The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,800 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 30 trips to carry that many people.
SMILEY’S DICE Adventures in Livingness
Adventures in beginnings, starting over, and rewriting a story you’ve lived many years is the same as re-writing a story. It takes the same blind courage.
About half between forty and fifty years old, you hear people say, “It’s too late to start over,” It’s not true. I hope it never feels like that when I wake up. Just thinking about it makes me run in circles. Behavioral change is essential to living a full life. In the middle of the night I woke up as if it was morning. When I looked out the window, the moon was white as a laundered tablecloth, staring back at me. It said get up and write.
I retreated to my corner of the world, a tiny room bathed a blush pink and gold, and wrote from beneath the goose down comforter. The moon watched. Now that the lights and decorations are placed in the cartons, the wrapping and ribbon tossed away, a landfill of disturbing, distressing, and terrifying global news is dumped on us. I do not understand the external world of political and international power, wealth, and motivation.
I fled that world a long time ago when I learned that men who controlled the paths of others were dangerously self-serving. I recall my father sitting on that green velvet sofa, holding the remote in one hand and watching a news program. He turned it off and said to me, “Luellen, everything that goes on is fixed; you cannot hide your head in the sand and think otherwise.” I nodded my head in understanding, while internally I thought my father was suffering from his usual psychosis. Eventually I crossed over, and forfeited my interest in politics. The forces of evil have shattered that glass of indemnity.
This year is not about vapid resolutions catering to our comfort, it is about survival. It’s about transforming behavior and habits, excesses and denial. Doing it in a group, makes us feel less traumatized. Imagine, all the thousands of people paddling the same current; forcing back the mortgage lender, relinquishing precious possessions, driving a car with a shattered windshield, wearing coats without any down feathers left, and wondering when the pink slip will arrive. Alienation and neurosis are at the root of people’s aggression and discontent. It can lead to unexpected violence, and then to massacre and war. It is a collection neurosis that grows worse every year.
The inner world, where each of us faces a truth no one else knows, is ruptured. All I can think of is bringing a little bit of light to someone you know is in darkness.
The decision was made for me, I must write no matter how
infective of my life. That’s frighting.
“Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.”
Anais Nin. 1931
Expecting snow, expecting pleasure… we are all in some range of expectation. Where you may be hunched under an umbrella waiting for the light to turn green, so you can find shelter inside a café, a shop, where someone else waits for the arrival of a friend, the death of a loved one, the offer in writing, the publication, the house to sell, the decision to resonate, the pain and suffering to subside.
I think of something my father used to say, “You made your bed, now you lie in it.” And another one, “It’s your lot in life.” I began writing Smiley’s Dice in 2002 from a desk in a Solana beach rental. Maybe in two years I’ll have a column in a newspaper or magazine, and maybe I won’t. It’s my lot: to not give up.
Santa Fe is blistery cold, the street dry and the sidewalks baking sheets of white snow. Out my window is a metallic sky that hints of more snow. This sky slows the rhythms of the body and mind; it invades the hurried motions of pedestrians, vendors and hotel staff. There is an absence of light that intercepts outward vision, so we turn inwards. I do anyway. And because I gorge myself on the emotionalism, and interior life, I have not slid into home base.
That is why it has taken me longer to launch my writing for worldly consumption. Some of us are not in a rush to wave the “I made it” flag. Some favor holding back, until the other elements of our character life are lived; our destructiveness, fear, pettiness, falsity, greed, so many steps to climb.
You and I have to trust in the pattern of our lives, the invisible thread that taunts us, teases us, and even torments us. My lot, postponed progress, maturity, development.
I was an A cup until college, without direction, a major in English, Art, and Psychology, before dropping out. My major interest was the countryside beyond Sonoma State campus walls, the roaming cows, and flock of geese over the swamps, the crooked paths winding through eucalyptus woods, the poetry pasted on bulletin boards in the coffee house, the farmers in the pasture.
“When are you going to start taking your life seriously?” My father asked this question every few years, and every few years, I lied.
I was adulterated when I was first employed at the old Gibraltar Savings & Loan on Wilshire Boulevard. I was serious about how they measured my performance, and was vicariously unconcerned with personal gratification. How excited could I be about trust deeds? I cannot even recall what I was doing; just the name of the department, the Beneficiary Demand department.
All that restrictive training, in punctuality, production, and prudence, exploded late in life. I did not discover my passionate interest in writing until I was forty.I didn’t own a home until I was forty-seven, did not stop biting my nails until I was fifty-four, did not learn to love and trust until last year.
I developed friendships late in life, now I honor a treasure chest of sterling gems that glitter from near and far. Friends that abandon tasks to listen to me talk about moving the furniture again, and consent to my absence because the victor of writing has kidnapped me.
It is a day later, the sky is unchanged; still the cloud cover is nailed to the sky. In random conversations I have heard of people’s hardships, of sacrifice and compromise during this holiday season. No more travel talk about Paris, and the Orient. No more extended vacations or extravagances. We have to give ourselves a holiday from lament, from error, and from exasperation. I tell myself not to be combative, not this year, and don’t polish the guilt and remorse, just let it fade away. Don’t open those links to real estate values, retirement funds and investments; open the link to History. Remember what the greatest generation was handed; remember soup lines, suicides, and World War II.
Mostly don’t reprimand your partner for unrealized expectations; They are most fragile to your voice and touch. The adventure in livingness is to look at your lot; and ride it with amusement and wonder.
A LITERARY AGENT I know emphasized the importance of rounding up readers. That’s not so easy when you’re exposing your own guarded family secret.
My mother married my father two years after Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel was murdered. Sitting beside Ben the night of the murder provoked an immediate response from my father; it was time to get the hell out. He promised to reform, and she agreed to marry him. One of her compromises was her religious faith. She was Irish Catholic. She stopped going to church, and she didn’t convert. It was a bitter irritation between them. My father raised us Jewish, we attended Hebrew School and went to Synagogue every Saturday morning. The complexity of being half Jewish and half Catholic surfaced, when some classmate told me I wasn’t really Jewish. I told this to my father. I still remember his answer coming at me like a round of bullets.
” That’s an idiot! It doesn’t matter if you’re half Jewish or a quarter, you’re a Jew! Don’t you ever forget it, and don’t let anyone tell you different. DO YOU HEAR ME?” To this day when people remind me that I’m not really Jewish I say,” For my father, God made an exception.”
Friends are different for men in the Mafia, and for their wives. Real friends have to be connected. You cannot trust anyone else. My mother had three friends. Marianne was married to Gus Alex a powerful political fixer in the Chicago syndicate. She had been a model like my mother. She was the stunning Grace Kelly sort of beauty with coolness much like my mother. She and my mother whispered when I was in the room.
More than any other person, Aunt Bess was beholden to my mother. She wasn’t really an aunt. Bess was Benjamin Siegel’s little sister. The one he favored over the others. I suppose Bess met my mother way before I was born, when Benjamin was alive. She had the same bedroom eyes of her brother, big hound dog eyes that swept sentiment in every glance. She had a heart too big for the turmoil in her life, and she cried about everything. She squeezed my face, and forever referred to me as her gorgeous baby. Bess was as content crying as she was laughing. There wasn’t any in between. She dressed in high heels, tailored suits and carried a hand bag with lots of tissue. She and my Nana, my mother’s mother were very close friends. Bess, her husband, and daughter lived in a house on Doheny Drive that Ben Siegel bought for her. Bess’s husband Solly never uttered a word, and worked for Ben doing odd jobs.
In later years I would live across the street from them, but by then my father had distanced Bess’s family for reasons never revealed.
How I loved to watch Miriam; a saucy brassy Italian from Brooklyn. She propped up her bosom like two statues, waved a long red lacquered nail, and smoked one cigarette after another without ever taking a breath. She shopped everyday, charged everything, and when we were in the room she did not change her act, she let us see what it was really like to be a gangsters wife. Beneath all the enamel and cosmetics she loved my mother unconditionally. Although their characters were strikingly different, they shared that bond. Miriam was married to Doc Stacher, who rose in the ranks to become enforcer for Abner “Longy” Zwillman, the boss of New Jersey. Doc walked with his hands clasped behind, a cigar stub lived on his lip, and he was bald and heavy lidded. He lived in short pants and little white sneakers. Beneath his somewhat harsh and metallic skin was a wreath of worship for Joanne. He didn’t restrict her humor, appetite, or spirit. The more outrageous her behavior the more he approved.
Mafia men make the most outrageously entertaining hosts; nothing is ever out of the question. All they have to do is pick up the phone, and someone in the network will make it happen.
Mafia men don’t get up and go to work. Not one day in his life did my father ever report to an office. When I wasn’t in school, he took me with him in the powder blue Cadillac and we drove the streets of Hollywood visiting friends in delicatessens. We sat in big leather booths while my father and the owners talked. I didn’t know what work was all about. No doubt the conversation was the rackets, the races, or Vegas. I was a very good decoy. What kind of a man takes his daughter to mob meetings? The kind that doesn’t want to look like a mob guy. My father didn’t think I was listening, but I heard a lot.
Rory Calhoun was one of the characters that stood out. He was a western movie star; the Clint Eastwood of his day. Rory was also in the same reformatory as my father as a teen. The Calhoun family and ours spent a lot of time together. They had two daughters and lived in an exotic Spanish villa on a corner of Sunset Boulevard. Inside it was like a movie set, with animal rugs, oil paintings of Spanish Troubadours and Moorish decorations. Rita, Rory’s wife, wore tiny stacked high heels and she clicked across the Spanish tiles like a flamenco dancer. The whole family was blessed with dreamy looks. I remember looking at my reflection in the mirror as Rita combed my hair, and discovering I was not at all pretty. I didn’t realize that I was surrounded with extraordinary beauty; everyone had these exceptional vogue looks. The importance placed on that kind of beauty was just as distorted.
Rita exhumed a stern feminine demeanor, extremely seductive but not without a battle. I learned my first lessons about temptation just by watching her. She fanned the room with perfume and laughter, and men just succumbed like drugged animals. I felt my first tingle of sexuality in the arms of Rory. He was a treasure of natural emotion, conversation, and jokes. They both gambled, borrowed money from the other, and bet on everything.
My mother was raised in East Orange, New Jersey, before the neighborhood changed. My grandmother always said that East Orange used to be a very nice place to live. There is a photograph of my mother at age seven or eight posing in the garden with her German Shepard. She is holding a ruffled parasol, and dressed like a doll. Her face is a bud of innocence, but with a hint of pained modesty. She didn’t flaunt her beauty; it was more of an embarrassment. When her father died suddenly, she elected to help her family financially, and entered her photograph in a Redbook magazine contest. At seventeen years old she won a modeling contract with John Robert Powers in New York City. My mother ascended to an identity that suited her in some ways and restricted her in others. The Powers girls were invited to grand openings of hotels, restaurants and nightclubs. She appeared on stage at New York’s Copacabana Night Club in 1943. On one of those nights my father was in the audience, and that was where the Smiley Casey bridge from East Orange to Hollywood began.
Sixty-four years have passed since Ben Siegel was murdered, and my father stood in the Beverly Hills police station defending his innocence. I am the link to his truth.
Last week, I received an unrecognized e-mail. It was from a relative of Mr. Robert’s; who was a friend of my father’s in Houston. I met Mr. Roberts on a business trip to Houston back in the 70’s, he pulled a royal flush in the oil business.
This relative discovered one of the Smiley’s Dice memoir columns. He wanted to share some stories with me, and so I responded I would love to hear them. A few weeks later, Susan, a former classmate from Emerson Junior High, sent me a link to a New York Times feature, “Looking For My Father in Las Vegas.” Susan suggested I read it, get inspired, and go back to my own memoir. A week later, I received two DVD’s in the mail from a man I never met. A friend had informed me this man was on a synagogue lecture circuit, and that his subject was Jews in Sing Sing Prison. He was using Ben Siegel and Meyer Lansky as models in his presentation on genealogical research.
The DVD’s went into the drawer, and only recently, I pulled one out and played it. Ben and Meyer were used as subjects to add humor to his presentation. Everyone in the audience laughed at his Siegel/Lansky anecdotes. I ejected the disk, relieved Allen Smiley was not part of the presentation.
In the middle of reinventing a new life, having placed my memoir in a trunk in a storage unit, so it will not be visible or even accessible, the memoir haunts me. A story that has to be written cannot be hidden. About a month ago, a pastor wrote to me, and related this story:
“I am pastor of a church in L. A. I have studied the mob for years. I ran across your name as I studied about your father that night on Linden Drive. I have been approached by a man who claims to have knowledge about who killed Mr. Siegel. The guy was a right-hand man of Mickey Cohen.(and claims Mickey told him). Well, I wondered if you had any preference on the theories that have been put forth. What stories you must have to tell. God Bless you and yours.”
What am I supposed to think? Did the killer confess in his church? This brings to memory another letter I received about a year ago. The name mentioned in the letter was one I had hunted for many years. Harry Freedlander was discovered back in 1995 in the pages of my father’s testimony before the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Harry was a friend to my father back home in Winnipeg. They were childhood chums. When my father stowed away to Detroit, he wrote letters to Harry who informed my grandmother of my father’s travels. A few years later, Harry joined my father in Detroit and began working in the automobile industry. I remember Harry stating to the INS officer that he was very close to Allen’s family.
When an e-mail arrived from the grandson of Harry, the letter remained on the screen for a long time. Truths revealed by government documents, informants, and books are harsh on my father. The companions, friends, and associates are the ones who give me introspection. The grandson remembered hearing stories about my dad, and he wanted to know more about his grandfather. I told him that his grandfather had testified in court to their early friendship. Harry said my father stopped corresponding after he was in Los Angeles.
Several books were released this year with references to dad. The first book arrived compliments of the author, who interviewed me in 2003. I’d forgotten all about it. In Gus Russo’s “Supermob: The Story of Sidney Korshak,” Russo referred to my father in an incident in 1988, with attorney Robert Shapiro, and a lesser know Las Vegas club owner, Gianni Russo, no relation. According to Gus, Korshack told Gianni to see my father in his penthouse apartment on Doheny Drive, after Korshack shot someone in his Vegas nightclub. This is highly impossible, since my father passed away in 1982, and had moved out of the Doheny Towers several years prior.
Throughout the year, I am jabbed, teased, and taunted by the ruminations of strangers on my dad. I feel protective of his legacy. I feel protective of Ben Siegel too. It is part of growing up with gangsters.
Last month, a man who had given me the very first insight into my father passed away. I never met Ed Becker in person. We corresponded regularly. I found my journal marking the first entry of our correspondence. Ed guided me through the labyrinth of half-truths and myths. Without his perspective, the story was all trumped-up headlines. Ed Becker was the one man I could always turn to when I was tangled up in truth. It appears growing up with gangsters is still a work-in-progress.
I was thirteen the summer I moved into my father’s apartment in The Doheny Towers. My mother just died, and my father had weird habits. I didn’t understand why suddenly I had to ‘behave like a lady.’ It seemed like yesterday that I was running with a pack of friends up and down the hallways of the Hilgard House in dripping wet swimming suits, while Mommy was barbequing hamburgers on the balcony for all of us.
My father wasn’t prepared for a teenager; I had to grow up quickly, or pretend I was grown up. I sat on my bed in my new bedroom looking at the drapes. They matched the lime green and royal blue crushed velvet bedspreads. The drapes and spreads were so heavy I could barely lift them, and when the drapes were closed, the room was so black I couldn’t see my feet. My father had the room decorated by a friend who owed him a favor. Friends were always doing us favors.
Every morning I opened the drapes, and wrapped them around my body, pressed myself against the glass, and watched the Hollywood sunrise. Some days there was a coating of thick brown paste that hung over everything. Other days, after a rainstorm, or in the aftermath of a Santa Ana wind, all the soot dispersed. The colors splashed across the Spanish tiled roofs, palm trees, the big dreamy Sunset Boulevard billboards, and the crystal sharp edges of the San Bernardino Mountains. The East was my favorite view from the 12 th floor; because I didn’t know what was out there. It got me to thinking a lot about the East. The farthest I’d been was downtown Los Angeles to the Good Samaritan Hospital.
My father ran back and forth in the apartment barking orders to house maintenance, decorators, and telephone installers. He was adjusting things–furnishings, phone lines, new locks on the door; and he was removing guarded personal items. As I observed all this preparation, he kept telling me, ‘everything’s going to be all right, he has everything in order, new phones, more hangers, food in the refrigerator.’ I had no idea how many adjustments my presence required. Thinking back now, I know he was trying to erase any evidence of gambling, or mafia activities.
My father’s apartment belonged to him as a bachelor, and we did not fit together comfortably at the dining room table because it was really a card table. The hifi ensemble was polished mahogany wood with gold leaf trim. My father liked gold; it seemed to frame everything in the house, even the silverware. I ran my fingers along the corners of his record collection to see whom he liked: Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Johnny Mercer, and Tommy Dorsey. The records were in perfect condition and I wanted to play them.
“ I spent all my life in night clubs with music–I can’t stand it in my home. You can play the stereo when I’m out.”
“When were you in nightclubs all the time?” I asked.
“What? Don’t be concerned with my life; concentrate on yours.”
From our terrace facing west, the view was organized beauty. Every thing was in squares and straight lines in Beverly Hills 90210. I liked to sit on the terrace and look out; imagining all the lives going on at once. Every time I sat down, my father asked me to come inside and do something. He didn’t like me sitting on the terrace, exposed and vulnerable. When he came in to say goodnight, he reminded me to close the drapes. The drapes pestered him all his life; ever since the night the bullets shattered the glass of Benjamin Siegel’s undraped window.
I loved my father’s shadow in the door before I went to sleep. He blew me a kiss, and said, “Sweet dreams my little girl.” He liked me being a little girl at certain times.
I came to live my father in 1966, when he was fifty-nine. He wasn’t active int he oil business, but he received royalty checks every month . He had tiny gold oil-well paperweights on his desk. When his checks came in, he showed them to me and said, “That’s royalty income from my oil wells in Texas.” I heard him talk about his friend, Lenoir Josey, who sponsored him in business. Josey died the same year I was born, but my father wanted me to know the name–Lenoir Josey. I was proud to fill in “Oil Engineer” as my father’s occupation on school applications. None of my friends had fathers in the oil business. I imagined my father was very rich.
When he left the apartment, I studied his possessions. He had a black-and- white photograph of my mother hanging on the wall above the couch. It was one of those glossy modeling photographs that she had hidden from us. My father told me it was published in the newspaper, an advertisement for Bullock’s. After inspecting my own reflection in the mirror, I considered myself adopted. At thirteen, I was flat-chested, with thick frizzy brown hair that I continually tried to straighten, long shapeless legs, and braces on my teeth. My lips quivered when I was forced to smile, and my eyes were so light that the sun bothered them. I despised the way I looked.
There was a swimming pool on the roof garden of the Doheny Towers. On the weekends, a lunch counter opened and served hot dogs and hamburgers. Every Saturday my father went up to the roof to swim, and kibbitz with the neighbors. He cheerily demanded that I join him, because he said, “I want to get to know my girl.” I think he wanted me to watch him as he entertained everyone. He told the best stories. Even tough I didn’t understand most of them–the neighbors laughed like they do on television shows when the applause sign flashes on and off. All of them sat around Allen Smiley and listened. Telling stories was my father’s favorite past time.
Two worlds in opposition: nature and neurosis. The external world, the salon, the garden, the mirrors, and the reflections of them in the mirror. The sense of unreality in the neurotic comes when he is looking at the reflections of his life, when he is not at one with it.
Anais Nin-Volume Four 1944-1947
The throw of the dice this week falls on adventures in reflection. The morning began with an ardent rose pink sunrise, threaded into a pale solemn blue sky, (even the sky has emotions) and a Chaplin breakfast, as I dutifully spooned coffee into the filter, closed it shut, pressed start, and returned to find the pot in the sink, and coffee splashed everywhere. As the first attempt to write since the Dragon series, I am unwinding with you, not at you, because you’re all closer to me than you think.
I begin late on Friday, looking out to Palace Avenue, half- lit with descending sunlight, the other bathed in asphalt gray, the solid remains of Tuesday’s snowfall. It is the hour before gallery openings, and free food at the Museum Christmas party, and the first Marcy Street Art Walk, and a wedding at La Posada. The city is drowsily, awaiting Christmas festivities, redeemed coupons at Albertsons, invitations to parties, unwanted and wanted guests from back home, the end of the year profits, what there are of them, and the ringing of the Church Bells on Christmas Eve at the St Francis Church.
My bedroom window is sketched with a cloudless blurry blue sky, and a pine tree, that drops buckets of needles onto my driveway. I am zipped into my down jacket and still have my boots on from a short walk, up Palace and down Alameda, passing by withdrawn sour tails, who looked as downtrodden as me. The artist can tolerate solitude, it is a skill we must learn, and I was born with it. That is both a blessing and a bummer, because when the party is over, I do not seek companionship, I hide.
It was a month ago, just after reading an email from Rudy, where, in paraphrase, he demanded I move out, and not ever write him again, that I got this idea. John and I were in the kitchen, beginning or ending dinner, and I felt pressed to seek escape, ‘I’m going to live on Amtrak!’ The idea blossomed over some cabernet, and we lingered there in the kitchen, while I cooked up this idea, of riding Amtrak across America, while writing about subjects I choose from a long list, and develop it into a documentary, and a book. “You’re thinking too small. You get the History Channel or the Travel Channel to finance it. You could ride all over; assuming you could live in one of those rooms,” John said. “Of course I can. I lived in 99 square feet for a year and half, with ……what’s his name. ”
Then, in the blinding morning light of reality, I realized how much effort it would take to launch, and live this idea that was born in the kitchen over a bottle of cab. We spent the day researching and looking at the bedroom suites on Amtrak. I went to sleep imagining myself on the train, and the inherent comedy that would roll out, from living in a room the size of shoe box. I watched movies about trains, and started reading Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express.
There I am on Amtrak, with a laptop and a recorder, strolling through the isles, interviewing people, and then I’m in some unfamiliar city, and hopping from one place to another, and writing in cafes and adventuring. The illusion became real, like a dream that represents reality. I do see myself on such an adventure. This is what I consumed, day and night, to cross over from the Dragon, to the mouth of recovery. My life as I knew it has been dismantled, in the way the stage is after the play has finished its run. My run with Rudy ended, and so I must sculpt new routines, learn how to do the things he used to do, avoid reading his retired loving emails, make decisions without his opinion, blink twice when I look at the furnishings, gifts, and Southern comfort that erupt into a vivid memory.
After John left; the stage was mine to decorate so that every object and corner would ooze with a stroke of serenity that my inner wrath needed. I filled the candy dishes with chocolate, and the vase with poppies and lilies, lit aromatic candles that promise to smell like the French countryside, light a fire, and keep the Christmas lights burning all day. These pacifiers have proven to lighten the burden of a malfunctioning life, but they do not sedate my wrath. The Dragon, as I refer to the Bird, has marched into my soul, and is scratching at the core of my goodness. When we are tested for resilience and self examination, then we get know who we are. I don’t like who I’ve become; she is as discontented and repellant as a young woman on the verge of puberty.
My reference is the last two years, with John and, our blossoming patch of love, that drew out the most luscious and talented gifts I possess. He has remained in the corner, my trainer, wiping the sweat and blood from my face, urging me to stand up, to fight, to dream, to rewrite the ending. But the Dragons fire lit a flame of destruction that gives rise to wasteful protests, that if one of our beams fall, our foundation cracks. The final admission howls; how can a best friend turn into an enemy. I hear the chorus; ‘it happens everyday, it’s common, that’s why we have divorce,’ and so on.
As the moon fades into a rising Sunday morning, I am perched in between, clinging to the wisdom of my posse, whom I call on for solace, for answers, for encouragement,and you readers, who keep me adventuring in writing.
I was in New York when the story was percolating and I went searching for the Macedonio Obledo. After living with one stable, loving man, and knowing enough men to distinguish the characters from the counterfeits, I realized how singular Mace lived. I wanted to know his story. I searched the Internet and discovered a Macedonio Obledo in Florida. I wrote him a letter, circumventing the possibility of a hang up or bad news.
The last time I’d seen Mace, he was sitting across from me, drawing a picture of the exotic life we’d lived together in Florida. He showed up in an older Cornice Rolls Royce dressed in a dark blue pin-stripped suit and tie. He was a lot like the early criminally chic Jean Paul Belmondo of the French new wave films.
It was twenty years since we’d love nested in Marin county. I sat very still while Mace served me lunch and talked euphorically about Boca Raton. He was magnificently persuasive as he outlined his love for me and the destiny we would share. We would travel to Argentina, ride horses across the Pampa, and dance the tango. There was an immediacy in his gestures, as if he was being chased, that overlapped his ruminations of life at age 52. His hair was still blue black and closely framed his forehead. His bronzed skin stretched tight across his Indian cheekbones, and his farcical humor punctuated each sentence. He possessed an ethereal view of life that nullified the effects of aging. He tempered his Latin sensuality with Greek philosophy.
It was not easy to let Mace go, because I never stopped loving him. I was not considering his proposal, but I wasn’t ready to let him go either. He waited several weeks for me to make up my mind.
For the past nine years, Mace had lived a few miles away. Once we were reunited speeding on the freeway; and exchanged phone numbers at the next exit. That was the kind of serendipity in our history. I could not seem to move without Mace rising in the background with a force majeure to undermine whatever I happened to be doing—with whomever. He defied the laws of my father years ago, when he asked for an introduction into the Mob!
Mace left without me in early 1993. Eight years passed before I went looking for him. My life piloted me in different directions until two years ago. I began searching again. This time the Internet showed Mace living on San Marcos Island. Throughout our history, Mace had skinned off clippings of his adolescence. His abbreviated childhood began in Chicago. His mother died while they were on a plane. His father was wealthy and mean. Mace served in the Korean War. He later moved to Los Angeles, and married a wealthy Swedish woman. He ran with a fast crowd, and hung around Brentwood.
What he did not reveal was his interior self: the origin of his philosophy, his parent’s ancestry, and what trials of life he’d suffered. What fire burned at his heels? Why did he want to marry a woman with a distinctive background, and where’d he get the nerve to ask my father for an introduction into the Mafia? How can you write about such a character without knowing the entire story?
This year I went searching again. The Internet had him living in Ft. Lauderdale. No address or phone number. I remembered what he’d said, “Just think about me and I’ll know, and come find you.” I wrote a three part series in my column about him. Still, no sign of Macedonio.
Two weeks ago, I tried another search. This time his name came up in a puzzling excerpt on a church website. I emailed the Minister. A few days later, I received a note from his sister. I don’t have to tell you what it said.
Mace lived the rest of his life in Costa Rica. I imagine him living in a tropical villa with a beautiful woman. He is dressed in white tennis shorts, and spends his days surfing, riding horses, and dancing the tango.
Mace and I returned to San Rafael and rented a little cottage of our own. Mace painted the rooms lemon yellow, and I glided around in dreamy domestic ecstasy. In the sensuous seventies, the preamble to the essentials of living was not a prospering career, and getting ahead. It was with a minimal amount of work, improvise, meditate, and stay high. Some Indian guru coined it, “going with the flow.”
I learned to cook fettuccine, entertain Mace ’s guests, and polish tennis shoes. Above all, I learned how to read adults, in a way I had never considered before. Mace explained the concealed messages in spoken language, and how to recognize the signals of deception, arrogance, racism, and affectation. He was continually pointing out, people’s affectations, while he drove me around in our vintage MBZ 250 SEL.
For money, resources fluctuated between teaching tennis, calling his agent in San Francisco, (he did commercials for Gallo Wine) and working on various deals. There was never one steady job, he was the Rocket Man, and people gravitated towards us. After meeting someone one day, they would be at our dinner table that night.
Amidst all the activity, I was suffering the guilt of watching my college funds vanish. That was the tragedy, but there is always sacrifice in this kind of passion. Just as my father had warned me, Mace did not refrain from spending my money. I withdrew from the College of Marin, and for a while worked part time in a small bohemian cafe in Mill Valley.
One very early morning, while we were still sleeping, the doorbell rang. Mace rushed to the door prepared to admonish whomever was knocking. When I came striding over in my silk Rita Hayworth negligee, I was astounded.
“Luellen, who is this guy, he says you know him?”
“Dale, it’s all right Mace, I know him, he’s a friend of my father’s.
“What kind of friend?” Mace demanded. Dale stood there in the archway, dressed in a wrinkled suit, his sandy hair heavily slicked to appear arranged, and eyes shaded behind rose tinted sunglasses.
“Mace , I’m just here to make sure Luellen is all right.” Dale shifted his weight between both legs. He looked taller than I remembered.
“She’s fine, you can see that.” Mace replied.
“Mace , let Dale in the door.” I embraced Dale momentarily, as I always had in the past. His edginess did not alarm me; he was always burdened by some desperate measures. My father was continually counseling him about his tribulations.
Mace hustled Dale into the living. I went into the bedroom to get dressed. My mind raced between images of my father and Dale, the run-around guy that obeyed orders. He did not resemble a tough guy; he was the Sterling Hayden type, the guy always on the run. Mace appeared in the doorway, and rushed over to me.
“Who is that guy?”
“He’s just a friend of my Dad, don’t worry he’s not dangerous…. I don’t think. ”
“He came to get you, your father sent him Lue,” he looked at me apprehensively.
“Is that what he said?”
“He doesn’t have to. We’ll take him out to breakfast; I want to be in public, just in case.”
“In case of what?”
“Just get dressed quickly.”
“You won’t let him take me will you?” I said panicking.
“NO! I can handle it.” Mace assured.
We drove into Larkspur to our favorite café. Mace led us to a table outside in the garden, in the warmth of sunlight. Mace orchestrated the meeting, so it was relaxed and enjoyable for Dale, and slowly Dale began to unwind. He removed his suit jacket and ate heartily after the long drive. They talked, and I confirmed what Mace offered.
“We live modestly now, but not for long, I’m going to manage the Tennis club, and Lue’s going to get her real estate license. Isn’t that right honey?”
“Yes, that’s right.” I acknowledged. Mace had been advising me to get a license.
“Dale, you should hang out with us a while, I’ll take you around. You can see for yourself what our life is about. I’m not hiding anything Dale, I love Luellen, and her father knows it.”
“How is my father Dale?” I interrupted.
“Luellen, your father isn’t angry with you. He just wants to make sure you’re all right.”
“Why didn’t he come with you?” Dale hunched over the table and looking directly at Mace . “He was afraid of what he might do.” Mace stood up suddenly.
“ Dale, I’m not a stupid man. I know about him too.”
Things deteriorated from there. Mace and Dale argued, I pleaded to leave the restaurant. In the car, I managed to dissuade the arguing with a hysterical outburst, and tears. Then I mediated Mace and Dale, whose conflicting assignments were bordering on a hit in an alley.
“I need you both to calm down. Dale has to return without me, and my father is going to be angry. Mace , Dale needs our help.” Mace responded by retiring his grudge and substituting some personal stories along with several rounds of backgammon. When Dale was ready to leave, I took him aside.
“ See Dale, I’m happy here, I can’t go back with you.”
“Are you sure? I can still take care of Mace ! I will not hurt him, just stall him so you can get in the car. I’m not coming back again Luellen.” He said.
“Dale, he won’t let me go. He really loves me.”
“If that’s so, let him prove it. Come with me now, he’ll follow after you when he can handle things.”
“Dale, I just can’t go with you.”
“Luellen, your father’s gonna blame me.”
“I’m sorry Dale, please understand.”
“ He’s going to be furious.”
“Well, you’ve seen him that way before right? He’ll calm down.” I spoke with feigned confidence. I had no idea how he would respond, but I knew he would blame Dale. He passed me his telephone number on a piece of paper, shook hands with Mace and told him to take care of me. Then he took of in his Cadillac.
Mace returned to the living room boasting of his conquest.
“Dale was supposed to threaten me with a gun, but he liked me too much to go through with it.”
“Did he show you the gun?”
“Yea. Lue, I told you-I am not easily intimidated.”
In the next six months, I passed my real estate exam and Mace was setting up a business. Mace had a friend who owned a Mortgage Banking Company in San Francisco. I was going to sell new residential developments and Mace was going to secure clients. We moved into a charming little house in Ross and commuted to the city to have meetings. We dined with successful men and their wives and I tried to read all the signals. Soon my father would see me on the sophisticated side of the street, leaving the hippie hibernating spell for good.
Then one day the meetings stopped. Mace retreated to the tennis court and played the rocket man. He ignored my questions and concern for our future. The car was sold, the guests stopped coming over, and Mace lived in stubborn silence. The day came I had to make the phone call.
“Hi Daddy, it’s me.”
“Yea, what is it you want?”
“I want to come home and start over.” I replied.
“On one condition.”
“What?”
“You never go back to him; you have to be absolutely sure.”
“I’m sure; I want to leave right away.” I said.
Within a week, I was back in my father’s apartment sitting on the blue and green crushed velvet sofa.
“Look now sweetheart, stop your crying, at least you didn’t come back pregnant. There is nothing to cry about now, you made a mistake and it’s over, you got your whole life ahead of you. Don’t bury yourself in the sand, nothing to be ashamed of; you ought to know the mistakes I’ve made. You couldn’t come close.”
Mace continued to pursue me. He was met by my father’s warning, ”If you come within ten feet of her, I’ll scratch your eyes out and stuff them down your throat.” Any dice to throw Email:folliesls@aol.com
GUEST ALERT: Daughter Of Reputed Mobster, Making The Radio Rounds
THE MOUTH, NOVEMBER 8TH, 2011 — Luellen Smiley is the daughter of reputed mobster, Allen Smiley. Smiley’s dad was a close friend and confidant of famous Las Vegas mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and he was sitting on the couch just feet away from Siegel the night he was murdered. While Luellen Smiley hadn’t been born at the time of the shooting, she’s conducted research on her father’s life and the events leading up to the shooting and wants to dispel the common belief that her father might have been involved in the shooting. Luellen Smiley has contributed artifacts to the Las Vegas Mob Experience and she joins us to discuss her family history. She’s out promoting the fact that the gangsters of old were not trigger-happy murderers and that J. Edgar Hoover was someone who was out to get them in a big way. Not letting them go straight, etc. She also believes that J. Edgar Hoover was behind the killing of Bugsy Siegel. (Bugsy’s killing was never solved). This week, she joined KNPR for chat. LISTEN TO AUDIO HERE To set up, contact Scott Segelbaum HERE
As children our waiting depends on how long it takes Mom and Dad to finish what they’re doing and pay attention to our needs. It takes hold of us, like a fever, and we resort to nudging them, whining, even sobbing, if we are made to wait longer than we expected. During the school year, I waited all semester for the summer. In Los Angeles that meant it was hot enough to go swimming in the ocean. When I lived in Hollywood, I rode two buses, to get to Santa Monica. The second bus dropped me off on Ocean Avenue, above Santa Monica Beach. I ran down the ramp that connects to Pacific Coast Highway, and headed north to Sorrento Beach, another long block away, and when I got there I stumbled in the sand in my tennis shoes trying to run, and find the place where my schoolmates clustered, in a caravan of towels, beach chairs, radios, and brown bag lunches. I couldn’t just run to the ocean, I had to sit and talk and have something cold to drink, and then I made myself wait, until I couldn’t stand it any longer, and then I ran down to the shore, and embraced the waves, tumbling inside their grasp until I lost my breath, and floated into abandonment.
After I moved to New Mexico, I stopped thinking about the ocean, I had to remove the memories from my thoughts, and so I could continue to experience this spark of the world. The dry sage ocean of pink soil, and radiant blue sky that pinches your eyes when you’re driving, the sunlight, and the warmth of a desert night and the white snow on pink adobe. It has postcard perfection, even now, with fallen leaves spread like trash everywhere, and the trees almost naked, and the dead plants in the garden. I try not to think of the ocean, the look of the sea from watery suntanned eye lids, or from the bluff at Del Mar, or the splashing of waves around my shoulders as I sink beneath the surface.
I waited, like I did as a teenager, for that summer to come, so I could return to the sea.
Last week, I stood at the water’s edge in Del Mar, it was like summer without all the kids playing ball and screaming, hey dude what’s up, and the running of the dogs, and lifeguards thrashing the beach in their jeeps shouting, , no swimming, no dogs off the leashes, no glassware, and no surfing. They were missing, so as the caravan of beach runners, and surfers. In fact, I was only one swimming, on that first day at the beach. Before I went into the water, I reclined on a big black boulder, and faced the sea, and let my eyes wander amongst the scenes of the beach on a Tuesday afternoon. In front of me was an older man with graying hair, in a wal-mart beach chair reading. He must be retired, he looked perfected adapt to his spot about five feet from the shoreline. I thought about that Dennis Hopper commercial, about retirement, and how I still cannot come to grips with retirement, and spending my days on park benches or in cafes watching younger men and women live.
There was one swimmer, on a bogey board, he was far out, and floating along, and I wished I’d brought mine with me, but it was in SC’s van, and the last time I used it was when I lived in Solana Beach. I also wished I had a new bathing suit, because the one I was wearing was ripped, and the neck straps were tied together in a knot so I could swim without losing my top. The sun baked my body, and I let it without abatement, without shading my limbs, or wearing a hat, just enough sunscreen to keep the rays from trotting over to my skin, and I closed my eyes and I opened them, and this is when the waiting business suddenly felt so important, so much so that I began to think about waiting as an aphrodisiac or something like a good cocktail that you have to make last for sometimes, years, while you wait for that moment that makes you feel immortal, and childlike, and senses sharpened as an animal.
I felt the beach flies, and the tang of salt water on my lips, and the when the seagulls swarmed above the water’s surface, like so many beads of a necklace, I thought, that this is about the most beautiful day I could have, and it’s all because I WAITED, I didn’t give up on the ocean, or my place in it, or believing that I would have my day in the sand, under a faded denim blue sky, with cotton ball clouds floating above me. I baked until the sweat drenched my pours, and then I raised myself up, and walked slowly to the edge of the water, the flat surface made tiny breaks not enough to shatter my body warmth and I felt the first sting of the water on my feet, and then my knees, and then I submerged, and found that the best way to celebrate this day was to keep flopping backward on top of each wave as it crashed, and I did this for a dozen rounds, until I felt silly and weak, and dented with the surf, and I found that waiting thing again, meant something that I should write about because all of us are waiting for the election, and the economy to recover, and our real estate to be worth something again, we are all waiting for this big change so we can feel secure and optimistic about the future. There is something useful about waiting, something predisposed, that gives us the support and substance we need, so when the waiting is over, and we are all flush with success again, it will feel like the first time, it will overwhelm with us with power and joy, like the ocean.
When I left, I had enough jubilation bouncing through my blood to take the risk of driving by Maurice’s home, the one he left three years ago, when he died under his favorite orange tree.
Navigating through my post-work world
Every Day is a Gift!
Entertainment website · Marketing agency · Advertising agency 🎧⽣👠💋
The inner voice where gaps of expression are liberated.
Funny Blogs With A Hint Of Personal Development
Become a Story Hunter!
It's just banter
Larry Harnisch Reflects on L.A. History
Escaping reality or facing reality.
Saratoga Springs, New York - Arthur Gonick, Editor
Space, Travel, Technology, 3D Printing, Energy, Writing
Live Your Dreams Don`t Dream Your Life
Even a bad guy can have redeeming qualities
Books and Lifestyle with Hermione Flavia.
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER / IGNORANCE IS BLISS - YOU DECIDE
Navigating through my post-work world
Every Day is a Gift!
Entertainment website · Marketing agency · Advertising agency 🎧⽣👠💋
The inner voice where gaps of expression are liberated.
Funny Blogs With A Hint Of Personal Development
Become a Story Hunter!
It's just banter
Larry Harnisch Reflects on L.A. History
Escaping reality or facing reality.
Saratoga Springs, New York - Arthur Gonick, Editor
Space, Travel, Technology, 3D Printing, Energy, Writing
Live Your Dreams Don`t Dream Your Life
Even a bad guy can have redeeming qualities
Books and Lifestyle with Hermione Flavia.
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER / IGNORANCE IS BLISS - YOU DECIDE
ADVENTURERS IN LIVINGNESS 