See the name up in the title of this posting, The Glasshouse? Got it right this time. The only reason I kept the out-of-date jpg up on your schedule, John, is because I love this picture of Gateshead so much and got too lazy to change to the new name. Expect that pic to crop up again in some other impersonation in the future.
Number two. This picture. Okay, I will admit to a sudden unexpected and totally unfamiliar onrush of an irrational emotion. But if you don’t understand how you get to me there’s no hope for you or your generation.
Number three. This picture. An honest artistic statement. Yeah I stole your selfie. Come and get me, coppers.
Number four. The matter at hand. I got the strong impression last night, John, that you were still in Gateshead (you’ve probably finished your Liverpool gig by now) and needed some sort of psychic “Daphne Moon” boost from me. Glad to oblige. I’ll tell you the story, long overdue, of how my dad and mom met and got married. It has to do with two of my aunties not-really-aunties-but-older-cousins—years of letter writing—and the Jai-Alai Building in Manila…
Shoot, time passes…now I’ve got to go be with Mister Grumble for a while. Tonight we’re listening to (my baby angel’s blind, remember?) the near-beginning of The United States of Socialism by Dinesh D’Souza; the middle of The Con Man by Ed McBain (“Mendo-zaaaaaaaah!”); and the last chapter of The Simulacra by Philip K Dick. Oh! And streaming the fifth season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
I’ll return on my next writing day, which fortunately is tomorrow.
I see they’re making you travel from Gateshead down west to Liverpool and then back up north to Glasgow and then back down to Nottingham and finally over to Manchester. Jeez, what a schedule for you and your people.
So you want to hear more about my dad. Okay! I’ve owed you this for a while, sorry for the lateness, juggling a lot of balls, including a heart episode, not to winge. Continuing what I wrote in “25 May—Two Birthdays: My Dad’s and My Beloved English Conductor John Wilson’s“…
Well, after that whole thing about not being able to marry the woman he wanted to because of the miscegenation laws of the state of California, my dad and his white fiancee (never found out her name but it was the late 1940s so I bet it was something pretty like Helen or Margaret) went back to her home in Missouri where, like in most of the interior states, there were no legal barriers.
[4:30pm 13 Nov 2023 Pacific Time. Have to go now, Mister Grumble’s dictating his new novel to me, his sixth…be back as soon as I can…]
Mister Grumble is calling his latest novel The Last Bohemia. It’s about our old neighborhood, New York’s East Village, during the cheap-rent artsy 1980s. I’m really looking forward to it.
Back to my dad. So John, the marriage didn’t work out, of course, name me another interracial couple who made it work in the midwest in the 1940s-50s. So when they broke up in St Louis, my dad I guess was at a crossroads. There were two things he knew how to do, box (he was a small-time prizefighter in California in the 20s, a flyweight like his hero, Filipino 1923 champion-over-Welshman-Jimmy-Wilde, Pancho Villa)—and cook.
This is where that Minneapolis railroad tycoon comes in and where the story enters Scott Fitzgerald country in more ways than one.
[2:20pm 14 Nov 2023 Pacific Time. If it doesn’t rain I promised to take Mister Grumble out for a beer, he can’t go out anymore by himself. (He has a red-tipped cane, but sighted people just don’t pay attention and the sidewalks are too littered anyway.) Still, the IPAs here are pretty good, so… ]
[WHOEVER’S READING THIS WHO ISN’T JOHN: If you’re around him during this tour and you can pass him a couple words when he won’t bite your head off, just let him know CANTARA GOT HIS DAPHNE and will try to write more soon. Right now I’ve got to talk about Kennedy]
"I'll Be Dead Before You Break My Heart" 