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"When he drank-and it was often---he turned grotesque. He loved to hurt people when he was drunk, because he didn't have the guts to hurt them when he was sober. When he drank, all sorts of terrible things gushed out. He'd say anything to anybody.
The several times I returned home, with my pretty wife and my good job and my healthy, pleasant life, he was simply gone.
I think he was cremated. I don't even know where the ashes are.
Yet I saw my dad a few days ago in some pictures. It was all there: the receding hairline, the thinning hair, a peculiar thickness between ear and crown; the funny way he had of cocking his head and squinting when he listened; the awkwardness of the body, held in tightly, the body of a man never truly at ease. The slight paunch, the sloppy clothes. He is holding a child-a son-and it's hard to read much from the relative postures of the figures. There's some awkwardness there, a little tension. The kid has a pugnacious handsomeness, a wildness to him, and the father is clearly a little unsure about the whole business---he doesn't know where to stand, where to yield.
But I like to tell myself there's some love in that picture too, and, I hope, enough to build on. Because it's my dad's face all right, but it's also mine, and that's my son I'm holding."
Stephen Hunter
"Father of Darkness"
21 June 1981
November 24, 1958 - International Ballroom, Beverly Hilton Hotel
"Harry Einstein---better know as "Parkyakarkus" of old-time radio fame performed that evening.
When he finished to an ovation, emcee Art Linkletter asked the audience, "Why isn't this man on TV in prime time?" The comic reached his seat and replied, "Yeah, why aren't I?" He then turned to event producer Barry Mitkin and asked, "Was everything all right?"
At that very moment, the comic was seized by a fatal heart seizure in full view of nearly twelve hundred persons in the International Ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Hotel. "He had for a moment lurched forward," said 'Variety,' "mortally stricken with a heart attack with the crowd's applause and laughter still ringing in his ears"
Linkletter took the microphone and called out for a physician, and the stunned audience began almost hysterically shouting for doctors. Ed Wynn, seated nearby, ran to the dais, shouting, "Put his head down!" Einstein's wife, actress Thelma Leeds, rushed up from the audience and pushed nitroglycerin pills into her ashen-faced husband's mouth. Five physicians converged from all corners of the room and were at his side in seconds but could detect no pulse or respiration and, after carrying him to a narrow vestibule in back of the dais, vainly applied artificial respiration for about twenty minutes without noticeable results. In a grisly scene, City of Hope chief surgeon Alfred Goldman sliced open Einstein's chest with a pocket scalpel and with a trio of doctors took turns at massaging his heart. "Electric shocks, effected by makeshift means from a lamp's wire cord were applied directly to the heart." continued 'Variety,' "but life's spark was gone from Einstein." He was pronounced dead at 1:10AM., an hour and twenty minutes after first being stricken."
His son? Albert Brooks.
"Girl in the Deserts"
by Cully-boy Castleberry©
---------
Girl ties my heart
as the White Tanks beckon
the night is pitch
we travel in silence
our hands clasp warmly
so soft and pretty
I see her there
as she watches me closely
her nails glance in the night
my palm feels their need
Girl whispers softly
the engine now silent
she is beautiful in her mirror
she can't stop looking
so soft and pretty
the deserts take Girl
her soft laugh from the pitch
moon light
unbuckled denim
pale columns
insistence from the pitch...
"are you my lover, boy?"
...
her soft laugh again?
pale columns
a shadowed apex
so soft and pretty
we can't stop looking
"or, are you my boyfriend, Cully?"
her laughter again
soft and pretty
she whispers to her man
breath so sweet
columns, pale and warm
her pitch now mine
Girl, in the deserts
I can't stop looking
I'd be "Sadie" this time. -Sadie McKee- (1934)
I'd do it precisely as "Sadie" did.
I'd forgive "Tommy" because God tells us:
"But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive yours."
Matthew 6:15
I'd be "Mike Talman" tall, handsome, beautiful and new in that Navy peacoat. I'd stay one step ahead of that psycho bastard from Scarsdale, and send him back to hell for all the people he'd left butchered in his perverted wake.
I'd gather "Susy" and take her away from that SOB of a husband, cross into Canada and take station at that point where the Falls go over the cataracts (you know the spot). And I'd "paint" that picture for "Susy" so she could "see" it and I'd never leave her side, nor, sneer at her because she could not see.
And I'd -Wait Until Dark- every night and hold her in my arms so she'd never be afraid of it again.
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