Stevie's Law

Thank you for providing me the opportunity to talk about Dashiell Hammett, or more specifically about Sam Spade or more specifically still about Stanley Spade.  It allows me, after all these years, to set the record straight.  I would like to thank the good people at the CarnarsieSouth Mall for providing the room, the coffee and the delicious, if stale, pastry. I must admit, I haven’t been at the mall in years.  In fact, I thought it had closed.

I’m sure you all remember my father, Stanley Spade, the renowned private detective.  Because of him, I had a very privileged childhood.  I got to share in the excitement that Stan, the man, generated.  He radiated energy, like a nuclear reactor set just low of too high. We could do nothing else but take that lunacy aboard. There were twelve of us included in that “we.”  “All boys and all boy”, Stanley would wisely say, although his syntax left much to be desired.  Stanley married nine women, but never strayed, as all nine of his wives lived in a single tenement on Hopkinson Avenue, in Brooklyn, New York.  His girlfriends, some jazzy gals in slinky skirts and some slinky girls in jazzy skirts, all resided in Manhattan.  Women fell all over him and he was frequently and painfully black and blue.  One bone in his left foot was broken four times.

It was well known in knowing circles in the know that Sam Spade, that cardboard cutout, was modeled after my old man.  I have Stan’s word for that, and he could no more tell a lie than could The Lone Ranger, Batman, or the CEO of AIG. The amazing thing, of course, was that while dad was a PI in the fifties, Sam Spade was kicking around in the early 30’s.  It is this sense of anticipation, and this alone, that makes Dashiell Hammett such a great writer. 

Pop, as we learned to call him, was a tall thin, willowy fellow—so thin in fact that his body refused to cast a shadow and even folks that hardly knew him would call him The Thin Man.  He always said that his thinness, and mine, was a Curse from his mother’s family, the Dains.  He was perpetually tired, with the kind of tiredness that only a man with nine wives and fifteen girlfriends can know. I don’t believe I ever saw my father without a cigarette dangling, like an impending suicide, from his lower lip.  He never lit the cigarette—a home-rolled beauty, because try as he might, he could never roll one as good.

Although he often claimed aloud to disdain them, Hismy papa carried sixteen weapons on his ninety two pound person and it was a rare treat just to watch him try to stand up.  I remember a black 38 revolver, an old fashioned 97 with cigarette lighter, and a 44 Cro-magnum with a picture of Clint Eastwood engraved on the handle.  He carried five or six steak knives in their original wooden case, an ice pick, a pair of tin knuckles and a few photos of his grandmother, Medusa, before she got her false teeth. When Pops moved in the sunlight, the shadow of each of those weapons moved ahead of him. (I really have no idea what I mean by that. Don’t dwell.)

I was his favorite son.  He would often say, “Dave, you are my favorite son.”  It made my heart swell to hear him say that, and I swear my heart would have burst had my name not been Sal.  He’d often say “Come with me now, Sid, I’ve got a case.”  I’d drop everything to come along, although 99 times out of a 100 my role was to loan him trolley fare, or to convince whatever woman had fallen insanely for him that he had indeed just been drafted by the Red Army or to sober him up and bring him home. He would have me sit in a motel room on some of these jobs, place a water glass against the wall to hear the “conversation” and write it verbatim into a small spiral notebook while he napped. He later published the notebooks in Playboy. (Can you believe I did not even get an acknowledgement). It was all worth it, however, as I was right there for his two biggest cases.

His biggest case of his early career—the recovery of a chicken salad sandwich from the Brooklyn Museum cafeteria in 1953— was duly recorded in the New York Daily News.  The sandwich had gone missing in 1951. This was before the day of incessant TV news coverage, but today I’m sure the story would have run on CNN, FOX and MSNBC, with some blistering commentary on the lack of cafeteria supervision at the museum.  It was big news in Brooklyn, as the thief turned out to be a no-account from the Bronx, with bad eating habits.

But the case this audience, if I can call the four of you an audience, would like to hear about is “The Case of the Poughkeepsie Parakeet.”  The “Maltese Falcon,” though certainly earlier, was stolen almost directly from it, and went on to win acclaim, because in some (might we say, liberal) circles, Malta is considered more exotic than Poughkeepsie. 

I remember it as if it were 40 years ago. I was in dad’s office, behind the barber chair at Frank’s shop, when that woman, Ima Liar, came walking in.  She was wearing a skin tight outfit and little else.  Her eyes were passing strange. The rest of her was merely amazing.  She was balancing a statuette on her head.  To my eye, it looked like a parakeet that had been painted black.  From the look on her face, it must have weighed a ton, as if constructed of stone, or lead, or 14k gold encrusted with jewels. (After each paragraph, the reader should feel free to add, cigarettes were rolled, liquor was consumed, and Stanley was drugged).

Ima Liar says, “Help me tail Trusty, but I can’t tell you why.”

Dad replies, “You are a liar, Ima Liar” ( I know, I know, but I couldn’t resist)

Ima Liar says, “Yes, but I can’t tell you why.”

My father had a partner by the name of Lew Spear.  Sometimes he went by name Lou Spear to throw the bad guys off. His only role, as near as I could tell, was to get knocked off early in the Parakeet case to keep the plot moving.  He was a tall, greasy fellow with a bit of a mustache on the right side of his face.  It was the rumored (the bookies had it at 8 to 1) that my dad was having an affair with Lew’s wife Lulu. The evidence was circumstantial—Lulu had four children, three girls and a boy, and had named each of them Stanley.  Lulu’s role, in the story, was to periodically show up at Dad’s office, so that he could kiss her, slap her around and tell her what a fool she was.

Lew said, leering at Ima Liar, “I’ll do it.”

Ima Liar said, leering back at Lew, “You’ll do it alright.”

They leave, with the intention of getting Lew killed.

Lulu (who looks much like Ima Liar) enters and says, “Love me Stanley.”

She gets kissed and slapped around—this time by Frank the barber. Poutingly, (wow, I am so proud of that word) she leaves.  Mr. Madrid shows up.  He is swarthy, with dyed blond hair and a weak mustache.  No one, least of all Mr. Madrid, knows what he is doing in the story. 

Mr. Madrid pulls a very, very, tiny pistol and growls, “Did you see a parakeet,” (Try growling “did you see a parakeet.” It’s not easy.  My respect for Mr. Madrid grows and grows with each growl). Stanley, quick as an arthritic cat, takes the pistol, crushes Madrid’s girly hands and says, “Everyone in Brooklyn saw the parakeet.”

The police arrive and grill Stan for 45 seconds.  If we disregard the whimpering and whining, Stan is so terribly cool.  The cops beat up Frank the barber and leave.

Lulu and some punk show up together.  From now on we will call him The Punk (TP), to distinguish him from all the other punks. They put on a short Laurel and Hardy skit replete with “after you-s” and “I insist-s.”  Mr. Madrid shows up again to fawn over TP.  My dad crushes his girly hands and takes two guns off TP. He ties TP’s hands behind his back using razor strops.  He makes out with Lulu for a while, smacks her, and sends her on her way (Poutingly? Perhaps).  He takes two more guns off TP.  A fat man shows up.  (fat man vs. thin man, get it. Oh, I hope so.) Frank, the barber, gives him a lousy haircut.  He asks about a parakeet in a language that is not English—possibly it’s Poughkeepsieese (the music swells).

My dad and I leave to see if Lew is dead yet, so we can identify the body.  He is.  Ima Liar says Trusty did it.  My dad and I glance at each other and ask silently, if either of us knows why Trusty is in the story.  The same cops show up. They grill my dad for 37 seconds.  He looks like he might crack and tell them what’s going on. Fortunately, he has no idea.  The fat man shows up again—TP too.  My dad takes two guns from TP and ties his hands behind his back with his necktie (My dad’s necktie or TP’s necktie?  Some riddles persist).

My dad visits his lawyer.   (Does anyone know why?)

The fat man, Dad, Ima Liar, TP and I have lunch at a Chinese restaurant on 98^th Street in Brownsville.  (They have great pork fried rice). They all fear that Mr. Madrid may have dropped out of the story.  My dad takes two guns from TP.    He ties TP’s hands behind his back with a napkin and longs to crush Mr. Madrid’s girlie hands. The fat man eats all the pork fried rice, smiles a lot, and tells us how happy he is to be dealing with a man like Stanley.  Stanley pouts (part of that word again) he had been looking forward to the pork fried rice.

My fortune cookie says go to Pier 34 and step on it.  A tug boat from Poughkeepsie is burning when we arrive.  A man, obviously the Captain because he is tall and weathered, gives my dad a package, just before he dies from 402 gunshot wounds to the heart.  My dad drops the damn thing and I have to go into the murky river to recover it.  I can’t find it.  He pushes me back into the (murky) water.

Mr. Madrid shows up.  Stan, tired of crushing his girly hands, throws him into the water.  There is no splash. (the music really, really swells this time)

We meet with dad’s lawyer again.  (Anything? Anyone?)

The fat man jokes. Stan takes two guns from TP and ties his hands behind his back with an elevator cable.  Ima Liar disappears.  Lulu appears munching an egg roll.  She is kissed and slapped.  The cops show up and question Stan for 23 seconds.  Ima Liar disappears again.

We all meet in the fat man’s elegant (indoor plumbing) room, at the Motel 6 on King’s Highway, in Brooklyn.  My father, Stan, tells the fat man, Mr. Madrid, and Ima Liar—who has reappeared—that he has the parakeet. He takes two pistols off TP and ties his hands behind his back using a roll of toilet paper.  Mr. Madrid keeps his girlie hands in his pockets.

Stan says, “I have it.”

The fat man says, “I’ll pay handsomely for it.”

Stan says, “We have to give the cops TP.”

Mr. Madrid and the Fat man consult for well over three seconds then say, “Okay.”

Stan calls me in.  I have the parakeet and a viral infection from my four hours in the (murky) Hudson River.  I crush Mr. Madrid’s girlie hands and take two guns from TP.  I tie his hands behind his back using Mr. Madrid.  Money changes hands.  It’s mostly quarters. The sopping parakeet statue I am holding falls apart.  It is just Papier Mache. Money changes hands again.  It’s only nickels now.

The fat man says, “damned Russian,”  then does a double take, muttering that he has no idea what a Russian is doing in the story.

The fat man and Mr. Madrid, in tandem and in tune, say, “Easy come, easy go.”

They leave arm in arm for Poughkeepsie, like characters in a Bob Hope-Bing Crosby road movie.  They get all the way to the lobby before TP shoots them both, four or five hundred times.  The cops grab TP, take two guns from him, and use TP to tie TP’s hands behind his back.

My dad says, “I love you, Ima Liar, but you’re a liar.”

Ima Liar says, “I’m a liar,”

They kiss.  (music really, really, really swells) Stan turns her over to the police, who question her for 30 seconds.  She cracks. The parakeet she has been wearing on her head falls to the motel room floor.  (God only knows the last time that floor was cleaned.) All the wealth of Poughkeepsie is uncovered, but no one is paying any attention.

The cops leave with Lulu, believing she is Ima Liar. 

In the confusion, I leave with the statuette for a fourth avenue pawn shop.

Life is good.

A Room with a View, Too.*

My aunt Edna had a room with a view of the brick wall of the small apartment building next door. She lived on the 2nd floor of a 4 story building at 1017 Hopkinson Avenue, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, and her window looked out on the bricks of 1019. Edna had gone to school long enough to know her times table through 15, the names of the all the presidents, and the capitals of the 48 states. Although she learned to revere George Washington, Abe Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, she adored Herbert Hoover. We never knew why. My aunt never told a lie—except when playing penny poker— and liked everyone but redheads. We called her Addie, as Eddie didn’t seem quite right.

Addie had six sisters and six brothers and although she never married, she didn’t lack for company as her rooms were always full of nieces and nephews. She taught them all to play poker, although her method of teaching was to encourage slow and steady progress—mostly by not explaining all the rules at once. In this way, she methodically collected our allowances, almost always in pennies, and stored them away in large Mason jars, for hard times. If you beat Addie twice she would never play poker with you again. She would move you quickly on to some more challenging game, usually Whist. Her technique made for hard thinking children and critical thinking adults. Two of my cousins went on to be household names in the world of bridge, while two others could never be convicted of the bank fraud they had so obviously perpetrated. When Addie died last year, we found 42 Mason jars full of pennies—just over a thousand dollars worth. Of course, we played poker for them. One of the bank thieves won. Did she cheat? Perhaps, but we will never know.
Addie worked her entire life in a factory that made the sleeves for long playing 78 records. She would often bring home the latest Sinatra or Tony Bennett—but without the record. She had, I believe, the largest collection of record sleeves in the country, but not a single record. She said that she could not see any point to music. I thought at the time that she might not have picked the right sense for music appreciation, but I have heard her croon “Happy Birthday,” on many occasions, and I’m forced to admit that her natural antipathy to music may not have been a bad thing. It may have, in, fact, contributed to her popularity.
But the love of Addie’s life was the mural she was continuously painting, when weather permitted, on the patch of bricks across the narrow alley from her bedroom window. I was handy and when I was 10, she had me construct from a broom handle, a device she could use to screw in paint brushes of different sizes and shapes. It wasn’t far from wall to wall, across that narrow alley, and by using my invention she could paint quite comfortably. It was always a thrill for six or seven of us to gather in her room at the very first hint of spring and listen to what she had planned for the mural that year. We’d offer our suggestions en mass, in our cacophony of high and low pitches voices, which to Addie must have sounded much like music and made as little sense.
There aren’t many occasions now when I can get together with my cousins —those at least that were the children of the fifties that grew up in Brooklyn. We are scattered across the country and the world. For most of us, explaining what we do now, or how we got to what we do now, or, I suppose who we are now would be uncomfortable, awkward even for the few of us whose lives bear scrutiny. But what can I say, “We will always have Brooklyn”, and for those of us who grew up together there and then, there is an easy comfort in each other’s company. We last met at Gloria’s house on the island. She didn’t tell us what she had planned. Gloria has more money than god has children, as they say, but she is also very lucky and has aged the way that lucky rich people do. I don’t envy Gloria that, but I do envy her the four aces, she still carries with her, that Addie dealt her in a poker game in 1958.
Gloria rented a limo to take us all to the Bowery and the New Museum—a multistory cavernous warehouse filled with the most contemporary of contemporary art. The show was entitled, “Post-graffiti: Building art in New York City.” And Addie’s mural, chipped from the building and reconstructed in the third floor gallery was clearly the highlight of the show. It turns out that New York City is using federal stimulus money to take down many of these old apartment buildings. All in all, over a thousand buildings will be removed and replaced. But as they have gone over the buildings—many of them empty for years—they have discovered a treasure trove of art work. Painted floors and walls, mosaics, abstracts and representations—a primitive, yet very urban art, that they have decided is not only worth saving, but worth exhibiting.
My cousins and I marveled at the show. We particularly liked the title for Addie’s work, “The View from My Room of New York City.” We ate at the old Chinese restaurant on 98th Street, in East Flatbush, that has survived so many changes to the neighborhood. We joked that they had probably started cooking some of the food we were eating back in fifties, when the Yankees were king and every summer lasted 100 years. Then we settled back at Gloria’s for some very serious penny poker. As always, I lost my shirt to those sharks.

*This year is the 100th anniversary of the Bloomsbury group.

I got this from the blog of a recently elected congressman from Kansas.  I believe it needs wide distribution, so I am passing it on.

Now that we, the people, have spoken and Big Government has been eliminated from these United States forever, we must turn our attention to the other problem “Bigs.”  The first that we need to tackle is Big Science.  Big Science is funded by you, the hardworking taxpayer, by Federal Agencies such as NSF and NIH.  Do common people have a vote in these Federal agencies on how their hard earned money is spent?  No, they do not. Hand-picked government employees make the decisions, based on things they learned in College! 

 It seems fair to me to ask then, “What are we getting for our money?”  A short list would include:  making monkeys into humans, stealing stem cells from screaming babies, cloning goats, trying to over warm the planet, making vaccines for diseases that only affect gay people, and all of these generically engineered foods.  Why do we need generic wheat in Kansas?  We want brand named wheat. 

It is instructive for smart hard working people to ask, “What does science promise?” Progress!  And just what is the difference between Progress and that word that is another name for the liberal, Marxist communists we oppose?  No more than three or four letters.

I believe we must consider a fundamental question, “Why should the laws of science be the same in New York City as they are in Kansas?” Lord knows, nothing else is the same.  Do you realize that sometimes it can be nighttime in Kansas while daytime in New York?  How can the laws of science explain that?  What we need is an end to Big Government funding of Big Science.  All science funding should be at the local level.  It you want to over warm New York City—fine, but we won’t stand for it in Kansas.  It is my understanding that some religious groups have had experience in managing scientific investigations.  I am trying to find out the details of this synergism, but it is difficult, as it apparently happened before computers.  But I am convinced that this is where we should start—with science as a locally funded, locally controlled, faith based initiative.

Karen and I will be moving to Northern Saskatchewan this winter.  We have already sold the house.  As many of you know, my maternal grandmother, The Enforcer, was born in London and we have qualified for Canadian citizenship.  We plan to grow things in the ground—mostly Kale—and raise goats for companionship. Kale is a useful crop, as chewing it for breakfast, lunch and dinner will give us something to do in the 10 month winter and people we have never heard of speak highly of goats.

We want you to understand that our decision had nothing to do with the recent election.  Many hours ago, we shed our remaining belief in the neo-terrorist regime of “Nikita” Obama and “Beria” Biden.  In fact, after only a few days of the kind of mild stomach problems that the emergency room was easily able to deal with using an array of psychotropic drugs, we have come to value the results of the election and to realize that who better to get us out of our current morass then the smug, self-righteous, snake oil salesmen that got us into in the first place.

Please come visit us at our new home at #476511, So Bald and So Lonely a Mountain.  June 12^th, the day before the annual black fly festival and the day after most hard frosts is supposed to be swell.

We will have an internet connection as soon as I am able to launch our first synchronous satellite.