The Peerless Wine Store

I only mention the Peerless Wine Store in one line in Hell on Earth, a love story, which is kind of unusual because I could probably write a whole book about that one job. The thing is, delivering booze for the Peerless Wine Store was one of the most interesting experiences I’ve ever had.

Lowell seemed to have an almost unparalleled number of bars for a city its size. But sometimes a bar on every corner is not enough. That is why there were more vans delivering booze in Lowell than most cities have delivering pizza and the Peerless Wine Store was just one of the many enterprises dedicated to keeping shut-ins, pie-eyed.

On just a single beer run I was likely to deliver a bottle of whisky to the house where Jack Kerouac lived as a boy, deliver a case of beer to a house across the street from where Kerouac might have been drinking at that very moment, or deliver three bottles of wine to a kindly old lady—unscrewing the top off one before hiding the other two behind the sofa, and then finally make one last stop at the house of Mrs. Roussamanus to deliver her gallon jug of wine.

We never talked and I don’t even know if she spoke English but Mrs. Roussamanus was one of my more interesting customers. Anna, the owner of the store told me everyone in her family had passed away. About once a week she would call the store to have a gallon of wine delivered. She was a massive, friendly, lovable woman, probably in her 70’s but possibly in her 80’s who suffered from an illness of some kind that made her whole body shake like a rustling fruit tree in the middle of a hurricane. Anna said the wine just helped her to get through the day.

She understood the language of tipping and always took good care of the boys who delivered her wine. This is how the wine deal would go down.

I’d put her gallon jug of Port on the table, assume the ready position and wait. As I was doing this she would have already begun her approach, shuffling and lumbering across the room like a several hundred pound bowl of jello, grinning in anticipation because she knew I was anxiously awaiting the prize she was about to throw my way. By the time she reached the table her whole body would be pulsating like a jackhammer but her arms and hands would be shaking the most. I glanced down at what I knew to be my tip as the moment of truth grew near. The only question was would we be able to complete the transaction.

I was in position; my feet firmly planted on the linoleum floor and my hands at the ready for the missile that I knew was coming. Her large trembling hand closed in on the unsuspecting banana lying innocently on the table. Suddenly with her grin now an uncontrollable smirk, and in one surprisingly agile motion her hand dropped down, scooped up, grabbed what was once a banana but was now a weapon and tossed it across the room to where I stood waiting. I threw my hand out in a calculated response, intercepted and seized that banana like I would the brass ring on a merry-go-round, pulled it down out of its mid-air trajectory, stuffed it into my pocket, thanked her, turned and walked out the door. My job was done.

Hand-in-Hand

A similar version of this post was originally published under the title, Memories of hand-in-hand images, in October 1988 in the Virginia Beach Sun.


There is this elderly couple that I would occasionally observe walking through the lobby of a building where I delivered mail. I remember them stepping out of the elevator, arms locked together, and taking short, shuffling steps to where I would be distributing the mail. Neither of them walked with the greatest of ease, and one could easily and humorously speculate as to who was helping whom.

There are not many details to my recollection of this couple other than that short shuffle that I would sometimes observe. But I thought about them the other night a while back at—of all places—a skating rink where kids, mostly teenagers, were whizzing around just as smooth and as graceful as most people only dream about.

Waiting for the Other Shoe to Fall

Life is all about waiting for the other shoe to fall and getting out of the way before it hits you. The first shoe is just the set-up—the act of a straight man and who ever remembers the lines of the straight man?

The second shoe is the punch line and is accompanied by a drum roll. Battaboom!

A fire alarm went off the other night while my wife and I were staying in the Emily Morgan Hotel across the alley from the Alamo. I was pretty sure it wasn’t a warning that the Mexican army was back in town but I was absolutely positive that there wasn’t a fire. That’s because I, like most people, have a long history of dealing with fire alarms going all the way back to my early days at Abraham Lincoln Elementary School. And the thing is, there is never a fire, it is always a drill.

Purgatory vs. Transient Barracks

In Hell on Earth, a love story, Hank spends a little time in a transient barracks when first arriving in Vietnam. There is also a strong suggestion that Erebus, home to his caseworker and others managing the sentences being served on Earth, might be some type of Purgatory

I don’t think anyone has ever had a real good idea of just what Purgatory is, where it is, or why it is. It is a place we can easily accept in general terms—a kind of halfway house on the way to heaven. However when we get down to specifics—tolerable pain and suffering to pay for minor sins—pain and suffering that can be reduced to some extent by deeds and prayers we do or someone does on our behalf, well the whole idea gets a little bit complicated.

"Trees" by Joyce Kilmer and me

I wasn’t always a writer of prose. There was a short time a very long time ago when I wrote poetry—damn good poetry.

I was reading a book about the Appalachians, which had a chapter about the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest—the only never-logged woodland in all of Appalachia. The naming of this choice natural treasure was obviously inspired by Kilmer’s famous poem, “Trees.”

Reading the story of the forest, Kilmer and the poem reminded me of an incident that happened more than 50 years ago when I was in the third grade at Abraham Lincoln School in Irondequoit, New York.

The Thrill of It All

Hell in Earth, a love story was just an idea in my head or it was an idea put in my head by Foo Ling or was it an idea put in Hank Johnson’s head by Foo Ling. But what if I got it wrong or Foo Ling was just pumping Hank or me with misinformation?

What if God and his management team on Erebus aren’t dissecting every single little thing we do and breaking it down into good or evil and then devising elaborate schemes to punish the evildoers? Might there be more to life than committing sins and being held accountable for sins?

Recently I was listening to Frank Ifield’s 1962 hit, “I Remember You.” The high point of the song, the line that I haven’t been able to get out of my head, goes like this.

“When my days are through and the angels ask me to recall—the thrill of it all, I will tell them I remember you.”

Although presumably not divinely inspired (and I realize there is no way of knowing for sure), this line does present a different perspective of God and his relationship to mankind than the divinely inspired Bible. The Bible essentially describes a judgmental God—the tough-love old Geezer in the Old Testament and the more gentle spirit in the New Testament—but always someone who is keeping tabs.

The God of the Bible is absolutely obsessed with how mankind handles the concept of right and wrong. It’s all pretty basic; don’t sin and you go to Heaven, do sin and you go to Hell and like Santa Clause, God is keeping a list.

It’s true that God gave us free will, and in essence, said we have a choice but warned us to make the right choice.

But He also gave us human nature. Even though there is this constant right versus wrong struggle going on within each of us, on the whole, my bet is that God is not that surprised by what we as a race do. Furthermore, I don’t think He even cares.

Except for exceedingly bad and almost universally agreed upon evil persons (Hitler, Attila the Hun, Stalin, Hannibal Lecter), I don’t think God is all that disappointed by the “sins” we commit down here and given the situation that He, Himself, created, I think He expects them. Frankly, I think God has too much going on to even be keeping score.

Consider this: If you were a supremely powerful, all-knowing being capable of building a universe out of nothing but a whim and a prayer, patient enough to let it develop over billions and billions of years*—most of which can only be described as very down time—and yet at the same time creative enough to let a race of humans evolve from virtually nothing into beings actually capable of understanding, to a degree, almost everything in that universe, up to a point, wouldn’t it be mighty petty to just sit up there in heaven and keep track of all the things these humans do wrong?

Maybe God isn’t a judge so much as he is an artist. And if He is an artist wouldn’t He be far less interested in what we did wrong and much more interested in how did we like it. In other words, wouldn’t He want to know what did we like best? What was “The thrill of it all?”

*Note: To get a better concept of just how long a billion years is, consider that if years were money, a billion years would be the equivalent of the cost of a cruise missile, which if dollars were miles, would be the equivalent of 2,000 round trips to the moon.

The Stories of Rufus and Jessie

In Hell on Earth, a love story, I wrote about a story I didn't get published in the newspaper. The paper had run a story on the front page about placing a cardboard picture of a rhino in the zoo to make one of the rhinos (Jessie) jealous and induce her to mate with the other rhino (Rufus). They never did a follow-up, which I thought was kind of strange since it was such a strange story to begin with. I sent them this story but apparently in the newspaper business, when it come to stories about rhinos, the policy is one and done.