BusterStronghart@Gmail.com


Gloria called to let me know that Brownie died about three weeks ago. I had no contact with him at all since I sold the business.

Basil wrote back:

Dear Mike:

That is sad to hear Mike. He was a unique. Thomas Mann would have called him a Delectable Mountain.

Dear Bas:

Well, Basil, you're right. But he was such a pain to deal with--he wanted so much of my attention, he constantly complained about the other workers, he tried to be such a goody two shoes--and really wasn't, he wasted so much of my time, took so much of my energy; his fingernails were always too long and dirty. He often left shaving cream around his earlobes. He was a manic-depressive and sometimes I worried that I would find that he had hanged himself in the cellar from the hot water pipes; he sometimes used the two-way mirror to ogle young girls.....it was hard for me to appreciate his uniqueness...but as my dear Mother constantly reminded me, de mortuis nil nisi bonum and so--

He had an amazing memory; he could remember the costs and selling prices of every item in the business. Not only that but also he could remember which wholesaler was cheaper on each item and further than that he could also remember what it cost last year and what we sold it for. This was especially important when gifts were a major part of our business.


He could recite all the parts of speech, including the most esoteric, some of which run of the mill grammar teachers had never heard. He could also recite all the states in alphabetical order, and then repeat it in reverse alphabetical order pronouncing the name of each state backward.

If asked he would drive people home in the worst of driving weather, and would offer to do so without being asked.

His mother had run a candy-news stand on the corner of Moore Street. They kept their stock in our cellar. (By the way, that cellar held the ovens in which Levy's Rye Bread was first baked)

Brownie was a big, strong boy who toted cases of soda up and down the stairs for his mother to whom he was overly attached. It was she who sold the Charlotte Russes that were kept in a glass box with two shelves, precariously balanced on top of a huge tub filled with ice and soda bottles. Of course, my father would never let my sister or me taste one. In his eyes their sterility was suspect.

At first, my father used Brownie to drive into NYC to pick up and deliver cosmetics that we were diverting to or trading.* Somehow, Brownie insinuated himself into a more formalized employment by my father--that was long before I was even a teen-ager

During the Korean War while on leave after Basic Training he stabbed his girlfriend, which made the front page of the New York Mirror. My father's friend Bill Kleinman (Leo Freedman's close friend too) defended him and he received a suspended sentence. **

In retrospect, I think, that after himself, and maybe even before himself, he was truly dedicated to my business.

I know that there was nothing Brownie wouldn't have done for me, had I asked him. I just couldn't stand to get close enough to him to ask.

mek

* It was Brownie who brought Willie the Red onto the scene--another sui generis if there ever was one. Willie hung out on the street corner, and when Brownie needed someone to sit in the car when he went into Manhattan on a delivery he could always find Willie. But more about Willie another time.

**Colonel Bill Kleinman had been, before the War, the Assistant District Attorney who prosecuted an acquantaince of Dad's who was Sid Luckman’s father, a gambler, for a murder which occurred at a craps game in the back of a garage on the corner of Moore and Bogart Streets. Mysteriously, the open and shut case against Luckman went down the drain when several witnesses took long vacations in Miami.

Several years later, Jack Nelson ran Lady Beth Ice Cream out of the garage, presumably after swabbing the blood from the floor.




mek

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com


"Kaput"
Curzio Malaparte

St Eve:

I am working my way into "Kaput."

You and the blurb writers describe it as a hellish description of the Eastern Front, and the depravity of man.

Although I am not far in, perhaps 60 pages, I am reading a master of description. Sights, smells, the deep Finnish forest, the endless lake, night and dawn--a master. There has been only a hint of what is to come, and because of my recognition of Malaparte's extraordinary power I am afraid.

Why is it that I shrink from artistic renderings of horrors, as in film or books, but at the same time I feel that in reality I would have little difficulty in living through them?

I know I have asked this question before; but why is that I might cry at a sentimental commercial but not at the side of an accident victim or a homeless woman?

mek