A Rain of Frogs 

A Rain of Frogs

More stuff―in case you missed anything

Martha, the Last of the Passenger Pigeons

A lone passenger pigeon, stuffed, returned this (2010) year to Waukesha, Wisconsin, a town where I went to high school oh, so many years ago. Was she an analog for the buffalo hunters with their stacks of skulls set to bleach on the prairies? Also―a brief from Aldo Leopold. Let’s see how they come together along with―John Herald, angular and introspective, a singer and guitarist, and Martha, another wild bird, likewise gone extinct.  read more >>

Harry and the Mudman

Harry had studied the Mudman's early recordings, slowing them down to pick up the difficult passages. At the bottom of the grooves, struggling against a tidal surf of record noise, lay genius. These recordings, the Mudman's grip on history, had been made at an Alabama prison camp in the 20's. The Mudman had killed someone at a card game. With an axe handle.  read more >>

The diary of an Ohio farm wife

Winter smelled like wet wool, oatmeal and coal oil, and lungs gurgled with persistent coughs. When it snowed, the mud of the dooryard was dotted with great, plashy wet flakes, piling into drifts in a day; the brown mud seeped up as the coal smoke seeped down. Wind-blown snow exposed striations of white, black, and brown eddying in the gritty film that covered all outdoors. Soot clotted on the snow, the walls, the curtains, and in the lungs. Two kitchens and four stoves—the soot and ash filtered into every room of the house.  read more >>

McMuckle makes a Minyan

The singing fish was an amazement.

Ivor McMuckle, a song plugger, has been summoned to Hyperion II, planet of the Last Diaspora, where all faiths mingle in a shared state of abject poverty. He sells off shares in excess of 120 percent of a bad, really bad, pop tune. His client, Maven Lipchutz, a lounge pianist with a dream, is not beyond a little interspecies hanky-panky: the Maven's light o' love, Heidi, is a singing fish. Final judgment devolves upon a Higher Power, said Higher Power being among the company of the conned.  read more >>

Scrotum, a wrinkled old retainer

I get fired and meet a bear.

It was the usual workday. I arrived at the radio station, plumped the book bag with my lunch, Maalox and humorous magazines on the control room table next to the Associated Press computer station, and headed to the coffee service. My name is Robert Hunter, professionally Rob Hunter, except for a year in the late 1960’s when I was Tom Mitchell, a house name. WSAR in Fall River, Massachusetts had bought a jingle package and, before it arrived, Tom departed. I became Tom.  read more >>

Miss Sweet Potato Pie

I meet the Muse. She expounds upon ancient astronauts and parking meters

The dog, a border collie, was waiting by the parking meter. She was staring at a spot in the sky, somewhere above the heat exchanger on the roof of the Pick N Pay supermarket. She threw back her head for a lonesome shivering howl, a primal coyote crying down blood from the moon.  read more >>

3 Days with Claudette Colbert

The single rose in the bud vase made everything else look incredibly tacky.

John Malkovich, Meryl Streep, Keir Dullea and Kelly McGillis hadn't rated this treatment. They had put up with the accumulated crud just like we did. This time we were getting a visit from a real star, from when there were stars. Claudette Colbert.  read more >>

Loose Lips Sink Ships

Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without

As a five-year-old in World War II, I never realized that we were doing without. This was normality—life’s necessities were rationed. We did a lot of things for the war effort. In retrospect, I realize the civilian activities were aimed more at building home front morale than defeating the Axis powers. We saved string in big balls. We saved tinfoil in big balls. We saved bacon fat in big cans. We planted a Victory Garden to supply the family with fresh vegetables so the troops could enjoy canned and dehydrated vegetables. Yummy! There were scrap drives, bond drives, us kids bought Postal Savings Stamps at school. When our little books were filled, we got a U.S. bond.   read more >>

That Old-tyme Religion

The Fata Morgana, Lady of the Wild Things, Queen of Heaven, etc., etc.

The goddess got a far-away look in her eyes. She searched the middle distance, a shepherdess seeking lost innocence. Wrist to brow she felt for a fainting couch with her spare hand. “All events that will or would ever occur in each and every universe or imaginable universe from the innards of the dust mote to the googolplex of stars have already happened. All and at once at the moment of creation.” She leaned backwards, then fell down. “Shit! There should have been a velvet couch.”  read more >>

Play it (again), Sam

Murray Burnett, Humphrey Bogart, and the Warren Commisssion

That Casablanca might be available for consultation as a spirit-channel from the Great Hereafter, I did not guess. But, wait! It had in its day been intended as an ad hoc guide to the dilemma of an isolationist America. Lucky Lindy loved the Fuehrer. Errol Flynn loved Hitler by most accounts. But then, no one took Flynn overly seriously―his premier accomplishment was playing "You are My Sunshine" on a piano with his penis, a party stunt.  read more >>

Basil Rathbone and Robert Sheckley

The elegant gentleman in the announce booth finished his reading, stretched, and collated his discarded pages back into an impeccable order. The year was 1966 and they still blew up the Bullwinkle and Underdog balloons for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade two cross-town blocks away along Central Park West. John Lennon yet flourished and Strawberry Fields was still called The Sheep Meadow. The actor looked up, as if for approval. “I wonder what the hell that was all about,” Basil Rathbone said. Well into his seventies his voice had the ring of authority. He kept supple practicing fencing moves in Central Park; it was just that cold reads were not his cup of chamomile. The program being recorded was “Beyond the Green Door,” a radio series written―mostly―by Robert Sheckley.  read more >>

Why William Powell?

If somebody bites you on the ass it means they are thinking of you, says The Thin Man.

Libby Pease is my favorite person out of all of Willipaq County—an evocation of the usually broke and always hopeful denizens of, perhaps, just perhaps, Washington County, Maine—living free and wild in their very own Yoknapatawpha. The Libby tales became a triptych and she picked up a spiritual counselor, a 400-year-old medicine man. Ah, but Libby's interlocutors, even as Doctor Who's companions, had to start somewhere. William Powell was the first choice. The Carnegie Repertory Cinema—three floors down under Carnegie Hall where the subway (57th St. Station, a loop on the Q line) passed by on the far side of plush-covered walls—ran all the Thin Man movies back-to-back one weekend a month. The big sliver faces and the discrete drapery of Myrna Loy’s shimmering dressing gowns got me hooked on the Thin Man and Myrna Loy.  read more >>

The Death of James A. Garfield

Your honor, I admit to the shooting of the president, but not the killing...

You probably picked up this tale expecting one of those conspiracy theory tell-alls. I mean from the title and all. Nope. In the middle of the Twentieth Century mysterious things were still reported in the Southern Highlands. However, in real life, hauntings, hexings and supernatural doings were as strange to the post-bellum South as pit barbecue, Winn-Dixie, Dr. Pepper and Royal Crown Cola were familiar. Well, there was this one item about an exploding deer that got buried in the back pages.  read more >>

James A. Garfield backstories

Postwar USA, and I had my first set of new tires in four years...

Raw pork—schlach—is an old Milwaukee delicacy. Or was until after the All-Star Game when half the parishioners of St. Stanislaus got wiped out by toxoplasmosis from contaminated pork. That was July 8th of last year, 1947, a Tuesday to allow travel time over an extended 4th of July weekend. Joe DiMaggio of the Yankees was in the outfield along with Ted Williams from the Boston Red Sox. One hell of a game—Ed and I listened to it on the radio at the Antlers bar—the American League took it 2-1. The St. Stanislaus church picnics were always held during the All-Star break. Six hundred died, but Joe DiMaggio escaped the stain of blame and the buffet caught the rap.  read more >>

Judge Crater's First Miracle

Your chastity is safe with me, I am a Democrat.

“‘Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not.’ James 4:2,” said the man in the doorway. “The Bible is a almanac of failed good intentions, Sister. You can help me; I am asking. Here, accept this as a further token of my sincerity.” The visitor produced a large fruit basket, beribboned and covered with cellophane, of the kind often left by a well-wisher in a stateroom of a great ocean liner.   read more >>

Judge Crater's Second Miracle

You have been out of things. In... limbo? Heaven, hell?

“A gray place with vapors. Rather like a hot springs health spa. But without the health. No whole grains and celery tonic. No colonics, upper or otherwise, I fear—high or low. Not much fun, in short. But I am certainly revivified. I don't feel a day over forty-one. That is the age at which I died. I was garroted and stabbed by a pair of burly policemen and buried in Brooklyn. Coney Island, under the boardwalk.”   read more >>

Necrophilia Jones (Judge Crater #3)

Tammany. I was as corrupt as any of the 'em. More than most.

“She lured me to my death. Dear Necrophilia Jones—she was such a cozy little piece. I was smitten; what could I do but follow the call of the glands. I allowed myself to be murdered. Anything else would have been unfeeling, insensible. That's French. Nekki was a dancer in the Roxy chorus, a showgirl. Breasts like a renaissance whore, tight blonde curls. What we called a flapper in those days. A veritable heart-stopper, sister. She had that indefinable something, a je ne sais quoi.”  read more >>

The Nooz at Newn

And I thought I would never run out of words...

A disc jockey’s life is a permanent disconnect—imagining an audience while staring ahead and counting the holes in the same Celotex wall tile over and over. The resulting numbers are always the same. Every time. Pete Myers was a friend some forty years ago. We were flat, dreaming of a world where we could be round.  read more >>

Miguel Santandrea

Murder, I wrote: a memorial for a street dealer

My old neighborhood, St. Agnes parish, was Crazy Joey Gallo's turf. You cleaned up after. One piece of litter—a candy wrapper, a cigar butt, and he'd have your guts for garters. Like kiss your ass goodbye. His mother lived over on Wyckoff Street. Not quite Brooklyn Heights, but close. The real estate speculators who hoped to cash in on the “Brooklyn Renaissance” dubbed it Boerum Hill.  read more >>

Umberto Eco and the pygmy shrew

Eco’s work is high-style SpeciFic, indeed

I had brought along a laptop and a book, Baudolino, by Umberto Eco. I trust that very little of the Eco-esque penetrated into Rice Barge Coolie. If it has—well, we learn from the masters. I once rented a video of The Name of the Rose and thoroughly relished the film version: Sean Connery as a medieval monk, William of Baskerville. Then I had to read the book. I held on to a yard sale paperback for eight years, and just finished it for the second read. Starting takes time. And I would some years later take a crack at Dan Brown's DaVinci Code; pale stuff when held up against Eco’s.  read more >>

The fastest hound dog in the State of Maine

I came from Wytopitlock, where I was living at the time, down to Mattawamkeag on the Bangor & Aroostook Railroad one day to buy myself a hound dog. Up to Wytopitlock we was having a run on long-legged rabbits then, I didn't want none of these short-legged dogs that can run all day and not move any. I wanted one with rangy pins that could get close enough to a Wytopitlock rabbit so he'd exert himself and know he was chased. The short-legged dogs we'd been using was no good at all, and I says to myself, “The Hell with that!”  read more >>

The Manticore's Tale

“Level with me. You believe I am a figment when I am only a story that got better with the telling. The telephone syndrome—travelers from the Land of Cathay chat with African merchants who talk to a Turk, the Ottoman natters to a Tatar mujhik who spills the beans to an itinerant Italian who in turn goes home with a marvelous tale of what he expected to see in the first place and tells the homefolk what they already knew. I am an article of faith. This is how legends begin. I might have begun life as a simple giraffe. But I am here with you. Now. Deal with it.”  read more >>

The Milwaukee Road

The deep winter snows turned Depot Square into an isolated plains village.

Ed Crowley was a retired brakeman from the Soo Line. Not really old as railroaders go, he was in his mid-fifties and waiting out the years to his pension working at an inside job—night telegraph operator. Ed had done some long hauling on the CB&Q—the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy, on a transfer crew riding the Northwestern tracks to Ashland, Wisconsin. Ed was crippled with arthritis that twisted his hands and wrists. Thirty years in the yards in all weather had done for Ed as a brakeman. The only parts of his hands that he was still able to articulate were the index and middle fingers before the first joint. With his wrists turned in he would yank at the patch cords and make their weights rattle in the falls, looking like a praying mantis going at its dinner.   read more >>

The year we invented rock n roll

Charles Scott King and I leaned on the bar, lost in the wonder of frozen lemonade dished out by Red Margolis, bartender at Martin's Bar, 59th and Broadway, as a substitute for whiskey sour and collins mixers. At work, across the street, Central Park was spotted with fall reds and slick, sickly silver and gray: native maples and sycamores. The year was 1962 and we all worked at the same radio station. If you accepted as an operating premise that anything west of the Hudson was camping out, the RealLemon Red Margolis concocted his whiskey sours with had made it in stages from the Caribbean to Jersey and thence Manhattan by a kind of reverse osmosis.  read more >>

Aldo and the Bristleheads

If I could choose, I guess H. V. Kaltenborn would be my bristlehead of choice. I was a kid in the 1940s and 50s, and who you hear first defines the rest as Johnny-come-latelies. Kaltenborn had those rare commodities Rush and Glenn lack: courtesy, brains and grace. I can’t help notice that through the years, the quality of bullshit has declined. There was no Fox News in 1955, television hardly at all. However, we enjoyed the blessings of Joe McCarthy, Bishop Sheen and HUAC all the same.  read more >>

A Deuce of Moose

Nunzio Calabrese did not think of himself as a bad person. He loved his mother, most black people because the insides of their mouths were so pink, and his pigeons. He flew his pigeons from a rooftop. He felt joy at their tight formations and gratitude when they returned to his lure, a scrap of red bandana flown at the end of a bamboo pole. Where a lesser man would unburden his sins at Confession or between the polished pillars of a willing woman's thighs, Nunzio partook of the freedom of the skies. He was a born killer.  read more >>

The Illuminati owe Carl .57

He spoke a mumbo-jumbo of home brew mysticism...

The day the Illuminati—secret, sinister—reentered my life Harold Junior pulled up in his rusted-out Lincoln Continental as I was checking my mail. Our mailboxes, down by the road, do double duty as street addresses too, here in rural Maine. Harold's huge domestic battle cruiser had been bought cheap and came with a titanic appetite for gas and oil. But it never had to go far, only start. And it plowed through drifts that would stall a Jeep.  read more >>

Fred Splendid, boy announcer

Mommy, mommy! It's eating the linoleum...

Fred Splendid was developed in the 1980s, a backward-glancing homage to the 1960s Chickenman (Dick Orkin) radio comedy series (He’s everywhere! He’s everywhere!). The commercials were the best part.  read more >>

The tales of onetinleg.com (free reads)

MP3 downloads released under a Creative Commons license. They're free. Copy the files as much as you want, pass 'em around. All I ask is that you don't alter the file or sell it. To download—right click “download” and select “Save Target As” or “Save Link As” depending on your browser. To preview a story just click “stream.” The audio versions of the tales from Onetinleg.com will be appearing here as studio time allows. Hint: you can stay ahead of the curve by clicking the symbol to initiate a podcast.  read more >>

St. Velcro™ and the swan (my heart belongs to Dada)

St. Velcro™ had a nagging feeling he had forgotten something. He squinted myopically. No, he had always stood here on a precipice at the banks of a wide muddy river.  read more >>

Lucy and the Mouse

Behind the poisonous wallpaper the spirit of Catherine Armstrong Hobart settled in to wait...

“Jesse Ventura,” said Lucian Hobart, known as Lucy. A cat that walked at his feet looked up questioningly. “I recall a picture of him in his wrestling getup. With a nice blond with her boobs out.” The cat was a Burmese shorthair as far as anyone could tell. She stalked small things in tall grass, ate dry kibble and was a vegetarian by choice. Sixteen mousetraps hung by strings from the handlebars of Lucy’s walker.  read more >>

3000 Beatniks Riot in Square

The happy folk singing days

Ken sang This Land is Your Land, a request from the crowd. “Just like Woody did it,” said a well-kept white-haired woman. She patted Ken on the shoulder and gave him a hug. “Good.” She introduced herself as Margie Guthrie, Woody's ex, Arlo’s mom. Quite a compliment. We packed it in and headed to the falafel parlor on MacDougal Street. With Emma passing the cigar box we made enough for falafel for five kids and three adults plus the subway fare back to Brooklyn. read more >>

Zeitgeist is the Right Geist

The baby was named Oversight. Sophie Rae Shufflebeam picked her up from a dumpster behind the Pick ‘N’ Pay. She had been shopping for olives. Presumably some young mother-to-be had evacuated her bundle of joy and was not thrilled by the prospect of returning home to inquisitive parents. The baby, Oversight, had been saved for Sophie Rae’s arrival by the dumpster’s missed pickup that week.  read more >>

Hooray for the Pulps

There once was a golden age when I was barely old enough to slip in under the tent flap and into the show. We now call it the golden age of the pulps. The pages were raggedy-edged and they were expensive. Well, twenty-five cents mostly, but they were thick. Tales of wonderment and awe, a life of adventure and romance down at the corner drug store. Good stuff.  read more >>

Tom Ashley and the Coo-coo Bird

Tom Ashley’s tremulous high tenor sang through the scratches on the Library of Congress archive disc—“The cuckoo is a pretty bird she sings as she flies / She brings us glad tidings, and she tells us no lies…” Tom was recorded in 1928, a young man with a banjo.  read more >>

How the Orange Virgin came to be

“wotthehell toujours gai I always say, there's life in the old girl yet.” ―Don Marquis’ Archy and Mehitabel  read more >>

Duct tape references in the Bible

Maine is big on signs. As I have written elsewhere in this blog, I live on a fjord, a fresh water river that connects with the sea—the Bay of Fundy, eventually the Atlantic Ocean—and turns brackish twice a day as the tidal surge backs things up just like the tenement plumbing that serenaded us in Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal basin: “Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal... As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time,” a saying attributed to C.S. Lewis of Narnia fame.  read more >>

Sylvester and Beany

The year the monarch butterflies didn't return to Maine, I went home to Brooklyn. “Something in the milkweed,” they said. With a cold winter and no milkweed to browse to keep up their strength on the long flight from Mexico, the butterflies weakened and froze, dying in their millions far from the thoughtless haciendas. Almond eyes pouchy with sleep denied by fever dreams of avarice and the night sweats of free trade, the latafundistas and tin shanty dwellers alike wondered at the deaths, but with never a thought for Maine or for me. A preoccupation with the exigencies of day-to-day survival will do that. Greed will do that. Starvation clears the mind. I was busy, too, and forgot the butterflies. They were, after all, dead.  read more >>

 

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