An LP, Presence by Led Zeppelin, echoes in my head, accompanying memory images of Nia as Sydney Cooke, fighting in Walter's, a Hollywood screenwriter's idea of a greasy spoon cafe in Delta, Utah. Each booth's chrome-rimmed formica-top table has a compact jukebox no recent memories can recall hearing anyone play. They seem strange objects, if used, interfering with other jukes at other tables, Elvis's "Love Me Tender" drowned in "Purple Haze."
I now have the opportunity to play a juke in Walter's, Nia Peeples at the counter with Chuck Norris. Camera crew, boom mike man well-muscled, no awkward drops of the recording instrument into the frame to be expected from this man, Artie Fleming, came in third at the last World's Strongest Man Competition held in Lexington, Kentucky.
Chuck Norris watches his stunt double, a man of the same build, but in shape. Doesn't look like Norris, but at fifteen years younger, the double can actually do the moves we expect Walker to do. Early seasons of the show had Norris doing many of his own stunts and fighting scenes, but now he'd be a pile of broken bones if he ever were to face off against a black belt used to vanquishing most opponents.
Black Belt Charley of Fremont, California, puts Ranger Walker in the hospital. Walker sits up in the hospital bed, leads his team from that position, same expression on his face as when he's flirting, chasing a suspect in his pickup truck, or farting into the toilet. Someone makes a joke about Jell-O.
Later, a nurse named Myrna comes in and flirts with Walker. Next thing you know they're making out, but Myrna's boyfriend is the big villain of the episode called "A Thousand Minutes of Blood." It's one of those stand-off in a desert town cafe premises. Recall The Petrified Forest with Humphrey Bogart playing Duke Mantee, a tough cookie holding a group of disparate people hostage in a desert cafe and gas station.
Nurse Myrna learns intelligence from a careless Walker, besotted with lust for this very generous caregiver, above and beyond the call of duty, yes sir, she's a mighty fine gal, Walker thinks, propped up in bed after Myrna helps him get to the toilet to poop.
I'm going to ask Myrna to marry me once I get out of this house of healing. I saw that the Lord's Vessel Through Which He Poured His Love And Power In The Form of Jesus, i.e. Mary, the Pure One, worthy of God's Nightly Visit To Her Tent While She Slept, Impregnating The Lady With His Divine Essence...What was I trying to figure out? I must get back into shape. My reflexes are flabby. I'm obsessed all of a sudden with Nurse Myrna and I barely know her. What's wrong with me? Did that kick to my head scramble my brains? No, they were scrambled before that, I think going back six months to the moment I realized I'm just acting. I'm projecting an appearance of professionalism. I solve crimes because I'm good. I studied crime-solving at the International Institute of Criminology and Learning How to Get Away With Crime in Prague. My grade point average, though low, did not hinder me from getting this Ranger job. I've had only one job, unless you want to count the five dollar hand jobs I gave to stock brokers and bankers when I was living in New York trying to become a minstrel.
After first seeing her around 1999, I forgot about Nia Peeples. I thought she looked like Valerie Bertinelli, the TV actress who married Eddie Van Halen. I remembered Nia Peeples when I saw her in Season Seven and Season Eight, the final two, of Walker, Texas Ranger, when Chuck Norris gathers around him rookie Rangers to do most of his fighting for him. Chuck was getting old. Chuck was bored. Chuck was afraid he looked slow in the fight scenes. Well, he got slow--it's called aging. I saw Chuck in a movie with Anne Archer, the wife from Fatal Attraction, not a good date movie. Archer and Norris did the nasty in some adventure film from about 1980, when Chuck was young and blonde, with a blonde mustache, a shoulder holster, and a coffee cup in one hand while he talks to Anne Archer wearing a bathrobe, the morning after they do that nasty referred to.
Chuck loves to dress up in black turtlenecks. Give Chuck a black turtleneck, a small automatic machine pistol, a black cap, black face and body paint, plastique, and a mission to blow up a compound somewhere where Asians or Latin Americans are trying to mind their own business, and Kaboom! Take that, Asians! Hiss! Feel our hatred, Latin Americans! We cage you not because we respect your dignity, get real.
But wait, isn't Chuck the one who made Invasion U.S.A.? Soviet commandos landing on American beaches and carrying out hit and run guerrilla operations, causing chaos and confusion. Chuck fights them off. Bella Shaw, the CNN newscaster had a small part in that picture. I had a thing for Bella Shaw for a while. Long silky and shiny brown hair, vivid eyes, nice gaze, beautiful smile and teeth. Farewell Bella Shaw, wherever you are, at the bottom of the well of memories of CNN, the blazing lights of U.S. bombing runs over Baghdad, Bernie Shaw reporting live from a city under attack by Shaw's country.
Reason and chaos, making sense of modern times, like picking through dust to find a flake of cannabis, single-focused on assembling enough random pieces to make me high, like when I was kite-flying on the beach in Lincoln City, Oregon, in 2006, where I watched Albert Brooks's The Muse, saw naked Sharon Stone, a favorite actress of mine.
Sharon Stone appeared in Above the Law, starring a Chuck Norris-like martial arts "actor," Steven Seagal. Sharon's been around sweaty male avengers. She's seen stage blood, heard gunshots, driven winding roads in fog at 1:29 am in a made up movie, after an argument with her estranged husband Monty (Ryan Phillippe) who screwed the upstairs maid after promising to never do it again. Blake Hescox (Alec Baldwin), family friend and Monty's lawyer, has advised Marge Hamilton (Sharon Stone) to not make an issue of Monty's fucking-down class-wise sexual needs.
The film, Finders, Keepers, Losers, No Weeping, makes no box office coin, garnered a review by a serious critic, Benjy Bettycheeks:
"...such as this effrontery to good taste, starring a has-been performer who nevertheless possesses a commanding screen presence, unlike most of the other actors in the film. Stone, experienced, shines when she doesn't have idiotic lines to say. The screenplay, written by four people, is a mess showing clearly instances when they couldn't decide what to do, so they put in two or three solutions to the problem, creating a sense of redundant scenes and dialogue. Sloppy for a forty-five million dollar production, sloppy for a low budget TV ad, and at 240 minutes, just plain sloppy."
I'd rate Finders, Keepers, Losers, No Weeping five out of ten. An average likable made up film. Sharon Stone, boy, I've had a thing for her ever since Basic Instinct 2. Surprised? Not the first film, but the underrated second one. I've also seen Scissors (not good), Sliver (preposterous, but she's good in it), The Muse, Basic Instinct, Catwoman, Total Recall.
Delta, Utah, a town of 3,678 people situated in the middle of the state at the eastern edge of a great desert extending into Nevada. This town has appeared in two of my unfinished novels. Delta has no delta. There, the motels have TV sets that might have on their screens Delta Burke in Designing Women at times.
Episode 304: Julia is Aghast
Julia Sugarbaker (Dixie Carter) of Sugarbaker and Associates Interior Design Firm, headquarters located in her house in Atlanta, comes downstairs wearing her bathrobe, hair up, face mortified in rich woman's shock, having just seen Charlene's (Jean Smart's) naked seventy-one year old mother (Phyllis Diller) naked in the bathroom.
Julia's younger sister, Suzanne (Delta Burke) perches on couch arms, delivering quips illustrating how her intelligence doesn't match her sister's.
Guest Star Robert Wagner plays Crispin Delacroix, Charlene's old beau, a cravat-wearing importer/exporter from Cannes, Brighton, Brooklyn, Santa Barbara, and Tokyo. Crispin wants to sell his original Renoir painting, "bought it for twenty-five quid from an old lady cleaning her attic, wanted to get rid of her things but quick, like."
Crispin Delacroix, real name Benjy Ferliker of Dallas, Texas, is as phony as the Renoir painting. Mary Jo does a background check on him because she doesn't "like the smell of him." She thinks he may have murdered his wife or something.
Flashback. Benjy Ferliker in Dallas eating sushi in a restaurant attacked by ninjas. A throwing star kills the woman in the booth behind Benjy's. He vomits on his tablecloth, ducking just enough to avoid a crossbow bolt pinning a baby to his mother's chest.
Benjy Ferliker remembers this, remembers it hard. Confessing his deception, he asks for matches with which to burn the fake Renoir.
Mary Jo, flaming her one hitter, hands him her lighter, saying, "Bic. Reliable until it runs out of fuel."
He takes the lighter and painting outside and is not heard from again.
What of Julia? She saw Charlene's Mother naked and wet, a ghastly sight.
"How can I un-see that?"
Charlene's Mother comes downstairs in a black dress with a white sash and a gold diamond-studded brooch. Trading insults with Bob Hope really paid off.
Charlene's Mother: (To Julia) I suppose, dear, you're going to try to avoid me for the rest of my indefinite stay?
Julia: Charlene never said indefinite.
Charlene's Mother: My word. Do I detect a hint of resentment in your cultivated voice?
Julia: As eldest member of this group of designers and their hangers-on I insist on compliance with my rules, for this is my house. If I choose to eject you from these premises, which I can prove by word and deed are mine, you will go, you will not come back, you will be out on your keister, sister! (Wild applause from the studio audience, laughter, whistles).
Charlene's Mother: My keister's so flat you'd mistake it for the top of a piano (more laughter from the audience than merited).
Julia: I did not see your keister, fortunately, though the white wire brush above your drooping genitalia was prominent.
Charlene's Mother: The same will happen to you. Gravity is not a woman's friend.
Julia: I will kill myself before I allow my precious lady parts to to fall ever ground-wards toward the Earth's nickel and iron core.
Suzanne: How will you kill yourself, sister?
Julia: With something close to hand. This bathrobe tie, for example.
Charlene's Mother: You'll hang yourself? Honey, take a bottle of barbiturates and go to sleep. I've done it many times.
Julia: Not to the death, obviously!
Charlene's Mother: Revived every time by chumps who care. "There's so much to life!" Yes, but they don't have to look at this mug in the mirror. Julia, you remind me of the Homecoming Queen at my high school, Beatrice Bunters. Lustrous reddish-brown hair, gorgeous brown eyes, great body, all the boys wanted to date her. The girls hated her guts but pretended to love her and everybody wanted to know her. A year after high school graduation she ate a bad piece of octopus, went into convulsions and died on the way to the hospital. I sometimes visit her grave to remind myself that you have to watch what you eat.
Suzanne: I'd be afraid the tentacles would bite me!
Julia: Dear, the octopus, when served, would be dead.
Charlene: We have problems! That was a man from the IRS. We're going to be audited.
Reaction shots of wide-eyed Julia, Suzanne open-mouthed but uncomprehending, Mary Jo blowing marijuana smoke, Charlene looking worried for Julia, and Charlene's Mother looking from one to another as if not knowing what "audited" means.
Cut to commercials:
Do you know how to drive a car? Choose Upper and become a cabbie in your own car! Set your own hours, but you better set many hours because you won't make much at this job, not enough to live on so you'll have to get an additional job and possibly a third one. How about a fourth?
Upper. Put wear and tear on your car, meet new people, make no money.
A couple in a bedroom:
Man: Alice?
Alice: Yes, honey?
Man: How do you make my socks stay on my calves?
Alice: With Calf Stick. Rub a full stick on each sock, and voila! No awkward reaching down to yank up your socks two hours from now while you're at the work party.
Man: You've saved me that indignity. I love you.
Alice: No time for mushy stuff! I need to buy more Calf Stick!
Calf Stick, made with one hundred percent animal fat.
Julia, setting her womanhood at maximum tease, seduces Sherman Dickey the IRS man (Alec Baldwin).
Suzanne sits on a couch arm. Suzanne files her nails. Suzanne makes an obtuse remark. Suzanne looks in her makeup mirror, mortified by the appearance of a pimple on her cheek. She wraps her head in bandages mummy-fashion, with holes for her eyes, nose, and mouth.
Charlene gets together the paperwork required by Sherman Dickey. The tediousness of the task leads to her musical daydream in which she tap-dances on huge piano keys with Michael Jackson. She goes to Coney Island, rides rollercoasters, has dinner at the Ritz, attends an Atlanta Braves game, kisses Michael Jackson good night at her front door. When she enters her house she's greeted with a surprise birthday party--oh, life is never-ending fun!
Mary Jo smokes more pot, makes a reference to the Uriah Heep album, Look At Yourself. While Suzanne sleeps, Mary Jo unwinds her mummy wrap and then, with a permanent black marker, draws a circle around Suzanne's pimple.
Charlene's Mother counter-flirts with the IRS man, enraging Julia.
Julia says goodbye to the mollified IRS man, who never even kisses her, but feels charmed by her and grateful to have been rescued from Charlene's Mother's excessive touching.
After he leaves, Julia says, "I have had dinner with city councilmen who can't keep their hands off of my body. I have watched my little brother salivate at the prospect of going to a strip club on his eighteenth birthday. But I have never done such a heroic work of staving off a man's animal passions. You wouldn't know to look at him, but Sherman Dickey of the IRS is a pesky multi-handed man."
"I didn't find him to be that way," Charlene's Mother remarks. "
"He made brief contact with my boobs three times," Julia continues. "I let him hold one for one second to give him hope and to call off the government hounds.
"The IRS will not audit Sugarbaker and Associates in 1989!"
(Cheers, applause, whistles).
Suzanne comes downstairs wearing a white dress with a black ring shape design all over it, matching the black magic marker ring she wears unashamedly on her face.
"My pimple's gone!"
(The audience loses it).
Vic Neptune
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