DORIS

                                                          DORIS

                   

She had that look that I loved.  Mature but soft and vulnerable at the same time if that is possible.  Call it experience with a touch of sensuousness.  She was older but she oozed sexual energy.  Her face told me she had been through some rough patches but beneath the surface she was a friendly and decent woman.  The second I laid eyes on her the last chapter had already been written.  And she knew it before I did. One of those women with whom you make eye contact and everything after that is a foregone conclusion.  

She brought back memories of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s when I was young and daring and frequented what were called “cheaters’ bars.”  Older and lonely women looking for a cheap thrill to help them forget their misery. At the same time, though, she was different.

Her name was Doris.  I figured her for late ‘50’s, early ‘60’s.  Short stylish conservative hairdo. Nice, enhanced boobs.  Her eyes were a contradiction.  Like many women her age and temperament, she had the look of experience:  probably married more than once, liked to have a drink, had her heart broken one too many times and hardened because of it and, like many women her age, was now looking for something that probably didn’t exist.  

I met her not at a bar but on a dating site.  Around 2005.  Online dating had its own routine:  exchange messages on the platform, then phone numbers, chat back and forth and then meet for a casual date like coffee or a drink.  If there was chemistry, then let the games begin.  We spoke on the phone and seemed to be compatible.  She invited me to her house.  That was rule number one for women who use online dating.  Never invite a man over until you know him well.  Too many crazies out there.  But the way she said it made it seem natural.  I am about as harmless a man as you can imagine so I agreed to come to her home the next night.  

She lived a few miles from me in a town home development that was neatly landscaped.  They were everywhere in South Florida.  Two stories with a small backyard and security gate where you had to give your phone number and they called the owner to allow you in.  Which I did and was allowed through.  I parked in front of her house.  I knocked on her door.  Waited about ten seconds and she opened the door.  And there she was, as I described her above.  There was an instant attraction.  I hugged her and pecked her on the cheek.  Nothing crazy but the casualness of it all masked what we both felt.  Not to be crude but the look on her face and feeling in my body left no doubt that the night would end upstairs and not with a meaningless hug and kiss on her forehead. 

I brought a bottle of red wine for the occasion.  Not that is mattered but it’s just the right thing to do.  She made a few hors d’oeuvres.  We sat outside for about ten minutes and chatted.  What we talked about I do not remember and it does not matter.  I just could not wait to get my hands on her. Not in a lascivious way but a romantic one.  I offered to help her uncork the wine and pour it.  We went inside to her kitchen.  I lifted the cork and turned to face her.  I kissed her forehead in a sort of platonic way.  And that was the last platonic thing that happened that night.  Within about half a second, we had our tongues in each other’s throats and my hands all over and under her blouse.  She asked if I wanted to go upstairs and I responded: “let’s wait.”  Never appear too eager.  When it comes to handling a woman in such situations, I learned a valuable lesson when I was younger as told to me by a good friend 30 years my senior:  act like you have been there before.  And I did.  We had two glasses of wine and munched on sushi.  While I knew we would finish the night upstairs, as we talked, the thought did not really cross my mind.  She was fun to have a conversation with.  I don’t remember what we discussed; only that it was pleasant.  I was honest with her.  I casually told her I had a girlfriend who lived with me.  She appreciated my honesty and that did not bother her.  Most women don’t really care.  What offends them more is the lying.  

Then we walked upstairs.  It was erotic, romantic, passionate, and real.  Another rule from my elder drinking buddy: a gentleman does not kiss and tell.  Two hours later, I bid her good night.  

Doris and I saw each other quite a few times over the next three years.  It was magical.  Maybe in a different time or place, things would have progressed differently.  I just don’t think I have the character to be with one woman.  Everybody has weaknesses and God knows I have mine.  Doris moved to New Hampshire and lives there with a male friend.  We still speak once a month or so and reminisce about the fun times and speculate how things might have turned out differently.  I loved her and still have feelings for her.  I hope she is happy.  

  

      

Twilight Zone: The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine or The Tragedy of An Aging Woman

     When it comes to the human female species, there is no sadder spectacle than the march of time.  The aphorism "men age gracefully, women just get old" is, unfortunately, true.  Our society places a premium on youth or at least its appearance.  But only for women.  Men attract more beautiful women the older they get.  Their calling card is maturity and wealth and a certain perspective that dispenses with silliness and emits a level of sophistication that attracts younger women.  The successful older man who still plays the game has learned a lesson about how to be around other people:  act like you have been there before. Think Robert Mitchum or Humphrey Bogart.  But back to women.  Last night I watched episode 4 of season 1 of The Twilight Zone, The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine.  Ida Lupino plays an aging actress who enjoyed huge success in her younger years.  A matinee idol you might call her.  She spends her days isolated in her mega mansion watching reels of her old movies.  She refuses to accept the rules of nature which, of course, are not kind to her.  She summons her sycophantic yes-man valet, played beautifully by Martin Balsam, to arrange a meeting with a studio head honcho so she can re-live her golden years via a new movie.  The tete a tete does not go well.  The mogul gives her a cold dose of reality and tells her that time has passed her by and she should face reality. This episode is loosely based on Sunset Boulevard with Gloria Swanson, William Holden, Eric Von Stroheim, and  Cecil B. DeMille as himself, but without the Holden angle. In the end, instead of having a corpse in the swimming pool, and in true Twilight Zone fashion, Lupino disappears from her seclusion, nowhere to be found.  But alas, Balsam looks at the movie screen in her hideaway room and there she is, an aged beauty queen and starlet, playing the lead role in one of her films 30 years ago.  Cue the Twilight Zone theme music.  

No Honor Among Thieves

 

       This book was my first foray into a Richard Deming novel and I do not regret it.  Our protagonist, is a professional con artist whose specialty is duping lonely widows into falling in love with him and then running off with their money.  An old tale but this one has quite a few twists that delivers quite a shocker a the end.  

A Bit Off The Beaten Path

         This book is two separate novels by Robert Silverberg, the well known and prolific author of many pulp yarns and science fiction stories. I reviewed Stripper a month ago and posted the review here.  I gave it five stars.  I cannot give Never An Even Break the same rating.  Here is why.  Every pulp novel, especially ones written 65 years ago, contains a good deal of risqué material.  Most of it is titillating and pushes the edge of the envelope when contrasted with the mores of the era.  That is why they were not featured in the local public library of Everytown, USA.  But Silverberg pushes the envelope to the edge and then jumps off the cliff.  The result is a crash and burn that, without the boorish and sick sex scenes, would have warranted five stars.  Let me explain.  

        Meet Harry Fletcher, a mundane accountant, living with his equally mundane wife and two teenage children in a suburban (or maybe Queens) apartment around New York City.  The novel has four sub-plots playing out at the same time.  First, we have poor Harry.  A schlub.  Hard working, low earning, boring, unappreciated.  In a word, anonymous.  Think Mad Men on the cheap.  But by happenstance, the urge for lust captures him in the form of Della, a gold-digging hussy who entraps him in her sexual charms and starts draining him financially, penny by penny.  Silverberg paints quite a devastating cent by cent descent into financial slavery.  The meals go from $3 to $10.  The theater tickets from the back of the room to front row.  Poor Harry is like a dope addict without the means to sustain the habit as Della bleeds him dry. But wait, our hero has found a solution!  While auditing an account for a big time grocer, he discovers an accounting error.  Or is it?  It's not a mistake but a clever scam devised by the son in law of the company founder, one Ed Ryan.  Rather than doing the right thing and reporting it to the founder, Harry blackmails Ed.  $50 bucks a week to keep his mouth shut.  As expected with Della, the extra cash keeps her going for a few weeks and she cannot help become suspicious of Harry's recent generosity so she does what every kept tramp does so well:  ups the ante.  That puts poor Harry with his back to the wall as he has a family at home whom he must support.  Like every successful blackmailer, he approaches Ed and bumps up the price for his silence. Now it is $100 a week.  But Ed is no fool and knows this will never end well.  

        Meet Marge Fletcher, Harry's equally downtrodden and boring wife.  While Harry is at work every day, Marge is, on the surface, a sort of Edith Bunker like housewife without the humor.  She is bored. Her sex life with Harry is almost non-existent.  To the extent it does exist, it is more akin to conforming to societal expectations once a month to at least pretend to have the trappings of a real marriage.  More monotony than pleasure.  But as with everything else in this novel, what appears to be is not.  Twenty years ago, the good wife Marge had a lesbian fling with a fellow high schooler.  All in the past.  Or so she thought.  There is a phone call in the middle of the day.  The old flame is back.  They re-unite.  But the girlfriend finds greener pastures with a wealthy widow and decides to spend the winter island hopping with her new lover in the Caribbean.  Poor Marge is now hooked on female fleshly pleasures.  She starts frequenting lesbian bars in Manhattan and hooking up with random women and paying for it, which puts a hole in her rainy day fund at home.

          Now the children.  And here is where it goes off the edge into a land of sexual perversion that, even for the genre, is a bit uncomfortable for even a hardened reader of trash fiction.  You have Nancy and Jack, two teenagers a few years apart who share the same bedroom.  They each have a girlfriend or boyfriend and are at the experimental stage of teenage sexual exploration.  Without going into the details and there are way too many of them, Jack gets Nancy, his sister, pregnant.  Yes, you heard it right.  

           Put all this together and here is how it ends.  Marge, in a fit of depression, overdoses on sleeping pills and meets her maker.  Harry gets drunk and loses it with Della.  In a fit of rage, he kills Della in her apartment and is run over by Ed Ryan as he leaves the scene of the crime.  And Nancy?  She goes to an abortionist who rapes her before he performs the deed.  But the procedure, which I guess is what they call it these days, is botched and she dies on the table.  All these loose ends are never tied up.  The novel just ends.  

          This story would have been much more interesting if the incest angle were left out.  There is simply too much page after page detail about sexual arousal that, like pornography, becomes very boring very fast.  The Harry and Marge side stories are very well written, especially Harry's dilemma which could have been a novel all by itself if it were more developed at the end.  All in all, three and a half stars.  Your mileage may vary.

                 Queenpin by Megan Abbott

 

     A bit of a switch in the genre. Has all of the elements of a traditional pulp novel of the 1950's except the protagonists are women and it is written by a female.  Our feminine lead, whose name I cannot remember, is a young woman, who, like all noir characters, gets mixed up with the wrong crowd at an early age.  She likes the taste of danger and the allure of a fast buck.  But she puts her trust in the wrong people and it all goes downhill from there.  The ending has a nice twist.  Worth reading.

 I watched Detour last night.  I last saw it about ten years ago.  Well worth seeing again.  The film is about an hour long but packs a wallop.  The story is told in flashback format.  Tom Neal plays Al Roberts, a struggling piano player who is in love with barroom singer Sue Harvey.  For reasons that are unclear, probably because she wants to ditch our poor friend Al, Sue heads to LA sans Al, to start over and make it big.  Al, smitten about her, decides to hitchhike from New York to LA to re-unite with her.  Or so he hopes.  In true noir fashion the fun, or trouble, begins.  Al hitches a ride somewhere in Arizona with a fast talking con man who is on his way to LA.  Al drives for a bit as our hustler falls asleep.  A long sleep it is as he has a heart attach and dies.  Poor Al panics and thinking the cops will never believe the truth, steals the con man's identity and money and drives his car to California.  Al is beset with uncertainty and confusion. He stops for gas and sees a hitchhiker, Ann Savage, and offers her a ride. His moral uncertainty is now replaced with fear.  Savage plays the femme fatale to perfection.  Slowly, Al gets deeper and deeper into her web of deceit and blackmail.  It does not end well for Savage but our  noirish hero ends up broken spiritually and financially.  The film touches all the noir bases:  a decent man who is morally conflicted, an evil woman who pushes him in the wrong direction, and an ending that is anything but happy.  

  

 Stripper is one of those books/stories whose cover you look at and jump in with low expectations.  They used to call it trash fiction.  One of those thin paperbacks you bought in the back of variety store and felt guilty as you coughed up the ten cents from a cashier who reminded you of your grandfather.  Most of them rate a 2/5 stars if that.  Not Stripper.  Robert Silverberg has told a tale that captures the genre to perfection and then some.  Diana is a stripper/call girl who works at a club in Philadelphia for an organized crime syndicate.  She dances and then hooks up with, well, just about anyone:  customers, bosses, and bosses' bosses.  Therein lies the trouble and quite a turn paging plot.  The end is quite a shocker.