Oh my love, my darling…

Archie Shitsville’s life was a lot like his movies: entirely predictable, full of C-grade actresses with generous bosoms, the Technicolor process made him look slightly negro, and at odd times in the silvery dark even as you munched through a caravan of popcorn you found yourself wishing it would all come to a swift end. But I suppose I owe some wonderful things to the great ape who was the unwilling source of my creation. He bought Shitsville Ranch in the Sixties and gave it to my mother as a wedding present, which is why the Vegas Mafia could never roll him for it.

For a long time I sat in the mountain sunlight admiring the view and the patio furniture and trying to think up a nicer way of saying “In lieu of flowers send money”. Then I thought perhaps that was the real reason unlettered folk turn to ‘poetry’ made up of kindergarten rhymes on special occasions: funerals, weddings, etc, where in my book torturing your family into donations somehow seems less friendly than asking for the cash straight up. Meantime my cousin Francis Matlock Shitsville was very upset by the news, as upset as I was when I heard that Davy Jones had passed away on my birthday last year. Blind with drink and tears Francis ferreted through my records and finally pulled out an ‘Archie Shitsville Live in Vegas’ LP from the Seventies, which had been shut away from the light so long that the inner sleeve turned to dust when it was exposed to the air. Then he boarded himself up with a bottle of tequila and listened to it over. “Oh, my love, my darling… I’ve hungered for your touch…” I could feel the vibrations through the floor.

“His voice in that version could m-m-move m-mountains,” Frankie sobbed.

“My father had a lot of practice moving mountains,” said I. “He lifted at least a hundred and seventy kilos every time he got out of bed.”

Vale Archie

It happened on a Sunday. Frankie and I had been up all night playing Uno or something like that (I remember it well); then in the morning light while the forest (high up in the hills on Shitsville Ranch) rang with the chatter of monkeys, we were having good ole fashioned Texas prawn, pork and bacon toasted sandwiches for breakfast with whisky in our lattes (or something greasy and unrefined anyhow) under the striped umbrella on the red brick patio.  Then the phone rang. It was Great-great-great Aunt Olga on the line, calling from America, with news as unexpected as if it had hatched out of a breakfast egg, or Frankie had gone on the wagon.

“Hello Aunt Olga (stop that Francis),” said I as he poured tomato sauce onto his plate, and later stubbed his cigarette out in the pool of it. “That shows a great want of refinement.”

But the relative refinements of Francis Shitsville would soon matter nought as Aunt Olga had some awful news. “We have arrived in Palm Springs in one piece,” she said.

“Oh?” said I. “I hope you enjoyed the zeppelin?”

“Yes, yes,” she said, “But that is another story. Dear sweet great niece, something dreadful has happened. It’s your father.”

“Oh,” said I. “Yes, I know.” (Francis in the background: “Ha, ha, ha.”)

I was struggling to hear and trying to push Frankie’s face into the sauce as she told me: “We arrived at the house in Palm Springs but he wasn’t there; some tarted up cleaner with thick ankles said he’d been in Vegas for a week so she gave us the address of a motel there. And that’s where we found him… My dear, the smell.”

“You get used to it,” said I.

“We found him by the pool. In blue underwear and a terry towelling robe open…”

“Oh, I’m so sorry dear auntie. That must have been an awful sight for you,” said I.

“He was horribly bloated…”

“He is sensitive about his weight, but too vain to discuss it.”

“Sweet niece, you don’t understand. What I’m trying to tell you is that he wasn’t moving at all…”

“It is usually like that after a Saturday night in Vegas…”

“And he looked slightly greenish…”

“There should be a note on the fridge with the recommended dosage of Pepto…”

“I mean he was dead,” said Aunt Olga.

“Dead? Comatose perhaps sweet auntie but not dead surely. You can try pushing him in the pool if it worries you and he’ll come to soon enough.”

“Dear dear,” said Aunt Olga. “You don’t understand. I mean he was really dead; quite deceased. There was a hole in his head. He’d been shot.”

At last I saw it clearly, the scene by the pool: Archie green skinned in the grey Vegas morn come to sit by the pool and smoke and watch the Listerine-coloured ripples lap while a neon Marilyn’s skirt fluttered up in three lighted stages and empty chip packets shuffled around the Motel court like dreaming hoofers hoping for a dime. He might have fallen asleep, his robe falling open in soft folds either side to reveal the sweet portly stomach and thunder thighs; how tender and boyish he must have looked when the sky above the grey desert turned soft and pink; a strand of hair, errant from the well oiled pouff and duck’s ass falling forward over his forehead, his waxed spotted chest rising and falling as he dreamt as trustingly as a babe; and then some villain with a pistol, stepping out of the awkward chiaroscuro shadows made by the folded umbrellas and plastic flamingoes; some tool of the Vegas Mafia come to seek revenge…

“There wasn’t much blood so the coroner said he was dead from drugs before he was shot,” Aunt Olga was saying; her voice seemed to be coming from somewhere far away (i.e. Las Vegas, Nevada). “We had to make a formal identification… Though I haven’t seen him for years his is a face I’ll never forget. Funny how he looked a little Japanese, his eyes were so puffy,” she said.  Meanwhile Frankie was still laughing in the background.

Letters from home (Shitsville)

Archie Shitsville never got the free underwear; either he was too drunk to read the terms and conditions properly or it was all some kind of ingenious dodge and now some clever clean Jap is stealthily assuming his identity piece by piece;  on the plus side if another Archie Shitsville suddenly turns up on the planet he might draw some of the wrath of the Vegas mafia away from my father. Sometimes they send me letters to pass on to him: ‘Dear Miss Shitsville, We want to break your father’s bones for failure of payment but he will not answer his phone, the letters are collecting in a pile on the door step, would you be so kind as to pass the message on to him, Yours sincerely, etc.’

Spring in Shitsville

It’s not Spring, in fact it’s freezing, but for the purposes of this blog we must pretend it is; flowers blooming everywhere, sex in season, or whatever Spring is like (from this distance it’s hard to recall). My point being that after all of the atmospheric rain the sky cleared and all of the dripping and reflected lights made the mountaintop forest flora look like water-pastels. Frankie and I had decided that our old, old Shitsville aunts (great-great-great aunts, in fact) would be packed off to Palm Springs in their rich travelling cloaks to live with mein pater (their great-great-nephew, in fact). This was the neat solution to every problem that had presented itself (hence the hay fever-like watering of the eyes); my father Archie, who had never learned that chasing floozies and drunken revelry is less endearing in a man of the middle years than it is in a good looking youth, would make the perfect eternal child for my old, old aunts to coddle; they in their turn are so distressingly filthy they would not be bothered by the concentric circles of fag-ends and other scum in which Archie exists; they had long ago ceased to notice the layers of dust collecting in their witch-like homestead, assuming that the perpetual fog they lived in was due to cataracts. And most importantly in one foul swoop I would be rid of the burden of caring for all of them. Of course you should know that I am quite fond of the old aunts but the time had come for us to part. With the illuminated, visionary gaze of absinthe drinkers Frankie and I looked forward to a glorious future.

Some velvet morning in hotel rooms with famous people (Las Vegas, NV).

Yesterday Archie rang to tell me that he had found a website that sent you free underwear. He had ordered six pairs — one for every day of the week, skipping Naked Sunday. Like a lot of rich people who were once poor he has held onto some curiously tight habits and has a genuine fondness for free things. “It’s probably not very good underwear,” he admitted. “But it’s free!” I had to wonder why the website was sending out free underwear and he said there was probably advertising printed on it.

“That is some very targeted advertising,” said I. “Who is going to see the underwear besides you and perhaps some drunk women?”

“It is probably just a web address,” he said.

“I only wonder what kind of web address is going to make the women stop what they’re doing & head to the computer.”

“Well I’ll find out soon,” he said gleefully. No hint of criticism really troubles the man unless he feels it has something to do with his appearance, in which case his brow furrows and his disposition clouds very quickly; I have seen the sulking come on like thunder over the mountains, then he digs his heels in like a child. Soon enough he is in despair and calling for old morphine doctors that haven’t been allowed to enter the state since the 40s.

So this is what it has come to after those long, drowsy ochre and umber years, awash in soft whisky… After all of the hours spent in hotel rooms with famous people; flutes of sparkling wine and free peanuts on Opening Nights with Barbra Streisand and Nancy Sinatra and Tom Jones et. al. Some velvet morning when he’s straight he’ll realise what he’s lost. I said as much and he became thoughtful. As he drew the words to him the clock ticked over. Finally he said, “You’re right, honey. So many old fond friends. A lotta them are gone now. I’d forgotten…” he sniffed. Then he said, “Do you think I should call Nancy Sinatra and tell her about the underwear?”

“Maybe not, Archie,” I said.

“But she might want to get some for herself.”

 

 

Conclusion: Brooks ended & Frankie returns from the mists.

Archie Shitsville at the Heartbreak Hotel, Las Vegas, NV

My papa took years to get it together but it came undone in a matter of months. All of that therapeutic LSD began to have adverse effects, so I have spent years suffocating under the boredom of talking to a man whose body has essentially been taken over by aliens in the hope that I can prevent those aliens from harming his body so that it is still in one piece when the papa I love finally comes back. After Mother left him he began to spend a lot of time holed up in hotel rooms that were slathered from wall to wall with the soft furnishings of nouveau riche bad taste, and personally he looked almost as much like a pimp as Elvis in the 70s, when the cigar never left his hand: stone walls, stone fireplaces, stone floors, plastic palms and plastic couches, a conversation pit that was sunk to the depths of a mine shaft, a lazy Susan on the coffee table, avocado oak and orange accents and all bathed in that slightly lunar lighting which comes from having a fish tank wall. If you knew my Mother like I do you might dimly suspect that she is being a bit of a bitch when she heaps scorn upon the man & feigns not to know him. For all of that, the one time I went to live in Vegas with papa, I gave up after a couple of weeks; most women can’t bare being with him long enough to get pregnant.

Years of being petted by every woman in the realm, starting with his own Mother, left Archie Shitsville with the idea that women would part for him like the Red Sea. He is vain beyond belief, which is understandable, tho slightly pitiable. In his first youth I think he looked a lot like ‘The Great Dark Man’ that Quentin Crisp will tell you about (in his second youth he looked more orange than tan). But Quentin was also sage enough to know that The Great Dark Man does not exist, a lesson my papa never learned, so ageing upset him & he cried like a baby over multiple shots unable to comprehend why after the first steamy encounter women (& men) were unable to take him seriously and didn’t return his calls.  Papa operated like many spoiled boys in the belief that all of the energy in the universe was generated by and returned to him; and he was simply blind to the residue of post-shave stubble & dead skins cells and general rubbish that collected around him & the avocado-coloured porcelain bathroom sink like Coca-Cola bottle tops on the banks of green rivers.

Beginning in 1967, every Sunday was Naked Sunday. I suppose he had got the idea that weekly nudity would connect him with the irresistible forces of Primal Man.  In any case you can imagine the horror I felt whenever Sunday came around and I was forced out of the place; the problem being that Naked Sunday often blurred into Naked Monday (which was otherwise “Drunk-at-work Monday”). And on any given Tuesday it was hard to know whether he would sleep at the casino (read pass out in his dressing room) or come home for a night chaser with a blonde woman in brown sandals who looked like Sylvia Plath. These sandal-wearing Sylvia Plath women also believed in the godliness of Naked Sunday.

Archie lives between Vegas hotel rooms, downsizing or upgrading as his fortunes change; otherwise he has a more or less permanent suite in a shabby hotel just outside of town where a gigantic neon Marilyn presides over the former glory of the forecourt and the swimming pool. Marilyn’s skirt flutters up in three lighted stages (a bit like the Skipping Girl’s rope). This was where he met the cocktail waitress he married (Jeanie Shitsville); she also did room-service on Mexican feast days. After he had been married to her for two weeks she was scared off and so the room-service dwindled rather. That was when I came to live there. One day I went around the room collecting all of the dishes from the various locations he had left them: cereal bowls in the bathroom, dinner plates under the bed, glasses on every surface (still filled with dried out slices of lemon and scummy melted ice water, going slightly green) and filth-encrusted cutlery in every cranny, I put them into a pile beside the sink and the pile went up to the ceiling. The scatalogical mess that I was forced to clean up for him was much in contrast to the Fierce Independence and hunter-gatherer instincts supposedly exemplified by the hairy figure of Primal Man, which just goes to show you that men are full of shit, so is it any wonder that fairy-tale marriages break up.

Shitsville Blvd in Hollywood.

Before my father became a tool of the fabulous Las Vegas Mafia, paid like Frank Sinatra & Dino to lure high stakes suckers to Vegas with his dark timbre, he had to make his money the old fashioned way — by being the tool of drug companies and entrepreneurial doctors, many of whom had found themselves out of work after the collapse of Nazi Germany. Papa and Cary Grant were both early advocates of the mental health benefits of LSD. Papa introduced Errol Flynn to novel & experimental kinds of aphrodisiac — a tiny cut was made and then pills & monkey glands were inserted under the skin in some discrete place, such as the shoulder blade — and it was my father who first taught Tony Curtis that when doing lines he must never use denominations under $50  [eventually Tony switched to free-basing].

Archie Shitsville was once a scabby little boy, a filthy, gappy-toothed ragamuffin. Let’s imagine him kicking along one of those post-industrial revolution slum dwellings in the North of England that George Orwell liked to complain about. Archie and my grandmama Gladys lived in the last house in a row of cottages crumbling between an abattoir, a baby farm and a hospital for Unreclaimed Lunatics. In those days when little Archie was the picture of family life on the dole, how little he suspected what the future held in store: the streets would run with champagne, gardenias float in his swimming pool, the ceilings in every room of his house would be mirrored and of a morning the butler would serve his cornflakes on an onyx tray in a silver goblet that had once belonged to Henry the VIII. Everything changed when his toothless step-father died, only after having spent Archie’s formative years drinking away the money for shoes. [Shitsville was Gladys’ maiden name; Archie’s father was whoever Gladys’ most regular client was at the time of conception.] That was when Gladys and little Archie tied their rags in a bundle at the end of a stick and used the dead man’s left over pittance & the money they had got selling his cracked dentures to leave Shytsvllfwy — and then in some way that’s never been explained to me, Mrs. Shitsville & Archibald ended living respectably in a little white wooden house in Bowie St, Beeville, TX, US — where the sunlight coming in through the trelliswork is so thick and honeyed it looks like an old lady has knitted it.

In Beeville Gladys Shitsville married a Doctor named Alfred Pleasance. Around that time her name changed to Gladys Marylouanna Pleasance-Shitsville and all traces of any unsavoury past dropped from the record. She became adept at tatting, making jam and thrice won a ribbon at the Beeville county fair for her apricot pie; no one ever wondered why she went on wearing elbow-length gloves outside of church picnics (she used to go with a  lot of sailors) or why in 1929 when everywhere across America prohibition was repealed she trembled and grew pale when the townsfolk voted 36 to 2 for Beeville to continue as a ‘dry’ town.

In Beeville Archie learned to tan and throw Swiss balls for health; he cultivated a universal accent, he learned to sing in church, O Lord Thou Art a Comely Hick, The Devil is a Black Man and other approved numbers, then at age of 16 when he became a man, Archie again took up his old bundle-on-a-stick and hitch-hiked all of the way to California garbed in Doctor Pleasance’s oldest suit of clothes (bowler-hat and striped trousers as was the fashion for Beeville doctors in 1900).

It’s hard to imagine what young and sunny California looked like to this eager eyed English lad in those golden days, when for miles on end the highways were lined with highly coloured, striped canvas tents in which you could get $1 fucks from girls who may have looked over fourteen if you kept your eyes tight closed. At the entrance to one of these tents, back of a gas station somewhere just outside of Hollywood, Archie met a man who looked a lot like Charlie Chaplin coming out. After first remarking on Archie’s improbable tramp’s clothes the man flipped him a buck while buttoning his flies & walking hurriedly away. This was the very first of Archie’s gambles and the only one that ever came up trumps: the girl inside the tent ended by being my mother.

Cont’d next post.

Archie Shitsville calls while still slightly sober

When Brooks indicated that he intended to continue our conversation in the privacy of the taxi the unexpected hero of the hour turned out to be my unfortunate papa, Archie Shitsville, calling long distance from Las Vegas. He’d gambled away his last dime for the one hundredth time & refused to believe he’d ever been card-sharked, but his annual check from the government had saved him again. [There are photos of Archie, former teen idol & singing cowboy, shaking hands with Nixon; the U.S. government has been secretly floating him since the Sixties on the assumption that you can’t trust an alcoholic or the tell-all memoirs of the children of old movie stars.] He’d used the money to place an inspired bet and come up aces. And so he phoned to tell me all about it — the rush he got being in the money again, etc. — it is really a much longer story we shan’t go into.  On the phone he sounds far away & stoned… “Showgirls last night… 8000 bucks later… this morning my tie was so covered in glitter I had to throw it out.”

“Daddy,” said I. “On a normal day it would be all very well for you to call from Vegas to boast about the high-life. (How are the Mafia treating you?) But today of all days, daddy –” (tears were making speech difficult) “when Brooks wins & the aunts lose their house & worst of all they will have to live with me in Shitsville Ranch…” (Brooks loaned me his handkerchief from the front seat of the cab, sniff, sniff) “We are going there now to see the house exploded…”

“I must’ve done a lot more than I remember last night because there are bruises all over me, some queer thing with my arse and you don’t make a lotta sense, darlin’,” said papa. “Who are the aunts?”

“Your aunts,” I said, articulating. “They are your aunts.”

I’m sure he was about to deny he had ever had any aunts when he was overcome by the shakes and his voice became cloudy at the other end of the line, which runs fragile but taut between us like the fine silver lineament from a spider’s rectum connecting Melbourne, OZ to Las Vegas, US and also Palm Springs where he occasionally goes to dry out when he remembers his mama (my grandmama Gladys Marylouanna Pleasance-Shitsville) lives there.

Continued here.

In every dream home a heartache

In spite of appearances I haven’t spent the last seven days in the parlour with my aunts eating teacake and clock biscuits: in fact I have been concerning myself overly with their real estate problems, as I do not intend to live the rest of my life with a triptych of antique aunts ensconced in Shitsville Ranch amongst the mid-century bric-a-brac. Even though I was the mayor and primary land holder of Shitsville, TX for a brief tenure, a girl of my age can’t reasonably be expected to know much about property law. And so short of going out to work, foregoing Scotch or oiling up my hog’s leg to hold up the mail train, I have been doing everything in my power to raise the money for a lawyer.

Yesterday I was desperate enough to ring my mother: I haven’t spoken to Mother since the same time last year. I opened the conversation with a neat reminder that Thursday would be my birthday, and she was full of some very Mother-like wisdom, namely: “I can’t reasonably be expected to remember your birthday years after the event… Truth be known I can barely remember the actual day of your birth, being as I was doped to the heights & the memory deeply repressed in the years after; it occurs to me now that I was barely there at your conception, and chances are good that the man you think of as your father  wasn’t there at all.”

After I said, “Thank-you, Mother. I hate you,” and hung up, it occurred to me to ring the man I think of as my father: Archie Shitsville. He lives in Las Vegas, not just because it is a gambler’s paradise, tax haven and sort of elephant graveyard for fallen movie stars. But Archie could not come to the phone because he was on a roll (the bell boy said); days later there was a perceptibly maudlin return call with Archie pleading poverty in a gin-cracked voice that was slightly muffled due to him being face down in three foot of hot pink shagpile (it works like a mop head to soak up the sweat and tears). The Mafia were threatening to break one bone a day until they got their money, so he was no use and will be even less use in days to come sans an essential number of bones. Meantime Brooks has been over again stuffing every visible cranny of the house with sticks of dynamite, using far more charge than is strictly necessary I must say but apparently he can afford to be generous with council funds.

Now if you are wondering what happened to my many millions & glorious Deco villa with  sixteen miles of pure aqua sea view, and why I couldn’t just let the aunts live there with me or sell some of my trinkets to pay the council rates, you should know that I have always subscribed to the theory that it’s better to sell your food and buy something to starve with and don’t intend to change my mind on that point this late in life.  In any case last September my house was tragically incinerated along with my pet peacock Sebastian Gas (less tragically).

As you’ll know from being a dedicated reader of missshitsville, Sebastian was a serial- killing, finickitty bitch of a peacock. Anyway, it turned out that one of the many millions of small animals and birds which he mercilessly slaughtered was in fact a mythical phoenix. After the bloodbath Sebastian had dragged the corpse by its ankles into the atrium, where it lay prostrate for two days before bursting into flames (as a sign of rebirth) and eventually burned the house to the ground. When I finally found his charred remains after days of raking through the rubble and following the scent of Kentucky Fucked Chicken, Sebastian was a sight to see. Gleefully remarking thus, I got into a fuckload of trouble with a bunch of vegans & the RSPCA, who were freakishly unable to understand how anyone could openly rejoice in the accidental barbecue of an animal (obviously because they had never met Sebastian). The real point being I have nothing to pawn, even if I wanted to, not even a soul.