Mar
We have been slow on decorating the living room but have added a wide recliner sofa and a 65” screen television complete with a Bose audio system and a couple of chairs. I usually sit in just one position on the sofa to watch the television. The light is in the center of the room and provides adequate lighting for the living room, except for the spot where I usually sit. I like that spot because it puts me in perfect alignment for the television, however there is very little lighting in that spot for reading or even looking at the remote-control headings. So, it has been on my mind for quite a while to acquire a lamp that would suit my personal needs but being picky about the kind of lamp that I want I had yet to acquire one.
In my younger days, after returning from Vietnam, I would often fully awake in an instant, sometimes sweating, eyes bulging to see, what was there, apprehensive, and hyper-vigilant. Over the years, those dreams have slowly faded but my dreams persist but this night it was a different kind of dream.
I found myself in England, at an antique store, looking for a lamp to satisfy my lighting requirements in the corner of our living room. The salesperson was a distinguished-looking Englishman, complete with vintage clothing of a period from long ago. He had dark hair, a mustache and of course, he had that unique accent that many Brits have. I was admiring this one particular floor lamp that was nearly 8 feet tall. The long stem from the base of the lamp was solid brass, approximately 3 inches in diameter and about 7 feet in height. The base was broad and approximately 18” in diameter but what captured my attention was not so much the weight of the lamp but the way the brass shined so brightly even in the dimly lit antique shop. I remembered in the Marine Corps boot camp using Brasso to make our belt buckles glisten like this with even the slightest amount of light. We would work for hours shining our brass belt buckles, preparing for an inspection that could come at any time. The shade was quite large, probably 2 feet in diameter and I couldn’t determine the nature of the fabric, but I liked it as well. The salesperson calmly approached me and said, “I see you are a gentleman of good taste. You should know that this lamp was owned by the Duke of Earl.” He emphasized “Duke of Earl” with such sincerity and respect, I was taken aback since I didn’t know who the Duke of Earl was or what he represented. But being a Yank, I was admittedly ignorant but appreciated his reverence for the lamp as well as the Duke. I chuckled inside at the time when I remembered my favorite Western movie of all time, Clint Eastwood’s “UNFORGIVEN”. Little Bill Daggett was the local tough-guy Sheriff in the movie and was played by a Marine by the name of Gene Hackman, in the movie, he referred to English Bob who was known as the Duke of Death. Little Bill had confiscated a book by the writer traveling with English Bob who was recording his exploits and while the writer and English Bob were in jail, Little Bill read the title from the book as "Duck" of Death. The writer timidly attempts to correct Little Bill (who is meaner than an angry rattler) about the pronunciation but Little Bill intentionally continues to read the word Duke, as Duck. The fact that many people from that time period in the West were not always schooled well made it plausible that the character didn’t know how to pronounce the written word Duke, but Little Bill had a mean streak in him and continued referring to English Bob as “Duck” instead of Duke who is laying in the jail cell beaten to a pulp by Little Bill, but still conscious. Anyway, I’m impressed with the lamp and purchased it for an enormous sum of money, the sum of which I cannot remember, but the reluctance I felt in parting with the money told me all I needed to know about the cost.
And that was the end of the dream or so I thought. Here I was now fully awake at 1:00 am CST wondering how in the world this thing manifested itself in my subconscious. I tried to go back to sleep which has always been quite easy for me but this time it was different. I cleared my mind, closed my eyes and tried to drift off to sleep, only to open one eye, glancing at the digital clock in the dark from across the room and seeing 1:15, then 1:30 and so on until it was 2:30 am and still not asleep. I decided that this must be a very unusual dream and decided that instead of fighting to get back to sleep, I would make a voice memo with my cell phone recalling the dream as I freshly remembered it. After recording the dream on my iPhone, I went straight back to sleep in seconds, awoke this morning with a resolve to determine where this dream came from.
In my younger days, my wife and I married in 1974 and moved to Jackson, Mississippi where I opened a small sales office for Lewis Business Forms. We both worked to make ends meet and I played a little pool to make extra cash and had discovered that I had a talent for playing the gambling pinball machines, sometimes called Bingo Pinball. These machines did not have flippers, and most had either 20 holes or 25 holes where the silver pinballs could fall into and possibly win additional games if they were in a particular order. Those won games could be converted into cash and I was very good at it. Now, don’t leave me just yet, I’m getting there, cutting to the chase as fast as I can. They used to call me Pinball Joey and the owner of the Amusement Company in Jackson, Mississippi eventually caught up with me after a few years and warned me to never play his gambling pinball machines again. I found out from some of my friends that they guy was a deadly dude and they said that if I continued playing his gambling pinball machines, my wife would find me dead in a ditch on some lonely dark road. I’ve seldom given much thought to my own safety in such situations and had always lived a bit on the sharp edge of life, sometimes rubbing elbows with the seedier degenerates of the underworld, but I always put my wife and son first and didn’t want them to have to look for a new dad and husband, so after that encounter with the amusement company, I stopped playing the gambling pinball machines in Jackson. I could probably write a book about gambling pinball machines and the journeys that I made to play them in my early adulthood but that’s not what this is all about.
It was around 1962-1964 and my family lived at 4918 Bienville Street in New Orleans, right across from a local cemetery. It was a shotgun house; you know one of those houses where one family lived on one side of the house and another family lived on the other. You could stand in front of either side of the house and look all the way through the house to the back door if all of the interior doors were open. One side of the house was probably adequate in size for handling 3 or 4 people, we somehow managed to fit 7 of us into that one side of the house. My older brother Jim had already moved out on his own at that time and my brother Barry and I slept on spring bunk beds in the back room. My sisters were cramped in another room while my parents had the master bedroom which was probably no larger than 10 feet by 12 feet at the most. It had one bathroom, but hold on, I’m getting there, don’t leave me just yet.
Our home was located a few blocks from the Beach Corner Grill on Canal Street, and it is still there today, and are well known for their famous charbroiled hamburgers. Back then, I would walk to the Beach Corner Grill to get a coke if I made enough money left over from selling soft drinks at City Park Stadium that week. They also had a couple of those gambling pinball machines with their colorful painted back glass, with moving screens and lighted panels. Those electro-mechanical machines made an almost hypnotic noise as the patrons of the establishment would fill the machines with many nickels in hopes of winning more than they lost, much like the slot machines at casinos of this day and time, except that there was skill involved in playing those gambling pinball machines. So last week, I found an estate sale which had what was an original gambling pinball machine made by Bally, called Beach Time. I had gone to the estate sale and while the photo looked like it was in good condition, it turned out that the pinball machine was not close to being in good working condition. The Beach Corner Grill on Canal Street had one of those old-time juke boxes with vinyl records and one of the favorite songs that the patrons chose to play was a hit song by Gene Chandler from 1962 named, Duke of Earl. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQnfooEED8Y&t=53s It was a buried memory that only surfaced this morning as I started writing this story. Now I have to go and find out about more about the Duke of Earl. Hope you had fun traveling down memory lane with me.
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