#ken warner

[mrkapao]

My copy of Ken Warner's 'Wizard' from the Merrick Book Shop giveaway recently came it and it looks gorgeous!

[cantomagazine]

A Short Story in Four Parts: Stuck in the Swamp

Kildare Dobbs discovered it was Tuesday quite by accident.

It had not been his first startling discovery which had come with the unrelenting, obnoxious, unforgiving buzz of the electric clock telling him it was morning, that he had a hangover, and that when he finally gathered about him the necessary courage to fumble around his pockets of his khaki trousers, he would find that he had spent a good deal more money last night than he could afford.

But he had been on a bender and wasn’t even sure what day of the week it actually was.

He discovered it was Tuesday by accident when he went to lunch at Torb’s.

He had a more than passing acquaintance with the blond-haired waitress with the too-wide space between her front teeth and she revealed the day of the week with a reminder that today’s special was barbequed spare ribs.

Torb’s always had barbequed spareribs for Tuesday’s special. He always had the Irish Stew instead.

That it was Tuesday not only determined his choice of lunch, it also determined his choice of dinner; where he was to have it, what he was to have and who he was to have it with.

Tuesday meant Marsha for dinner.

He pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket and searched through the others for a light and found neither his brass Zippo lighter nor, for that matter, any money with which to pay for lunch. He asked the blond-haired girl named Jamie with the too-wide space between her front teeth for a pack of matches and a pen and wrote a check to cash, signing it on the back and watching the ink as it left his signature.

It would probably bounce, and they both knew that. But it was a game they had between them at times like this. She would cover it for him -- and redeem it later.

He had known Jamie since high school when she worked the breakfast shift at the Towne Diner on the corner of Market Street and now, she had the lunch shift at Torb’s.

Marsha for dinner.

It had been six months since her father had committed suicide – waking at 4:00 a.m. to milk the cows and instead, putting a forty-five caliber bullet through each one’s brain and then turning the gun on his own.  A lot had happened since.

Kildare Dobbs and Marsha had escaped midway through her Father’s wake, much to the dismay of her Mother, Millicent, who wanted to show Daughter-Mother fealty to the mourners.

Marsha wanted none of that. What she wanted just then was Kildare Dobbs and they had driven down to the lake where, in the sand beyond the point where the deserted part of the beach was, they had made love – not once, not twice, but three times.

It wasn’t a surprise to either of them.

Kildare Dobbs had wanted to fuck Marsha Downey since the ninth grade. But she was a cheerleader and always more into guys who were into football. Dobbs was always into cars instead. And by the time they were seniors in high school, it became apparent that Charley Downey, Jr. was also into Marsha – in a big way.

The story would have ended when Marsha and Charley married the summer after high school, but instead came to a very real end when he came back from Vietnam in a flagged draped coffin.

Since graduation, except for one winter as wingman on the town’s snowplow with Charley Downey, Sr. -- Junior’s father -- Kildare Dobbs had been the sole reporter for the town’s weekly newspaper. And he had been Marsha’s shadow, admiration at a distance – always the best friend as she mourned.

But as they walked the beach hand in hand in the twilight of the day of her father’s funeral, it seemed quite natural when she came close to him, turned her soft, full lips upward towards him and asked “Are you going to kiss me now?”

He had and in an instant, the kiss had turned to exploring hands, clothes shedding around both of them.

Despite what everything thought – that she was bedding everyone in town since Downey’s death – in fact, she hadn’t had any sex in over 18 months.

Since that summer evening, they had spent most waking hours together and every evening that Kildare Dobbs wasn’t working late on a story and Marsha busied herself making plans for their future.

The Farm was gone.

Marsha’s mother had the farm auction within the month. And, she had broken ground on the new house she was building high up the hill within 60 days of the funeral.

Marsha had been the beneficiary on a $100,000 insurance policy her father had left her which caused the chasm between her and her Mother to grow ever wider as Millicent Belding thought all the money should go to her.

But the auction of 150 year-old farmhouse full of antiques, a working farm and 320 prime acres had brought her a tidy little sum of her own. Developers had been salivating over the land for years as a site for a new Shopping Mall and planned community and Millicent Belding had been more than happy to accommodate them.

“It was what Herman would have wanted,” she had said – at least ten times a day, thought Dobbs.

For her part, Marsha threw herself into planning her escape with Kildare Dobbs.

She had bought one-way plane tickets to Paris and they were scheduled to leave on New Year’s Day. She had found an apartment just off Rue des Ecole and within sight of Notre Dame Cathedral and down the street from the Sorbonne where Kildare Dobbs would write his novel and she could work as an English tutor for students at the University. Her planning was impeccable, right down to storing all of their furniture and clothes in October before winter really sets in.

“We’ll buy everything new,” she exclaimed one night after making love. “A new life in a new country. We’ll live in a new city with new friends, a new wardrobe of Paris clothes for me, and a new typewriter for you. And you can write and cook exotic French dinners for me while we sip new French wines and you write your novel.”

There was only one part of the plan that she was having a problem with, and Kildare Dobbs was thinking about it as he ate his stew.

Kildare Dobbs didn’t want to go.

Quite frankly, he liked his job at the paper. And he liked that he knew everyone in town and that most days, he could finish his work by noon and spend the rest of it either sailing, fishing, or drinking.

He didn’t speak French, he wasn’t much of a cook and he had only casually mentioned writing a novel once when he was riding with Mike Vickson when he got arrested for DWI by the local cops for driving the wrong way down a one-way street. Mike’s girlfriend then picked him up at 4:00 in the morning at the station. Mike was still drunk when they released him. He got into an argument with her, kicked her out of the car and then smashed it up while driving down the same street an hour later. He was dead by 6:00.

“That would make a good story,” Dobbs said at the bar the next afternoon.

But he hadn’t really meant it.

Now, as he finished his homemade stew, he began to check off the ingredients that would mean the usual evening with Marsha.

A flower, red and a rose-- from the florist on the corner. Champagne -- two bottles and while not particularly expensive -- expensive looking. A card from the grocery store -- more for show than for sentiment.

© Ken Warner, 2014

[cantomagazine]

A Mini Remembrance of Jack Germond

One of the things I've noticed about getting older is that sometimes it's hard to identify those memories that you truly remember versus those memories that you think you remember. My memory of almost meeting Jack Germond is one of those.

This former Rochester Times-Union Political Reporter died earlier this year at the age of 85, and he was truly one of this City's greats. For those of you who don't remember the days of the two-newspaper town, the Times-Union was the afternoon daily and a staple at our house. We were a working class family out in the country and a morning newspaper would be wasted on us, as my father and mother were out the door at the crack of dawn to get to work. It wasn't until the end of the day that anyone had the time to even glance at the headlines, and in the evening after dinner and watching Walter Cronkite on television, my Mother and I would settle down with the newspaper.

News was a big thing to my Mother, and consequently to me, so that when I started to be asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I began to reply that I wanted to be a journalist, even though I had only a vague notion of what one was. My mind's eye began to develop a vague notion of a hard drinking, typewriter tapping, late-night gambling, smart-mouthed wittier-than-thou lifestyle -- much to my Mother's chagrin. But, we didn't actually know anyone like that, so I think she felt reasonably sure that her second son was safe from sin. She suggested that I become a lawyer, respectable and educated. Secretly though, I dreamed of being a writer and the political bug had bitten me so that I was slowly becoming obsessed with the combination of reporting and politics.

Who matched my role model idea? Jack Germond of the Times-Union. All I had to do was actually meet him and my dreams would all come true. But in those days, country boys from Brockport had little chance of ever coming into the "Big City" -- Rochester -- and meeting anyone, much less an actual live newspaperman.

Someone though -- I'm not sure who -- told me about Earl's Grill on Exchange Street. It was a legendary watering hole, where politicians and judges, power-brokers and newspapermen all hung out drinking martinis for lunch. And, since the drinking age was 18 and I at least thought I looked the part (even though I was several months short of my 18th birthday) off to Rochester I went. I was sure that Jack Germond must hang out there. All I had to do was skip a day at school, walk into Earl's, order a drink and let the magic begin.

There was only one flaw in my plan -- I had never actually drank a martini or been in a real-live city bar. And so, when I ordered my drink, I got the once-over from the bartender when he asked me "olives or an onion?" and I replied, "Both, I guess." He served me, though (the rules on the drinking age were a little lax in those days) and I sat scanning the bar for notables and famous people. Of course, I had only a fuzzy idea what Jack Germond looked like, but that didn't seem to me to be an obstacle. After all, I was in Earl's. I had a martini. And I was smoking a Marlboro. I had arrived.

Unfortunately for me, so had the second martini. As my vision blurred (and consequently my memory) I have a dim recollection of a large and portly guy that seemed to know everyone and who everyone called Jack getting his own martini and glancing casually in my direction. I nodded and said "Hi", he nodded back, and I began to realize that two martinis had limited my communications skills to little more than that -- nodding. So, I staggered -- and I mean staggered to the door and out to my car where I promptly threw up.

Not exactly an auspicious beginning to my exposure of and to the City of Rochester, but at least I had survived and had a great story to tell around the lunch table the next day at school. And, the adventure fed my imagination of what life would be like in Rochester.

Years later, I watched Germond on PBS bantering about politics, and in 1999, when his book "Fat Man in the Middle Seat" came out, I devoured the pages. I have to admit that I secretly hoped I might read a Jack Germond recollection of a young, scared to death kid on school day afternoon at Earl's, but I guess our meeting didn't have the same effect on him as it had on me, and of course there wasn't one.

But in my own bank of recollections, that day was a big one. I had been in the company of greatness, and while I never became the journalist I dreamed of, I at least can appreciate the greatness that guys like Jack Germond embodied.

Certainly, the world is a little less bright because of his passing.

  © Ken Warner, 2013.

Illustration by Najia Zayed.

Ken Warner is a writer, blogger, editor and community advocate with a long list of local publications to his credit. He is currently working on a novel and hopes to self publish a book of short stories early in 2014. His website: "Musings of an Irish Samurai from the North Coast of America" launched this Autumn.  [email protected].