Monday, March 18, 2024

Pneumatic Tubes

“WHEN A YOUNG MAN IN Manhattan writes a letter to his girl in Brooklyn, the love letter gets blown to her through a pneumatic tube–pfft–just like that.” — E.B. White, ‘Here Is New York’. The pneumatic tube system was once an essential part of New York life. Cylinders containing letters, packages, or at least in one case a live cat, were shot through tubes by air pressure, at a rate of 35 mph, and these tubes ran all over New York.Though the tubes were officially retired in 2016, as of 1998 the New York's main library was still installing new systems. And though no one gets to use them anymore, you can still see the antique pipes in the NY Humanities and Social Sciences Library. I loved going to the Rose Room's desk and submitting requests magically transported to the subterranean stacks beneath the library containing over four million books. I sat on a bench waiting for my request to be posted on the iconic arrival. Scholarship for the masses. Earlier this year I was accepted as a research scholar at The Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division. As a child I haunted the attic of my grandmother's house in Westbrook Maine. Thousands of National Geographics. I visited hundreds of faraway lands, dreaming of see them in the flesh. I have been blessed to have seen the world then and now. Oh, the glory of studying

Winchester Gun Club - Jomtien -2007

For the last months of 2007 the facade of the old Beggar's Arms in Jomtien had been undergoing renovation. The venerable Jomtien institution had been closed for the better part of a year. Someone had dropped money to resurrect the short-time bar under the guise of the Winchester Club on Soi Wat Boon.

I used to go to the Manhattan Gun Club on West 20th Street every Monday with my Dutch uncle, Howie Hermann. I worked in his diamond exchange. Guns were part of the business as were the thieves, who made them necessary. I never fired once in anger, but Howie and I popped off hundreds of rounds each week. I like 9mms best. Soft trigger and little recoil. 

Strangely many of Pattaya's elephant camps have shooting ranges and the pachyderms were freaked by the daily gunfire, figuring one day a Chinese or American tourist might go safari-hunting frenzy. For some reason I suspected that the new owners weren't installing a basement shooting range and suspected that the 'gun club' was a euphemism for activities pursued within the confines of the second-floor bedrooms.

Jamie Parker called Sunday.

"I'll buy you a few beers at the Winchester."

"It's open?"

"Yes, and they have a free buffet with ribs." Jamie knew I was a little short for cash this month and that I also had a weakness for ribs. I told my wife I was going out to get the oil changed on my bike. She rolled her eyes in disbelief, but didn't ask too many questions, since I had paid for repairs to the car.

Her accident.

My bill.

Sunday traffic had become infuriating with the influx of Bangkok weekenders in a rush to get everywhere fast and I avoided the congestion on the back road through the wetlands, reaching the Winchester within ten minutes. About thirty bikes were parked in the dirt lot.

The door was plastered with a Thai-language anti-gun sticker and a long sentence saying that shirts were required for all male customers. No tank-tops. Nothing puts me off drinking beer more than seeing some old geezers' saggy tits.

I stepped inside the bar. It was dark as midnight, except for around the bar. Girls in dresses lurked in the shadows. My eyes adjusted to the murk, yet I couldn't make out their faces. The men with them seemed pleased by this lighting arrangement, since dim lighting cuts both ways. A hand touched my shoulder. Jamie.

"Good, huh?"

"Black as a witches heart."

"And it's only 3pm." Transylvanian blood ran in his family and the New Yorker tried never to see the light of day.

"How are the ribs?"

"Good." He signaled two beers and offered a rib. It was tender and free. I went into the pool room to load up a plate. Back at the table Jamie and I talked about baseball. He was a Yankee fan and as a New Englander I hated the Bronx Bombers as much as a Tottenham Hot Spurs fanatic despised Chelsea. Our discussion was getting heated and Jamie said, "Good thing there's a 'no guns' sign on the door."

"Not like the old days." Red Sox Nation believed more in fistfights than shootings. "When I first came to Thailand the hotels and bars had signs forbidding landmines, grenades, dynamite, dogs, and durians."

"A sensible policy, especially about durians." Most farangs ran at the smell of an over-ripe durian and the stench clung to the walls too. "Smells like old baby diapers."

"I like a little durian." The Indonesians say 'when durian comes down, the skirts go up', referring to its aphrodisiacal powers. Probably a myth, since my wife never reacts amorously after eating the foul-smelling fruit.

"You can have it." Jamie was eying the girls closest to us. He was a single man with money and time on his hands. I was married with a kid and bills for school. Another beer was as far as I was going to get today, but Jamie disappeared upstairs for a test run of the new facilities.

Sean loomed out of the darkness. The Elfin Aussie was proudly wearing a Winchester Gun Club shirt and explained that he had branched out of his visa service on Soi Buakhao to become the CEO of the Winchester Club. "In other words I get to shut the door at night."

"You have a good crowd." More than two farangs was a success this low season.

"They come from everywhere. Businessmen on the way home to Ban Amphur. Golfers. Husbands seeking someplace secluded without having to get involved with a 'mia-noi'. And this is August."

"You expecting a big high season?"

"High season for 2006-7 was shit. Punters had no money and they didn't come here this summer either, but you can't tell me that they can stand a year away from here. I mean the UK is brutal for men our age."

Bald overweight single men in Britain have sex with another person once a decade. Married ones even less.

"Which is why the internet is loaded with spam for Cialis and porno."

"Sex for the home bound."

"And also fighting off baldness."

"Too late for me and here who cares." Thai girls were notoriously forgiving of a male partners' physical flaws and social faults.

"No one." My wife was equally blind to my age. I drank another beer and then pissed off for home, where my wife sniffed the tobacco on my shirt. She made no comment, but thought the worst. I could expect nothing else.

Jamie later called from the Winchester and said he was on his way to getting supremely drunk.

"It-chaa?"

"More than a little jealous." I was sober, but next time at the Winchester I would take advantage of the eternal night.

If only to celebrate Beermas.

WINCHESTER GUN CLUB - Soi Wat Boon near Jomtien Beach Road.

Hours early to late

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Plastic Plastic Everywhere 2011

Over forty years ago Jomtien Beach was a hidden paradise. The drive from Bangkok took 4-6 hours depending on the tides. The Sukhumvit road was flooded twice daily by the coming and going of the sea. The Old Roué of the Orient tells on swimming at dawn with a lovely Thai girl.


"Fish leapt from the water. It was clean as gin."

Thirty years of tourist expansion have not been kind to the Gulf of Siam.

Two days ago I had arrived in Thailand and taxied south from Bangkok to Jomtien, where my wife lived with my son, Fenway. I sat with my friends on the narrow strand of beach. The beer was cold and the islands on the horizon hovered over the sea like UFOs from Eden. The wind was gentle and holiday makers from Ban Nok frolicked in the shallow water. For many it was their first time seeing the sea. None of them noticed the thousands of plastic bags floating on the surface like desiccated jellyfish. The shoreline was a solid bunker of plastic trash.

I spent five minutes picking up flotsam. Mostly plastics bags. Within ten minutes the beach was clean.

"I don't know why you bother. Everyday. Next high tide and the trash is back." An overweight British lager lout had witnessed my Sisyphean efforts on the beach before.

"I don't care about then. I care about now," I took off my glasses. My myopia Xed out the plastic in the water, but the Brit was right. The next high tide deposited another harvest of trash. 

Once more mostly plastic bags.

Thais blame the sea-borne garbage on fishermen. They are mostly Cambodian. No one likes to blame themselves, since the real source of the plastics are 7/11s and food stalls shops along the beach. The person leave their trash on the beach, as if they city of Pattaya is paying someone to haul it to a landfill on the Moon.

The city depended on the sea.


"Remember in THE GRADUATE," said my friend Richard, who was teaching in Saudi Arabia. No bars. No booze. No women. No porno. The South African's sole form of entertainment was watching old movies. "The man saying the future was plastics."

"He was a prophet." Mark an Aussie mate detested my crusade against plastic, viewing my work as demeaning for a foreigner. He also hated the plastic. "Some Swede invented plastic bags in the early 60s. They didn't hit the UK until the 80s."

"Fish was wrapped in newspaper. Sometimes the skin would bear the headlines."

"Teenage packers at the supermarket check-out specialized in sorting the right shaped food into the bags." Mark was almost as old as me. The 60s were a different time from today.

"The Thais used banana leaves." I remember buying khao surrounded by a leaf. The cook had added spices. The rice was delicious.

"Now the stores give plastic bags for everything." Mark pointed to a passing Thai beachvendor carrying a plastic bag of fried bananas.

"A pack of gum or cigarettes." Richard loved his cigarettes.

"The Chinese pharmacist on Pattaya Tai says her customers think she is being kee-neo or cheap, if she doesn't give them a plastic bag. Food candy or chips. They want them no matter the size of the purchase."

"It's free." Mark traveled from free food bar to free for bar. His UK pension shrank with every crisis back home.

"Whenever I refuse them, the clerk regards me as if I were pian or weird."

The Thais are no different from farangs, who regard my trash discipline as that of a crazy man. "Young people think that is choice or old-fashioned."

"Young people regard us as dinosaurs. "

"And they're not wrong." Fifty-nine years old, however my aversion to plastic bags was spreading across the globe. Bhutan was the first nation to ban the eyesores. Ireland and France placed a surcharge on the bags. 90% reduction of bags entering the garbage centers in those countries. The petro-chemical companies have lost 25% of their global reach due to bans and restrictions. The USA has been slow to buck the plastic mania as Big Oil rules the nation.

"Africa is covered in plastic bags filled with shit. It's called the poor man's toilet." Richard had recently visited his family in SA. He considers nowhere his home.

"Nice image. Shit and plastic. The future is plastic shit." Mark ordered three beers for the beach boy. "Mai sow tung plastic."

The Thai beach boy brought the beers in a plastic bag, saying he only had two hands.

They were cold.

Later that evening I mentioned the ban of plastic to Fenway's mom. She thought that I was crazy.

"Not have plastic bag. Have what? Banana? You choie."

Thais throw plastic out the window and expect the trash to blow away with the wind.

Breaking this addiction to ease will take years.

Hawaii is in the middle of the Pacific. Remote and idyllic, yet millions of plastic bags wash up on the tropical beaches every day.

I don't mean to lecture.

I hated sermons.

And I don't mind picking up plastic bags.

Keeps me limber.

But one day I'd like to see none of the beach.

No, actually I'd like to see them never.

Cause that's the way of the new modern world, no matter what the the Rich want.

Twins of Ireland


Last year my older brother was my # 2 friend. My best friend was my father. The native of Maine was 89. His address was an Alzheimer hospice south of Boston. Once a month I took the Fung Wah bus to South Station and then the commuter train to Norwood. It was a ten-minute walk to his rest home. Throughout the summer his condition deteriorated to the point where he couldn't remember where he was or what he was doing there. My brothers and sisters warned that he didn't recognize him and last September I approached the re-designed doctor's house with a heavy heart. He greeted me by name. My sisters saw him 2-4 times a week. My father has no idea who they were and I asked him, "Why can't you recognizes them?"

"Because they don't look like they used to?"

"And I do?" At 58 I had my teeth and hair, but the reflection in the mirror was not me.

"No, you look like a stranger too, but something about you reminds me about your mother, so I think of Angie and then you." He shuddered at the connection. We were never friends until my mother's passage from this world in 1996. I talked a lot. She spoke more. In some ways we were the same person for him.

"You remember your son Frank?" His memory was dim as a winter candle.

"My # 1 son. You two were Irish twins." My mother had dressed her two oldest sons alike since I stopped wearing baby clothes. Frank and I fought over everything, but she also loved that people thought we were twins.

"We weren't really Irish twins." The term pertained to children born within a year. My older brother and I were separated by 13 months. Actually 59 days. He was born on April 1. I arrived the morning of May 29.

"60 days were a week back then." He was talking about the 1950s. TV was black and white. Eisenhower was the president. America was the top world power. My father pointed to the clock on his desk. Time meant nothing to most to Alzheimer patients. "You were never on time." On time for him meant to the second.

"I was never really late." My punctuality ran 15-30 minutes behind the clock, although I had achieved perfect attendance throughout five grades in grammar school. My mother had saved those awards. I have the one from 5th Grade.

"Only once and once was more than enough." "That's an old story." My father was talking about the time that I had stayed over my girlfriend's house well past midnight. Her mother was not on the premise. We were alone. The radio had been playing THE VELVET UNDERGROUND. We came close to losing our souls to ROCK AND ROLL. "If it was so old I would have forgotten it." "Forty years is a long time." Janet had been wearing her cheerleader outfit. It was football season. "Forty-five years to be exact." My father had been an electrical engineer. He had studied at MIT. Numbers and math were his expertise. "To be exact you're right on the money." The year was 1967. I was 15.

Janet's mother came home at 1:30. I had left through the backdoor with my clothes in hand. I dressed in the backyard and watched the lights go out in Janet's house. There was no yelling. I waited for a minute to see if Janet came to her bedroom window, but she was a cheerleader and not Juliet and the only breaking light was a harvest moon. My neighborhood in the Blue Hills was a good four-mile walk. Bus stopped running at 9. The houses were dark. Everyone was asleep. I heard a car coming from the opposite direction. It was my Uncle Dave. The Olds stopped at the curb. "You want a ride home?" He had been coming from the VFW bar. Uncle Dave had served in the Pacific. Three years on a destroyer. "No, I'll walk it." I was in no rush to get home. "Your mother and father know where you are?" Uncle Dave was a good man. He made no judgment of other people's kids, even if they were family. "Sort of?" It was a teenage answer. "I was a teenager once. Your dad's going to be pissed at you, if you haven't called. You sure, you don't want me to drive you home?" "I'm good." I thought about sleeping in the woods. It wasn't that cold, but that would make it even worse. "Thanks for the offer." The Olds drove off in the direction of Quincy. Uncle Dave would be home in five minutes. I figured that I had another hour to go. I was wrong. My father pulled up to me at the crossroads before the parish church. He flung open the door of the Delta 88. It hit me in the thigh. "Where have you been?" He demanded with a voice that I had never heard from him. "At a girl's house." I hadn't told my parents about Janet. My mother wanted me to be a priest. "At a girl's house." My father knew what that meant. He had six kids. "You have any idea about what your mother thought happened to you?"

"None." I hadn't been worrying about my mother or father or school, while lying next to Janet's hot flesh.

His right hand left the steering wheel in the blink of an eye. I never felt his wrist smack my face. "I didn't want to do that." Tears were wetting his eyes. "I thought something bad happened to you." "Nothing bad happened, Dad." I rubbed my face. He had never hit me before. I tasted metal in my teeth. All of them were intact. "Next time call and let us know where you are." "Yes, sir." "Let's go home. I'll handle your mother." He sighed with regret. The next morning my eyes were shadowed with black and blue. My mother was horrified as was my father. Janet cried upon seeing my face. She said that she loved me. In some ways I felt like she had become Juliet, although I was no Romeo. My father and I maintained a cautious distance throughout the remainder of my teenage years. Hitting me had scared him and at the nursing home I held his hand. I had kids now and said, "I understand why you did what you did that night." "What night?" The memory had sunk back into the fog. "Drove me home in the dark. You were always a good father." I kissed his bald head, as my older brother walked into the room. My father looked at him with doubting eyes. "It's Frank, your oldest son." "That's not Frank. He didn't look like that." My brother was wearing a suit and I thought maybe that threw off my father. I stood next to Frank. "See the resemblance." "We're were Irish twins," My brother took off his glasses. "You two were never Irish twins, except for your mother." "It was good enough for her, Dad." She had loved her children with all her heart. My father too. "Then it's good enough for me, whoever you are." He offered a hand to us both. We spoke about Irish twins three times in succession without his retaining a single word. His mind had been swept clean of the good and the bad and I was lucky enough to possess a memory of both good and bad for him. My mother wouldn't have it any other way. I was her Irish twin and that was good enough for my father too.

Erin Go Gay

Aristotle wrote in his histories that the Celtic warriors preferred homosexuality to heterosexual joining. The practice of man with man abounded amongst the Gauls and men ere deeply upset by the refusal of Romans to join them in gay orgies or one-one-ones. The Holy Roman Church quelled this freedom in favor of establishing their pedophiliac destiny over the souls of the Hibernian Isles.

Homosexuals and lesbians were put to the torch, whipped, exiled, imprisoned, and forcibly converted to heterosexuality by the wicked priests and lay brothers and nuns, however this weekend the Free State of Ireland overwhelmingly voted to legalize the union between men and men and women and women. The Church vowed to fight the law, but the new Pope doesn't have a dog in this fight.

Francis wants a new rock on which to form the new church and that foundation does not include sexual prejudice or the criminalization of woman's right to govern her own body.

Despite having received an outstanding education from the Sisters or St. Jospeh, the Xaverian Brothers, and the Jesuits, my devotion to atheism prays for the eventual destruction of the Holy Roman Church and an end to its two-thousand year old reign of terror.

In the meanwhile Sunday was a good day to be Irish.

Free to be who we want to be forever.

Saoirse go bragh.

Zroom Ferrari Zroom

My mother deteriorated rapidly in her bed at MGH. She was in the final stages of her battle with cancer. It was not a pretty fight, but her beauty remained intact to the end. On Christmas Eve my mother held my hand and said, "I'm so happy I made Christmas."

"Me too." I thought about John Wayne at the end of THE SEARCHERS and forced back my tears.

"You've been everywhere in the world. You've never been to Ireland. I'm leaving you a little money. I want you to go to Ireland and find a girl like your aunts or sisters to marry. Will you do that for me?" Her grip tightened to crack my knuckles. She knew her own strength to the measure. Her grandmother had fled the Aran Isles as a girl of twelve. Nana never went back home. The one boat trip was enough for her.

"Yes, I will." There was no refusing here, despite the incestuous nature of her last demand from her second son.

"You're a good boy." She released my hand with a sigh. "Help me with the medicine."

By medicine my mother meant her morphine drip. I hit her up good. Her tender eyes rolled into heaven and I kissed her forehead. Three weeks later she passed from this life. No one in my family contested her will and six months later I received enough money to survive four months in Ireland. My good friend Camp had arranged a rental in the far west of Galway beneath the Seven Pins of the Connemarra. The renovated school house belonged to the Guinness family. They made beer.

"So it has to be grand?" I had read about the nearest town. Clifden had fifteen pubs. The guide books said nothing about women.

"It's the Guinness'. How grand couldn't it be?" Camp was English. He lived north of New York in a valley dedicated to the pleasures of the wealthy. I trusted his taste, even if the Brit had never been to Ballyconeeley. Camp was an interior designer. Straight, but still an interior designer. They knew style.

The cottage was rented until the end of the summer and I sublet my apartment at the beginning of September. My boss at the diamond exchange wished me luck with my wife hunt.

"May you make your mother happy." Manny was a mother's boy. We all are in the end.

"I'm doing this for her. I doubt there will be any women." Most Irish women like women everywhere else left their hicktowns for big cities and the guide book had indicated that a small village could get more hickster than Ballyconeeley. It was renown for its cows.

"Better you than me." The seventy year-old jeweler was in the first stages of divorcing his second wife. "I'm done with women. But you're still a young man."

"43." My father had six kids at this age. I had none.

"43. I would cut off your right ball to be 43 again." Manny slipped me a c-note. "Save it until you have a girl to take out to dinner. A yard has to go a long way with a girl from the sticks."

The flight to Dublin was six hours. I found myself a cheap bed and breakfast on the other side of the Penny Bridge. I phoned Lord Guinness to pick up the keys for the house in the West. A taxi took me out to LOdge Park. The red-headed driver was impressed by my destination.

"I helped pay for this with all the Arthurs I bought." The gravel driveway led through a quiet park to a large Georgian mansion with a nearby Victorian shed housing a steam museum. The only word for the estate was grand.

"Arthurs?" My ear was adjusted to the accent.

"Pints of Guinness. The founder's name was Arthur."

"Right." I stored this tidbit of local lore for use at a later time and tipped the driver
His house was a palace complete with medieval tapestries and 16th Century paintings. Selling beer was a good business and I thought to myself, "If the cottage is a hundredth of this barrack, then I will be living in the lap of luxury."

Lord Guinness greeted me and we drank a glass of an excellent St. Emillion to seal our verbal agreement. After my paying the rent for three months in total the white-haired aristocrat drove me back to Dublin in a gray Ferrari from the 60s. The 250 GTE hit 120 mph on the rainy motorway. The windshield wipers worked over-time. A mansion and an Italian sports car were good omen for the cottage in the West.

"I love this car, but I'm getting too old to drive it."Nearing Dublin he slowed down to 60.

"I know what you mean." Getting in was easy. Getting out required a man-servant.

We stopped at the Shelbourne Hotel for drinks. My landlord was greeted by several of the men at the bar. He ordered the finest whiskey at the bar. My rent money paid for both rounds. It was an early night for both of us. He dropped me at my bed and breakfast and I bid him fare-well.

"Enjoy yourself. My friends have spend many summers in that house."

"You don't live there."

"No, I live at the family house."

Oh." I entered the B and B thinking how bad could it be. The man had a Ferrari.

The next morning I rode the train to Galway. A bus brought me to Clifden. A taxi finished off the journey and the female driver asked, "So you'll be staying at the schoolhouse?"

"Yes, you know it." I had great expectations.

"Ah, yes, it's a fine building." She was in her 40s. Her brogue was thick than a slab of breakfast toast. The turn indicator presaged our entering a dirt track. The uneven surface would have broken the axel of the 250 GTE. "This is it."

"I guess it is." I got out of the car and shivered in my light jacket.

The lawn was overrun by thistles and the tufts of grass wavering in a wet wind. The whitewashed house was devoid of any modern design or ancient practicality. The tall walls stood facing the west. The Atlantic lay beyond the field. The color blue matched the shreds of sky visible through the tattered clouds.

"You'll be wanting to wear a few more sweaters in the house. Cold comfort." She joined my shiver. "I went to school here. The teacher lived in the upstairs. Some people say the house is haunted. What do they know. You have a good day now?"

She drove away in the direction of Clifden. I stood and examined my home for the next three months. It was not a mansion. Part of the roof was in need of repair. A neglected graveyard lay in a bog dominated by a burnt church. The wan sun slipped into a cloud bank and the rain beat on the hard dirt. I ran inside the house. The woman had been right, It was colder within the old schoolhouse than outside. The decor of the sitting room affected the height of simplicity and the furniture might have been rummaged from the local dump. The telephone worked and there was pile of peat by the fireplace. I lit it several chunks and spotted a nearly empty bottle of whiskey on the desk.

I felt no heat from the fire and smoke was curling out of the fireplace to form a low fogbank in the sitting room.

It was no mansion. The Ferrari was back in Dublin. My fingers were losing feeling from the cold and I poured two measures of Paddy into a fruit glass grimy with fingerprints. I downed the fiery antithesis of Jamison's Malted Whiskey in one go. My body shook with displeasure.

"Cheap whiskey."

All and all it wasn't bad, because this was where my mother wanted me to be and wherever she was in the afterlife, she knew that I had obeyed the first part of her wish.

Getting to Ireland was easy.

Meeting a girl like my sisters or aunts.

That was the hard part.

There was only one way to make it easy and I finished off the bottle. It went down same as before and I wouldn't have expected anything different from a house without a Ferarri.

DIRTY OLD TOWN by the Pogues 2009

Several hundred bands will parade up 5th Avenue in New York in honor of St. Padraic. Not one of them will play DIRTY OLD TOWN. I love the Pogues and what about Spider's teeth. real stumps they are.

So for a good lift go to this URL

And if you don't like it, Go hifreann leat!