My Work History: Ending as It Began?

 The letters, applications, birth certificates, Degree of Indian Blood cards, Tribal Roll lists, etc., pile up every day at work.  I've got to log and scan them all!  I learned a week or so ago that I was the only person doing that job; maybe I was hearing wrong.  But Friday someone mentioned that two temps had been hired to help with the mail-ins -- and that they stopped showing up almost immediately.  I guess I'm the only one stupid -- er, man enough to handle the job.

My latest position reminds me of my very first job as dishwasher at the Bixby Cafe in Bixby, Oklahoma.  This was washing by hand -- none of those fancy dishwashin' contraptions around here.  Only occasionally did I get help from a part-time fellow who was more janitor and line cook.

I needed help, and my boss Louise Gordon kept hiring help -- that vanished quickly.  I left my day shift one Saturday, pausing long enough on my way out to say hello to the new evening-shift guys -- two big and burly Good Ol' Boys.  I fell exhausted into bed about 10:00 PM . . . and about 10:15 my father dragged me out of the sack, because the cafe had called.  Both new dishwashers had ducked out the back door about 9:30 and never came back.  So I was scraping baked-on crud from the pots and pans until about 2:00 AM.

[These guys had the gall to come back for their paychecks for their brief time at the restaurant.  Louise asked them what happened.  They said they'd never seen anything like that pile of dishes and pans and silverware, and it frightened them off.]

Another assistant was Jim Ramsey, a fellow Bixby High student who didn't know his own strength, and he was the most easy-going guy I ever met.  I hung out with him because basically, if you told him to do something, he'd do it.  "He won't be intimidated by the pile of detritus," I told myself.

He had the day shift while I had the evening, this time.  I arrived at work in time to see him yank off his damp, dirty apron, yell "THIS IS THE WORST #$@% JOB I EVER #$%! HAD!", throw the crumpled apron into Ms. Gordon's face, then storm out.  So I was alone again.

One Mark Allen Winkle, my younger brother, told me he wanted some of the "easy money" I was making, so he went to the Cafe as well.  I actually had a day off.  He shambled in that afternoon.  His legs and hips seemed to work, but his upper body sort of deflated like a balloon, and his hands hung down around his ankles.  "AAAAAUGH!  I CAN'T STAND IT!  AAAAUGH!  I CAN'T BELIEVE IT!", he said, or something to that effect, and, needless to say, he did not return.

Well, there were other fun incidents, but after nine months at the Bixby Cafe even I ran screaming into the night.  Still, I toughed out while everyone else fled.  Was that being steadfast and true, or being an idiot, though?

Inspirational Reading

 Well, with multiple books to edit, re-read, and polish up for agents, not to mention coming up with material for Patreon, the ol' blog gets neglected.  Since there come long periods when I have nothing else to do but read, I thought I'd give space to some inspirational pieces of literature.

Golden Apples of the Sun, Ray Bradbury

What can you say about Bradbury?  His prose holds more imagery and metaphor than most poetry.  It's almost too good to start off with; an aspiring writer could get a complex!  "Golden" contains famous SF like "A Sound of Thunder" and "The Fog-Horn," but only a few stories are fantasy or SF.  Don't try to hem Bradbury in with labels and genres!

 

"Empire of the Ants," H. G. Wells

Had to look at a bit of Wells as a change from Bradbury.  There's a stretch of Bradbury-like prose in the description of the Amazon and the smallness of humanity compared to it.  The new species of intelligent ant is pretty formidable.  They should have taken over by the 1960s, according to H. G.

 

"The Snow-Women," Fritz Leiber

Leiber's back story for Fafhrd, the first tale of the first Nehwon book, Swords Against Deviltry.  A long, long story, over one hundred pages, with no chapter breaks, it's rather slow going until the last quarter.  The second volume, Swords Against Death, would probably be a better introduction to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

 

"Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Thought I'd try a little classic poetry.  Creepy imagery of the Flying Dutchman-like curse of the sailor who didn't like albatrosses.  Some bits have become a little too familiar due to overexposure ("Water, water, everywhere . . .").  I didn't quite understand the need for the glosses (apparently by Coleridge himself), although I liked the references to Josephus and others to explain the type of "nature spirit" it was that the Mariner offended.

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And one full-fledged book review:

The Intruders

 

Pat Montandon

 

(New York, NY:  Coward, McCann, & Geoghegan, 1975)

 

Pat Montandon was a local TV talk show hostess in San Francisco in the late sixties.  She became a professional “party thrower” to S.F.’s rich and famous (everyone from the Great Gildersleeve to Ted Kennedy), as typified by the title of her first book, How to Be a Party Girl.  Unfortunately, her life and career went into a spin after she threw an “astrology” party, and the reader is pulled along for the ride.

 

It seems a self-important Tarot reader was displeased with Pat’s supposed rudeness (she was busy greeting her important guests and forgot to bring him a drink).  Whereupon he grandiosely put a curse upon her and her house – a rather cold, old, empty place to begin with -- in front of dozens of San Francisco VIPs.  Her problems seemed to begin after this.

 

Montandon makes her case for something supernatural haunting her – she does list strange noises, music from nowhere, cold spots, and a sense of “presence”; her dog becomes so frightened of the house she has to give him away – but much of her book seems to be a record of simple bad luck.  Someone breaks in and steals jewelry, her car is hit on the bizarrely-curved street on which she parks, fires break out in odd places, and drug addicts and pushers move in upstairs.  Those seemed to me like normal big-city risks.  In these cynical times some of her other disasters seem rather tame:  She is supposed to be on Merv Griffin but gets bumped because the British model Twiggy takes too much time.  (“I felt myself retreating into the nightmare that had surrounded me for so long.”  Get over it!)  TV Guide advertises a televised appearance as “From Party Girl to Call Girl” (implying she was a prostitute; at least she sued them for $150,000).  After this a pimply-faced teenager calls her a hooker at a book-signing party (“I continued autographing books, but everything was a blur.  I could hardly see to write my name”).

 

So what makes the book interesting?  Well, there’s the man given the pseudonym “Earl Raymond”, an uninvited guest at the astrology party who dates Pat once or twice.  He devolves into the craziest SOB on earth during one date; I remembered him thirty years after reading The Intruders in high school.  Then there is the strange death of Mary Lou Ward, Pat’s secretary and best friend.  Much of the book is devoted to this tragic event, and we are given police and coroner’s reports, yet the more details we see, the murkier, stranger, and creepier her death becomes.

 

Reading it again after thirty years, another factor set in:  The book is almost a companion piece to Robert Graysmith’s Zodiac, though the infamous serial killer is never mentioned.  Names familiar from the Zodiac case pop up here, including Herb Caen’s and David Toschi’s – Detective Toschi is almost a “guest star” in The Intruders.

 

. . . So I read Intruders yet again, pretending that Zodiac was the cause of Ms. Montandon's problems:  the mysterious fires, the threatening and obscene calls, the break-ins . . . and damn if Pat’s “disasters” didn’t mesh well with the Zodiac timeline!

 

And the crazy boyfriend “Earl Raymond” becomes even more noticeable:  a large, heavyset man, he crashed the astrology party to begin with – paralleling the Darlene Ferrin painting party.  His attempted abduction of Pat Montandon across the Bay Bridge to “Squaw Valley, where he had a cabin” is uncomfortably like the Kathleen Johns abduction.  Just who was “Earl Raymond”?

 

Why would Zodiac zero in on Pat Montandon and her cold, dark haunted house in the first place?  Remember the astrology party that seemed to spark the curse?  “I planned to have a huge round panel hanging by the entrance, with the signs of the Zodiac on it.” (p. 27)  So Z was wandering down the street and saw the big zodiac on her door . . . naturally he had to wander on in . . . practically an invite.

 

Not mentioned in the book is yet another tie to Zodiac:  Ms. Montandon was married, apparently, for two or three days, to Melvin Belli, the attorney who received at least one letter and phone call from the killer.  As I understand it, Montandon and Belli happened to be in Japan at the same time; they got a little tipsy; Belli took our heroine to a strange Japanese ceremony; the next day he announced that it was a Japanese wedding, and that he and Pat were now man and wife.  I suspect there was a major ass-whuppin’ after this, and Belli insisted it was all a joke.  Were they married or weren’t they?  Inquiring minds want to know.

 

So here it is.  The Intruders is mostly a rambling memoir of a really crappy period in Pat Montandon’s life.  Interesting in its details of a minor celebrity’s career, creepy in parts but unconvincing as a tale of the paranormal, and interesting in retrospect as a kind of sidebar to the Zodiac mythos.  Worth a read, especially if you know anything about the Zodiac case. ***

"Countdown" is Coming!

 I finally gathered together enough of my short stories to make a collection.  The provisional title is Countdown.  The theme is:  each story is as short as or shorter than the one before, for those with limited time (or attention spans).  We end up at the end with VERY short stories, so I needed well over 100 to make a full volume.  What kind of stories, you ask? Well, I reviewed them, and among other subjects in the book are:  anthropomorphic insects, a sperm whale, Sherlock Holmes (several times), the Mothman of West Virginia, cameos of Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry (unnamed, of course), Jack the Ripper (multiple times), the Pied Piper, invading aliens, werewolves, the Cthulhu Mythos, The Hook and other urban legends, the Invisible Man (a few times), a scruffy little mutt, the Giant Rat of Sumatra, the Last Man on Earth (more than once), a stag-headed Wendigo, a pre-teen dragon, and a Jabberwock.

In other words, something for everyone!

More Random Thoughts

 I've read a lot of books and stories from the early part of the 20th century. When I first read about the 1918 flu pandemic, however, it was like reading about some sort of alternate history, because none of the books or movies or old radio shows I'd seen or listened to ever mentioned this world-wide catastrophe. Did someone go back in time and prevent it?

I started revising an old story and wondered if I might update it with contemporary references, including COVID-19. I decided against it. Then I wondered if I would mention the virus in any upcoming stories I had planned -- frankly, I don't feel like it, unless I have to for a plot point. Maybe that's what happened in the media and fiction of a century ago -- after putting up with a pandemic for so long, no one wanted to remind themselves and others of it. Looks like no time travel or conspiracies are needed to dump something into the memory hole.

* * * *

I'm revising some older stuff to adapt for/upload to Amazon Kindle, so I'm re-reading books and stories for the first time in some years. "Hey! These are pretty good!" I exclaim occasionally to the empty room.

Earlier I dug up a story I wrote -- well, MANY years ago -- expecting it to be wretched, crude, dreary, overwritten, etc. It definitely needed a lot of work [on every page], but even it wasn't too bad.

I've read in writers' memoirs how they looked at some story or article they published at the beginning of their careers and gasped at how bad it was -- unable to believe any editor wanted it in the first place. I keep telling myself I should be more critical of myself and see similar flaws in my old stuff -- but I rarely do. Actually, I usually end up crying "Hey! This is pretty good!" again.

Well, I scribble and type and delete and copy, and as the days and weeks pass I slow down to a trickle, wondering if what I'm working on is worth it. I need the occasional egoboo (as older fans called it) to keep going. Glad I can find it on my shelf of Mike Winkle publications! (Yes, I have a bookshelf with nothing but magazines and books with my efforts in them. Wanna make something of it?)

Getting to Work in 2021

Started February 2021 off and running with another Patreon entry, "Gazetteer of Aanuu Part 3." Reviewing my many old notes, some written in college, I really did feel the "secondary world" I was winnowing out of old myths, legends and Greco-Roman classics was more than just a backdrop for board games, stories and novels. Was it -- REAL?!!? Maybe not, but if Plato can give us Atlantis, Herodotus Hyperborea and the Rhipaean Mountains, Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons, "Magonia, whence ships sail in the clouds," Sir John Mandeville Natumeran where "men and women . . . have heads like dogs, and they are called Cynocephales", and Pliny the Elder "the cavern which is called ‘the North Wind’s Cave’ -- the place named Ges clithron," the least I can do is put them in a gazetteer!

And as usual, I either have no urge to do anything or I try to do everything at once: for the anthology "Classic Monsters Unleashed" I'm trying for a Frankenstein and/or Phantom of the Opera story; I paused on "A Kingdom of Children" to work on a new novelette about the Gryphons of the Great Eyrie, and I finally wrote past the "hard part" of "Kingdom", which I've been leery of reaching for ten years now.

Moving my many books around out in the barn [where sadly most must remain for the foreseeable future], I'm reminded of my desire to write dictionaries/ encyclopedias/ guides to certain authors and series. I'd like to write a dictionary of the names, places, worlds and series of Andre Norton -- and for the fantasy tales of Manly Wade Wellman -- and of Lovecraft/the Cthulhu Mythos (though there are at least two of those already) and of the tales of H. G. Wells (though there's one of those out there, at least). Is that enough on my plate? I suppose. Now if I can just type everything into the computer!