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Out of Kansas: Revisiting The Wizard of Oz by Salman Rushdie

New York Magazine - May 4, 1992

Photograph from Everett

I wrote my first story in Bombay at the age of ten; its title was “Over the Rainbow.” It amounted to a dozen or so pages, dutifully typed up by my father’s secretary on flimsy paper, and eventually it was lost somewhere on my family’s mazy journeyings between India, England, and Pakistan. Shortly before my father’s death, in 1987, he claimed to have found a copy moldering in an old file, but, despite my pleadings, he never produced it, and nobody else ever laid eyes on the thing. I’ve often wondered about this incident. Maybe he didn’t really find the story, in which case he had succumbed to the lure of fantasy, and this was the last of the many fairy tales he told me; or else he did find it, and hugged it to himself as a talisman and a reminder of simpler times, thinking of it as his treasure, not mine—his pot of nostalgic parental gold.

I don’t remember much about the story. It was about a ten-year-old Bombay boy who one day happens upon a rainbow’s beginning, a place as elusive as any pot-of-gold end zone, and as rich in promises. The rainbow is broad, as wide as the sidewalk, and is constructed like a grand staircase. The boy, naturally, begins to climb. I have forgotten almost everything about his adventures, except for an encounter with a talking pianola, whose personality is an improbable hybrid of Judy Garland, Elvis Presley, and the “playback singers” of Hindi movies, many of which made “The Wizard of Oz” look like kitchen-sink realism. My bad memory—what my mother would call a “forgettery”—is probably just as well. I remember what matters. I remember that “The Wizard of Oz”—the film, not the book, which I didn’t read as a child—was my very first literary influence. More than that: I remember that when the possibility of my going to school in England was mentioned it felt as exciting as any voyage beyond the rainbow. It may be hard to believe, but England seemed as wonderful a prospect as Oz.

The Wizard, however, was right there in Bombay. My father, Anis Ahmed Rushdie, was a magical parent of young children, but he was prone to explosions, thunderous rages, bolts of emotional lightning, puffs of dragon smoke, and other menaces of the type also practiced by Oz, the Great and Powerful, the first Wizard De-luxe. And when the curtain fell away and his growing offspring discovered, like Dorothy, the truth about adult humbug, it was easy for me to think, as she did, that my Wizard must be a very bad man indeed. It took me half a lifetime to work out that the Great Oz’s apologia pro vita sua fitted my father equally well—that he, too, was a good man but a very bad Wizard.

I have begun with these personal reminiscences because “The Wizard of Oz” is a film whose driving force is the inadequacy of adults, even of good adults; a film that shows us how the weakness of grownups forces children to take control of their own destinies, and so, ironically, grow up themselves. The journey from Kansas to Oz is a rite of passage from a world in which Dorothy’s parent substitutes, Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, are powerless to help her save her dog, Toto, from the marauding Miss Gulch into a world where the people are her own size and she is never, ever treated as a child but as a heroine. She gains this status by accident, it’s true, having played no part in her house’s decision to squash the Wicked Witch of the East; but, by her adventure’s end, she has certainly grown to fill those shoes—or, rather, those ruby slippers. “Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness,” laments the Wicked Witch of the West as she melts—an adult becoming smaller than, and giving way to, a child. As the Wicked Witch of the West “grows down,” so Dorothy is seen to have grown up. This, in my view, is a much more satisfactory reason for her newfound power over the ruby slippers than the sentimental reasons offered by the ineffably loopy Good Witch Glinda, and then by Dorothy herself, in a cloying ending that seems to me fundamentally untrue to the film’s anarchic spirit.

The weakness of Auntie Em and Uncle Henry in the face of Miss Gulch’s desire to annihilate Toto leads Dorothy to think, childishly, of running away from home—of escape. And that’s why, when the tornado hits, she isn’t with the others in the storm shelter and, as a result, is whirled away to an escape beyond her wildest dreams. Later, however, when she is confronted by the weakness of the Wizard of Oz, she doesn’t run away but goes into battle—first against the Wicked Witch and then against the Wizard himself. The Wizard’s ineffectuality is one of the film’s many symmetries, rhyming with the feebleness of Dorothy’s folks; but the different way Dorothy reacts is the point.

The ten-year-old who watched “The Wizard of Oz” at Bombay’s Metro Cinema knew very little about foreign parts, and even less about growing up. He did, however, know a great deal more about the cinema of the fantastic than any Western child of the same age. In the West, the film was an oddball, an attempt to make a sort of live-action version of a Disney cartoon feature despite the industry’s received wisdom that fantasy movies usually flopped. (Indeed, the movie never really made money until it became a television standard, years after its original theatrical release; it should be said in mitigation, though, that coming out two weeks before the start of the Second World War can’t have helped its chances.) In India, however, it fitted into what was then, and remains today, one of the mainstreams of production in the place that Indians, conflating Bombay and Tinseltown, affectionately call Bollywood.

It’s easy to satirize the Hindi movies. In James Ivory’s film “Bombay Talkie,” a novelist (the touching Jennifer Kendal, who died in 1984) visits a studio soundstage and watches an amazing dance number featuring scantily clad nautch girls prancing on the keys of a giant typewriter. The director explains that the keys of the typewriter represent “the Keys of Life,” and we are all dancing out “the story of our Fate upon that great machine.” “It’s very symbolic,” Kendal suggests. The director, simpering, replies, “Thank you.” Typewriters of Life, sex goddesses in wet saris (the Indian equivalent of wet T-shirts), gods descending from the heavens to meddle in human affairs, superheroes, demonic villains, and so on, have always been the staple diet of the Indian filmgoer. Blond Glinda arriving at Munchkinland in her magic bubble might cause Dorothy to comment on the high speed and oddity of the local transport operating in Oz, but to an Indian audience Glinda was arriving exactly as a god should arrive: ex machina, out of her own machine. The Wicked Witch of the West’s orange smoke puffs were equally appropriate to her super-bad status.

It is clear, however, that despite all the similarities, there were important differences between the Bombay cinema and a film like “The Wizard of Oz.” Good fairies and bad witches might superficially resemble the deities and demons of the Hindu pantheon, but in reality one of the most striking aspects of the world view of “The Wizard of Oz” is its joyful and almost total secularism. Religion is mentioned only once in the film: Auntie Em, spluttering with anger at gruesome Miss Gulch, declares that she’s waited years to tell her what she thinks of her, “and now, well, being a Christian woman, I can’t say it.” Apart from this moment in which Christian charity prevents some good old-fashioned plain speaking, the film is breezily godless. There’s not a trace of religion in Oz itself—bad witches are feared and good ones liked, but none are sanctified—and, while the Wizard of Oz is thought to be something very close to all-powerful, nobody thinks to worship him. This absence of higher values greatly increases the film’s charm, and is an important aspect of its success in creating a world in which nothing is deemed more important than the loves, cares, and needs of human beings (and, of course, tin beings, straw beings, lions, and dogs).

The other major difference is harder to define, because it is finally a matter of quality. Most Hindi movies were then and are now what can only be called trashy. The pleasure to be had from such films (and some of them are extremely enjoyable) is something like the fun of eating junk food. The classic Bombay talkie uses a script of appalling corniness, looks by turns tawdry and vulgar, or else both at once, and relies on the mass appeal of its stars and its musical numbers to provide a little zing. “The Wizard of Oz” has stars and musical numbers, but it is also very definitely a Good Film. It takes the fantasy of Bombay and adds high production values and something more—something not often found in any cinema. Call it imaginative truth. Call it (reach for your revolvers now) art.

But if “The Wizard of Oz” is a work of art it’s extremely difficult to say who the artist was. The birth of Oz itself has already passed into legend: the author, L. Frank Baum, named his magic world after the letters “O-Z” on the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet. His original book, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” published in 1900, contains many of the ingredients of the magic potion: just about all the major characters and events are there, and so are the most important locations—the Yellow Brick Road, the Deadly Poppy Field, the Emerald City. But the filming of “The Wizard of Oz” is a rare instance of a film improving on a good book. One of the changes is the expansion of the Kansas section, which in the novel takes up precisely two pages at the beginning, before the tornado arrives, and just nine lines at the end; and another is a certain simplification of the story line in the Oz section: all subplots were jettisoned, such as the visits to the Fighting Trees, the Dainty China Country, and the Country of the Quadlings, which come into the novel just after the dramatic high point of the Witch’s destruction and fritter away the book’s narrative drive. And there are two even more important alterations. Frank Baum’s Emerald City was green only because everyone in it had to wear emerald-tinted glasses, but in the movie it really is a futuristic chlorophyll green—except, that is, for the Horse of a Different Color You’ve Heard Tell About. The Horse of a Different Color changes color in each successive shot—a change that was brought about by covering six different horses with a variety of shades of powdered Jell-O. (For this and other anecdotes of the film’s production I’m indebted to Aljean Harmetz’s definitive book “The Making of The Wizard of Oz.”) Last, and most important of all, are the ruby slippers. Frank Baum did not invent the ruby slippers; he had silver shoes instead. Noel Langley, the first of the film’s three credited writers, originally followed Baum’s idea. But in his fourth script, the script of May 14, 1938, known as the DO NOT MAKE CHANGES script, the clunky metallic and non-mythic silver footwear has been jettisoned, and the immortal jewel shoes are introduced. (In Shot 114, “the ruby shoes appear on Dorothy’s feet, glittering and sparkling in the sun.”)

Other writers contributed important details to the finished screenplay. Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf were probably responsible for “There’s no place like home,” which, to me, is the least convincing idea in the film. (It’s one thing for Dorothy to want to get home, quite another that she can do so only by eulogizing the ideal state that Kansas so obviously is not.) But there’s some dispute about this, too; a studio memo implies that it could have been the assistant producer, Arthur Freed, who first came up with the cutesy slogan. And, after much quarrelling between Langley and the Ryerson-Woolf team, it was the film’s lyricist, Yip Harburg, who pulled together the final script: he added the crucial scene in which the Wizard, unable to give the companions what they demand, hands out emblems instead, and, to our “satiric and cynical” (the adjectives are Harburg’s own) satisfaction, they do the job. The name of the rose turns out to be the rose, after all.

Who, then, is the auteur of “The Wizard of Oz”? No single writer can claim that honor, not even the author of the original book. Mervyn LeRoy and Arthur Freed, the producers, both have their champions. At least four directors worked on the picture, most notably Victor Fleming, who left before shooting ended, however, so that he could make “Gone with the Wind” which, ironically, was the movie that dominated the Academy Awards in 1940, while “The Wizard of Oz” won just three: Best Song (“Over the Rainbow”), Best Original Score, and a Special Award for Judy Garland. The truth is that this great movie, in which the quarrels, firings, and near-bungles of all concerned produced what seems like pure, effortless, and somehow inevitable felicity, is as near as you can get to that will-o’-the-wisp of modern critical theory: the authorless text.

The Kansas described by Frank Baum is a depressing place. Everything in it is gray as far as the eye can see: the prairie is gray, and so is the house in which Dorothy lives. As for Auntie Em, “The sun and wind . . . had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled now.” And “Uncle Henry never laughed. . . . He was gray also, from his long beard to his rough boots.” The sky? It was “even grayer than usual.” Toto, fortunately, was spared grayness. He “saved [Dorothy] from growing as gray as her other surroundings.” He was not exactly colorful, though his eyes did twinkle and his hair was silky. Toto was black.

Out of this grayness—the gathering, cumulative grayness of that bleak world—calamity comes. The tornado is the grayness gathered together and whirled about and unleashed, so to speak, against itself. And to all this the film is astonishingly faithful, shooting the Kansas scenes in what we call black-and-white but what is in reality a multiplicity of shades of gray, and darkening its images until the whirlwind sucks them up and rips them to pieces.

There is, however, another way of understanding the tornado. Dorothy has a surname: Gale. And in many ways Dorothy is the gale blowing through this little corner of nowhere, demanding justice for her little dog while the adults give in meekly to the powerful Miss Gulch; Dorothy, who is prepared to break the gray inevitability of her life by running away, and who, because she is so tenderhearted, runs back when Professor Marvel tells her Auntie Em is distraught that she has fled. Dorothy is the life force of Kansas, just as Miss Gulch is the force of death; and perhaps it is Dorothy’s feelings, or the cyclone of feelings unleashed between Dorothy and Miss Gulch, that are made actual in the great dark snake of cloud that wriggles across the prairie, eating the world.

The Kansas of the film is a little less unremittingly bleak than the Kansas of the book, if only because of the introduction of the three farmhands and of Professor Marvel—four characters who will find their “rhymes,” or counterparts, in the Three Companions of Oz and the Wizard himself. Then again, the film’s Kansas is also more terrifying than the book’s, because it adds a presence of real evil: the angular Miss Gulch, with a profile that could carve a joint, riding stiffly on her bicycle with a hat on her head like a plum pudding, or a bomb, and claiming the protection of the Law for her crusade against Toto. Thanks to Miss Gulch, the movie’s Kansas is informed not only by the sadness of dirt-poverty but also by the badness of would-be dog murderers.

And this is the home that “there’s no place like”? This is the lost Eden that we are asked to prefer (as Dorothy does) to Oz?

I remember, or I imagine I remember, that when I first saw the film Dorothy’s place struck me as a dump. Of course, if I’d been whisked off to Oz, I reasoned, I’d naturally want to get home again, because I had plenty to come home for. But Dorothy? Maybe we should invite her over to stay; anywhere looks better than that.

I thought one other thought, which gave me a sneaking regard for the Wicked Witch: I couldn’t stand Toto! I still can’t. As Gollum said of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins in another great fantasy, “Baggins: we hates it to pieces.” Toto: that little yapping hairpiece of a creature, that meddlesome rug! Frank Baum, excellent fellow, gave a distinctly minor role to the dog: it kept Dorothy happy, and when she wasn’t it had a tendency to “whine dismally”—not an endearing trait. The dog’s only really important contribution to Baum’s story came when it accidentally knocked over the screen behind which the Wizard stood concealed. The film Toto rather more deliberately pulls aside a curtain to reveal the Great Humbug, and, in spite of everything, I found this change an irritating piece of mischief-making. I was not surprised to learn that the canine actor playing Toto was possessed of a star’s temperament, and even, at one point in the shooting, brought things to a standstill by staging a nervous breakdown. That Toto should be the film’s one true object of love has always rankled.

The film begins. We are in the monochrome, “real” world of Kansas. A girl and her dog run down a country lane. “She isn’t coming yet, Toto. Did she hurt you? She tried to, didn’t she?” A real girl, a real dog, and the beginning, with the very first line of dialogue, of real drama. Kansas, however, is not real—no more real than Oz. Kansas is a pastel. Dorothy and Toto have been running down a short stretch of “road” in the M-G-M studios, and this shot has been matted into a picture of emptiness. “Real” emptiness would probably not be empty enough. This Kansas is as close as makes no difference to the universal gray of Frank Baum’s story, the void broken only by a couple of fences and the vertical lines of telegraph poles. If Oz is nowhere, then the studio setting of the Kansas scenes suggests that so is Kansas. This is necessary. A realistic depiction of the extreme poverty of Dorothy Gale’s circumstances would have created a burden, a heaviness, that would have rendered impossible the imaginative leap into Storyland, the soaring flight into Oz. The Grimms’ fairy tales, it’s true, were often brutally realistic. In “The Fisherman and His Wife,” the eponymous couple live, until they meet the magic flounder, in what is tersely described as “a pisspot.” But in many children’s versions of Grimm the pisspot is bowdlerized into a “hovel” or some even gentler word. Hollywood’s vision has always been of this soft-focus variety. Dorothy looks extremely well fed, and she is not really but unreally poor.

She arrives at the farmyard, and here (freezing the frame) we see the beginning of what will be a recurring visual motif. In the scene we have frozen, Dorothy and Toto are in the background, heading for a gate. To the left of the screen is a tree trunk, a vertical line echoing the telegraph poles of the previous scene. Hanging from an approximately horizontal branch are a triangle (for calling farmhands to dinner) and a circle (actually a rubber tire). In midshot are further geometric elements: the parallel lines of the wooden fence, the bisecting diagonal wooden bar at the gate. Later, when we see the house, the theme of simple geometry is present again: everything is right angles and triangles. The world of Kansas, that great void, is defined as “home” by the use of simple, uncomplicated shapes—none of your citified complexity here. Throughout “The Wizard of Oz,” home and safety are represented by such geometrical simplicity, whereas danger and evil are invariably twisty, irregular, and misshapen. The tornado is just such an untrustworthy, sinuous, shifting shape. Random, unfixed, it wrecks the plain shapes of that no-frills life.

Curiously, the Kansas sequence invokes not only geometry but arithmetic, too, for when Dorothy, like the chaotic force she is, bursts in upon Auntie Em and Uncle Henry with her fears about Toto, what are they doing? Why do they shoo her away? “We’re trying to count,” they admonish her as they take a census of chicks—their metaphorical chickens, their small hopes of income—which the tornado will shortly blow away. So, with simple shapes and numbers, Dorothy’s family erects its defenses against the immense and maddening emptiness; and these defenses are useless, of course.

Leaping ahead to Oz, it becomes obvious that this opposition between the geometric and the twisty is no accident. Look at the beginning of the Yellow Brick Road: it is a perfect spiral. Look at Glinda’s carriage, that perfect, luminous sphere. Look at the regimented routines of the Munchkins as they greet Dorothy and thank her for the death of the Wicked Witch of the East. Move on to the Emerald City: see it in the distance, its straight lines soaring into the sky! And now, by contrast, observe the Wicked Witch of the West: her crouching figure, her misshapen hat. How does she arrive and depart? In a puff of shapeless smoke. “Only bad witches are ugly,” Glinda tells Dorothy, a remark of high Political Incorrectness which emphasizes the film’s animosity toward whatever is tangled, claw-crooked, and weird. Woods are invariably frightening—the gnarled branches of trees are capable of coming to menacing life—and the one moment when the Yellow Brick Road itself bewilders Dorothy is the moment when it ceases to be geometric (first spiral, then rectilinear), and splits and forks every which way.

Back in Kansas, Auntie Em is delivering the scolding that is the prelude to one of the cinema’s immortal moments.

“You always get yourself into a fret over nothing. . . . Find yourself a place where you won’t get into any trouble!”

“Some place where there isn’t any trouble. Do you suppose there is such a place, Toto? There must be.”

Anybody who has swallowed the scriptwriters’ notion that this is a film about the superiority of “home” over “away, that the “moral” of “The Wizard of Oz” is as sentimental as an embroidered sampler—“East, West, Home’s Best”—would do well to listen to the yearning in Judy Garland’s voice as her face tilts up toward the skies. What she expresses here, what she embodies with the purity of an archetype, is the human dream of leaving—a dream at least as powerful as its countervailing dream of roots. At the heart of “The Wizard of Oz” is a great tension between these two dreams; but, as the music swells and that big, clean voice flies into the anguished longings of the song, can anyone doubt which message is the stronger? In its most potent emotional moment, this is inarguably a film about the joys of going away, of leaving the grayness and entering the color, of making a new life in the “place where you won’t get into any trouble.” “Over the Rainbow” is, or ought to be, the anthem of all the world’s migrants, all those who go in search of the place where “the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.” It is a celebration of Escape, a grand paean to the Uprooted Self, a hymn—the hymn—to Elsewhere.

One of the leading actors in the cast complained that “there was no acting” in the movie, and in the usual sense this was correct. But Garland singing “Over the Rainbow” did something extraordinary: in that moment she gave the film its heart, and the force of her rendition is strong and sweet and deep enough to carry us through all the tomfoolery that follows, even to bestow upon it a touching quality, a vulnerable charm, that is matched only by Bert Lahr’s equally extraordinary creation of the role of the Cowardly Lion.

What is left to say about Garland’s Dorothy? The conventional wisdom is that the performance gains in ironic force because its innocence contrasts so starkly with what we know of the actress’s difficult later life. I’m not sure this is right. It seems to me that Garland’s performance succeeds on its own terms, and on the film’s. She is required to pull off what sounds like an impossible trick. On the one hand, she is to be the film’s tabula rasa, the blank slate upon which the action of the story gradually writes itself—or, because it is a movie, the screen upon which the action plays. Armed only with a wide-eyed look, she must be the object of the film as much as its subject, must allow herself to be the empty vessel that the movie slowly fills. And yet, at the same time, she must (with a little help from the Cowardly Lion) carry the entire emotional weight, the whole cyclonic force, of the film. That she achieves both is due not only to the mature depth of her singing voice but also to the odd stockiness, the gaucheness, that endears her to us precisely because it is half unbeautiful, jolie-laide, instead of the posturing adorableness a Shirley Temple would have brought to the role—and Temple was seriously considered for the part. The scrubbed, ever so slightly lumpy unsexiness of Garland’s playing is what makes the movie work. One can imagine the disastrous flirtatiousness young Shirley would have employed, and be grateful that Twentieth Century Fox refused to loan her to M-G-M.

The tornado, swooping down on Dorothy’s home, creates the second genuinely mythic image of “The Wizard of Oz”: the archetypal myth, one might say, of moving house. In this, the transitional sequence of the movie, when the unreal reality of Kansas gives way to the realistic surreality of the world of wizardry, there is, as befits a threshold moment, much business involving windows and doors. First, the farmhands open up the doors of the storm shelter, and Uncle Henry, heroic as ever, persuades Auntie Em that they can’t afford to wait for Dorothy. Second, Dorothy, returning with Toto from her attempt at running away, opens the screen door of the main house, which is instantly ripped from its hinges and blown away. Third, we see the others closing the doors of the storm shelter. Fourth, Dorothy, inside the house, opens a door in her frantic search for Auntie Em. Fifth, Dorothy goes to the storm shelter, but its doors are already battened down. Sixth, Dorothy retreats back inside the main house, her cry for Auntie Em weak and fearful; whereupon a window, echoing the screen door, blows off its hinges and knocks her cold. She falls upon the bed, and from now on magic reigns. We have passed through the film’s most important gateway.

But this device—the knocking out of Dorothy—is the most radical and the worst change wrought in Frank Baum’s original conception. For in the book there is no question that Oz is real—that it is a place of the same order, though not of the same type, as Kansas. The film, like the TV soap opera “Dallas,” introduces an element of bad faith when it permits the possibility that everything that follows is a dream. This type of bad faith cost “Dallas” its audience and eventually killed it off. That “The Wizard of Oz” avoided the soap opera’s fate is a testament to the general integrity of the film, which enabled it to transcend this hoary, creaking cliché.

While the house flies through the air, looking like the tiny toy it is, Dorothy “awakes.” What she sees through the window is a sort of movie—the window acting as a cinema screen, a frame within the frame—which prepares her for the new sort of movie she is about to step into. The special-effects shots, sophisticated for their time, include a lady sitting knitting in her rocking chair as the tornado whirls her by, a cow placidly standing in the eye of the storm, two men rowing a boat through the twisting air, and, most important, the figure of Miss Gulch on her bicycle, which is transformed, as we watch it, into the figure of the Wicked Witch of the West on her broomstick, her cape flying behind her, and her huge, cackling laugh rising above the storm.

The house lands; Dorothy emerges from her bedroom with Toto in her arms. We have reached the moment of color. But the first color shot, in which Dorothy walks away from the camera toward the front door of the house, is deliberately dull, an attempt to match the preceding monochrome. Then, once the door is open, color floods the screen. In these color-glutted days, it’s hard for us to imagine ourselves back in a time when color was still relatively rare in the movies. Thinking back once again to my Bombay childhood, in the nineteen-fifties—a time when Hindi movies were all in black-and-white—I can recall the excitement of the advent of color in them. In an epic about the Grand Mughal, the Emperor Akbar, entitled “Mughal-e-Azam,” there was only one reel of color photography, featuring a dance at court by the fabled Anarkali. Yet this reel alone guaranteed the film’s success, drawing crowds by the million.

The makers of “The Wizard of Oz” clearly decided that they were going to make their color as colorful as possible, much as Michelangelo Antonioni did, years later, in his first color feature, “Red Desert.” In the Antonioni film, color is used to create heightened and often surrealistic effects. “The Wizard of Oz” likewise goes for bold, Expressionist splashes—the yellow of the Brick Road, the red of the Poppy Field, the green of the Emerald City and of the Witch’s skin. So striking were the film’s color effects that soon after seeing the film as a child I began to dream of green-skinned witches; and years afterward I gave these dreams to the narrator of my novel “Midnight’s Children,” having completely forgotten their source. “No colours except green and black the walls are green the sky is black . . . the stars are green the Widow is green but her hair is black as black”: so began the stream-of-consciousness dream sequence, in which the nightmare of Indira Gandhi is fused with the equally nightmarish figure of Margaret Hamilton—a coming together of the Wicked Witches of the East and of the West.

Dorothy, stepping into color, framed by exotic foliage, with a cluster of dwarfy cottages behind her, and looking like a blue-smocked Snow White, no princess but a good, demotic American gal, is clearly struck by the absence of her familiar homey gray. “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” she says, and that camp classic of a line has detached itself from the movie to become a great American catchphrase, endlessly recycled, and even turning up as one of the epigraphs to Thomas Pynchon’s mammoth paranoid fantasy of the Second World War, “Gravity’s Rainbow,” whose characters’ destiny lies not “behind the moon, beyond the rain” but “beyond the zero” of consciousness, in a land at least as bizarre as Oz.

But Dorothy has done more than step out of the gray into Technicolor. Her homelessness, her unhousing, is underlined by the fact that, after all the door play of the transitional sequence, and having now stepped out-of-doors, she will not be permitted to enter any interior at all until she reaches the Emerald City. From tornado to Wizard, Dorothy never has a roof over her head. Out there amid the giant hollyhocks, which bear blooms like old gramophone trumpets, there in the vulnerability of open space (albeit open space that isn’t at all like the Kansas prairie), Dorothy is about to outdo Snow White by a factor of nearly twenty. You can almost hear the M-G-M studio chiefs plotting to put the Disney hit in the shade—not simply by providing in live action almost as many miraculous effects as the Disney cartoonists created but also by surpassing Disney in the matter of the little people. If Snow White had seven dwarfs, then Dorothy Gale, from the star called Kansas, would have a hundred and twenty-four.

The Munchkins were made up and costumed exactly like 3-D cartoon figures. The Mayor of Munchkin City is quite implausibly rotund; the Coroner sings out the Witch of the East’s Certificate of Death (“And she’s not only merely dead, she’s really most sincerely dead”) while wearing a hat with an absurdly scroll-like brim; the quiffs of the Lollipop Kids, who appear to have arrived in Oz by way of Bash Street and Dead End, stand up more stiffly than Tintin’s. But what might have been a grotesque and unappetizing sequence in fact becomes the moment in which “The Wizard of Oz” captures its audience once and for all, by allying the natural charm of the story to brilliant M-G-M choreography (which alternates large-scale routines with neat little set pieces like the dance of the Lullaby League or the Sleepy Heads awaking mobcapped and be-nightied out of cracked blue eggshells set in a giant nest), and, above all, through Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg’s exceptionally witty “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead.” Arlen was a little contemptuous of this song and the equally unforgettable “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” calling them his “lemon-drop songs,” and perhaps this is because the real inventiveness in both tunes lies in Harburg’s lyrics. In Dorothy’s intro to “Ding Dong!” Harburg embarked on a pyrotechnic display of a-a-a rhymes (“The wind began to switch/the house to pitch”; until, at length, we meet the “witch . . . thumbin’ for a hitch”; and “what happened then was rich”)—a series in which, as with a vaudeville barker’s alliterations, we cheer each new rhyme as a sort of gymnastic triumph. This type of verbal play continues to characterize both songs. In “Ding Dong!” Harburg begins to invent punning, concertinaed words:

Ding, dong, the witch is dead!

This technique found much fuller expression in “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” becoming the real “hook” of the song:

We’re off to see the Wizard,

The wonderful Wizzerdovoz

If everoever a Wizztherwozz

The Wizzerdovoz is one because . . .

And so on.

Amid all this Munchkining we are given two very different portraits of adults. The Good Witch Glinda is pretty in pink (well, prettyish, even if Dorothy is moved to call her “beautiful”). She has a high, cooing voice, and a smile that seems to have jammed. She has one excellent gag line, after Dorothy disclaims witchy status: pointing at Toto, Glinda inquires, “Well, is that the witch?” This joke apart, she spends the scene looking generally benevolent and loving and rather too heavily powdered. Interestingly, though she is the Good Witch, the goodness of Oz does not inhere in her. The people of Oz are naturally good, unless they are under the power of the Wicked Witch (as is shown by the improved behavior of her soldiers after she melts). In the moral universe of the film, then, evil is external, dwelling solely in the dual devil figure of Miss Gulch/Wicked Witch.

(A parenthetical worry about the presentation of Munchkinland: Is it not a mite too pretty, too kempt, too sweetly sweet for a place that was, until the moment of Dorothy’s arrival, under the absolute power of the evil and dictatorial Witch of the East? How is it that this squashed Witch had no castle? How could her despotism have left so little mark upon the land? Why are the Munchkins so relatively unafraid, hiding only briefly before they emerge, and giggling while they hide? A heretical thought occurs: Maybe the Witch of the East wasn’t as bad as all that—she certainly kept the streets clean, the houses painted and in good repair, and, no doubt, such trains as there might be running on time. Moreover—and, again, unlike her sister—she seems to have ruled without the aid of soldiers, policemen, or other regiments of repression. Why, then, was she so hated? I only ask.)

Glinda and the Witch of the West are the only two symbols of power in a film that is largely about the powerless, and it’s instructive to “unpack” them. They are both women, and a striking aspect of “The Wizard of Oz” is its lack of a male hero—because, for all their brains, heart, and courage, it is impossible to see the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion as classic Hollywood leading men. The power center of the film is a triangle at whose points are Glinda, Dorothy, and the Witch; the fourth point, at which the Wizard is thought for most of the film to stand, turns out to be an illusion. The power of men, it is suggested, is illusory; the power of women is real.

Of the two Witches, good and bad, can there be anyone who’d choose to spend five minutes with Glinda? Of course, Glinda is “good” and the Wicked Witch “bad”; but Glinda is a silly pain in the neck, and the Wicked Witch is lean and mean. Check out their clothes: frilly pink versus slim line black. No contest. Consider their attitudes toward their fellow-women: Glinda simpers upon being called beautiful, and denigrates her unbeautiful sisters, whereas the Wicked Witch is in a rage because of the death of her sister, demonstrating, one might say, a commendable sense of solidarity. We may hiss at her, and she may terrify us as children, but at least she doesn’t embarrass us the way Glinda does. It’s true that Glinda exudes a sort of raddled motherly safeness while the Witch of the West looks—in this scene, anyhow—curiously frail and impotent, obliged to mouth empty threats (“I’ll bide my time. . . . But just try to stay out of my way”). Yet just as feminism has sought to rehabilitate pejorative old words such as “hag,” “crone,” and “witch,” so the Wicked Witch of the West can be said to represent the more positive of the two images of powerful womanhood on offer here. Glinda and the Wicked Witch clash most fiercely over the ruby slippers, which Glinda magics off the feet of the dead Witch of the East and onto Dorothy’s feet, and which the Wicked Witch seemingly has no power to remove. But Glinda’s instructions to Dorothy are oddly enigmatic, even contradictory. She first tells Dorothy, “Their magic must be very powerful or she wouldn’t want them so badly,” and later she says, “Never let those ruby slippers off your feet for a moment or you will be at the mercy of the Wicked Witch of the West.” Now, Statement No. 1 suggests that Glinda is unclear about the nature of the ruby slippers, whereas Statement No. 2 suggests that she knows all about their protective power. Neither statement hints at the ruby slippers’ later role in helping to get Dorothy back to Kansas. It seems probable that this confusion is a hangover from the long, dissension-riddled scripting process, in which the function of the slippers was the subject of considerable dispute. But one can also see Glinda’s obliquities as proof that a good fairy or a good witch, when she sets out to be of assistance, never gives you everything. Glinda, after all, is not so unlike her description of the Wizard of Oz: “Oh, very good, but very mysterious.”

“Just follow the Yellow Brick Road,” says Glinda, and bubbles off into the blue hills in the distance; and Dorothy—geometrically influenced, as who would not be after a childhood among triangles, circles, and squares—begins her journey at the very point from which the Road spirals outward. And as she does so, and while both she and the Munchkins are echoing Glinda’s instructions in tones both raucously high and gutturally low, something begins to happen to her feet: their motion acquires a syncopation, which by beautifully slow stages grows more and more noticeable until at last, as the ensemble bursts for the first time into the film’s theme song, we see, fully developed, the clever, shuffling little skip that will be the leitmotif of the entire journey:

You’re off to see the Wizard,

The wonderful Wizzerdovoz.

You’ll find he is a Wizzovawizz

If ever a Wizztherwozz. . . .

In this way, s-skipping along, Dorothy Gale, who is already a National Heroine of Munchkinland, who is already (as the Munchkins have assured her) History, who “will be a Bust in the Hall of Fame,” steps out along the road of destiny, and heads, as Americans must, into the West: toward the sunset, the Emerald City, and the Witch.

I have always found off-camera anecdotes about a film’s production simultaneously delicious and disappointing, especially when the film concerned has lodged as deep down inside as “The Wizard of Oz” has. It was a little sad to learn about the Wizard’s drinking problem, and to discover that Frank Morgan was only the third choice for the part, behind W. C. Fields and Ed Wynn. (What contemptuous wildness Fields might have brought to the role!) The first choice for his female more-than-opposite number, the Witch, was Gale Sondergaard, not only a great beauty but, prospectively, another Gale to set alongside Dorothy and the tornado. Then I found myself staring at an old color photograph of the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and Dorothy, posing in a forest set, surrounded by autumn leaves, and realized that what I was looking at was not the stars at all but their stunt doubles, their stand-ins. It was an unremarkable studio still, but it took my breath away; for it, too, was both melancholy and mesmeric. In my mind, it came to be the very epitome of the doubleness of my responses.

There they stand, Nathanael West’s locusts, the ultimate wannabes. Garland’s shadow, Bobbie Koshay, with her hands clasped behind her back and a white bow in her hair, is doing her brave best to smile, but she knows she’s a counterfeit, all right: there are no ruby slippers on her feet. The mock-Scarecrow looks glum, too, even though he has avoided the full-scale burlap-sack makeup that was Ray Bolger’s daily fate. If it were not for the clump of straw poking out of his right sleeve, you’d think he was some kind of hobo. Between them, in full metallic drag, stands the Tin Man’s tinnier echo, looking as miserable as hell. Stand-ins know their fate: they know we don’t want to admit their existence, even though our rational minds tell us that when we watch the figure in this or that difficult shot—watch the Wicked Witch fly, or the Cowardly Lion dive through a glass window—we aren’t watching the stars. The part of us that has suspended disbelief insists on seeing the stars, and not their doubles. Thus, the stand-ins are rendered invisible even when they are in full view. They remain off camera even when they are onscreen.

However, this is not the reason for the curious fascination of the photograph; that arises from the fact that, in the case of a beloved film, we are all the stars’ doubles. Our imaginations put us in the Lion’s skin, fit the sparkling slippers on our feet, send us cackling through the air on a broomstick. To look at this photograph is to look into a mirror; in it we see ourselves. The world of “The Wizard of Oz” has possessed us. We have become the stand-ins. A pair of ruby slippers found in a bin in a basement at M-G-M was sold at auction in May, 1970, for the amazing sum of fifteen thousand dollars. The purchaser was, and has remained, anonymous. Who was it who wished so profoundly to possess—perhaps even to wear—Dorothy’s magic shoes?

On being asked to pick a single defining image of “The Wizard of Oz,” most of us would, I suspect, come up with the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and Dorothy s-skipping down the Yellow Brick Road. (In point of fact, the skip continues to grow throughout the journey, and becomes a full-fledged h-hop.) How strange that the most famous passage of this very filmic film—a film packed with technical ingenuity and effects—should be the least cinematic, the most “stagy,” part of the whole! Or perhaps not so strange, for this is primarily a passage of surreal comedy, and we recall that the equally inspired clowning of the Marx Brothers was no less stagily filmed; the zany mayhem of the playing made any but the simplest camera techniques impossible.

The Scarecrow and the Tin Man are pure products of the burlesque theatre, specializing in pantomime exaggerations of voice and body movements, pratfalls (the Scarecrow descending from his post), improbable leanings beyond the center of gravity (the Tin Man during his little dance), and, of course, the smart-ass backchat of the crosstalk act:

TIN MAN (rusted solid): (Squawks)

DOROTHY: He said “Oil can”!

At the pinnacle of all this clowning is that fully realized comic masterpiece of a creation, Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion, all elongated vowel sounds (“Put ‘em uuuuuuuup”), ridiculous rhymes (“rhinoceros” and “imposserous”), transparent bravado, and huge, operatic, tail-tugging, blubbering terror. All three—Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion—are, in T. S. Eliot’s phrase, hollow men. The Scarecrow, of course, actually does have a “headpiece filled with straw, alas,” but the Tin Man, the ancestor of C-3PO in “Star Wars,” is completely empty—he bangs on his chest to prove that his innards are missing, because “the Tinsmith,” his shadowy maker, forgot to provide a heart—and the Lion lacks the most leonine of qualities, lamenting:

What makes the Hottentot so hot?

What puts the ape in apricot?

What have they got that I ain’t got?

Perhaps it is because they are all hollow that our imaginations can enter them and fill them up so easily. That is to say, it is their anti-heroism, their apparent lack of Great Qualities, that makes them our size, or even smaller, so that we can stand among them as equals, like Dorothy among the Munchkins. Gradually, however, we discover that, along with their “straight man,” Dorothy (she occupies in this sequence the role of the unfunny Marx Brother, the one who could sing and look hunky and do little else), they embody one of the film’s “messages”—that we already possess what we seek most fervently. The Scarecrow regularly comes up with bright ideas, which he offers with self-deprecating disclaimers. The Tin Man can weep with grief long before the Wizard gives him a heart. And Dorothy’s capture by the Witch brings out the Lion’s courage, even though he pleads with his friends to “talk me out of it.” For this message to have its full impact, however, it is necessary that we learn the futility of looking for solutions outside. We must learn about one more hollow man: the Wizard of Oz himself. Just as the Tinsmith was a flawed maker of tin men—just as, in this secular movie, the Tin Man’s god is dead—so too must our belief in wizards perish, so that we may believe in ourselves. We must survive the Deadly Poppy Field, helped by a mysterious snowfall (why does snow overcome the poppies’ poison?), and so arrive, accompanied by heavenly choirs, at the city gates.

Here the film changes convention once again, becoming a portrait of hicks from the sticks arriving in the metropolis—one of the classic themes of American films, with echoes in “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” and even in Clark Kent’s arrival at the Daily Planet in “Superman.” Dorothy is a country hick, “Dorothy the small and meek”; her companions are backwoods buffoons. Yet—and this, too, is a familiar Hollywood trope—it is the out-of-towners, the country mice, who will save the day.

There was never a metropolis quite like Emerald City, however. It looks from the outside like a fairy tale of New York, a thicket of skyscraping green towers. On the inside, though, it’s the very essence of quaintness. Even more startling is the discovery that the citizens—many of them played by Frank Morgan, who adds the parts of the gatekeeper, the driver of the horse-drawn buggy, and the palace guard to those of Professor Marvel and the Wizard—speak with what Hollywood actors like to call an English accent. “Tyke yer anyplace in the city, we does,” says the driver, adding, “I’ll tyke yer to a little place where you can tidy up a bit, what?” Other members of the citizenry are dressed like Grand Hotel bellhops and glitzy nuns, and they say—or, rather, sing—things like “Jolly good fun!” Dorothy catches on quickly. At the Wash & Brush Up Co., a tribute to urban technological genius with none of the dark doubts of a “Modern Times” or a “City Lights,” our heroine gets a little Englished herself:

DOROTHY (sings): Can you even dye my eyes to match my gown?

Most of the citizenry are cheerfully friendly, and those who appear not to be—the gatekeeper, the palace guard—are soon won over. (In this respect, once again, they are untypical city folk.) Our four friends finally gain entry to the Wizard’s palace because Dorothy’s tears of frustration undam a quite alarming reservoir of liquid in the guard. His face is quickly sodden with tears, and, watching this extreme performance, you are struck by the sheer number of occasions on which people cry in this film. Besides Dorothy and the guard, there is the Cowardly Lion, who bawls when Dorothy bops him on the nose; the Tin Man, who almost rusts up again from weeping; and Dorothy again, while she is in the clutches of the Witch It occurs to you that if the hydrophobic Witch could only have been closer at hand on one of these occasions the movie might have been much shorter.

Into the palace we go, down an arched corridor that looks like an elongated version of the Looney Tunes logo, and at last we confront a Wizard whose tricks—giant heads and flashes of fire—conceal his basic kinship with Dorothy. He, too, is an immigrant; indeed, as he will later reveal, he is a Kansas man himself. (In the novel, he came from Omaha.) These two immigrants have adopted opposite strategies of survival in a new and strange land. Dorothy has been unfailingly polite, careful, courteously “small and meek,” whereas the Wizard has been fire and smoke, bravado and bombast, and has hustled his way to the top—floated there, so to speak, on a cloud of his own hot air. But Dorothy learns that meekness isn’t enough, and the Wizard finds (as his balloon gets the better of him for a second time) that his command of hot air isn’t all it should be. (It is hard for a migrant like me not to see in these shifting destinies a parable of the migrant condition.)

The Wizard’s stipulation that he will grant no wishes until the four friends have brought him the Witch’s broomstick ushers in the penultimate, and least challenging (though most action-packed and “exciting”), movement of the film, which is in this phase at once a buddy movie, a straightforward adventure yarn, and, after Dorothy’s capture, a more or less conventional princess-rescue story. The film, having arrived at the great dramatic climax of the confrontation with the Wizard of Oz, sags for a while, and doesn’t really regain momentum until the equally climactic final struggle with the Wicked Witch, which ends with her melting, her “growing down” into nothingness.

Fast forward. The Witch is gone. The Wizard has been unmasked, and in the moment of his unveiling has succeeded in performing a spot of true magic, giving Dorothy’s companions the gifts they did not believe until that moment that they possessed. The Wizard is gone, too, and without Dorothy, their plans having been fouled up by (who else but) Toto. And here is Glinda, telling Dorothy she has to learn the meaning of the ruby slippers for herself.

TIN MAN: What have you learned, Dorothy?

DOROTHY: . . . If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own back yard; because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with. Is that right?

GLINDA: That’s all it is. . . . Now those magic slippers will take you home in two seconds. . . . Close your eyes and tap your heels together three times . . . and think to yourself . . . there’s no place like . . .

Hold it.

How does it come about that at the close of this radical and enabling film—which teaches us in the least didactic way possible to build on what we have, to make the best of ourselves—we are given this conservative little homily? Are we to think that Dorothy has learned no more on her journey than that she didn’t need to make such a journey in the first place? Must we believe that she now accepts the limitations of her home life, and agrees that the things she doesn’t have there are no loss to her? “Is that right?” Well, excuse me, Glinda, but it is not.

Home again, in black-and-white, with Auntie Em and Uncle Henry and the rude mechanicals clustered around her bed, Dorothy begins her second revolt, fighting not only against the patronizing dismissals by her own folk but also against the scriptwriters and the sentimental moralizing of the entire Hollywood studio system. “It wasn’t a dream, it was a place!” she cries piteously. “A real, truly live place! . . . Doesn’t anyone believe me?”

Many, many people did believe her. Frank Baum’s readers believed her, and their belief in Oz led him to write thirteen further Oz books, admittedly of diminishing quality; the series was continued, even more feebly, by other hands after his death. Dorothy, ignoring the “lessons” of the ruby slippers, goes back to Oz, in spite of the efforts of Kansas folk, including Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, to have her dreams brainwashed out of her (see the terrifying electro-convulsive-therapy sequence in the recent Disney film “Return to Oz”); and, in the sixth book of the series, she sends for Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, and they all settle down in Oz, where Dorothy becomes a Princess.

So Oz finally becomes home. The imagined world becomes the actual world, as it does for us all, because the truth is that, once we leave our childhood places and start to make up our lives, armed only with what we know and who we are, we come to understand that the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that “there’s no place like home” but, rather, that there is no longer any such place ashome—except, of course, for the homes we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz. Which is anywhere—and everywhere—except the place from which we began.

In the place from which I began, after all, I watched the film from the child’s—Dorothy’s—point of view. I experienced, with her, the frustration of being brushed aside by Uncle Henry and Auntie Em, busy with their dull grownup counting. Like all adults, they couldn’t focus on what was really important: namely, the threat to Toto. I ran away with her and then ran back. Even the shock of discovering that the Wizard was a humbug was a shock I felt as a child, a shock to the child’s faith in adults. Perhaps, too, I felt something deeper, something I couldn’t then articulate; perhaps some half-formed suspicion about grownups was being confirmed.

Now, as I look at the movie again, I have become the fallible adult. Now I am a member of the tribe of imperfect parents who cannot listen to their children’s voices. I, who no longer have a father, have become a father instead. Now it is my fate to be unable to satisfy the longings of a child. And this is the last and most terrible lesson of the film: that there is one final, unexpected rite of passage. In the end, ceasing to be children, we all become magicians without magic, exposed conjurers, with only our simple humanity to get us through.

We are the humbugs now. ♦

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loudsuitlover · 4 years

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Would you write a blurb about their honeymoon or just about a day with their kids ?🥰

A/N: I chose the second one, hoped you like it! xx

Toddlers make everything look huge because they are so tiny so their little hands would hold apples and have them look like melons. Dylan wasn’t as tiny anymore, he was five years old, three months from turning six but in Blue’s eyes, he was still a tiny piece of cotton to hold and protect.

He was colouring on the table while his daddy set the new stereo he had gotten for their movie nights and he was very focused on not colouring out of the lines because at school he had noticed, his colourings got better marking when he didn’t colour out of the lines, and even though this time the lines he had drew them himself, he still wanted to respect every single one of them.

Mummy was doing laundry minding baby Annie and Hughie was down for a nap. It was a Sunday, so Nana was having dinner with them, but mummy and daddy were in homeware and Dylan didn’t knew, but he loved this moments because these were the moments were mummy and daddy were just mummy and daddy, and they weren’t anybody’s doctor and he didn’t have to share.

“Daddy”

His dad didn’t look at him because he knew his son wasn’t looking at him either. He would do that quite a lot, when he was colouring or when he was building with Lego; he would just start a conversation while being in his own head and Harry felt lucky that his son would let him have a glance at his little, magic mind. He shared a lot with Blue- he shared everything with Blue- but then again, Harry had been a mummy’s boy himself, so he couldn’t get any hard feelings with his own son for that. If he were a boy, he would choose Blue over him too.

“Yes, honey?”

“I was very scared.”

In that moment he turned around and his green eyes searched for his kid’s but he wasn’t yet looking at him. It surprised him then, how calmed he looked- how much he looked like Blue- and how he was focused on his drawing and his little nut nose wasn’t wrinkled and his frown wasn’t troubled.

He knew he meant three nights ago, when Hughie had had a seizure because of the fever because their two older babies had gotten a cold. They always got sick together. He sighed.

Blue had heard their interaction, not because she meant to eavesdropped, but because she had put Anie down and she had found a lego Dylan had lost under her cot and she wanted to bring it back to him for she knew it would make him happy but she hadn’t want to interrupt the father-son moment.

She also knew, Harry was a lot better with words than she was- he was also a lot better at cuddles, she figured- but she loved to hear him talk to their kids for she loved the way he was trying to raise them. It was mostly on love, they had both agreed that- that they would always wrapped their children in love and that was the only thing that could never ever be missing for food could miss if they struggled, even a roof could miss but love? Love will always be there for their children to feel. And she admired the way Harry thought, she had always admired that, but the way he tried to guide his kids... She was at awe with that and that’s why she felt so at ease, because if anything were to happen to her; she would leave her babies with the best person in the world.

“You were?”

Dylan hummed and a smirk found its way on Blue’s hidden face for she found it a very adult-like hum and she felt her heart beating hard with pride. Harry always said Dylan was a male mini-Blue, that he thought like her and talked like her and even walked like her so she always felt a weird pride with every little thing he did.

It’s not that he was her favourite child. There was not such thing. She could never choose, because Dylan was so much like her, but Hughie was so much like Harry and she loved Harry... Hughie was dorky and funny, a people’s person, a real showman. He was a little distracted, sometimes even a little rough- just as his father was too straightforward sometimes- but he had the kindest little soul, and he would care and protect those he loved like a lion. And baby Anie... What was there not to love? They didn’t really know her yet because she was just a baby but they knew she liked Elvis and daddy and spending time with the boys.

“And how did you know you were scared?” Harry asked him.

That had him thinking. He stopped colouring then and his little hand held the colour crayon as he frowned and thought back of that night. How had he known he was scared? What was it that give the feeling away? He swallowed.

“My heart was beating faster” He decided “but I didn’t like it.”

“Was that the first time you had been scared?”

“No.” He shook his head. “But I had never been scared for Hugh.”

Harry nodded then. Hughie was tougher than Dylan. Harry had seen them playing on the park with other kids and he had seen Hughie protecting his older brother sometimes so he understood what he meant.

“Well, honey, there’s nothing wrong with being scared. Fear really is just self-protection, you know? We get scared because we think something is going to happen that’s going to hurt us or the ones we love and that’s good because sometimes it’s true and we can prevent it from happening, you know? Most times, however, fear is just in our heads so”

Harry got down from the stool he had been stading to reach the stereo better and took a seat next to his son on the table. The boy looked at his dad once before he got back to his colouring. Green eyes set on the piece of paper and they travel across the figure of a woman in white that kneels on the bed of a boy dressed in a superhero costume. He notices the sharks under her legs too and the blue birds surrounding her but how neither of them, nor the bad sharks nor the inocent birds, seem to mind her.

“Is that mummy?”

Dylan nodded and Harry smirked.

“She wasn’t scared.” Dylan noted. “She saved him and then she made chocolate milk for the two of us and cuddled me.”

Blue felt her heart swoon and her eyes getting teary. She probably should have explained better, even though she did explain to Dylan what had happened and what she had done, but the little boy still thought she had saved his brother, and she didn’t really feel worth it of that word.

“Mummy’s really brave, isn’t she?” Harry asked.

And Dylan nodded.

“She’s braver than me.”

“She’s braver than me too.” Harry chuckled and his son looked up at him with a frown.

Was he being serious or was he messing with him? Daddy knew everything too and Mummy was very brave but Daddy was the most brave and Mummy always waited for him to go to bed because she slept better when Daddy was home. She always said that... And Mummy curled up to Daddy when there was thunder outside like they did to her and Daddy held Mummy when she cried so Daddy must be the most brave of them five.

“But you know, Mummy’s scared sometimes too.”

“Do you think so?” His son challenged.

“I know so.” Harry shrugged. “She was really scared once when you were younger because you had hit your head at uncle’s Rio’s house and she didn’t know how it had exactly happened so she was very scared that you had hurt yourself really bad.”

“But I didn’t?”

Harry chuckled.

“No, you didn’t.”

“So she was scared for me, like I was scared for Hugh.”

“That’s right.” His dad nodded. “I reckon that’s the only thing that can really scare Mummy, something happening to us four or Uncle Rio or Aunty Coco or Aunty Gemma or Nana or Abuela, you know.”

“You too, daddy?”

“What do you mean?”

“Mummy is scared for you too?”

His son’s question took him off guard. What was he doubting here?

“Well, yeah.” He chuckled. “Mummy loves me quite a bit too, you know? It’s not just you, little chipmunks.”

Dylan giggled at his daddy’s tickles but he already knew that. What had surprised him was that his mummy would be protective of Daddy too because Daddy was who protected them all and he had never been afraid of anything happening to Daddy so it surprised him that Mummy would be. Mummy seemed rather smart...

“But the important thing, Dy, is that you know when you’re scared and that’s great, you know why?”

“Because if I know what’s wrong, I can change it.” The little boy repeated his daddy’s teaching and the man smiled, as proud as amazed at his intelligence.

“Exactly, and because you helped Hughie too, you know? You got scared so you called for Mummy and then Mummy could help him. If you hadn’t called Mummy, then maybe Mummy wouldn’t know.” Harry shrugged. “So see? Fear was a good thing then, wasn’t it?”

Dylan seemed to consider it. He hadn’t felt good that night. He cried and he felt a heavy weight on his chest and his belly turning upside down and his pulse on his wrists and he didn’t like that. But he supposed... Maybe Daddy was right. Mummy did came to help Hughie.

“And you know why Mummy wasn’t scared and you were?” Dylan shook his head. “Not because Mummy was bravest but because Mummy knew what was happening, because Mummy is a doctor, and you didn’t. That’s why.”

Dylan nodded. That made sense. Daddy always made sense, except when he watched the Packers.

“So next time you’re scared, you need to ask yourself- wait, why am I scared? And then you do what you have to do, okay?”

Dylan nodded.

“Okay.”

In a second he got on his knees on his chair and wrapped his small arms around his daddy’s neck.

“Thank you, daddy.”

“No problem, baby.”

“And daddy, is that going to happen to Hugh again?”

“I don’t know, it might. But that’s okay, we know what to do.”

“But... Hughie is okay... right?”

“Sure, love, he’ll be fine. He just got the cold worse than you did. But he’ll be alright. Don’t worry.”

“Okay.”

“Now, shall we see if Daddy figure to connect the right wires for the stereo?”

With that he got up from the table and turned back around so he could turn the stereo on and a few seconds later, after Blue had picked her heart up from the floor and had set it back on her ribcage, she thought it was a good time to give Dylan his lego construction.

She set it on the table in front of him before either of them noticed her presence and the little boy jumped in his seat in excitement.

“Yeah, baby!” He celebrated, making both his parents laugh. “You found it! Mummy, you’re the best!”

“Thank you, lovely.”

“Mummy, look! It’s for Hugh but this is you. See? I painted her lips pink like you like.”

“Oh, thank you, love! This is such a great drawning! Look at these birds! They’re so gorgeous, and these sharks, baby, they’re very scary! You’re such a good drawer, Dy! And you didn’t colour out of the lines at all! Hughie is going to love it.”

“Is he up?”

His hazel eyes looked up at her with hope and will but she shook her head and kissed his hairline when softly The Crystals started playing from the stereo.

“Oh, well, you did it!” She celebrated.

Her husband gave her a cheeky grin over his shoulder and having their child on her hands, she still felt her heart skipping a beat at that spark of his, like from the fifties and she wanted to laugh at herself.

“What? Did you come here to dance? Just when the stereo is playing, she appears out the door...” He teased her, making her giggle stupidly.

“Well, I didn’t originally. But I’d never say no to dancing with my favourite man on Earth so... Can I have this dance, Dy?”

Harry smirked but brought a hand to his heart and pretended to have been shot and Dylan giggled at his mummy’s antics as she picked him up from the chair and danced with him before they all heard baby Anie calling.

“Oh, that’s my call, like Cinderella.” She giggled and set the boy back in the table, pressing another kiss to his head before she rushed outside.

“Don’t forget your slipper, princess.” Her husband called after her making her giggle again.

He still chuckled after she had disappeared and his boy, still at the table, was gathering his crayons and keeping them on his pencil case.

“Daddy,” He spoke again “do you like Mummy?”

He had to laugh. He turned his body to the side so he was facing his kid and the little boy challenged him with the sterness of his mother’s hazel eyes.

“What do you mean if I like Mummy? I love Mummy. I’m married to her.”

He shrugged.

“I just thought you liked Mummy because Mrs Mars said when people like someone, they might make jokes but they always treat that person especially good.”

“That is true.” Harry nodded.

“So I thought you liked Mummy because you called her princess and that was a joke but you always make her breakfast and you hug her and you always let her have the new blanket and you say nice things to her too like how good she smells or how pretty she is.”

Harry smirked at his son’s appreciations. He didn’t know he had been watching him but he found it endearing. And he did always let Blue have the new blanket, because she was always colder than he was, and he liked hugging her, that was true.

“Well, you caught me. I do like Mummy. A lot.” He played.

Dylan nodded with an eyebrow cocked as if saying, you’re telling me... And Harry tried his best not to laugh as he watched his little smarty pants keeping his pencils in his red pencil-case.

“Don’t worry, Daddy. Mummy likes you too.”

“You reckon she does?” He grinned.

“I think yes. She always serves your plate before she serves hers and the other day she bought you a sweater because she heard you say you were cold at work so she doesn’t want you to be cold and she always laugh at your jokes and he says you’re very handsome all the time.”

“She laughs at my jokes because my jokes are good.” He defended.

“Aunty Gemma says they aren’t.” He confessed. His hazel eyes found his daddy’s. “Daddy, I told her I think they are but I lied.”

And he was apologizing for it, Harry wasn’t sure whether he was sorry for having lied or if he was sorry that he didn’t really find them funny but he couldn’t help himself when he squeezed his son against his chest in endless love and admiration.

“I love you so much, Dy.” Harry chuckled.

“I love you too, Daddy.” Then his little hands cup Harry’s cheeks and he held his dad’s face close to his. “Daddy, your jokes are good.”

And he laughed again until someone ringed the bell.

“Nana!” Dylan’s eyes opened as he jumped off his dad’s embrace and ran to the door.

And as he made his way to the door himself, he stopped you on the corridor with a firm grip on your hips with both hands and you smiled at him with baby Anie on your waist.

“Hey, Blue, our son thinks we like each other.”

She frowned amused but she thought she knew where that came from because she had picked him from school on friday and he had told her about what Mrs Mars had said about liking someone when a girl from class had told another that Bryce pulled from her piggy tails because he liked her.

“Maybe I should take you on a date or something...” He joked.

“Maybe you should.” She smiled. “Because, yeah, I do like you.”

He captured her lips with his on an amused kiss.

“Yeah, I kinda like you too.”

#doctor harry blurb #harry styles blurb #harry styles fluff #harry styles dad #daddy harry #dad harry #harry styles one shot #harry styles imagine #doctor harry dylan #dylan styles

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ginnyzero · 4 years

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The South Dakota Setting (my books)

Like I said, bikers are quintessentially American. I’ve been fortunate enough that I’ve seen quite a bit of America, even if it was just traveling through it by car or train from one place to another. I’ve lived on both Coasts, went to college in the middle of America for a time and haven’t always taken a plane to get from one side to the other.

America is huge and it’s extremely varied. The Rockies, the Catskills and the Appalachians may all be mountain ranges in America, but they are so different from each other. I grew up in upstate New York in the Fingerlakes Area. It’s a beautiful place. It’s very green. Our hills are covered with trees so the further away they are the bluer they look. A lake to me isn’t this tiny thing. A lake is miles long and you have to go up to a top of the hill to look across it.

There were a couple places that I’ve visited with my family and where I’ve lived that really stood out to me. One of my favorite places in the United States is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the area bordering Lake Superior. It’s a beautiful, slightly hilly landscape that is covered in pine tree forests. The lake is huge and blue and has its own tidal system. I remember going across Mackinaw Bridge and being amazed that I could look down and see the lake floor where the lakes met and how intense the colors were. If I was to have a summer home, that’s where it would be. A lake house where I could hunt for blue agates on the beach.

I’ve talked about how I’ve went to college at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. And I know I have rose colored glasses about San Francisco because I can google earth/map it and it doesn’t look the same as it did when I lived there. What I loved about San Francisco though was the architecture, whether it was the early twentieth century buildings put up after the earthquake of 1906 or the gothic cathedral or the French art noveau inspired buildings on Market Street or even the buildings of Japan town. The weather was decent though I’ve grown to like my weather warmer than San Francisco can give me. The shopping was great even if I mostly window shopped while I was there, poor student after all. There were art galleries and open area parks. San Francisco had atmosphere when the fog rolled in at night. It also always felt extremely safe in most neighborhoods. I could walk around late and not be bothered because half the working population left over one of the two bridges each evening. The best thing about San Francisco though was the way it felt like a town and not a city. I could walk everywhere. To the grocery. To the movie theatre. To class. To my friend’s. To my favorite pizzeria on Bush and Powell. To the sushi place. To the Korean hibachi bbq. OMG, THE FOOD. Very rarely did I take a bus and when I did, Muni was an amazing bus system. I sincerely miss it when I’m waiting every half hour for a bus here in Daytona. (Unfortunately, I haven’t yet figured out a PLOT to set IN San Francisco. It’s very frustrating given how much I love this city.)

The summer after my senior year of high school and before I went to college, my family had a big out west trip planned. I’d already gone to NYC with my class for our senior trip and visited my Uncle in Texas to meet my newest cousin with my mother and grandmother. But this big out west trip was to meet some relations in South Dakota and hopefully make it to Yellowstone, before I went to Ohio. (We didn’t make it to Yellowstone.) Most of the trip out there was through the Midwest, and the Midwest is one thing, flat. And it became this sort of game to count what the fields were growing, corn, alfalfa, sunflowers, and more corn. There were bands of trees between the fields but honestly, there wasn’t much of interest.

We stopped in Mitchell, South Dakota to see the Corn Palace. It was a tribute to Elvis year. The Corn Palace is just one of those things you either know about it or you don’t and you either get it or you don’t. After the Corn Palace we went through the Badlands on our way to Wall and promptly the camper overheated and broke down. South Dakota is mostly prairie and along the highway there were ranches where they kept bison and donkeys and ostriches. In one of the national parks, the bison were allowed to roam free. And people do keep bison in New York (which is crazy to me but yes, it was once part of their natural habitat) but this was different. There weren’t any fences to protect you. Fortunately, bison are mostly placid animals.

Once we got to Wall, we stopped in Wall Drug and it was this huge indoor strip mall basically. Buffalo burgers turned out to be a bit dry. But then we were finally on our way to the Black Hills. It was the evening as we were driving down the highway through the last of the prairie and there was storm rolling in and lightning looked like it walked across the grasslands. We got closer to the hills, the white spruce really did make them look black and then the tops were pure white rock and bare of trees.

It was actually around Sturgis Bike Week when we went. So, once we got out of Rapid City and went into the Black Hills themselves, there were motorcycles everywhere. The roads in and out of these towns twisted about between the hills. The forest grows right up to the roads. It really felt like a place where something magical could happen. There is still evidence of some gold mining going on as well. We did some tourist things, Deadwood, Mount Rushmore and across the state border to Devil’s Tower. There is a lot of history in the Black Hills of the old west between it being a drop off point to sell cattle, gold mining, trains and Wild Bill Hickok. There are ghosts in the Black Hills.

What I didn’t know at the time is how important Sturgis was to Bikers, because I was much more interested in the cowboys and the gold mining and the Native Americans. Sturgis is the biggest bike week in America. (Daytona being the second biggest.) And it’s a mandatory event for a lot of biker clubs. They often induct new members and have special events that go on at Sturgis. To me, there were just a huge amount of bikers in the Black Hills which were holding up traffic and annoying my father.

Once I found out about how important Sturgis and the Black Hills were to the biker community, out of all the places I had seen and loved about America, the Black Hills were the obvious choice to make the setting for my novel. In some ways, bikers can be like the new cowboys of the modern era. Rugged individualists riding iron horses. (I am not saying it is a one for one comparison.) The Black Hills just felt appropriate.

With just these three core building blocks, there is a lot for me to explore and think about in my universe. I try not to get overwhelmed by it and approach it one bit at a time. It’s a journey and the road may be long, twisty and the engine noisy. And that’s the best way to be.

#setting #my books #werewolves #south dakota #sturgis #bikers #the black hills

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rolltidewrestlingfan4life · 5 years

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THIS IS VERY LONG AND VERY PERSONAL FOR ME. YOU MAY FIND IT AN ENJOYABLE STORY. I DID NOT PLAN TO WRITE A VIRTUAL NOVELLA BUT MY HEART AND SOUL STARTED POURING.

I didn’t do this back in February but this man deserves the mention and respect. This is the man that raised me. The man I idolize. He died February 5th as I was performing CPR on him or just before. I’m happy that he had a very quick and painless death that I believe he was expecting and prepared for. This man was born in New Hampshire and took a job in the 8th grade, he never returned to school and usually worked 2 jobs 6 days a week. His family moved back and forth between New Hampshire and Vermont. He got his first car when his brother’s car broke down, his brother traded him a 48 Ford for a bicycle.He loved riding his Indian motorcycle until a car slowed too fast in front of him and he collided and flew over the top of the car, miraculously his only injuries were cuts and knocked out teeth. In 1955, he made the decision to join the US Air Force.It would be the decision that triggered his destiny, After completing basic training he returned home to New Hampshire, gave his brother his air force ring as a momento (I have it now) and headed to Savannah Georgia where he was stationed.

431 miles away, in a booming coal mining town deep in the country of central Alabama, there lived a teenage girl in her senior year of high school. She didn’t really care for any of the boys in her town though she would “take them from their girlfriends to prove she could” She had an aunt and uncle that lived up in the big city in Birmingham, that is..until her Uncle joined the Army. Ironically, he was station in Savannah.

As fate would have it, the man from Alabama met the young man from New Hampshire and they became friends. One day there was a special event at the base where family was invited, the teenage girl came with her aunt to see her Uncle. In the cool twilight of the day the girl was walking outside when she saw a man sitting on a bench beneath an oak tree. The tree was huge,it had stood for many decades if not a century, the tree had wisdom in it’s soul. She stared at the young man in the distance. The sun was fading as swamp moss swayed in the breeze as the night began to overtake the day. She saw a flicker of light as the young man lit a Lucky Strike with his zippo. “he looks just like Elvis Presley” she thought. Something in the breeze made her sneeze, try as she might she could not hold it in. The young man turned at the sound and stopped in his tracks. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever saw and he had to meet her. He approached her and introduced himself, he was the young man from New Hampshire. They spent a lot of that night sitting under that mighty oak and talking about their pasts, their presents and their hopes for the future.

Not long after the meeting, the man was deployed to Morocco in North Africa. Morocco had been under French control and the locals were ready for a revolution. He was a photographer, after a battle between the rebels and the french, he would either sit on the edge or hang from a cord out of a helicopter and take photos of dead bodies, destroyed buildings. He saw a lot of things a man just don’t want to remember while he was in Africa. When he was being sent home, the airplane he was in lost an engine over the Bermuda triangle, the plane struggled but managed an emergency landing in the Virgin Islands.. after a day there, he was in the air bound for Savannah.

He was pleasantly surprised and happy to see the girl from Alabama waiting when he and his fellow soldiers stepped off the plane. They went to the movies that day. They would talk on the phone and write long love letters to one another almost daily. I have a shoebox full of these and they span a month, It was clear these two were smitten. One weekend, he decided he had to see her. He went AWOL on a Friday night and drove almost 7 hours through a state he had never seen, to a town he had never heard of. The young girl’s mother had heard about him and knew he was her brother in law’s friend, she also knew her daughter was crazy about him. She invited him in for supper and to talk and get to know the family. When bedtime came though, the young man was made to sleep on the porch. Going AWOL on weekends to spend days in her house and nights alone on her porch became a regular thing until finally, he showed up one weekend with a ring. A week later, they were married in a small church that her family had established decades ago, He was called up to serve in the Bay of Pigs but received his honorable discharge just a week before. He flew to New Hampshire and kissed his momma, got his dad’s guitar (the only thing he had left of his father) and wished his brothers and sisters well. He flew back to his new home and his new wife in Alabama. He opened his own photography studio but business was slow, there just wasn’t a demand for professional photography in this town. He took a job with the owner of a gas station/general store at the end of Main Street, he worked 6 days a week,, delivering items, repairing things and installing huge propane tanks. In 1959, he and his wife had their first child, a daughter. A little boy came in 1961. His father in law was an electrician at the huge hospital in Birmingham Alabama, he got the young man a job in the maintenance department.

He learned much working at the huge University Hospital, he learned about electricity, he learned HVAC, he learned plumbing. He watched and soaked in everything. He was a long way away from the burning corpses he photographed in Africa, or was he? September 15 1963 seemed a usual day at work. Even a slow day, He was working in the attic area of the hospital, running ductwork, secluded from people or news. Around noon he got a call to immediately go to the morgue and repair a broken light. When he got there he climbed his ladder and fixed the light. With the room now bright, he realized he had illuminated bad memories and new sorrow, as he climbed down the ladder he looked down upon the charred and burned bodies of four young innocent girls. One was completely decapitated, barely recognizable as a human, another had metal embedded in her head. He could not fathom what he was seeing, he did not know what he felt. He only knew his heart was broken. He found out later these girls were murdered. The church they were attending sunday school at was bombed, an act of racism in the deep south in 1963. He hated it. This man never liked seeing someone innocent hurt or suffer. He also never saw color, he saw people for being decent or not. He was a part of history that day, however small a part it may have been.

After 5 years of working at the huge hospital in the magic city, he was told of a new, smaller hospital being built. It was closer to home and they were paying more to attract employees. He started in maintenance and engineering the day they hospital opened in 1964. Two months later, the director of plant operations resigned, this position was 3rd in command of the whole hospital and responsible for overseeing engineering, maintenance, and security. At only 26 years old,he was shocked when the position was offered to him. He accepted without hesitation. He was a nervous wreck but it fueled him. His wife took a job at the same hospital.

In 1982, his first grandchild was born, His son had a daughter. A grandson followed in 1984. In 1989, his daughter had her only son. To the man, there was something different about this kid, maybe it was his father not being around, maybe it was fate but the man decided he would mold this kid and raise this kid. He was closer to this kid than the other grandchildren. He fell in love with that baby and as he grew that baby became a kid and loved that man too. From then on out, they were absolutely inseparable.. I am that kid. We would ride dirt roads while Alan Jackson or George Strait, George Jones and Merle Haggard blaring on the radio. I was always the flashlight man. Deep in a dark crawlspace holding it while he worked on electrical wires.. just as he did I was watching, I was learning, I was soaking in his knowledge like a sponge. We would ride the country roads on the weekend, stopping at every yardsale and junkyard we’d pass. Oh, how I loved when we’d burn brush or leaves and watch the fire. We’d go fishing and somehow there was always a venomous snake and he always killed it with a wooden handle floating fishing knife. I still have that knife today.

His father in law had passed in 1984 and his mother in law’s health was failing, His wife retired early from the hospital in 2001 to take care of her. Her aunt and the Uncle that had arranged their meeting way back in Savannah were also gravely ill, she moved them in too. He kept working at the hospital,He was the man that made that place run. His mother in law passed in late 2001. In 2003, her uncle passed away. It had come full circle. He had made it possible for them to meet and they had returned the favor by caring for him, her aunt followed him in death shortly after.

By this time, his granddaughter had two daughters and he and his wife had been through a lot caring for 3 bedridden people for 3 years. When he received word that the huge hospital in Birmingham he had left 40 years ago was taking over the hospital, he retired. For the next 19 years, It was yard sales, brush fires, and working on houses. I was grown but I was still a kid, still watching his every move, still his helper, still his flashlight man. In 2017, he suddenly grew weaker. He still worked and pushed himself as hard as he could but something was wrong. He knew it. He just didn’t know what. Through 2018 I became the main repairman, he just couldn’t do it anymore. His leg and back had great pain. He lit the pilot light with me and all but collapsed as we exited the basement. His legs had grown week and just gave out on him. Later that day I had to repair something in the attic, I will never forget him saying “I’m sorry, I’d help you if I could, I’d even just hold your flashlight but I gotta say in my chair right now, you know what you’re doing son.” Neither of us spoke it, but that was a powerful moment.. He had called me son. All of my life, I never saw him as my grandad, though I did call him Papa. I called him dad from that day forward. Later that year, I bought a fuel pump for his truck, I love that truck. I bought new tires and got it running. When he saw it running, he told me “You did a good job getting her going son, take care of YOUR truck.” He knew he had grown old, his memory had began failing, his legs weakening. He had passed his role as the fixer around three houses, and he had passed his truck to me.

Through 2018 most of our time together was spent in his den, him in his recliner, me on the couch, nana in hers. We watched NASCAR, we watched every Alabama football game together, when nana was gone.. me and Papa would watch reruns of Gunsmoke, and Mash. He passed out at a store in late 2018 and was admitted to the hospital, all the test revealed nothing wrong, they attributed the pain to a nerve. On February 4 2019, He really wanted a haircut to the point the barber had to stay late to wait for us. It was a 15 minute drive to the barbershop and he and I talked, we talked about memories, we talked about friends who had died, and family who had died. His memory was sharp as a tack that day. On the way home, I asked him why he was in such a hurry for a haircut.. He reached over and put his hand on my knee, gave me a gentle pat.. his eyes.. the same eyes that had seen dead bodies in Africa, burnt little girls dead in alabama, that had seen 60 years of a wonderful marriage, 2 children, 2 grandchildren and 4 great grandchildren, those same eyes looked at me. There was a focus yet a distance in them as he answered “I just felt like I needed to look good for tomorrow.”

The next morning, I woke up around 7 as usual and walked next door to their house, he wasn’t awake yet. He had started sleeping in, or just laying in the bed. It had gotten to where by the time he got up and got dressed, his legs were so weak he had to lay right back down. I got my coffee and visited with my grandmother a while and refilled my cup and went home. A couple hours later I had the strongest urge to go see him, as I got up I noticed my coffee cup was full. “He’s probably not up yet, I’ll wait until all my coffee is gone then I’ll see him.” That was a decision I will always regret.

Maybe 30 minutes later, As I was listening to the The Rolling Stones through my headphones, I heard the sound of my little cousin screaming. She was outside running toward my house just screaming help and crying at the top of her lungs. I ran outside and she yelled it’s papa. The whole world became a blur. I knew nothing. Nothing was familiar. It was so fast yet so slow. All I knew was I was me, and he was him. I loved him. He was my life and I was his. I had to get ti him. I ran faster than I ever dreamed I could, I didn’t even notice doors or steps.. Though I had to have somehow seen them. Everything was blur. I was here, he was there. It felt like an hour but it was really less than a minute. I got to him. There he was, laying on his back in front of his bedroom door. As soon as I saw him, his words about his haircut the day before played in my mind. I knew he was gone. He was my Papa, my dad, my friend, my teacher, my everything. I had to try and bring him back. I immediately started cpr. 911 advised me to do mouth to mouth as well, when I did, I tasted blood. I never stopped cpr. I knew je was gone. In that moment, his kid finally became a man. I felt different, I finally felt just like him. My Mind 2 months later is still in the floor with him. Today, I let that go. He would want me too. He would say sometimes, well we tried everything.. that thing just can’t be fixed. A couple nights ago I had a dream, so vivid. It was an exact replay. I was over his body desperately performing CPR, suddenly, in the dream.. he appeared and pulled me away from his own body. It was clear this was his spirit as he put his arm around me and hugged me and said “It just gave out on me, you tried everything, that old thing just couldn’t be fixed.” He lived an amazing life. The world will not remember nor remark him but today I celebrate him. I celebrate him for going from an 8th grade education to an air force photographer to spending 40 years as director of engineering at a hospital. I celebrate him for being a rock who always helped his family or those in need. I celebrate him for picking me. It’s no secret I was his favorite. He never tried to hide it, not to spite the others. This man loved all of his grandchildren equally.. There was just something different with me. It was like we were twins. We were just inseparable. I write all this to celebrate him and to let him go. My mind must stop trying to bring him back. He lived his life and he is now free from pain and a failing body. He is learning all the mysteries, he is getting all the answers so that he can teach me when I get there. I love you so much Papa, your soul is in heaven, but your spirit is in me. I see you in my eyes, I wear your belt buckle and I use your tools. I drive our truck. Your fingerprints are everywhere. It’s okay that you’re not here in your body. You’ve left a mark on everything. You will always be alive in us. I wish you had lived until I had children, I know you liked the young lady I wish would be mine.I can’t wait until I do have children and I can tell and show them all about their amazing Papa.

Heaven needed a jack of all trades engineer, they got you. Have fun up there, I’ve got it down here, I learned from the best and you taught me well. I will take care of nana, the houses and the rest of the family and hopefully one day I’ll do what you did and move and marry the girl of my dreams. I hope you get to watch my life from up there, and I hope I make you proud.

-JLM

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ziggory · 5 years

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Riverdale Liveblogs 3x07 - 3x13

Instead of making you all suffer through six separate liveblogs as I was catching up, have them all in on post!

3x07, “The Man in Black”

Remember when Jughead was the biggest woobie ever with a bunch of sad shit happening to him. Fun times. Honestly, Jughead’s just really taking advantage of finally being on the roadtrip he was denied

Justice for Jingle Jangle. Why did we need a new drug? Or I’d be fine with it complementing the other but NOooOooOOOO. It’s trying to shove JJ out of the spotlight!

Elvis’ granddaughter could’ve just drugged the eggs but instead she chose to nearly give Archie a concussion. Hiram might chop her head off if his Archiekins gets permanent brain damage

Let Archie kill a man!! Jughead got to skin someone who was fucking up his life. Why can’t he let Archie take his shot!? I can’t hear you about consequences

Your business is failing because trading away the final piece of the Soutshide to open a vanity project in the form of a dry speakeasy was not a great idea. Also, gamers can give you business. I’ve seen it!

The show can make Veronica say all these supposedly empowering lines, but I’m never going to forget that she supported a for-profit prison

MAYBE MY DAD’S NOT SO BAD!!?!?

This voiceover was completely unnecessary. Honestly, it’s sort of a slap in the face to Lili’s acting as if they didn’t think she could convey certain things without some hand holding

I’ve seen movies. They make you swallow that shit on the spot

So many negative thoughts being awkwardly confirmed

Honestly, this is what happens when you keep exploiting the place for abuses to help your investigations but never fucking shut it down

3x08, “Outbreak”

Does Moose need drugs to get it up? He said Midge liked to get wild, but methinks he liked it of his own volition as well. And just what I wanted. Shadowy makeouts while high on drug laced childhood candy

Kevin needs to find out who put a curse on his dick. ANOTHER hookup interrupted by bodies in danger

I don’t know why a group of high school boys acting like typical jackass high school boys with loud laughing is cause for thinking they’re all high.

“good people like Archie”

Gladys being a Jarchie shipper is pure. I will not stand for this no homoing

Wait, Cheryl did actually get to be Student Body President? I thought they were just going to let that circle the drain and disappear

MY FAVORITE INCOMPETENT EDUCATIONAL ADMINISTRATOR

THE PRISON WAS A FUCKING COVER?!?!? So all of S2 was just…oh my fucking god, I’m going to do drown myself

“good looking shortsatck” Love it. Goddamn, I love Gladys

Do they know that the way they write Hiram and Veronica feels like it’s been dipped in ten layers of incest? He talks to her like she’s the mistress he wants to bed

The affection the Jones women have for Archie is cute

The Gargoyle King being a hallucination is the most disappointing thing

TABLETOP RPGS ARE NOT FUCKING BORN OF MADNESS. Ugh, my inner geek is angry with rage

Oh, now you care about the kids in conversion therapy

So I guess they didn’t go to Toledo for Christmas??

Lili should get a raise for this Griffin Queen shit

I’m more emotional than I would usually be over these Fred scenes given Luke Perry’s recent condition

PROTECT THAT FUCKING DOG WITH YOUR FUCKING LIFE!! THROW YOURSELF IN FRONT OF A BEAR

I missed alcoholic Hermione. And lmao this Watchmen realness

I love Silent!Kevin getting nothing to say in that office! Just fucking great

we need to know more about this fucking Governor. Racist piece of shit who gets upset about vandalized statues of genocidal war criminals, AND he’s under Hiram’s thumb.

3x09, “No Exit”

Will someone get bit by a monkey? I can only hope

Oh fuck off with the Star Wars reference. IT DOESN’T FIT

Stealing from the rich to give to the rich. How very one percenter. And Toni, all your friends are living in tents by the river

KEVIN. WHY THE FUCK DO YOU ALWAYS JOIN THE WORST GROUPS

While the implication of Jughead sleeping over is nice, what the fuck was the point of last episode’s cliffhanger. This timeline makes no sense

I’M GETTING FIREWATCH VIBES

They’re so fucking low budget that they couldn’t even show the bear, LMAO

I forgot what Fangs sounded like. Didn’t FP retire? ARE THERE EVEN ANY ADULTS LEFT IN THIS FUCKING JOKE OF A GANG. But Damn, Fangs is good at crying. So pretty

Aww, I actually missed the hammy ass warden

Every time Joaquin’s name is mentioned, another dagger in my heart

The fact that the sisters have been fake nuns this whole time is just…what the fuck. AND THE FUCKING SOCIAL WORKER KNEW AND JUST LET THEM KEEP OPERATING!?!? LET THIS WHOLE FUCKING TOWN FALL INTO A HELLMOUTH

Remember when Jughead was outraged about the Serpents being paid security at the Pickens festival thing? Time is a flat circle

CHERYL, WHY DON’T YOU JSUT KILL HIRAM THEN

“SAVED”!??! REALLY NANA ROSE!?! IS THAT WHAT YOU CALL THE CHILD GROOMING YOU DID!? And uh, Fred and Sierra should know about that sordid piece of Penelope’s past

Damn, Veggie is hot as fuck

You know who else could’ve gone undercover for the Serpents to infiltrate the Gargoyle gang?!????? I HATE YOU FOREVER, RAS. ANOTHER AU FOR THE DRAWER

3x10, “The Stranger”

LMAO that they tried to make us think Archie died

Being attacked by a bear in Canada means not having to suffer through crippling debt because of the hospital bill for the rest of your life

Sidenote, but I really thought the painting of Veronica would have a bug or something. The fact that she just kept the painting instead of burning it says something

Oh so the core four are THOSE type of friends

Betty’s money >> those kids

Claudius just doesn’t want to do actual work

They let a kid pass the first grade when he couldn’t read? So the educational system has always been rather shit

Hey there, Silent!Kevin! Just sitting silently with your slowly developing biceps

Does Reggie know what PTSD is

I spy with my little eyes Kevin in the corner putting his PE clothes away! Once again robbed of a shirtless scene

FUCKING TALL BOY!?!? Lol, this is really good for my drawer fic actually. Keep sounding like a spiteful man! It’s semi feeding me

Wow, they really crammed in two Varchie sex scenes

Hiram deserved this and every agonizing second of pain he felt

Raw milk, huh? Yeah, that’s all you need to bait Kevin into this cult

Bye Claudius, no one will miss you

I want Hermione/FP to fuck

Jughead throwing a party to make things better is the biggest twist this series has ever done

Archie the alcoholic, eh. If this lasts more than one episode, that’d sure be something

3x11, “The Red Dahlia”

This is the noir episode, isn’t it. I’m…really bad with noir so an episode from THIS team is going to be…very trying

Awww, FP mentioning Joaquin is an extra pang. I wanted to know more about their relationship

I’d love to see the notes on this draft when Jughead tries submitting it to a publisher. Unless he goes the self pub route

Who even runs the newspaper now?

Betty, you’re like the last person to talk about black and white morality

Archie sounds like the protagonist of Office Space at the end when he finds his calling in construction

ELIO HAS SPOKEN MORE THAN MELODY EVER DID. EAT SHIT, RAS

I still need Jughead and Veronica arguing about classic cinema

I wonder where Penelope learned those crocodile tears, Nana. Like I never need a scene of her criticizing her ADOPTED DAUGHTER again

Cheryl is pretty forgiving of the uncle who sort of helped with her institutionalization

Have these boys never watched an episode of Breaking Bad? Put that body in a barrel

So has Veronica had a change of heart about Daddykins? I’m so confused

SMITHERS!?!? YOu’RE STILL ALIVE!? Protect this man

Remember when Betty was a camgirl for ten seconds and watched all of her fake brother’s porn videos

Josie’s voice is pure butter, and the show needs to stop pretending that we want to hear anyone else sing

Why doesn’t Toni have a job at Veronica’s dry speakeasy? She used to be an actual bartender!

“Kevin’s dad boxes at the gym” being a line from Josie is the most beautiful line in this episode

Well at least they explained the seizures.

YYYAAAAAASSSS, KELLY RIPPA!!

What is even the point of Minetta having faked his death just to be Hermione’s kept man

Well, damn, I really didn’t see this FP reveal coming. I wish he was the sheriff Hermione was fucking. And given all the things Jughead used to say and aim at Keller, it’s interesting to see him have to deal with his dad being somewhat in Hermione’s pocket

PULL THE FUCKING TRIGGER, ARCHIE

Lmao at this Bad Boys line. I see you, synergy

Honestly, how dare Archie shoot the person who was going to kill Hiram. I guess that’s one way to bury the Archie/Hiram grudge

Hermione’s trigger finger is life goals

3x12, “Bizarrodale”

So first off, fuck that title and everything it implies.

Second, this is the episode where I’m supposed to finally get fed, eh? FINGERS CROSSED

I forgot what Kevin sounded like after not talking for four episodes

WHEN CAN WE MEET KEVIN’S MOM!?!? I HAVE MANY FANCASTS

Veronica watches Netflix confirmed, and yet I guess she just scrolls past Orange is the New Black every time it’s recommended to her

Why are Kevoose makeouts always in shadow? Is it to disguise the fact that when they makeout it’s with their lips sealed shut

The actor who plays Major Mason followed me back on my burner instagram

Awww, Sweet Pea is a relationship guy with a gooey little heart!

Sierra pegs Tom confirmed. Love these two kinky fuckers

The way Tom says “Gargoyle King” goes straight to my nether regions

So does Britta have a kink for people outing others against their will? I swear this is a plot point in Ship It too

I feel like these issues are something they should’ve talked about way more. Making Moose’s coming out be an ultimatum is pretty gross

How DARE they not let us hear Josie sing?!??! Ohhhh, if we’d heard Josie sing then we would sent death threats to the fake Juilliard board. I never want to hear Josie’s teary little voice again because it hurts my feelings

Lmao, this is the second time a parent has been judgmental of how the Lodges involve Veronica in their business

Remember that time Moose and Cheryl made out? I’m forever traumatized by that

Hiram and Hermione strolling in like a fucked up Gomez and Morticia

I’m sure that Dilton would approve of his friend from another lifetime using his secret bunker to pop his cherry. But only Moose. Yes, I ship comics Dilton/Moose

Oh, HeeEYEEEEEEE, IT’S LIKE A BUNCH OF MY FIC DREAMS COME TO LIFE. Wow, I finally got pandered to. Kevin being in dagner is like…the basis of the majority of my drawer fics

I’M FUCKING PSYCHIC X2!!!! Well huh, this puts that earlier diner scene in a new light

Yesss, please keep calling him Tommy and talking about how Kevin looks like your old friend with that sad, wistful tone. Please feed my fic bunnies

Christ, Ashleigh has such a fucking amazing voice. I can actually bear KJ’s singing

Moose having to leave makes sense. ALSO MAKE SURE YOU WATCH CODY”S SHOW ON NETFLIX TO MAKE THIS WORTH IT

I never want to see Kevin cry again. Fucking Maramaduke

Gladys can step on me, and I’d apologize

3x13, REQUEIM FOR A WELTERWEIGHT

I’M FINALLY ALL FUCKING CAUGHT UP

I don’t think that bacon is fully cooked

So Veronica just decided to not move back out because the path of least resistance?? And she’s back in her Daddy’s clutches because....he got shot???

The Serpent with the awesome dreads is still there! Can he be an actual character with a name? He deserves it

Between last episode and this one, I am being fucking BLESSED with Daddy Keller content.

VERONICA IS a FUCKING REPUBLICAN CONFIRMED. I guess we all know who scrolled right past 13th on Netflix!

They’re really trying to sweep up their awkward plot mistakes from last season, eh

I need a flashback of young Alice in this ugly fucking wedding dress

This is some Rocky and Mickey shit. Hopefully Keller doesn’t have a heart attack while confronting Mr. T

YES, GLADYS!!! CALL OUT THAT LEADERSHIP!

San Junipero water, huh.

Why is Archosie so perfect

Ehhhh, the last time they talked was eight episodes ago. Will this scene be about how Kevin’s recovering post-Moose?? Of course not. My hopes for investigative Kevin are once again yanked away. Though of course remember that time she got him to catfish a murderer without telling him that Chic had killed someone?? Fun times

“cute gay farmies”

Veronica is the opposite intimidating ESPECIALLY in the face of Gladys who we all know has actually fucked up a bitch

The monstrous Freeform ate Malachai, eh. Ghoulie jackets are still the best jackets

I’ve never watched Apocalypse Now so this scene is wasted on me

THUNDERDOME!!?!?

Keller looks like he gives good hugs

How the fuck did Jason learn about The Farm?

This is Polly’s revenge for being sent to the Sisters

It’s awkward how Choni just sort of disappeared from the episode

Damn, Archosie has everything going on

Hermione, you should’ve just killed Hiram when you had the chance

PROTECTIVE BIG BROTHER JUGHEAD!

Gladys doling out gang advice is just everything I wanted from her

#Riverdale #Riverdale liveblog

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juicehoee · 6 years

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All Along the Watchtower {Chapter 4: Ghosts and Demons} (Juice Ortiz)

One/Two/Three/Four/Five

This chapter is almost 5,500 words so enjoy!

Chapter 4: Ghosts and Demons

“Have you ever seen the Conjuring?” Lana waved the DVD in front of Juice’s face. He sat idly, looking dreamily into the distance.

The clubhouse was bathed in a soothing yellow-orange light that danced across the walls and the floor. Amber rays accented the wood of the bar, covering the place with a cozy aura that made Juice want to place his head in the crook of his arm and just drift to sleep right there. It was quiet, save for the occasional car zipping down the street, but it was a faraway sound like part of a movie on the television with the volume turned down real low. He was practically dreaming now; his eyes were open, but his mind wasn’t there. It whizzed across the plane between wakefulness and sleepiness; an unconscious purgatory that felt like a brand new home in the dim, amber light of the bar.

Juice perched on the bar with a short glass of whiskey clenched in his fist, deep in thought about some very important things in his life. Was it worth driving down to Nevada tonight? Priscilla had invited him up for the weekend, but he was covering Sack’s Sunday afternoon shift at the garage which meant he had to drive three hours there on a Friday night and drive another three on a Sunday morning. He was having second thoughts about this girl; her and her Uncle Lenny seemed a little too friendly picking up a guy with head tats and an MC kutte without too many questions. It was weird for country folk to be so open about a grown man letting a guy like Juice into his vehicle with his pretty niece in the backseat. Most horror movies started out that way.

Juice, you’re just being paranoid, he told himself. Don’t screw up a good thing with a nice girl gettin’ caught up with all the little details.

He and Priscilla weren’t anything particularly official yet (a few texts back and forth do not a relationship make), but he wanted to talk to her again. He wanted to know about Boston, about her parents, about her life out there in the middle of nowhere, about her high school hockey career. She was so interesting and there was so much information he wanted to learn.

“Hello?” Lana smacked Juice on the nose with the DVD. “Earth to Juice!”

He jumped in alarm a mile in the air, his ass crashing back down onto the barstool. “Holy hell, you scared the shit out of me. Are you trying to give me a damn heart attack?”

“Sorry.” Lana shrugged. Juice decided she definitely didn’t mean it. “You were pretty zoned for five minutes and I kept calling your name, but you didn’t answer.”

Juice looked around the bar to see if Clay or Tig were around. It was silly, considering Clay went home about two hours ago and Tig had been missing in action for most of the day. In fact, you could hear crickets creaking with how quiet the bar was, highly unusual for a Friday night. Juice just figured most of the guys had gone to drink wherever Bobby was performing tonight. As per usual, he either forgot about his invite or didn’t get one at all. Juice and Lana were alone in the bar and it was the first time they’d spoken since the incident at dinner almost a week ago.

“Clay’s not here to beat your ass if that’s what you’re worried about.” Lana chuckled, propping herself on the barstool next to him. “Although, I’m pretty sure you could take him in a fight.”

She poked at his biceps, feeling the taut muscles of his arms that just oozed a sense of strength and masculinity. Sure, he might be able to take Clay in a purely physical head to head match, but Clay had powers he and Lana could only dream of. Still, he didn’t mind her admiring how strong he was and how high her opinion of him seemed to be in hand-to-hand combat. It was nice to be considered strong for once.

“Yeah, I could punch Clay a few times but he could have me buried off the highway and no one would ever find my body.” Juice said, taking a sip of his whiskey. “So, if I turn up dead, check the highway.”

“Easier said than done.” Lana rolled her eyes at him, but turned to face him and got quite serious all of a sudden. “I just wanted to apologize for getting you in trouble. I didn’t mean to cause anything between you and Clay. I know it’s hard being one of the new guys anyway and the guys still treat you like a prospect even though they’ve already got a new prospect.”

“It’s alright, you didn’t get me in trouble. Clay’s just a crazy old man and he’s gotta keep you safe for your dad while he’s not around.” Juice said. “I can understand that. You should, too.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Lana was quiet after that.

A few minutes passed by with neither of them moving. The tension was palpable, a thick smog of unspoken words suspended themselves in the air between the two, focusing on the space between their bodies on the barstool. She was desperate to be his friend and he was desperate for a friend; he was just afraid that they looked for the wrong kinds of satisfaction in each other.

Lana reached across the bar, sick of the silence. She picked up a bottle of Jack Daniels from under the counter and poured the delicious stuff into a glass, knowing anyone who checked the contents of the bar would never dream of suspecting her. Genius.

“When did you even get here?” Juice asked, finishing his own glass in a few more careful sips. He enjoyed the slow burn of his throat as it went down to his gullet, settling comfortably in the warmth of his belly. His eyes closed a bit; he felt so sleepy. “Thought you’d be at Bobby’s gig. You’re an Elvis fan, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I am. Just didn’t feel like facing everybody today, but I didn’t want to go back home either.” Lana avoided his eyes, swirling a drink with a little red mixer. “Came in through the back a few minutes ago while you were in the Dreamland.”

“The Dreamland?”

“You looked like you were asleep but with your eyes open. Dead to the world. I called your name over and over, but you didn’t even blink. I thought you had overdosed or something and I got worried.”

“You don’t have to worry about me.” Juice said, reach over the bar to put his empty glass in the sink. Someone would get it in the morning. Probably.

“If you say so.” Lana didn’t sound convinced, but she was preoccupied with the Jack Daniels.

As she was about to take her first sip, Juice jumped into action. He hopped up and knocked the drink out of her hand. The glass flew a few feet and crashed onto the hard floor, shattering into a thousand pieces and spilling Jack all over the floor. Lana stared at the mess in horror as Juice looked at her in horror.

“Are you trying to get me killed, girl?” he yelled, shaking her by the shoulders.

“You’re the one trying to get me killed!” Lana yelled back, shoving him off of her. “What the hell was that for?”

“You’re nineteen! You can’t be in here underage drinking on my watch!” Juice threw his hands in the air, exasperated.

“Then don’t watch.” Lana shot back. “You’re not my keeper. You’re my friend.”

“Yeah, well Clay would kill me if he knew I was in the clubhouse alone with you,” Juice paced back and forth. “Just imagine what he’d do if he knew I let you get sloshed on Jack Daniels.”

“He’s not here,” Lana pointed out. “It’s not like he’d ever find out.”

“Yeah, well,” Juice started, staring at the open bottle and wanting to smash it to the ground (but he didn’t have the patience to clean up two huge messes tonight). “You just shouldn’t be drinking anyway. You’re young and it’s bad for your liver.”

Lana was quiet, staring at the shattered glass on the floor. Her body turned away from him, particularly, her face, though he could see the red of her cheeks in the outline of her profile. He didn’t mean to embarrass her, but he was already treading on thin ice and he wasn’t a great role model to begin with. What if one of the guys walked in? He’d be toast. Still, it wasn’t his intention to humiliate her.

Juice closed the distance between them and held her face in his hands. “Look at me.” he pleaded tenderly. “Please.”

She turned her face toward him, but refused to meet his eyes. Half a win was better than nothing, he figured. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

“What are we gonna do about the broken glass?” Lana ignored his apology and just kept eyeing the mess.

“I’ll clean it up, don’t worry about it.” Juice’s voice lowered into a soothing whisper. “It’s my fault. We’ll call it a. . . muscle spasm.”

“Are you sure?” Lana asked. Her face was still tomato red and she avoided him like the plague. In his head, he gave her the benefit of the doubt that the yellow light making it that much worse. It was kind of cute in a way, but he shook that thought from his brain real quick. It was stupid to think like that right now.

Juice went to a cupboard behind the bar to get the broom and a little barrel to put the glass in. Lana sat at the bar and watched him as he cleaned up the glass. Cleaning was a talent of his, something he did regularly to keep him occupied. Boredom plagued Juice often and cleaning straightened his head out when he had nothing to do or things got a little fuzzy. His head always ran a little ragged and the serenity of cleaning the broken glass cooled him off a little bit thinking about Lana.

Dammit, he wasn’t even acting that drunk and everything was acting up already. Not a good look, Ortiz. He needed to straighten himself out.

Lana got up and got a Pepsi from the fridge, sipping on that while staring hard into the bar counter. She knew her crush on Juice was hopeless and reeked of high school girl fantasy, but it still hurt when she took a running leap trying to get to know him and landing on her face at his feet while Clay stood over like them like a watchful overlord. She felt like she always fucked up when there were people watching and the club had been keeper a closer eye on her lately.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“What was your question?” Juice emptied the last of the glass into the trash barrel.

“Have you ever seen the Conjuring?” Lana asked, showing him the DVD cover. “You know the one with the haunted Annabelle doll that takes over that family’s farmhouse? It’s based on a true story.”

“No, but I remember it coming out in theaters.” Juice recalled, taking the DVD from her. “Didn’t make it to the theater in time to see it. You like scary movies?”

“Yeah, I guess this stuff is kind of a guilty pleasure for me.” Lana laughed to herself under her breath. “You want to watch it? I was just gonna hang out in the back room tonight. I think my mother has been circling my apartment building all week.”

The DVD had the blurry image of a tree with a noose hanging down from it with The Conjuring displayed across the top. The whole thing was creepy looking, but didn’t stick out from any of the other bad horror movies he had seen in the theaters every once in awhile. The noose unsettled him a little bit, but not enough for him to decide either way on the quality of the movie. He guessed it peaked his interest enough even with the tugging feeling in his lungs that pushed him toward the door and home to his cats.

“Come on, watch it with me.” Lana urged. She got up and grabbed his hand, coaxing him toward the back room. “Don’t make me watch it alone! Creepy dolls are my weakness.”

Juice didn’t pull away. He followed her lead into the crash pad in the back room, separate from the dorm rooms. “You sound like Tig.”

“Yeah, well, where do you think I get my phobia from?” Lana smirked. “When I was six, he told me a story about a haunted doll that convinced a kid to kill his whole family in cold blood. Couldn’t sleep for weeks. The man has a knack for the gruesome little details.”

“He’s like an episode of Law and Order: SVU come to life.” Juice agreed, flipping on the light switch and bathing them in the same dim, yellow light of the bar.

“Gotta love him though.” Lana said. “He’s always been a sweetheart to me.”

“You just said he’s the source of your phobias.” Juice deadpanned.

“It’s not his fault. He didn’t do it on purpose.” Lana said. “I’ve always liked him.”

“If you say so.” Juice let it go.

Tig gave him the creeps and the clear blue sheen of his eyes reminded Juice of being stranded out at sea while being circled by sharks in a life raft with a hole in it. It was a smothering feeling of hostility, but then again, they really hadn’t gotten to know each other that well yet. He could be the sweetest guy with the biggest heart for all Juice knew. He had his doubts, but he had always been one for giving people the benefit of the doubt despite first impressions.

“Ready?” Juice asked.

“Ready.”

There was an old leather couch against the back wall and a small television next to the door. The television gave off 1970s vibes with two antennae sticking up from the back of the box. It didn’t look like the thing would even hold up for a two and a half hour flick, but they’d be damned if they didn’t try.

“Jesus Christ,” Lana looked shocked. “Is that a fucking toaster?”

Juice’s eyes widened at the profanity having never heard it from her mouth before. “Might as well be. Might make the whole experience a little creepier. It adds a certain horror atmosphere.”

Lana took his hand again. She had a slightly terrified look in her eyes and he was starting to suspect she was lying about being into horror movies. They hadn’t even put the disc in. He decided to test his little theory as he put the DVD into the player with one hand.

“We can pretend we’re in one of those old slasher flicks,” he suggested, furrowing his eyebrows and putting on a crazed grin he had learned from watching Stephen King’s It as a kid. “Like Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers is gonna come through the door and cut out throats before we can get out.”

Lana squeezed his hand hard, and he felt the softness of her palms. She inched closer to him and looked out the window, expecting a deranged killer to be standing there with a butcher knife. Juice knew the only way that would happen was if one of his brothers had returned to the clubhouse from Bobby’s gig early. That would be a real fucking horror movie then with real blood instead of the ketchup shit they use in film.

“Don’t be scared.” Juice told her, wrapping an arm around her shoulder and giving her a comforting squeeze. “You’ve got a big scary biker to ward off all the bad guys for you.”

“Thanks.” she gave him a weak smile. “But haunted dolls aren’t gonna see your kutte and run like everyone else does.”

“Jesus Christ, Lana,” he rolled his eyes and smiled wide at her. “Let me have my hero moment here, okay?”

“Okay,” she let up on him, weakened by his smile. Dammit, that fucking smile made her knees weak. How could he even be real? “You can be my hero for the night then.”

“Thank you.” he grabbed the remote and dragged them both to the lumpy old couch.

Halfway through the movie, he noticed Lana out of the corner of his eye. She wasn’t cowering, but her eyes were wide, barely blinking. Juice decided to break the tension in hopes that lightening the mood would have her freaked out a little less, but he didn’t have much experience in comforting scared little girls. He wasn’t Superman, for Christ’s sake.

“Why don’t I go make us some microwave popcorn?” Juice stood up right as a woman onscreen screamed her bloody lungs out. “You want extra butter or-”

“No1” Lana hopped up next to him, latching onto his forearm with insistence. “Don’t leave me here by myself.”

“It’s just a movie-”

“Please.” Lana pleaded, digging her nails into his wrists. “Please, Juice. I’m humbly begging you. You hold my life in your hands.”

“Alright, alright.” Juice conceded, taking note of the real fear he saw in the downturned corners of her lips. “Let’s just sit back down and finish the movie alright.”

With no popcorn (he’d make some when he got home for the night, he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep without some of it now that he was craving it), they starting watching the movie in all of its glory: screaming children and a sense of instability that made Juice’s stomach churn.

Admittedly, it wasn’t a bad movie. It actually gave him the creeps and made him look at the dark hallway outside a few times, looking for something that shouldn’t be there. It was ridiculous, but he felt a little paranoid himself. Lana looked worse for the wear as time went on; slowly becoming more and more pale like she was turning into a ghost.

“Hey, you okay?” Juice asked, putting a hand on her forehead to check if she had a fever. He felt her warm skin against the back of his knuckles, but it wasn’t hot enough to be a concern.

“I’m fine. It’s just the movie.” she gave him a weak smile. “I’m okay. I’m a big girl, Juice.”

He didn’t believe her especially since her hands were practically shaking every time she glanced at the television. “Come here,” he uttered and she didn’t argue.

Juice adjusted himself so he was laying back on the arm of the couch. He leaned over and gathered her in his arms so the top half of her body was pressed against his chest. One of his hands rubbed her back slowly in soothing circles as he hugged her close to them. Her body relaxed against him, preoccupied with the thought of him so that she completely forgot about the movie. Juice’s chin rested on the top of Lana,s head and he breathed in the scent of her cherry blossom shampoo.

In an article he read, mice were conditioned to fear the scent of cherry blossoms by being shocked after being exposed. Their offspring also feared the scent of cherry blossoms even though they had never come into contact with it, and that’s how some scientists decided that fear and memories can be genetic. But he wasn’t a mouse, and he wasn’t scared. Still, it felt like he was being shocked with electricity and he didn’t know if it was a good thing or a terrible, terrible thing.

“Your hair smells nice.” he commented, burying his nose in her brunette hair.

“Thanks.” she whispered, in awe of him.

There was an unmistakable strength in his arms around her, like gates keeping the ghosts out protecting her from herself (because, of course, the ghosts were all inside her head). The way he ran his hands up and down her back felt like heaven and she could feel the roughness of his hands through her shirt, undoubtedly from his short time working as a mechanic.

She took his other hand in hers, playing with the three gold rings that adorned his fingers. Her pointer finger rubbed the designs on them, all different versions of scary skeletons and other things that added to the image of the big, bad biker he was trying to portray.

“You know, I got into a bar fight a few weeks ago.” Juice told her. “Punched a guy with the rings on and they left a pretty gnarly mark on the guy’s cheek.”

“I bet. I’m sure those rings are tougher than you,” she teased.

They stayed like that, comfortable and happy, while the movie went on, but neither had followed along with the story for a while. Juice could feel Lana’s back rise and fall against him as she breathed and his lungs kept eventually learned to keep in pace with hers.

“Are you still watching the movie?” Juice asked, brushing aside a piece of hair that had fallen into her face.

“I don’t know.” Lana answered, swirling the rings in circles around his fingers.

Juice pulled back his hand from hers and held her under her chin. As her head turned up toward him, he kissed her. He fucking kissed.

Fuck it, he was a dead man, but he was gonna live it up until Clay had Skeeter burn him alive in the incinerator.

Lana was surprised, but she kissed him back as the screaming on the television faded away into the background. She focused on how soft his lips were (they should be, he carried around Blistex 24/7) and how they moved with hers. She clutched him to her, afraid to let him go, and dug her nails into him desperately.

As abruptly as it started, it ended and they separated, but not fully. She still lay against him and he still wrapped an arm around her, holding her at the small of her back. They waited politely for the movie to end, wondering just how the night would end for both of them. Barriers had been broken and the concept of careful had flown out the window. Uncharted territory frightened the both of them.

The credits eventually rolled down the screen, but the tv chose that moment to die and left them complete darkness to contemplate the idea of the clubhouse being haunted. Neither of them wanted to move, but risking falling asleep and waking up to Tig or Chibs finding them was a stupid idea.

“I can give you a ride home, if you want.” Juice offered. “I wouldn’t mind.”

Lana didn’t answer; the darkness had jolted her into delving into an imagination wrought with demons and banshees willing to tear her apart while she couldn’t see them. Her breathing was slow, but her heartbeat was rapid, thumping against her chest uncontrollably. She prayed Juice couldn’t hear it.

“Do you think demons are real?” She asked, timid and quiet. “Like, they can just possess people whenever they want and stuff?”

And that was the very moment Juice decided he wasn’t going to leave her alone in her apartment or the clubhouse. He placed a kiss on her forehead, holding her close to him.

“Come on, you can stay at my house tonight. I’m not leaving you alone for the demons to snatch you up.” Juice smirked. “Anyway, you haven’t met my cats yet, right?”

{***}

“Here are the keys to the black Sedan you needed, Gem.” Juice dropped the keys on the desk in front of her and turned to go straight back into the garage.

“Juice, wait a second.” Gemma said, stopping him before he could slip back into his work.

“Yeah?” Juice asked. “What can I do for you?”

It was hard not to be intimidated by the Queen of Charming when she wanted to have a word with you. Especially in the office where she had the entire club for backup, and that included her husband and son who would snap someone’s neck without a second thought for her. Please, God, he hoped she didn’t want his neck snapped. He was on too many people’s bad sides these days and he didn’t think he could afford to add another one to his list. Clay wanted him dead, Tig was with him, he couldn’t get a read on Jax, and Dolly (his precious cat) hadn’t been talking to him since he started going up to Nevada every couple of weeks to see Priscilla.

“Have a seat.” she told him.

Oh no, this could not be good.

Juice did as he was told, taking a seat in front of Gemma. She took her glasses off and folded them neatly, hanging them on the collar of her shirt. He felt like he was at the principal’s office in high school again, getting reamed for hacking through the school’s firewall so he and his friends could watch porn during study hall. Now, it was easy to admit he was a dumbass kid who didn’t know what to do with his talent, but Principal Wilkins was nowhere near as terrifying as Gemma Teller-Morrow in the same position. He would have given anything to go back to the principal’s office in high school to avoid her wrath.

“What are you doing, Juice?” Gemma asked, in a tone that made him positive that if she could reach across the desk and shake him by the shoulders, she would.

“I’m working?” he rose the pitch of his voice at the end. “I just got you the keys you needed for later on today and-”

She put a hand up to silence him. “No, Juice. I meant with Lana. What was with that shit at the family dinner? Clay blew a gasket and I thought she was going to give Jax a black eye in the middle of our living room!”

“Oh,” Juice realized, dejected. “That.”

“Yeah, that.” Gemma wasn’t happy. “What are you doing, Juice?”

He didn’t exactly know how to answer. Sure, he was friends with Lana before, even when he was a prospect. They were the closest in age (well, until Half-Sack came along, but Lana didn’t seem too keen on him. How could he blame her when Sack had a tendency to drop his pants at any mention of the word ‘balls’?). Ever since the disaster that was Gemma’s last family dinner, he had blown Lana off and avoided her like the plague, as per Clay’s threatening request.

“We’re just friends, Gem. Besides, I got a girl I’m seeing in Nevada and she might be coming to Charming if things work out well enough.” Juice explained. “She was just a little lost and I was trying to help her through it. I was lost before I found the club and she just needs some guidance.”

“Guidance into your pants?” Gemma raised an eyebrow. “Did you know she has a crush on you?”

“Kinda?” Again, he didn’t really know how to answer. “She’s always been a little bit nervous when I talk to her, but I didn’t think too much of it.”

“She’s practically in love with you, Ortiz. You should get glasses if you’re really that damn blind.” Gemma shook her head in disapproval.

“Did she tell you that?”

“No, but she’s not too subtle about it. Luann barely knows you and she could smell the whole thing as soon as she walked into the room and saw her hanging all over you.” Gemma’s voice started to soften. Clay had probably talked to her about the whole thing. “She’s just a kid, Juice.”

“She’s nineteen, Gem. She’s not a kid.” Juice argued. “That’s probably why she’s so lost. Everyone’s treating her like a kid and she’s stuck.”

“Well, maybe Lana’s not a kid, but she’s too young to be your old lady or your late night booty call, or whatever fantasy you got going on in that perverted little head of yours.” Gemma’s voice was stern. As a sidenote, she added, “I know about the panties.”

Juice blushed and wished he could hide in the turned up collars of his Teller-Morrow uniform. “I didn’t. . . I don’t-”

“Relax.” Gemma ordered. “I really don’t give a shit. I’m here to talk to you calmly about Lana on Clay’s behalf because he doesn’t think he’ll be able to stop himself from blowing a hole straight through those lightning bolts.”

Juice’s fingers instinctively reached toward the tattoos on his head, picturing Clay with a shotgun just tearing a bloody hole with a big bullet straight through the ink. It wasn’t a pretty picture but it surely wasn’t the worst thing Clay had ever done with a gun. They wouldn’t even find his body if Clay cared enough. That would send Lana a message.

“Clay’s been her dad since Otto went to prison. Luann hasn’t been much of a mom. Never wanted kids. A little too self-centered.” Gemma shrugged. “Love the woman, but when is it time to give up sequin handbags and blue eyeshadow?”

“I imagine the porn studio wasn’t much of a place for a kid.” Juice assumed, but he said it slowly and carefully as to not insult Gemma’s best friend.

“No, it wasn’t.” Gemma agreed. “The clubhouse wasn’t much better, but at least she had Clay or Chibs to watch after her.”

“I’ve been staying away from her. Like Clay asked.” Juice assured Gemma, knowing it was in his best interest to just go along with whatever they said. “I don’t see why I can’t be friends with her. She needs someone who-”

Gemma cut him off with a venom that made Juice lean hard into the back of the chair. “You’re fucking her up even worse, Juice. You said you got some girl in Nevada you’re seeing, yet you’re here in Charming getting Lana’s hopes up.”

“I’m not getting her hopes up, I’m just-”

“You are, Juice! You make her feel wanted. And that’s what women need: to be wanted.” Gemma stood up and walked around the desk to stand in front of him with a sense of urgency in her eyes.

There was a motherly quality in her features made him miss his own mother in Queens. How was she doing? Was she still sick? His sister would have called if there was something really wrong. Right? She wouldn’t leave him in the dark.

“Are you even listening to me?” Gemma said, annoyed.

“Yeah, shit. Sorry.” Juice apologized. “Where were we at again?”

“I’m not saying it’ll be easy, but it needs to be done.” Gemma said. “You don’t have to let her down easy, but you gotta let her down and don’t leave her with any false hope.”

“What are you saying I should do?” Juice asked, afraid he knew what she was getting at. Gemma knew how to be cruel without the use of fists (though he was sure she could put up her dukes when it came down to the nitty gritty).

Gemma grabbed Juice’s cheeks between her strong fingers. Her long, dark-blue acrylics dug into the the soft flesh of his face, forcing him to look her directly in her beady little crow’s eyes. If there was anyone in this world who could give Cruella de Vil a run for her money, it was Gemma Teller-Morrow. The only thing missing was a coat of skinned puppies hanging off her shoulders. Her eyes were black with poison that he felt creeping into his, rising goosebumps on his forearms. It was spooky, Gemma squeezing his cheeks in her hands. There was nowhere to run to.

“You gotta break her pretty little heart, Juan Carlos. You gotta break it hard and you gotta break it good.”

Fuck.

#juice ortiz #Juan Carlos Ortiz #juan carlos juice ortiz #juice ortiz imagine #samcro #soa #sons of anarchy #sons of anarchy imagine #sons of anarchy fanfic #soa imagine #soa fanfic #soa fanfiction #sons of anarchy fanfiction #samcro imagine #juice ortiz fanfic #samcro fanfic #gemma teller #original character

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duallygirl178 · 3 years

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Dearest O'Malley Chapter 18

Chapter 18

After a week, I still didn’t tell Gonzo and Robin about Sweetie-Pie yet because it still wasn’t the right moment. She had been calling me almost every night for an hour. While Gonzo and Robin were still hanging out with me, I didn’t even bring up the subject.

For two whole weeks, I didn’t bring up Sweetie-Pie but the next day, Gonzo and Robin wee in a conversation until I startled them for their attention, by whistling loudly. Once all their eyes were focused on me, I said; “Gentlemen, I wanted to tell you good news from the grapevine.” Robin and Gonzo smiled big and said; “What is it, O’Malley?” I took a deep breath for courage, smiled and said; “I’m in love with a woman named Sweetie-Pie and she’s an impala car.” both of them ‘oozed’ and congratulated me. Robin was so proud of me and said; “Dude, that girl from the SAFEWAY parking lot? Whoa! No way! Tell us everything. What did you two do?” Gonzo butted in and asked; “Did you two kiss?” I just giggled and said; “No, I only met her that first day.” Robin looked at Gonzo and said; “Come on, Gonzo, where’s your manners? So O’Malley, did you two roll in the hay?” now the teasing was on. I blushed a little bit with embarrassment and said; “No, no. come on now! You’re being crude. I wouldn’t ask her until we were perfectly comfortable on getting dirty.” Gonzo looked at Robin as if he just broke wind, then he looked at me and said; “hey, did you two have wine in the tub and get funky afterwards?”

Gonzo laughed out loud at his finesse of a sentence. I returned to my normal color and said; “No, that’s not very nice. Sweetie-Pie is a lady. You don’t go up to a stranger after you met her for two weeks and ask to get funky with her. It was just for one date only.” Gonzo giggled delightfully. He loved to be crude when he teased. He took a couple of gasps and said; “did you guys go to the park?” I simply answered; “No,” Robin butted in and asked; “Did you go to the astrology building yet and look at the pretty old stars?” Again, I replied; “No.” Gonzo excitedly hops his two front wheels on top of Robin and asks; “Ooh, ooh, any bon fires at the park?” I chuckled and said; “No, you guys. Whatever you’re thinking, we didn’t. I have more news.” Gonzo and Robin fell quiet to let me talk. I added; “We, meaning; me, you and Gonzo have dates coming up and your dates’ names are going to be thrilled to meet you. I spoke to Sweetie-Pie’s friends and their names are; Deb, and Salina. Sweetie-Pie wants us all to have a triple date together. What do you think of that?” I didn’t think Gonzo and Robin would be interested at first, but as it turns out they were interested after I added that they were classic cars too. Robin was the most excited and he excitedly said; “That sounds like fun. Does this have Sweetie-Pie’s approval on this?” I nodded and said; “Oh yeah. I even told her about you two bean-whiskers and she says that you two sound like a bunch of mother-whisker goats. She likes you.” Robin and Gonzo giggled together. Gonzo right away said; “She sounds so amazing. When’s the date?” I remembered from the passed few encounters and she told me that she would set a date for Saturday night at six at night. It was going to be fun. So I updated the two boys that the date would be exactly Saturday night at six. And I got a short answer of; “Okay, we’ll be there.”

So, at Saturday night around five in the evening as I was helping Robin get ready, Robin asked me twenty uncomfortable questions that I replied with a “No” or an “I don’t know” response. I asked Robin and Gonzo; “why do you two embarrass me when it comes to girlfriends and it always turns out dirty with no filter?” Gonzo replied respectfully; “What? We’re just curious. You got to keep her if she’s amazing. Too good to get rid of. Besides, why didn’t you tell us the day after you met this girl?” I sighed calmly and said; “because you say that or ask me dirty questions. Gonzo, you’ve always embarrassed me every time Impa was around. It’s like you have no filter on your mouth for words. It’s humiliating.” the two argued to me that they didn’t embarrass me, they were only a couple of curious didn’t-know-better-whisker-goats that didn’t mean any offense. They were only being guys.

When I drove with Gonzo and Robin to go meet Sweetie-Pie at a Mexican restaurant, she told us we looked handsome. Her two friends; Salina and Deb were smiling too as I thanked her for the comment. We had an all-you-can-eat taco and margarita event. After Gonzo and Robin got to know them all better while we waited for our meals, I told them I was treating them all to a movie after dinner. Everyone liked that idea. Tonight was going to be fun.

Sweetie-Pie sure could gobble up more tacos than Gonzo could. I had one too many margaritas because while Sweetie-Pie ate a lot of tacos, I hollered a little louder than I wanted to that Sweetie-Pie was like an endless machine. She and Deb were goose-giggling and already shushing me. Intoxicated, I shouted out; “Now, now girls, don’t be shushing your Uncle Malibu. You’ll send the neighborhood out with rolling pins.” Robin and Gonzo laughed out loud and said; “Gee O’Malley, lay off those Marty’s.” Deb chuckled hysterically, shushed me, and said; “I don’t have an uncle, you silly dilly bar.” after dinner, we went to a movie at the theater. I puked in the trash can in the bathroom. I imagined the restaurant wasn’t going to let me back in for margaritas again because I made a scene. But after all that, I started to feel better during the movie that we had gone to see. I sobered up as Sweetie-Pie got me water in water bottles that Salina snuck in. I cuddled a bit with Sweetie-Pie. She was already watching out for me even though she was having a great time.

I remembered Sweetie-Pie liking stars, so why not swing by the San Juan College astronomy center to use the telescope and when Gonzo, Robin, Deb, and Salina had gone home after the movie that nigh. I cuddled with Sweetie-Pie. She and I enjoyed ourselves. I told her I loved her. At first, I had to stop and think for a minute. What if she told me to bug off? But instead, she looked at me and said; “I love you too, O’Malley.” at that moment, my heart soared. We were officially boyfriend and girlfriend.

We went to the San Juan College astrology center and looked at the stars through the telescope. It was a beautiful night and we could see Saturn far away. It was incredible! We spent an hour looking at the stars. We were hooked on them, but after 20 minutes extra, we went to the park to have a romantic moment to spare. We talked about our thoughts referring to men and women. I told Sweetie-Pie softly; “I think men came from Jupiter and women came from Saturn. My wonder is that they were forced off their planets to live on Earth by taller beings.” Sweetie-Pie smiled and said; “That’s a creative theory. I like Mars. It’s red just like my favorite flower.” I brought her in closer, hugged her and said; “My mother would have loved to meet you. She made ginger rose chewy candy whenever I had good friends over. Instead of making cookies, she’d make those candies for me and every one of my friends that hung out.” Sweetie-Pie moaned pleasantly, and said; “I like rose candies. It’s my only favorite candy that I’ll eat. No other candy would delight me more but rose candies. Did you know in India, they have rose tea to calm down and it’s good for romantic moments?” I gave her a kiss and told her; “No, but I do remember eating rose candy would settle me down whenever I had an upset stomach.” Sweetie-Pie giggled and said; “I’m glad I met you.” I looked at her and said; “When I met you, I flt there was butterflies and bubbles fluttering all over in my gasoline tank. I wanted to kiss you. And night after night, I would think about you. I couldn’t sleep.” Sweetie-Pie smiled and said; “Me too. I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I tried listening to Little Richard songs and I tried Elvis Presley, but everyone of them reminded me of you. Every 1950s classic song to the 1980s all reminded me of you.” This was amazing. I learned something new about Sweetie-Pie. I liked music from the 1950s and so on. At least we were honest with each other. This was a good night to spend with friends too. Sweetie-Pie and I spent 20 minutes more at the park.

Then at 1:00 in the morning, I took Sweetie-Pie home. She kissed me farewell for now and I headed on my way home. It turns out, Robin and Gonzo weren’t home. They were waiting for me in hiding places in the dark. It was suddenly that I heard Robin call out; “Surprise! Long live the night.” Gonzo was applauding with congratulations to me and said; “We planned other things while you two love birds were parked in the grass. We’re going to have a guys’ sleep over.” I chuckled delightfully and said; “Oh you guys. You shouldn’t have now we’re all getting in trouble.” Robin scoffed and said; “Nonsense. We‘re going to have more fun to celebrate your love and ours. To brotherhood.” I thought about it and since I was already home, I decided to go for it. I smiled and sweetly said; “Lets go for it.” then the sleepover began.

About 8:30 in the morning, Robin woke up, checked the time and gasped out; “Oh no.” Gonzo and I woke up startled but still pretty bushed. Gonzo snorted and said; “don’t tell.” his eyes were half-open. I stretched out and said; “What’s wrong?” panicked, Robin said; “I was suppose to be home hours ago. My owners are going to strangle me.” I yawned and said; “Well, eat breakfast and then get home.”

Exhausted, I took Robin inside, I cooked him breakfast by warming up some motor oil in a Styrofoam cup with the logo Starbucks on it. Then Robin thanked me, and dashed home. I hoped he had made it in time.

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informationpalace · 4 years

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Little Richard: Rock and Roll Legend Died at the Age of 87

Little Richard, best known as Little Richard, who mixed the black church's sacred yells with the profane blues sounds to make some of the world's first and most influential rock 'n' roll songs, died in Tullahoma, Tenn, Saturday morning. He was 87. His lawyer, Bill Sobel, has said bone cancer was the cause. Little Richard never invented rock 'n' roll. By the time he released his first single, "Tutti Frutti" — a raucous song about sex, his lyrics cleaned up but its sense was hard to miss — other musicians had already found a similar vein in a New Orleans recording studio in September 1955. Chuck Berry and Fats Domino had reached the top 10 of the rock, Bo Diddley had topped the rhythm and blues charts, and for a year Elvis Presley had made hits. But Little Richard, delving deeply into the wellsprings of gospel music and the blues, pounding the piano vigorously and shouting as if for his own life, lifted the energy level to many notches and produced something not quite like any music that had been heard before — something fresh, exciting and more than a little dangerous. As Richie Unterberger the rock historian put it, “He was crucial in upping the voltage from high-powered R&B into the similar, yet different, guise of rock ’n’ roll.”

The label for which he released his greatest hits, Art Rupe of Specialty Music, named Little Richard "dynamic, completely uninhibited, unpredictable, wild." "Tutti Frutti" rocked up the charts and was soon followed by "Long Tall Sally" and other music now known as classics. His live performances were so amazing. "He would just burst out from anywhere onto the stage and you could not hear anything but the audience's roar," record producer and arranger H.B. Barnum, who played a saxophone early on in his career with Richard Penniman, recalled Charles White's authorized biography in "The Life and Times of Little Richard" (1984). "He would be on stage, he would be off stage, he would be jumping and yelling, screaming, whipping the audience on." An Immense Impact Rock 'n' roll was in its early days an unabashed macho music, but Little Richard, who had performed in drag as a teenager, posed a very different image on stage: gaudily dressed, his hair piled up six inches high, his face aglow with cinematic makeup. In later years he was fond of suggesting that if Elvis were the king of rock 'n' roll, he was the queen. He described himself as homosexual, bisexual and "omnisexual" in different ways offstage. His success as an artist was incalculable. It could be seen and heard in James Brown's flamboyant showmanship, who idolized him (and used some of his musicians when Little Richard began a long hiatus from performing in 1957), and in Prince, whose ambisexual image owed him a great debt. Presley has captured songs from him. A octave-leaping exultation, the Beatles adopted his signature sound: "Woooo! "(Paul McCartney said the first song he ever performed in public was" Long Tall Sally, "which he later recorded with the Beatles.) In his yearbook for high school, Bob Dylan wrote that his dream was to" join Little Richard. The impact of Little Richard was very social as well.

Mr. White quoted him as saying, “I’ve always thought that rock ’n’ roll brought the races together.” “Especially being from the South, where you see the barriers, having all these people who we thought hated us showing all this love.” Mr. Barnum told Mr. White that when Little Richard sang, "they still had the audience segregated" at concerts in the South in those days, but that, “most times, before the end of the night, they would all be mixed together.” If uniting black and white audiences was Little Richard's point of pride, it was a source of concern for many, particularly in the South. The North Alabama White Citizens Council released a rock 'n' roll denunciation primarily because it put "people of both races together." And with several radio stations under pressure to keep black music off the air, Pat Boone's clean-up, toned-down version of "Tutti Frutti" was a bigger success than the original Little Richard. (He even had a "Long Tall Sally" hit) Still, it seemed like nothing could hinder Little Richard's rise to the top, until he himself stopped it. He was at the height of his fame when, in late September 1957, he left the United States to begin a tour of Australia. He was tired as he told the story, under constant pressure from the Internal Revenue Service and angry at the low rate of royalties he earned from Specialty. He had signed a deal, without anybody to inform him, which gave him half a cent for every record he sold. "Tutti Frutti" sold half a million copies but only netted $25,000 for him. One night in early October, he had an epiphany in front of 40,000 fans at an outdoor Sydney arena. "Russia sent that very first Sputnik off that night," he told Mr White, referring to the first satellite that had been sent into orbit. "It looked like the huge ball of fire was going straight over the stadium about two or three hundred feet above our heads. It made my mind shake. It just made my head shake. I got up from the piano, saying, "This is it. I am through. He had one last Top 10 hit: "Good Golly Miss Molly," recorded in 1956 but not released until the beginning of 1958. At the time he had left behind a rock 'n' roll.

He was an evangelist on the run. He went into Oakwood College (now Oakwood University) to prepare for the ministry in Huntsville, Ala., a Seventh-day Adventist church. He cut his hair, married and began gospel music recording. He will be torn between pulpit gravity and stage pull for the remainder of his life. “Although I sing rock ’n’ roll, God still loves me,” he said in 2009. “I’m a rock ’n’ roll singer, but I’m still a Christian.” In 1962, he was drawn back to the stage and he performed for wild acclaim in England, Germany and France over the next two years. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones were among his opening acts, and then at the beginning of their careers. He went on to tour the United States relentlessly, with a band that included Jimi Hendrix on guitar at one time. By the late 1960s, sold-out performances in Las Vegas and triumphant appearances at Atlantic City and Toronto rock festivals were sending out a clear message: Little Richard was back to stay. ‘I Lost My Reasoning’ Alcohol and cocaine began to drain his soul by his own account ("I lost my reasoning," he would later say), and in 1977 he turned from rock 'n' roll to God once again. He became a Bible salesman, started making worship songs again and vanished from the spotlight for the second time. He is not staying away forever. His biography was released in 1984 and marked his return to the public eye, and he started performing again. By now he was as much a musician as he was a personality. He played a prominent role as a record producer in the hit movie "Down and Out in Beverly Hills" by Paul Mazursky in 1986. He appeared on television on talk shows, variety, comedy, and awards shows. He worked at celebrity weddings, and performed at funerals for celebrities. In concert he could still uplift the roof. He stole the spotlight at a rock 'n' roll revival concert in London's Wembley Arena, in December 1992. "Today, I am 60," he told the crowd, "and I still look remarkable." He proceeded to look incredible — with the aid of wigs and heavy pancake makeup as he flew intermittently into the 21st century. But in the end, age took its tool. He walked onstage with the assistance of two canes by 2007. In 2012, he suddenly ended a show at Washington's Howard Theater, telling the audience, "I cannot breathe hard." A year later, he told Rolling Stone magazine that he was retiring. "In a sense I am done," he said. "There is nothing I feel like doing right now." Survivors include a friend, Danny Jones Penniman. Full survivor information was not immediately available.

Raised in Macon, Ga., on 5 Dec. 1932, Richard Wayne Penniman was the third of 12 children born to Charles and Leva Mae (Stewart) Penniman. His father was a brick mason on the road, selling moonshine. An uncle, a brother, and a grandfather were preachers, and as a child he attended churches of the Seventh-day Adventist, Baptist, and Holiness, and aspired to be an evangelist artist. An early influence was Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a gospel singer and guitarist, one of the first artists to blend a religious message with the intensity of R&B. Richard's ambition had taken a detour by the time he was at his teens. He left home and started performing in traveling medicine and minstrel shows, part of a dying-out 19th-century tradition. Billed as Little Richard by 1948—the name was a nod to his youth and not to his physical stature — he was a cross-dressing actor with a minstrel troupe named Sugarfoot Sam From Alabam that had been performing for decades. He recorded his first songs in 1951, while performing alongside strippers, comics and drag queens on Atlanta's Decatur Street strip. The songs, without distinct style, were generic R&B, and attracted almost no attention. He encountered two performers during this time whose look and sound alone would have a profound impact: Billy Wright and S.Q. Reeder, who has performed as Esquerita and recorded it. Both of them were professional pianists, glamorous dressers, flamboyant entertainers and as openly gay as it was possible in the 1950s to be in the South. Richard Penniman acknowledged his debt to Esquerita, who he said gave him some tips for playing the piano, and to Mr. Wright, whom he once called "the most fantastic entertainer I have ever seen." However much he borrowed from either man, the music or persona that emerged were his own. His break came when Mr. Rupe signed him to Specialty in 1955, and arranged for him to record with local New Orleans musicians. He began singing a raucous yet obscene song during a break at that session which Mr. Rupe thought could attract the burgeoning teenage record-buying audience. Mr. Rupe hired Dorothy LaBostrie, a New Orleans songwriter, to clean up the lyrics; the song became "Tutti Frutti"; and a rock 'n' roll star was born. By the time he finished playing, Little Richard was a recipient of lifetime achievement awards from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and the Rhythm and Blues Foundation in both the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (he was inducted in the Hall's first year) and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2010, "Tutti Frutti" was added to the National Register of Congress Library. If Little Richard ever thought he had deserved all the honors he got, he would never admit it. "Many people call me the rock 'n' roll architect," he said one time. "I do not call that to myself, but I think it is true." Do not forget leaving your valuable comment on this piece of writing and sharing with your near and dear ones. To keep yourself up-to-date with Information Palace, put your email in the space given below and Subscribe. Furthermore, if you yearn to know about effect of virus on Frank Soo, view our construct, ‘Frank Soo: Google is celebrating England's forgotten footballer.’ Read the full article

#BoDiddley #CongressLibrary #ElvisPresley #GoodGollyMissMolly #JamesBrown #LittleRichard #littlerichardsongs #LongTallSally #LongTallSallysong #Mr.White #Omnisexual #Presley #RichardPenniman #RosettaTharpe #Tullahoma #TuttiFrutti #TuttiFruttisong

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x-enter · 4 years

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Paramount's Sammy Davis Jr. Biopic Moves Forward with Writer Charles Murray

Paramount Pictures is ready to move forward with their Sammy Davis Jr. biopic, and they’ve hired Charles Murray to write the script.

The film is being produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura; fellow musical icon Lionel Richie, who was instrumental in getting the rights from Sammy Davis Jr’s estate to make the movie; and Mike Menchel. The film that’s being developed is based on several resources, including the singer’s 1965 memoir Yes I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis Jr, which Davis wrote with Jane and Burt Boyar.

Apparently the studio looked long and hard for the right writers to take on this project, and they ended up hiring Murray, who has been a writer/producer on shows such as Sons of Anarchy and Luke Cage. According to Deadline, the “writer had read pretty much everything written about Davis Jr and came in with an encyclopedic knowledge of the iconic entertainer’s life and pretty much all dance movies.” That’s what landed him the job. Murry said:

“If you saw me, I’m 6’4″ and 290 pounds, maybe 300 if I’m being really honest. So it might surprise you that I grew up loving musicals, and gravitated to Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Elvis and James Cagney, and this little black dude I would see on TV, who held his own alongside Frank Sinatra.

“I would see movies like Ocean’s Eleven and Sammy just stood out. Singing with Frank, dancing like Fred and Gene, with none of those cats looked at him any different in those movies because he was black. I think I made the proclamation to my parents around eight that I wanted to make movies when I grew up. They’re from the South and knew all about what racial tension was and they said, ‘good luck.’ There weren’t a lot of actors on TV who looked like me. I would watch Bill Cosby as the gym teacher Chet Kincaid, and sometimes we would see Diahann Carroll in Julia. But of all those people, Sammy stood out. There was something completely unique about him and I never forgot him.”

This movie is obviously his dream project, and it seems like the kind of film he was born to be a part of. The report went on to offer the following rundown of Davis’s life and what he went through:

Davis was plenty provocative, a mix of out-sized talent and ambition, courage and defiance, with a need to constantly prove his worth at all times that led to a lot of loneliness. Murray is convinced the singer/dancer paid a price earning his way toward being the only black man on those sets and on the stages of casinos where he wasn’t allowed to book a hotel room. James Brown could support Richard Nixon, but Davis Jr took heat when he did. Davis Jr. was forced to hide his love affair with Kim Novak, and faced a backlash when he married the white Swedish actress May Britt at a time when interracial marriage was illegal in many states. Davis made his stands when he could, eventually refusing to work for companies that engaged in segregation, an effort that was helped by the likes of his Rat Pack pals Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, who did not see the world through skin color. Davis Jr marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr numerous times during the Civil Rights movement and when a 1954 car crash in San Bernardino nearly killed him and took his left eye, Davis began studying Judaism as he recovered. He converted along with wife May in 1961.

It’s said that the film will cover all of this stuff, “from his vaudeville origins to becoming a star as a member of The Rat Pack, and the highs and lows in Las Vegas and Hollywood.” Murray went on to talk about Davis Jr. more saying:

“James Brown didn’t get the same flack for bonding with Nixon because James was seen as the ultimate independent black man. Sammy had to ask himself, how do I become normal to the majority, and do I subjugate my ego and personality to do so, even when my talent is equal to or better than most everyone else? He was proving himself, every moment he was in the public eye. Imagine the toll that must take? His father and uncle would take him on walks through the city while touring, where no hotel would take them in, even ones they performed at. He understood what they are trying to avoid saying to him, as he saw the shame in the face of his father and uncles. He thought, eventually my talent will equalize the situation, but imagine being told you can be just as talented as the others, but you’ll never be equal. If I had to deal with that type of his today, at least I know I have rights and that there is a majority of people who embrace equality, so it’s only words that you can say or clandestine actions you can take to keep me from getting a job. But people were open about it back then; you’re black, stay back. You’ll never get a lead role in a studio movie ever, no matter how good you are. And this diminutive dude kept getting stronger.

“All this drove him but was his demon. He was constantly trying to impress people, and did not like being alone because that’s when the insecurities and terrible thoughts played in his head. That is what most fascinates me about him. In public he could be defiant. When threatened about dating white women, he dives in deeper. He spends money he doesn’t have. The act becomes your life. It was only during the course of interviews later in his life that he realized this, and only found peace with himself when he stopped worrying whether or not he fit in, and realized that fame doesn’t erase how people mistreat you. Being told you can play The Sands, but take your ass over there, to sleep. That colors the great time you are having and makes you not enjoy the times his life that were fabulous, those moments with Frank and Dean, making a ton of money and doing plays. What drives us can damage us. We saw it in Rocketman, the painful time Elton John went through in finding his sexual identity. And he was on top of the world.”

This Sammy David Jr. biopic is a movie that I’m very much looking forward to watching, and Murray seems like the guy that is going to deliver the kind of script that Davis Jr. deserves.

source https://geektyrant.com/news/paramounts-sammy-davis-jr-biopic-moves-forward-with-writer-charles-murray

#Entertainments

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thehooliganhangoutspot · 6 years

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parade.com Alison Abbey By ALISON ABBEY @awabbey He’s the man with the million-dollar smile and the heart of 24K gold. Bruno Mars has spent the past decade charming crowds, topping the charts and winning awards–he took home seven at the 2017 American Music Awards, including Artist of the Year—and now he’s paying his success forward. The multiplatinum-selling singer closed the Auburn Hills, Michigan, stop of his sold-out 24K Magic World Tour with the news that he (along with his tour promoter, Live Nation) had donated $1 million to the Community Foundation of Greater Flint, which helps children and families exposed to lead in the city’s water supply. “It’s just a heartbreaking situation,” says Mars a few months later, backstage at his Louisville, Kentucky, show. “People there are still suffering today. I just don’t want that to be swept under the rug. This happened to good people and their families and their businesses.” As for the decision to speak about his own good deed publicly, something Mars rarely does, he finds a way to make that about others as well. “I never talk about doing anything like that, and I just thought it would be really nice if the show was to kind of have that moment,” he says. “Hopefully everyone there could walk out of there feeling like they were a part of something great.” Being a part of something great is nothing new for Mars, the 32-year-old superstar known for hits like “Just the Way You Are,” “Uptown Funk” and “That’s What I Like.” Born Peter Hernandez (but nicknamed “Bruno” by his father as a toddler), he was raised in Hawaii in a family of entertainers. Mars was bitten by the showbiz bug early when he saw his uncle perform as Elvis onstage. An obsession with the hip-swinging showman was born, and little Bruno became the world’s youngest Presley impersonator at just 4 years old. (He even had a cameo imitating the King in the 1992 Nicolas Cage film Honeymoon In Vegas.) “As a kid, I didn’t know what he was singing about, it was just the fact that he got the girls screaming,” he says. “That’s what I was freaking out about, like, ‘Man, all I gotta do is shake my leg? I want to do that one day!’” The Family Business Elvis may have taught Mars how to be a heartthrob, but it was his father, Peter Hernandez Sr., who taught him how to be a star. “He was running the shows with a cast of 17 people,” he says of the senior Hernandez’s stage show, which included his mom, aunts, uncles and siblings. (Mars’ brother Eric is now his drummer.) “You don’t go onstage if your shoes aren’t spotless and your hair isn’t whipped and your gold isn’t shining enough, because the next band is going to come, and they might not even sound as good, but they’re the ones that are going to look memorable. That’s my dad’s school of rock.” Bruno graduated from that school, and at age 13, from the role of Elvis. “Since I was a little kid, that’s all there was—doing the show at night, going to school in the morning. It was like I was Batman. I had this secret identity at school,” he says. “It was an attraction. ‘Go see the little Elvis kid in his father’s show.’ I was that kid! Then you turn 13, and it’s not cute anymore. Elvis didn’t have pimples like that.” That’s when he discovered R&B music. “You’re going to school dances, and the girls are listening to Usher,” he says. “It was just like taking off the Elvis suit and singing R&B songs to girls.” A fan of legends like James Brown, Michael Jackson and Prince, Mars started looking to of-the-moment performers like Usher to expand his repertoire. That mix molded him into the artist he’s become. “That’s the bar—the highest level of entertainment. You’ve got to take cues from these guys who’ve set it,” he says. Becoming “The Man” Those early days onstage and years of watching VHS tapes of Jackson and Brown paid off when, at 18, he moved to Los Angeles and signed his first record deal. But the experience wasn’t exactly what he had in mind. Producers stepped in and tried to mold the young artist, who had his own ideas about image and sound. “I think that was the valuable lesson that I had to learn, that you’ve got to be in control. Me coming from Hawaii, where it whoever can just sing their ass off and kill it is the man. But it wasn’t like that [in L.A.]. My frustration with the record business was them trying to put me in a box, It’s like, ‘There’s pop radio, there’s adult, there’s rock. What are you?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know!’ You don’t know who you are at 18 years old. Hopefully I’m just dope.” Mars took matters into his own hands. “It was just having to knuckle up and say, ‘I gotta do this on my own, because I can’t expect the record label to tell me who to be or what to be. I’m just going to write the songs that I’m extremely proud of.’” And that’s what he did. After landing his second recording contract (with Atlantic), he released his first solo album, Doo-Wops & Hooligans in 2010. His debut single, “Just the Way You Are,” and the follow-up “Grenade” both reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts, but as he started planning for his second album, Mars realized something was missing. “The first album was me just trying to write the best songs I could possibly write, but then I go on tour for the very first time. Now I’m singing these songs I wrote in the studio, and I’m like, ‘Man, we’re not moving enough!’ It’s such a big part of my upbringing—every time my band and I are in sound check, we’re dancing. So we gotta pick up the tempo.” That’s where his second album, Unorthodox Jukebox comes in. Hit singles like “Treasure” and “Locked Out of Heaven” allowed Mars (and his band, the Hooligans) to show off their skills. But he still wasn’t satisfied. Ever the showman—and harkening back to the advice he got from his father and the lessons he learned from his musical idols—Mars knew he had to take things one step further. “They need to see all of the attitude, not just the little glimpse. They need to know that I’m the man up here. That’s where ‘Uptown Funk’ comes in,” he says, referring to his 2014 collaboration with super producer Mark Ronson. The song, which is heavy on ’70s funk, sizzles with swag, thanks to lyrics like, “I’m too hot / Call the police and the fireman / I’m too hot / Make a dragon wanna retire, man.” The megahit spent 14 weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart and certified Mars’ place in music as “the man.” And it showcased how Mars was able to take cues from the music he grew up with and make it his own. “I could sing almost any funk song over the music for ‘Uptown Funk,’ but have you ever heard ‘make a dragon wanna retire, man’?” he says, laughing. “It’s taking what you love and being able to spin it and make it feel like something no one has ever heard before.” He took a similar approach to his latest album, 24K Magic, a ’90s R&B-inspired opus that finally gave Mars the chance to sing, dance and be the man. Released in November of last year, the album was certified double-platinum and spawned hits like “24K Magic” and “That’s What I Like.” (Mars has amassed seven No. 1 songs throughout his career—and he attained the first five faster than any male artist since his original idol, Elvis.) “With this album, I really wanted to make a movie, based on a true story of this kid who’s in love with that feeling that ’90s R&B gave; how it was OK to dance and smile with a girl on the dance floor and sing to a girl.” That “movie” paints Mars—or a version of him—as a smooth operator, rocking Versace pajama-style shirts, gold jewelry and dark sunglasses, and wooing women with his clever turns of phrase and Casanova status. But all in good fun. “I saw the silky shirts and the gold chains, and I was dancing through Vegas,” he says of the persona he dons throughout the album. “For me, this one’s like, ‘All right, now let’s have some fun. Let’s flirt.’” Mars is having so much fun touring the album that he decided to turn it into a TV special. On November 29 at 10 p.m. ET, he’ll debut Bruno Mars: 24K Magic Live at the Apollo. The hourlong CBS special features performances at the legendary NYC theater (with an epic opening number atop the venue’s marquee) as well as throughout the streets of New York, as Mars and the Hooligans interact with passersby—“four days of running around Harlem,” performing every song on the album, as Mars puts it. “When you make an album, you want people to lose themselves in your world. It’s important that you know we’re the vessel,” he says. “I’m hoping that the special, once people see it, it’s going to even take it even further, and they’ll say, ‘He put together a show when he made this album. He was putting together this.’ They’ll understand where I am in life, and how much fun I’m having doing what I love to do.” Because the taping was a secret, audience members had to check their phones at the door, something Mars says changed the entire dynamic of the performance. “I’m like, ‘Why does this feel so different than everything I’ve done?’ People are dancing on the balconies and singing and so involved in the show that’s happening in front of them. Then it kicked in: They didn’t have their phones.” Mars says eliminating phones from a show creates a heightened level of engagement for the audience, and a heightened connection with whomever is onstage. “I say it every night: ‘Put your camera phones down and have fun.’ I remember how much fun I had [at concerts growing up]. Now you go and you’re not even taking pictures of the show—you’re taking pictures of yourself at the show! It’s The Twilight Zone!” Does it affect him to see people on their phones at a show? “A little bit,” he says. “The reason I wanted to do this is because of the feeling you get onstage in front of people. You are responsible for their night. You’re kind of this like DJ, and you’re conducting an experience based on the vibe in the room,” he says. “If everybody’s got a phone in front of them, you’re no longer looking at faces that are smiling or frowning or yawning.” The Man Who Keeps on Giving Mars wants to spread the love too. Giving back is more important than ever to the star, who once lived in a shack in the middle of a Hawaiian bird sanctuary. Beginning in 2014, he partnered with the Hawaii Community Foundation to offer Hawaii-based students scholarships to Grammy Camp, which allows high school students to learn all aspects of commercial music. This year, Mars, himself a five-time Grammy winner, opened up the scholarship to include students from all over the country. He also participated last month in NBC’s telethon for hurricane relief in Puerto Rico, One Voice: Somos Live! A Concert for Disaster Relief, where he took the stage to perform “Just the Way You Are” in English and Spanish. The cause is especially personal for Mars, whose father was born in Puerto Rico. “I’m extremely blessed that I am providing for myself and my family, doing what I love,” he says. “My dream came true, and more. If I’m in a position to help a cause that that breaks my heart, why wouldn’t I do that?” Life on Mars Favorite food: Sushi Last thing you cooked: Mac and cheese Last thing you listened to: A Cardi B song Binge-watching: Game of Thrones What do you miss most about Hawaii? The beach Favorite Michael Jackson album: Bad What do you miss most when you’re on the road? My bed. And my toilet. You don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone. Song you wish you’d written: “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley Song you wish you’d never written: I’m not walking into the Grammy’s going, “Remember ‘The Lazy Song’?”

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