the hard realities of the hard copy publishing business. Having been down and out myself despite her disagreeable nature I had some sympathy for her situation despite myself. A well done job here by Melissa McCarthy and Brother Grant as the mad monk Johnny.              

For God’s Sake Hunter S. Thompson, Doctor Gonzo, Give Us A Sign-Do Not Put Pearls Before Swine-With “Generation Of Swine,” Part 2 In Mind

By Frank Jackman

No question politics is a hard-ball profession, tougher still when you have to write about these thieving bastards who would not know the truth if they fell over it in some forsaken gin mill some salty midnight. Are so crooked and here you can use your own variation, they need anything from their morning toilette valet to six Secret Service agents to screw them into their pants (the women too except maybe they need help with dresses). That is why whenever I have despaired, when I was ready to fold them and weep I would, still do actually as you will read below, I grab whatever Doctor Gonzo, that is the late lamented Hunter S. Thompson volume I can lay my greedy little hands on. To relieve that awful headache that reaches to my medulla every time I try to write anything about current political developments, in the United States mostly in the Age of Trump.

Now Thompson was not a taste for everybody and as he slid down the life trail he got caught in something of a trap having to accept, however reluctantly, the mantle every four years from poor Teddy White of the dreaded Making of The President series of books trap  covering the freaking presidential campaigns that in the end he knew were pure vanilla, pure bullshit even if he had some partisan favorite. In the end they all, the politicians and their hangers-on had feet of clay and corkscrew morals.

I find it very hard to draw any comparisons between today’s extreme low bar of political civility, today’s political gridlock and previous eras since these times seem to be sui generous but when I grabbed from the shelf Thompson’s Generation of Swine I knew why I grabbed the sucker (beyond that political twist a read which stopped my headaches-for a while). That book detailed mainly through weekly articles what Thompson did when he got a serious paying job for young Will Hearst whose grandfather Kane I think his last name was hired him after he had taken over his San Francisco Examiner flagship newspaper with the idea of treading new ground in the Age of Ronald Reagan, POSTUS in the 1980s. (I would be performing my own whitewash of the times, making it some kind of middle ground ‘golden age” if I did not include one Yankee cowboy, George Bush, the old man not the guy who dragged our asses into now never-ending wars in Afghanistan in those times. Pretty Boy George gave the Eastern imprimatur to every dirty trick, every ugly ploy, every bag job, every satchel filled with twenties for some ill-begotten adventure those silly bastards pulled dragging the rest of us along with them.)

The Age of Reagan, the age of the Generation of Swine, Part 1 is the perfect low-bar to compare with these days of the serious gutter that bourgeois politics has fallen into (beyond that possibility it is either hapless Warren Harding or the misbegotten Sam Grant but those boys were strictly amateur, would be eaten by a guy like now disgraced Ollie North or Steve Bannon for lunch and have time for a nap). No question at the time that likes of cowboy Ollie who ran the whole Iran-Contra out of the basement of the White House while Dutch (and Ivy League Bush slept the sleep of the dusted), Sleepy Bud MacFarlane, shifty Admiral Poindexter, bum of the month George Shultz, the Dragon Queen Nancy, some stone cold-killers running the hustle of the month club out in Evangelical land like Jimmy Bakker and Patsy Robertson (who laugh, laugh had some kind of demented presidential ambitions were in line for the first rank of hell.

I almost become bilious when I saw the names from out of the past since I thought we had buried those “undead” or at least put knives through their hearts. I know I was ready to kick the nearest television set in anger at the damn supply-side voodoo economics, the big- time red scare Cold War II and other assorted bullshit these bastards put us through. Thompson caught it just right when he said that was an age when it was unsafe to walk in the acidified rain or to touch any human blood, meaning any human being for any reason without worrying about winding up in some freaking hospice. Today is worse, far worse but you already know that.               

Yeah, those were tough times, the bar was pretty fucking low to hold the tattered social fabric together. But what would Thompson, who committed self-sought suicide over a decade ago, think about this current edition of the generation of swine. How would he go down in the mud with the bad ass boys and girls, the rabble, there is no other word for it, who run the show down in D.C. No one would blame him for barring the door to his cabin in Woody Creek and daring anybody to come within fifty yards of that locale. Still with true crazies like Trump, his family, his entourage of yes men and women, his putting the rest of us through hoops Thompson would cut to the bone, would go down in the mud and mix it up. I swear I will not ask for anything else, but Hunter give us a sign, tell us where the tarot heads, channel Johnny Depp if you have to but give us some pithy words to slay these bastard dragons. Hell, call collect if you have to I will gladly take your call anytime.         

Bonnie And Clyde Were Lovers Right From The Very Start They Swore They Would Be True To Each Other True As The Stars Above-Dirty Kevin Costner And Alky Woody Harrelson’s “The Highwayman”  

Lance Lawrence

We were kind of funny about our heroes around the old neighborhood, around the now turned to ashes Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville where we eked out a growing and coming of age not with white-hatted cowboys and slinky goodie dads and moms spouting wisdom but guys and gals from the wrong side of the tracks. Outlaws, bad boys, whores (although we didn’t call them that but at first loose women and then when we got hip to what Mary Magdalene did plying her trade specializing in foot fetishes lewd women or finally whores), grifters, con artists, geeks, grafters, drifters and later when we got more literary flares, holy goofs.            

Blowhards like Roy Rogers and his honey Dale, Dale something, Ozzie Odd, some Howdy Doody junkie or Claribel hard honkers, the dumb bastard got short shrift come bad boy gathering night in front of Harry’s Variety and we wanted to steel ourselves for our midnight creep work around the richer precincts of the town. And who could blame us since between older brothers and uncles doing a nickel or a dime for anything from whacko armed robberies to cons up the ying-yang to neighborhood legend Saint Trigger Burke a key guy in the big Brinks armored car robbery that inflamed at least two generation of Acre bad asses who else could make the nighttime hall of fame (later hall of shame but that was much later when some of us sobered up enough to know that doing nickels and dimes from drugstore bullshit only got you old fast or to be somebody’s “girlfriend”)         

That was the local picture but then the late Pete Markin still missed who died with his boots on catching that Westbound train as they say in the hobo jungle camps from when he dived down Sonora way added to the shrine holy, holy relics when he got caught up in the folk music scene for a minute before he went under. Enflamed our hearts with the story in song by Woody Guthrie about a certified Okie gangster, bandito hombre who shot his way into more federally uninsured banks around the Dust Bowl than one could imagine. A guy named Pretty Boy Floyd, out of those hills who before he cashed his check, before he took the fall blazed a legend for himself in those godforsaken Great Depression 1930s. A guy who they say left dough for starving up against it farmers once he took a turn to the wild side, once he saw dying in the dust was nowhere, man, nowhere. A regular Robin Hood before we found out that the old-timey Robin Hood, real name Robert Lockwood was a rack-renter and serf beater who gave to the poor and left the rich a bit short of the kale. We would endlessly play that song to Pretty Boy adding verses about how he was a little sappy to share his gild but okay otherwise especially when taking out a few coppers in his dust. John Dillinger had that same kind of cache and forever more we would hate the name Hoover and the FBI for doing Johnny wrong.   

Bringing up names like Pretty Boy and Dillinger though immediate bring to bring to mind the legendary outlaw bad boy kick ass of our own generation, Pretty James Preston. A lot of people may say who, who was this guy but for a few years around the areas south of Boston he was the holy of holies. See Pretty James (nobody ever called him anything but that or faced some scowl that might end badly depending on Pretty James’ mood) robbed banks in the days when they made a certain sense before the techno-madness made white collar bank theft more lucrative and less dangerous. Not just robbed banks but did it in daylight shotgun or some heavy artillery in hand. By himself. (The actual robbery part although he had red-headed Irish beauty to cry for Molly Malone as look-out before the fall and we never heard from her again, at least I never did and she had lived the next street over from me on those wrong side of the tracks.) On a Vincent Black Lightening, a very fast, outrun the cops very fast British motorbike. Pretty James would fall down not for his audacity, his balls, his chutzpah but because some fucking rent-a-cop though the money Pretty James was grabbing from the bank was his personal stash or something. Pretty James had to waste the bastard but not before being winged to slow him down enough for the dirty coppers to lay that brother low. In certain lonely Friday night circles where young guys from hunger hang they still whisper of his exploits like some stylish cultists.           

All of this built-up to lead into the film under review The Highwaymen about the two dead-beat ex-Texas Rangers who led the huge expedition who laid a couple of other, let’s call them folk heroes, also from the 1930s, Bonnie and Clyde low. A tear wells up in my eye when I say their names, when I think what rotten stuff was done to them and yet their names shine to this day when anybody speaks of stone-cold killers and desperadoes who went off the tracks a bit. The worse thing about this film is that the two stars, Bonnie and Clyde, get nothing but a two-bit cameo appearance at the end when they are summarily executed in a hail of gunfire under the direction of these two has-been low rent Rangers who previously had been laid out to pasture.  Billy, who cares what their names are, played by Kevin Costner who must have been hard up for cash, for revenue flow, and Virgil, again who cares names, played by Woody Harrelson who used to serve them off the arm at  Cheers barroom on Beacon Street in Boston and who hasn’t been seen in films since he played some very real American psycho a while back get a reprieve from the harried Texas governor to grab Bonnie and Clyde before they rob every bank and shoot every cop in Texas.   

Billy and Virgil and little, no, a lot long in the tooth, hem and hew before getting down to average day police detection work. Hindering them is the whole state and federal law enforcement apparatus who were already unsuccessfully pursing the banditos. Further hindering the coppers was a pretty significant network of people, average Okies and Arkies who were thrilled by Bonnie and Clyde’s exploits   especially when they ran the coppers raggedy. This couple, as anybody knows, as even we knew back in that Harry’s Variety Store night, knew it in our bones were doomed, were built to take the fall. Get this though, Billy and Virgil or whatever their names were nobody remembers but the names Bonnie and Clyde, well, they might live in infamy, but everybody knows who they are, what they mean to the folk hero-deprived dusty people of the 1930s.          

A Haters’ Elegy, Of Sorts-Swerving A Big Detour From Simple “Traipsing Through The Arts”

By Laura Perkins   

Maybe it is because I am in chloric mood having just gone through a bunch of medical procedures, been poked and prodded to perdition but today I am nothing but an old-time flame-thrower, not those tunnel rat throwers that my friend Sam Lowell keeps telling me about from his time in Vietnam but the ancient stoic Greek warriors who batted burns with the best of them and maybe that will help me feel better.

I hate in no particular order: two million-word writers (excluding revered Jack Kerouac who at least wrote a few great novels and some passable ones too and who at least did his work the hard way via some nubbed pencils and a ten-cent notepad purchased at some off-hand Woolworth’s when that was a go-to place for such things among the young and then to secret cave libraries and mind adventures); terminal word junkies (not serious writers, see above,  although if my medical condition gets worse maybe them too but guys and gals who prattle on endlessly assuming just because they don’t consider their time valuable they assume everybody else is in step and that getting the last word is the idea of great literary/debate style); Jimmy Swag “hit men” (the last one, let’s call him X in case shows up in this country again and maybe take umbrage that I didn’t show him quite enough respect either calling him a lowlife hitman or that he left Jimmy cold and dry not doing his contract leaving the Swag to do a nickel in State Pen and who has rumored of late to have been seen in Argentina working as a gunsel for a high-end Madame at a Buenos Aires bordello; “fixer man” (no, not the beautiful backroom cigar-smoke, whiskey drinking guy of politics like sainted Mayor Daley of Chic town when he had that place wired, was so wired he was so wired that he was electric and who could “deliver” those last three crucial votes to your guy from his opponent to put him over the top by threatening to expose them as respectively having had carnal knowledge of animals, being a sodomite, and having sent fifteen years in a mental hospital but the guy down your street wearing high-belted yellow pants, floral jacket and a soft fedora with a feather in the band flailing little white packets yelling out “let me make your nightmares into dreams, ” let sister turn cousin in tricks in the night);Primitive Baptists( a primer, not the grand army of the post-flood who need to have their sins washed away in some rushing river or non-fetid swamp but the ones who insist that those adults, no children under twelve need apply thankfully resolved that issue without too deep a cut in the congregation, to be baptized in a muddy creek or swamp to signify they have been dirty little harlots who left alone for a minute covet every wife’s man or in a pinch every man’s wife, the whores, and con artists shaking some innocent girl out of her maidenhead by claiming ye are the Jesus and she the bride, bullshit with gravy,  so not the more well-known General Baptists who do their nasty rituals in fast-moving rivers without life-preservers daring the penitents to survive the torrents those few not drowned, the Remnant, are “saved” or the Particular Baptists who don’t care where it is done except everybody has to get naked as jaybirds for the cameras even the kids);Mountain Methodists (here I know from whence I speak unlike that flock Baptists, since my father, born and bred as I was, in Upstate New York, land “burned over” during the Second Great Awakening in the early 19^th century had been raised in that faith whose central tenet was that all would be saved come End-Times, come Judgement Day some might have to wait at the gate a little longer  that was all but would alms, welfare checks to day I guess, and who differed from the merciless Wesley boys and their factory pallor who would make the “saved” jump through hoops to get in the pearly gates and bums, tramps, winos, lay-abouts, junkies and usurers had best look elsewhere because the joint would be sealed with seven seals against them);Brethren of the Common Life (another place which I know from whence I speak, my mother was purebred Brethren, and I pretty much followed the religion as a girl, which was a breakaway operation from the more famous Monrovian Tabernacle the split issue there which I never really understood and then would care about less when I was old enough to have investigated had to do with doctrinal differences over how long and at what rest points did God create Earth the Brethren arguing five days on, two days off against the more traditional view); Clarence Dewar, a professional art critic for Art Today who I am calling out today by name for his boorish and deluded view that I have nothing important to say about art because I am not a professional art critic, which I have never claimed to be, that has stirred up the fire-eaters, dingbats, hopelessly deranged, a few irate art patrons, some museum volunteer guides, the Grey Ladies, here’s the dagger- back in the day to feed his horrible opium addiction he would take old copies of say Art Wave , maybe cut and paste, literally in those days before word processors saved our butts,                    

an article by Clement Greenberg and sent it along under his own name.); People who blather on about art being the search for the sublime (when we have the names Clarence Dewar and Clement Greenberg on the grille we might as well tackle this sawdust bit that has saved more bogus careers in the art world than you can shake a stick at when these dingbats go off on their tangents and proclaim, yes, that is just the right word, that the best artists rather than trying to sell a few items to keep the wolves from the door are really pushing the human experience forward a thimbleful thus saving themselves from having to work up a sweat over what the artists really had to say in their productions); Edgar Degas the pervert(there is no room even in hell for this degenerate who spent his life bothering, girls, children really, and young women around ballet schools and riding stables clutching his wretched cigars in his moth-eaten hands and taking a million hits of his bong pipe no among of reparations can repair that savagery but would help and while we all know that this stuff went on, goes on, witness the #MeToo movement the coppers knew wat he was doing, had the complaints in their archives gathering dust but sat on their hands when the art mavens and their bosses pulled down the hammer);Whistler’s “theory of art for art’s sake” (following ever so closely behind that sublime business that has saved more wretches clueless about art is the idea that nobody but the artist should give a fuck about their artistic production and not be floored by conventions and again every bum of the month has held on to this beauty for dear life when trying to get those last thousand words on some freshman term paper or glossy art journal entry although strangely Whistler himself, the old dog, used that idea to hustle his mistresses when the rent was due and when he couldn’t figure out what the hell he was doing with all those fireball, color ball, bombast ball paintings that did make sense otherwise including hanging his poor dear mother out to dry as some color study, not nice);Claude Monet’s Camille (Jesus why would anybody in their right minds pick on his poor first wife especially if one, I, am setting aside the whole idea of cultural appropriation associated with the painting La Japonaise but this allows me to get at the bastard through the back door since what I really want to get at is artistic whoring after having argued how fetching and sexy Madame posed and then found a photograph of her from an earlier time and she looked like like a lunger, had consumption or something);and, art gallery owners (I had intended to finish up with whorish press agents and flak-catchers but they are down in the cesspool of the food chain which runs the Cabal but I saw a better moving target and a grouping more central to the so-called trends which only means that they are always hustling to avoid being stuck with some goods that even flea marketeers would have a hard time getting the fuck rid of I know because some of it is in my living room).

Why all this, why all this venom. Why this surly mob of disparaged elements. One way or another these loss-leaders have been the bane of my existence of late as I have tried to blast some small hole in the entombed Art Cabal for the benefit of the art devotee public. Strangely the strands they represent could give one a very good look at the yahoos and b.s. artists who have attempted to defend the “academy” against the onslaught. You know already I feel better maybe I will take on the literary lightweights as an encore.        

Once Again-Go Where The Money Is-Robert Redford’s “The Old Man And The Gun” (2018)- Film Review  

By Lance Lawrence

The Old Man and the Gun, Robert Redford, Sissy Spacek, Danny Glover, Tom Waits, 2018

Around our neighborhood, our growing up neighborhood in Riverdale west of Boston, in the late 1950s we had our fair share of heroes. Mostly guys who had made the coppers cry for one reason or another or who had pulled some fast one on some high roller. Best of all were the guys who pulled armed robberies, stick-ups. Part of that lure was that the infamous Trigger Burke had set the tone having taken part in the famous Brink’s armored truck robbery of the early 1950s. Part of it was from my our household, and that of a few others when my late oldest brother, Prescott, started his long criminal career robbing the local Esso gas station at gunpoint at the age of seventeen (he got about thirty dollars, got caught and was given “the choice” by the judge-go in the military or go to jail for a long while-he took the military but I remember him saying after the service, he got a bad conduct discharge for some reason I can’t remember, but you can figure it out that he had made the wrong decision.) Something like he could have learned more important career skills in the slammer.

All of this to lead up to two things. First one of the key anthems of the neighborhood toughs when figuring out how to get money was to think about what the famous bank robber Willie Sutton said when, presumably captured after a heist, why he did it. And came back with the classic (and by his lights rational reason)- “that’s where the money is.” Fair enough. But as a recently watched film produced and starring ancient Robert Redford The Old Man and The Gun suggests that is only part of the motivation for a guy like the famous “gentleman” bank robber Forrest Tucker when he held sway back in the days. Maybe it was the excitement, the planning, the cunning or just liking the “life” but the actual money was just something shiny to pursue. All of these ideas got connected through my brother Prescott who actually did time with Forrest back in the early 1960s and so rather than the abstract Sutton that we were not that familiar with the big-time bank robber we knew about was Tucker. Probably if the film had not been made I would have thought nothing about it but since it was made the plot brought back memories of Prescott and his always having what we called his “wanting habits,” his almost constant scheming up some job, some robbery, or some con usually of women to get front money for a job. (Prescott was particularly attractive to women, and not just whores and bar girls there were always college girls around him, even one lawyer, looking for kicks before going off to the suburbs and that kind of good life not on the wild side.)

     

The way the story line played out Redford was trying to pitch to the idea that to some guys the “life” is in their DNA, to live to figure out the next scheme. Maybe if Bertolt Brecht was right in his play The Three Penny Opera the line as to personality types between criminal and businessman is not so far apart. The telling detail of this thought came graphically through at the end of the film when after a big bank robbery spree (which you probably can’t do anymore with the way banks are set up now and where, probably easier to rob ATMs I don’t know) he is finally caught, again, does some time and then is released to his lady friend, played by previously clueless Sissy Spacek who wants him to stay put-with her on her ranch. But it does not take much intuition to know that every look, every move Tucker makes is calling him back to the “life” as old and he was. Just one more spree. And that would be the last spree since he died in prison.

Let’s give few highlights of the film, points about his professional skills (including many escapes from prison and many dodging the coppers) though because Forrest was very clever and smart about the way he worked his grift. As mentioned above his act involved his acting the “gentleman” robber, sometimes on his own and others with a couple of ex-cons dubbed by the media the Over the Hill Gang played by Danny Glover and Tom Waits). Here’s the beauty of his scheme-mild-mannered old guy, an average harmless depositor   Forrest walks up to a teller or a manager and indicated he had a gun aimed right at them. That will usually loosen up those parties to give him what he wants-the dough and then he just as casually walks out the door and all hell breaks loose once the coppers are notified. But see he has a police scanner, extra well-placed automobiles and a route away from danger-usually. Of course the many escapes from prison us that he wasn’t always successful and so perhaps one had better think about a more rational occupation for his energies. Still although it was a close thing, very close in my case as a kid it seemed pretty exciting to live on the edge like that.