Reading To Grandpa

Grandpa Tom was my maternal grandfather. He was a steely eyed, quarter-blood-Cherokee who’d worked for the Wichita Falls daily newspaper all his life. 

I don’t remember grandpa Tom much before I was six-years-old, when we visited Texas for the summer. He had a favorite chair by the window where he would sit for hours. He had been ill, we children were told, so please be quiet around your grandpa. 

Every morning, mom used to hand me the newspaper and tell me to go over and read to my grandpa. “Show your grandpa how good you can read,” she’d urge. 

“The whole thing?” I’d complain. At first I was a little afraid of grandpa Tom, him being ill and so quiet and stern looking. He used to stare off into space and work his jaws as if he were eating. His fingernails were stained from the printer’s ink, too, which somehow I found upsetting. 

“No, honey,” my mom would reply sweetly, “just read to him until he falls asleep.” 

He fell asleep in his chair all the time. Later I learned that grandpa Tom had been recovering from the first of his many strokes at the time. While we stayed there that summer, I read to him every day, sitting on the leather ottoman at his feet, as he listened quietly and stroked an orange cat who slept in his lap. 

Eventually I forgot my fear and we became friends, grandpa and I. He’d smile crookedly with anticipation in the morning when I came to him with the newspaper.

Later, with great solemnity, he gave me an old, ivory-handled pen knife. “For you,” he sputtered, placing it in my hand. His words were terribly slurred from the stroke. “Don-don-don’t forget… to clean it.”

One day, I put the newspaper down when I thought he was asleep and I started reading to him from one of the books I’d brought with me from California. (Not sure if I could get books in Texas, I’d stuffed my suitcase full of them. “Whataya got in here?” my dad asked as he packed the car for the trip. “Rocks?”) 

What I read to grandpa that day wasn’t a rock. It was James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl. 

“Good!” grandpa said, startling me. I didn’t know he was awake. “More, please,” he added.

All that summer we laughed together at the adventures and misadventures of young James, while we hated and feared the cruel aunts Spiker and Sponge. When Spiker and Sponge deliciously got what they deserved and were crushed by the giant peach, grandpa laughed so hard he upset the cat, tumbling it to the floor with a squealing meow. Grandpa found the story very funny, laughed all the time, which surprised me somehow, and my mother thought was suspicious.

“What are you guys doing in there? Rusty? Dad?” she called. 

“Just reading,” we’d call back, laughing, but it was more than that. 

We were in another world together.  

   “And James Henry Trotter, who once, if you remember, had been the saddest and loneliest boy that you could find, now had all the friends and playmates in the world.”

Ah, Dahl, you magnificent bastard!

"Here You Have Time To Think of Your Soul"

“Here You Have Time 

To Think of Your Soul”

NYC. 1987.

Unable to find work as an animator, I was working as a messenger for Empire Messenger Service, in the Fourteenth Street office.

During a spare moment, sitting on the hard bench waiting for my turn to make a delivery, I would read. I was as much an avid reader as ever. More so perhaps, because apart from the many other benefits of reading, books were cheap and plentiful in New York. 

Almost as easy to get as drugs. 

I recall reading some of the great Russian novelists during this time, which, with their impoverished, hungry, or insane characters (sometimes all three at once), closely matched my own situation during this time. 

I know for certain I was reading Solzhenitsyn, because I used to read excerpts from his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich out loud to the other guys waiting around on the hard benches with me. 

It had started as a joke.

“Hey, Flasher! What you reading today, man?”

Did I mention my nickname at the office was Flasher?

I hope so, because I’m sick of explaining it.

“I’m not a flasher,” I’d answer. “I’m a kiwi. From New Zealand, remember? Reading a Russian. It’s about a guy in prison in Siberia.”

“No shit? We seen you reading all the time and wondered what was wrong with you. New Zealand? Where’s that?”

I explained again as best I could. It was down by Australia at the bottom of the world. 

“Oh. Australia, huh? I’ve heard of that.”

“Good book?” asked another.

“Yeah,” I replied. “You really sympathize with the guy. Shukhov’s his name. He’s in prison in Siberia, freezing and starving. 

“Ugh!” I shuddered. “Makes me cold just reading it.” 

I laughed at myself and my vanity. I thought I was cold and hungry, which was true, being a struggling artist at times I was, but Ivan Denisovich was freezing and starving. 

There’s always someone worse off, isn’t there?

“What’s he in prison for?” they asked.

I told them, then I had an inspiration. “Want to hear some?” I said.

No one said no, so I began reading aloud. 

It was the part where Shukhov is waiting to be searched by the guards and is nervous about the piece of blade hidden in his mitten. It was a lucky choice to begin reading there, not just for the perfection of the writing and the tension drawing you in, but it was a good choice because most of my fellow workers had had run-ins with Authority in their lives and could empathize. Possibly they had even been searched themselves by unfriendly cops with big guns and nasty clubs. For a fact some had spent time in the jug, usually for non payment of child support or drug busts. At least, that’s what they confessed to. Certainly, like millions who’ve read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, they sympathized with Ivan Denisovich Shukhov.

“You should rejoice that you are in prison. 

Here you have time to think of your soul.” 

Ah, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, you magnificent bastard!

After that, anytime someone wanted to hear some of it, they would simply ask quietly or come and sit close by expectantly. Then I would begin reading aloud from whatever point in the book I was at. I enjoyed it immensely, the words seemed to come alive when spoken aloud and I could see the story afresh in my mind’s eye. Sometimes my audience numbered eight or ten, sometimes half that, but usually somebody was waiting around and wanted to hear it. I eventually read through One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich aloud more than three times during those winter weeks, sitting on the hard benches with my audience of fellow waiting messengers. 

Waiting for a delivery and the chance of a tip. 

Waiting for a call from a film company and the chance of a job.

 Some of my coworkers wondered at the wisdom of all this reading and suggested I join them at their various downtime occupations instead. Occupations that included buying, selling, smoking, shooting or snorting dope, gambling with dice or cards, sleeping it off in the “John” or finally just pitching the whole thing in, taking the day off and heading for a bar or strip joint way uptown. 

I went with them once. I figured I owed it to myself, as an artist, to gather human experience from every strata of the socioeconomic order. An artist must experience life! Besides, I wanted to see the strippers. It was quite a day, what I remember of it, involving about a dozen drunken, drugged up, disgruntled Empire messengers, five overworked strip club bouncers, eight cops in four cop cars, three terrified pre-op transvestite strippers and one worldweary police desk sergeant.

He let us all go after we promised never to return to his precinct.

You should have heard the strippers curse us as we left!   

“C’mon!” said my coworkers at least every other day. “Screw work! We’re off to the strip club again!”

“That’s okay, mates,” I’d reply, remembering the first time and the hateful look in the desk sergeant’s eyes. “Not today, much as I’d like to. I’ve got to work. I need the dough.”

It was a low paying job, why did I take it so seriously, they wondered? After all, the boss could go and take himself a giant flying leap! Life was short! 

“Man, where’d you say you were from? Australia? Well brother, here in New York you got to take it easy. Take it easy or you’ll wear yourself out! Sheee-it! You’ll end up with your freaking ass in a sling!”

“My what in a what?” I asked. I was still having trouble with the American accent from time to time. 

I had no understanding of an ass sling.

“Crazy Limey!” they laughed.

“I’m not a Limey,’” I protested. “I’m a kiwi."

“From New Zealand, remember?” 

The Magic Check-Out Card

So, it was agreed. 

With my mother in hospital my father needed my help. Therefore I would leave the M.O.W. immediately and start working for my father in his small animation studio.

They were sorry to see me go at the depot, they said.

But they’d get over it, they added with a laugh!

You should have seen the piss-up Uncle Pat organized for my send off! There was even a raffle with a side of beef (that fell off the back of a truck) as 1st Prize. Because of Pat’s renown, not just M.O.W. men but workers of every stripe from all over the North Shore showed up. The Poenamo Hotel public bar was packed! Ha ha! That was the night that Pat punched Ben! Oh, how I wished I’d seen that! Right in the middle of one of Ben’s racist rants, for Ben would say anything to anybody at anytime, Pat reared back and hung one on him that laid him flat! 

“I don’t care if he is the depot looney!” thundered Pat. “Nobody talks to me like that!”

Which was true. Nobody in their right mind spoke to Pat like that.

I missed it because I was in the men’s room on my hands and knees making a call to Ruth on the porcelain telephone at the time. 

“Ru-uth!” I croaked as I chundered down the line. “Ru-uuth!” 

Ye gods! How I hate to vomit. And oh! What shame I suffered, or would have suffered if I’d been sober enough to feel shame at the time. 

That would come later, Shame and its spiteful companion, Remorse. 

I’d like to be able to say that I made, at Pat’s insistence, a suitably moving farewell speech to my gathered workmates and raffle ticket holders that afternoon, but all I could do by then was drunkenly mumble incoherently and stare down at the floor, while Pat, who enjoyed speechifying, said a few words for me. I think. I can’t remember because I was as drunk as a fart by then, and had to call Ruth twice more before they finally carried me out of there!

After all, I was only eighteen. What did I know about drinking? 

Nothing, that’s what. 

Mick drove me home, so he told me later. I was passed out in the back. Our wives Ethne and Olive were waiting when we got home, very disappointed. We were all supposed to go out to dinner together, to celebrate my new career. They’d even got a babysitter, but now we couldn’t go because I was intoxicated. 

Beer, it’s not always your friend. 

After yet another call to Ruth (where did it all come from?) I collapsed into bed and thought to myself as the room spun dizzily round and round;

“I wonder what my destiny as an animator will be?” 

So I left the rough and tumble world of workingmen and the worksites to become an apprentice of film animation, working with my father in his tiny (one man) studio.

My lifelong journey as an artist had begun.

The studio was located on Anzac Ave in downtown Auckland, a little up the hill on the right in a large office building. Lounsbery-Ewing Productions dad called his studio, after his mentor and friend from his Disney days, John Lounsbery.

My dad had learned animation from this great genius of the art.*

Now though, instead of a genius of animation at his side, my dad had me.   

I began working with my father and to the surprise of us both, we enjoyed it. Not the animation part, it was no surprise that I’d enjoy that. Sure, it wasn’t easy, but I liked to draw, and was naturally persistent and patient, essential qualities in the manufacture of hand-drawn movies. I soon became obsessed with it, as all animators do. To see and hear your character think and speak onscreen is quite an intoxicating experience. An experience one never tires of!

And oh! The thrill of the rare occasions when one gets it right!  

Plus, I’d always loved cartoons. 

So I found it was fun. 

No, the surprise was not that I liked animation, the surprise was me and my dad getting along better, for since coming to New Zealand a few years before we’d always been at loggerheads. I was fourteen when we immigrated and found New Zealand strange and hostile at first. I suppose you could say that at the time I was a rebellious, awkward kind of son.

I’d left home and gotten married since then, had worked among men and learned a few things, even if I was still only eighteen-years-old. 

My father had learned a few things, too. He’d adapted to New Zealand and started a successful animation studio. He’d also lost a friend and partner, maybe when he needed her most, for my mother was desperately ill and would never recover. 

Yes, a lot can happen in a couple of years. Maybe I’d grown up a bit since leaving home, and maybe my dad had grown some too. 

After all, we never stop growing, do we?

Of course, animation was not unknown to me. Back in California as a boy I had watched my dad animate at his desk at home, flipping the drawings as he sketched up a scene. It was like watching magic. I’d stare up at him working, asking question after question until Dad showed annoyance, reminding me hadn’t I some schoolwork or reading to do?

Because, although I hardly realized it at the time, it takes powerfully intense concentration to animate with any chance of success.

(Oddly, I rarely connected my father to the wonderful magic of the Disney animated movies that he worked on, until years later when we attended a family screening of The Jungle Book at the studio prior to its national release. I was so proud when I saw my father stand upon the stage among the other gods who had created it. A beautiful moment that thankfully I was old enough to comprehend at the time… and appreciate all my life.)

 I’ve always loved to read. Even as a boy a book to me was a special thing. My father was sympathetic and he would often, when he worked for Disney and had access to the reference library at the studio, bring home a rare volume of animation art or an out-of-print edition of some movie star’s biography for me to read. He brought me books of all kinds from the studio. Books about artists, actors and comedians. Technical books about drawing and anatomy. Books about the moguls, the con-men and the hustlers of Hollywood, as well as the great artistes of the cinema.

“Thought you might enjoy this one,” he’d quietly say, as he handed me a volume on Selznick or Hitchcock or Chaplin.

“Have a look at the check-out card,” he’d add with a smile.

I’d open the book and pull the card from its little pasted-on envelope. ‘Property of Walt Disney Studios’ was printed across the top. A strange sense of excited privilege would come over me as I read the names, scrawled in soft black pencil on the stiff yellow card, of those who had previously checked-out this very book. Checked-out and signed for it as if they had been mere mortals like you or me! Clark, Davis, Johnston, Kahl, Kimball, Larson, Lounsbery, Reitherman, Thomas,** or even the boss himself, signed simply, Walt.  

The book I held became imbued with mystery and glowed with special magic for me, knowing that these giants of animation had touched it with their own hands, read it with their own eyes, spilled in it with their own coffee! 

What knowledge had they gleaned from it, I wondered? 

Had reading this book helped them to greatness? 

If I read what they read, would I learn what they had learned?

* Mr Lounsbery was one of Disney’s original Nine Old Men. My father worked at Disney from 1959 until 1967.

** The complete Nine Old Men.  

Soggy Smokes

Auckland, New Zealand, 1970

                                                              

Some things are bound to happen. Why resist? 

When I was seventeen-years-old my journey from boy to man took the inevitable, some might even say false, first steps through the doors of a pub. 

The pub I refer to was the public bar of the Poenamo Hotel. The Poe was a workingman’s pub. It was filled with laborers and lorry drivers and men who made things with their hands or with their backs. Men who built things. Men who were physical. 

Our sort of place. Just a quarter-mile from the depot, it was alluringly close. 

The depot I refer to was the Northcote Depot of the Ministry of Works. The M.O.W. was widening and extending Auckland’s Northern Motorway, from its beginning at the foot of the Harbour Bridge all the way to Tristram Ave and Sunset Road and beyond as far as Albany.

It was a man’s world of earthmoving machines, dust and hard labor. And when the workday was over, there were always a few from the depot who went to the pub to unwind or blow off a little steam. I would conservatively estimate it to be about ninety to ninety-five percent. Allowing for five to ten percent error. 

Marko, for instance, went to the pub every night, usually walking the short distance still dressed, as he was now, in his work overalls and gumboots. Marko was a terrible drinker with a big thirst, so he usually wouldn’t wait for a ride, but started walking, head down looking at his dusty boots, the minute work was over.

Tonight though, we were all getting a ride. 

Marko, David from Fiji who was called that because there was another David at the depot who wasn't from Fiji, and myself whose nickname at the time was Whitey because of my very blond hair, were waiting for Arthur. Arthur was the gang boss. He gave the orders and drove the truck.

Arthur and Tom-the-Pom pulled up in the big Bedford dump truck. “Climb aboard, boys!” called Arthur.

We climbed into the back. 

Tom-the-Pom, seated inside the spacious cab next to Arthur, turned his pasty face around and grimaced at us through the window, gesticulating obscenely and mouthing profanities. He was Arthur's little toady and perpetual echo, always sucking up to the boss. Most of the men at the depot thought him an irritating little pipsqueak, myself included. He laughed at us through the window. There was no real malice in his actions though, he was just having fun. The gang was on its way to the pub, no need for insults, he just couldn’t stop himself from any kind of show of disdain towards his inferiors, as he saw us, the lowly fools who had to ride in the back. 

It wasn’t enough for Tom-the-Pom to have got the best seat, you must be seen to have got the crappy seat.

I could see Arthur inside next to Tom-the-Pom, laughing at these antics, his shoulders shaking convulsively. It was a joke of his to say that the cab was full, with just the two of them in it, and make any other riders climb into the back, where who-knows-what kind of crud or dirt had been carried earlier. 

Truth to tell, Arthur took excellent care of the Bedford and the debris from the day was hosed off nightly, but it was hardly the ballroom of the Ritz back there. Those of us interested in trying to stay clean during the short ride to the pub simply stood up, swaying and clinging to the steel mesh that protected the cab, with our faces to the wind.

In a minute we were there, joined by other workmen spilling out onto the gravel parking lot from every type of truck and car. We hailed “G’day!” to each other and lit our smokes as we sauntered through the doors into the cool interior, past the wholesale counter with its dozing attendant (he’d be busy later, at closing time, when customers purchased their take-home supplies), and into the bustling public bar itself. 

The public bar was a large room, the side opposite the entrance through which we’d come completely glass from floor to roof. The remaining walls were papered in a swirling pattern of what appeared to be highly stylized, purple flowers. 

Wooden tables were arranged about. Jugs and half filled glasses of beer cluttered the orange tabletops. 

Every tabletop or counter surface was the same shade of orange Formica, contrasting biliously with the psychedelic purple walls.  

On the opposite side ran the bar itself, also rendered in orange Formica. Patrons crowded and elbowed their way up to be met by efficient bartenders smiling behind dewey silver spigots.

Jugs of beer by the hundreds passed over the bar. 

Behind the bar neon signs beamed hideously out, casting a freakish, circus clown glow on the expectant faces of the customers, whose calloused hands, some clean and some dirty, reached out across the orange Formica exchanging money for drink. 

Beneath their feet was a beer soaked purple carpet, dotted with black cigarette burns. I say purple, but that’s just an approximation, because it was a ghastly mosaic of truly hideous hue whose pattern, thankfully, was long ago trampled into oblivion by thirsty workers' boots. 

Orange and purple, then, was the color motif of the Poenamo Hotel public bar, a design scheme whose very biliousness guaranteed to test the intestinal fortitude of its patrons, before even a single glass of alcohol was ever consumed.

When one felt the urge after a few libations, they put down their beer, unsteadily crossed the purple carpet and pushed through the men’s room door to the urinal. It was the usual contraption, a chest-high wall of stainless steel and running water against which you peed. It was usually occupied by at least three or four other patrons, standing side by side in the peculiar spread-legged way that men do while urinating. 

Being young, it only took a couple of beers to find me headed that way. 

I entered and stepped to the urinal, where I planted my feet, unzipped my overalls, and after making sure of my aim and that everything was flowing nicely, idly scanned the graffiti-covered wall in front of me.

I’ve always been an avid reader. 

I’ll read anything my eyes fall upon. 

The wall in front of me was decorated with graffiti of every possible persuasion, some with illustrations. I read a few, laughing inwardly (which is the safest place to laugh, standing at the urinal with your dick in your hand in the men’s room of a workingman’s public bar). I casually noticed the pattern certain repeated words made against the wall. Some words and phrases were repeated a lot. And written larger.

A professional looking, carefully printed sign at eye level asked;

Please don’t throw your cigarette butts in the urinal, 

as it makes them soggy and hard to light.

There’s always a comedian, I thought, laughing inwardly again.

I looked down at the drain. 

Sure enough, it was jammed full of cigarette butts.

None of which appeared in the least bit smokable.

A Load of Undeserved Crap

   At the bell announcing lunch, I gathered up my schoolbag and hurried out of the classroom, down the hallway and through the doors outside to the open fields in the sunshine. 

   I was having another bad day at Avondale College.

   I’d only been in New Zealand a month. I’d only been at Avondale College two weeks, but I was a miserable, lonely little schoolboy. 

   I didn’t want to speak to anybody or see anybody. I was sick of their taunts and insults. I was tired of being the foreigner they all laughed at. I wanted to be by myself. Finding a secluded place on the fields at the far side of the cricket pitch, I lay down in the grass, on my stomach, and tried to read. 

   I was reading a James Bond novel. I was reading them avidly at the time, having acquired all the cheap paperback editions I could find at the bookshop of the SS Oriana. They were ridiculously cheap, marked down to three-and-six and dumped into rotating wire racks which stood twirling in front of the ship’s little bookshop. What a wonderful pleasure to read the thrilling stories in the beautiful, sun filled lounge at the stern of the Oriana. I’d sit in an oversized chair with the sun streaming through the large windows and read for hours and hours. Now and then I’d look up from the book and admire the frothing wake the huge ship left behind. 

   It stretched all the way back to the horizon. 

   Bond, James Bond. 

   How very English on this very English ship. I’ve never met a book I didn’t like and there’s always time for reading, but sometimes one is lucky enough to come across the right books at the right time. The Bond books were perfect to pass the time on the voyage. From them I was gleaning a look into the world of travel and glamour and sex. 

   Things I've found interesting ever since. 

   They were first books I ever read that were spelled in English English, by the way. You know, tyre for tire, colour for color, that kind of thing. These little things gave them great sophistication in my eyes. 

   To a reader little things can mean a lot, but I suppose, you being a reader, you knew that already. 

   Today though, it was difficult to concentrate on the book as I kept reliving the events of the past two weeks. What a mess my life was in! Ever since arriving in New Zealand, things had gone wrong. At school I was laughed at by the students and punished by the teachers. At home I confused and infuriated my parents while my younger brother and sister thought I was going cuckoo. 

  I closed the book and lay there, feeling the warmth of the sun through my clothes and on the backs of my legs. (The silly school uniform sported short pants, which looked absolutely ridiculous on me, for I was a tall, gawky kind of kid.) I lay on my stomach and cradled my head in my arm, using the Bond paperback as a pillow. I could hear the other schoolboys at play kicking a ball, shouting in fun. Closer by, I could hear the wind droning through the oleanders at the field’s edges. 

   Lying on the warm earth, listening to the boys play and the wind drone while the sun was beating down on my back, I fell asleep in the soft grass.  

   

   “Hey! Wake up! You asleep?”

   I opened my eyes. It was Hugh’s voice, coming from above. All I could see of him was a pair of black school shoes, just like mine, only scuffed and considerably smaller.

   “The bell’s gone,” said he. “Didn’t you hear it? Bloody hell! You’d better get moving, mate, if you’re going to class.”

   I scrambled to my feet. I was in a daze from the sleep and for a minute I didn’t know where I was, literally. 

   It had been a deep, black, dreamless sleep.

   “Right,” I said more to myself than to Hugh. “New Zealand. School. Avondale College.”

   “I’m not bothering with any more today,” bragged Hugh. “I’ve had enough of their crap!” He sniffed and rubbed at his nose, then pronounced, “I’m wagging school this afternoon!” I noticed he was smoking, a cigarette was dangling from the stubby, nail bitten fingers of his left hand. He raised it to his lips and puffed nervously. 

   “Yeah,” I said. “Me, too.” 

   Now, while I truly believed that I had been dealt a load of undeserved crap over the last two weeks, as Hugh had just said, when I said ‘yeah, me too’ I meant it only rhetorically. I wasn’t going to skip school. I had never skipped school in my life. 

   That was what bad boys did. 

   Bad boys also smoked and cursed and left it for others to take the blame. 

   That very morning I’d been caned for smoking in the toilets, when it had been Hugh who was smoking in there, not me. He’d handed me the cigarette while he tired his shoelaces, then he’d hidden under the sink when Mr Hamilton had suddenly appeared. 

   Mr Hamilton caught me in a room full of smoke with a cigarette in my hand, and I was caned for it. 

   Now Hugh had stopped to find out what kind of trouble he was in, if any. He’d probably stumbled upon me accidentally while crossing the playing fields on his way out. The selfish little so-and-so, I thought to myself, he couldn’t even show human compassion at the misery of others, meaning me and my misery of course, when he was the outright cause of that very misery! 

   Hugh was impressively self-centered, I thought with admiration. I’d never met anyone quite like him. 

   “Ah, I wanted to, ah, ask you how it went with Mr Hamilton,” he stammered. He gave me a worried look. “You know. You gettin’ the cane. Haha. You didn’t mention me, did you?”

   “Your name never came up.”

   “Really?” His face completely changed, now creased by a big smile. “That’s great!”

   “Hugh, believe me, nothing I could have said would have availed me,” I said and I laughed as I said it. 'Nothing you can say will avail you now.' That was exactly what Mr Hamilton had said before he caned me. 

   I think the beginning of the dark, ironic side to my sense of humor was born that day.  

   “Bloody great, mate,” said Hugh, all smiles now. “I owe you one. Well, I’m off. Cheerio!” 

   Saying that, he turned and walked away, instantly forgetting that he owed anyone anything.

The Ghost of Rusty Pliers

(Part 1)

   “This is the room where he died, sir,” intoned the butler, who stood at the threshold showing us the way. “Take care! His ghost still walks!”

   We stepped into the somber room where we were to spend the night. The Count, whom we had met earlier, had kindly agreed to put us up in his castle for a nominal fee, once the unpleasantness about the damage to his moat had been settled.

   We were temporarily stranded without transportation and therefore had accepted his offer.

   We were without transportation because I had crashed our rented Peugeot into the river Rhone. I did this while narrowly avoiding a collision with an advancing oxcart. Yes, an oxcart. Not something you see everyday where I come from and I’d panicked a little and flew off into the river. I’ve never claimed to be much of a driver. No one was hurt and my wife thought it was very funny and coincidentally provided her with more evidence that I was a dunce. She liked those moments, of which I’d presented her many over the years. Then we’d somehow, after being pulled from the river, snapped our towline and along with the oxen and oxcart and a few French villagers who’d innocently come out and tried to assist, ended up in the Count’s moat, causing not a little damage to the moat itself and flattening the nearby shrubbery on either shore. 

   It was the oxen I blame for that. But they couldn't help it. They're just dumb beasts. They’d scrambled for footing as they were being sucked into the dark swirling waters with the innocent villagers. How where they to know the water in the moat was only three feet deep? Even the next day there was a terrible smell from the shit they sprayed everywhere in their panic to escape.

   The oxen I mean, not the villagers. Spraying shit. 

   I could go on, but why bother? 

   Stuff like that happened to me all the time when I travelled. The shit was always flying!

   “Will there be anything else, sir?” asked the butler as we passed into our room.

   “Uh, no. No thanks,” I stammered. I’d never addressed a butler before.

   “I’d like a gin and tonic, if it’s not too much trouble,” said my wife. She had never addressed a butler before either, as far as I knew, but she spoke now as if she'd spoken to one every day.

   “Yes mum,” he said. “Will there be anything else?” After hearing there would not, he turned and left the room.

   “Kinda creepy, wasn’t he?” said my wife, after he’d left. 

   “Yeah,” I responded. “Do you think it’s odd that a French Count would have an English butler?”

   “Not in this country,” answered Saucy Boy. Saucy Boy is a nickname I have for my wife. I call my wife that because she’s saucy, in case you were wondering, not because she’s a boy. “Listen,” she continued. “Any country that thinks Jerry Lewis is funny has got to be a little screwy!” She paused a moment, then added, “You think there’s really a ghost?”

   “There’s no such thing as ghosts, honey,” I lied. 

   Our luggage had preceded us. It had been opened and our things, those that had survived the crashes and the oxen and the river Rhone and the moat, had been put away.

   “Put away by whom?” said Saucy Boy as she inspected the closets.

   “I don’t know,” I answered. “Maybe the butler.”

   “I don’t like people touching my underwear,” said Saucy Boy.

   “That’s not what you said last night!” I laughed.

   “You!” she exclaimed. “Don’t you ever think of anything else?”

   “Nope.”

   “What’s that?” she said suddenly, looking behind me.

   “What’s what?” I said, turning to see.

   “That.” She pointed past me.

   There, peeking out from under the massive oak dresser that stood against the wall, was what looked like the corner of a dusty old telephone book. It appeared to have been there for years, yet seemed strangely out of place.

   I went over and picked it up. I blew off the dust. It was a manuscript.

   “Hold the Beetroot,” I read aloud. “By Rusty Pliers.”

   “Nice name,” said my wife. “I’ll bet he’s a fun date. Funny title, too. Wonder what it’s about?”

   I hefted it. “It’s about two kilos, I’d guess.”

   “Smart-ass!” laughed my wife. “You don’t suppose it’s really about beetroot, do you?”

   I shrugged my shoulders. “How would I know?” I answered.

   “Reeeeead it,“ came a deep, quavering voice, seemingly from within the stony castle walls. 

   “What’d you say?” asked Saucy Boy.

   “I didn’t say nothing,” I replied, my grammar failing me in my terror.

   “Reeeeeeead it!” commanded the voice.

   “Cut the clowning, will ya?“ ordered my wife. “I’m tired and I think an ox stepped on my foot.” She leaned down and rubbed her foot.

  “Reeeeeeead it!” commanded the voice again. “It’s nooooot about beeeeetrooooot!”

   My wife and I stared at each other. Neither of us had spoken.

   "Reeeeeaaad the boooook," said the voice.

   “Who are you?” asked my wife as she looked around the room. “Show yourself!” 

   That Saucy Boy, I thought with admiration, she is afraid of nothing!

   “I am the ghost of Rusty Pliers,” intoned the voice. “The author of the book you have found. Reeeead the book!” he commanded again. “Forget the beetroooot!”

   “If it’s not about beetroot, then why did you name it that?” asked Saucy Boy.

   “Ooooh-oooooh!” the ghost wailed in tormented anguish. “Everyone asks me that! If only I’d changed the stupid title before I died! Oooooh, woe is me!”

   His anguished wailing rent my heart and I felt pity for the poor ghost.

  “Why must we read it?” asked Saucy Boy. “What’s so important about your book?” 

   “Alas!” said the ghost. “I suffer the curse of the unpublished writer. My soul clamors to be heard! Unless one person can be found who has actually read my book and enjoyed it, I am doomed to forever walk the earth as a deathless spirit. It’s my punishment for wasting my life trying to creatively express myself for the enjoyment of others.” 

   “A curse?” I asked. “You’re being punished then? By whom?”

   “Yes, a curse!” responded the ghost. “I’m being made to suffer for my sins. Aa all artists must suffer! Some of us more than others!”

   “Make yourself visible, if you can,” said Saucy Boy. “Or are you too hideous?”

   “I’m not hideous,” said the ghost defensively. “I’m a ghost!”

   To be continued…