Thank You for Being a Friend
In the men’s locker room, Buddy Haskell was sitting in one of the faux leather lounge chairs watching a rerun of an episode of The Rifleman, a black-and-white western that aired in the late 1950’s, early 1960’s, starring Chuck Connors as Lucas McCain. Buddy watched this show every Saturday morning at the gym. I’d just been for my swim and was headed toward the showers when I heard the kid on the show, Mark, Lucas McCain’s young boy, say, “I can even say all seven stanzas of ‘Sheridan’s Ride.’”
Wait, a TV show where a kid recites poetry? Were people just more literate back then, was reciting a poem on a TV show not a big deal? “Sheridan’s Ride,” a Civil War poem by Thomas Buchanan Read, a portrait painter as well as a poet, though more popular in Florence than the United States. Portraits of Lincoln, Longfellow, Tennyson, the Brownings, William Henry Harrison. “Sheridan’s Ride” among his most famous poems.
On The Rifleman, General Philip Sheridan had just ridden up to the McCain Ranch looking for a place to stay. Mark, who worshipped the man the way very young children admire army soldiers, began to recite, “Up from the south at break of day …” and through to the last line of the first stanza, “And Sheridan twenty miles away.”
But after one verse, Sheridan interrupted him. “Sheridan twenty miles away,” he scoffed. “Now that’s what a man gets for trying to serve his country. They write a poem about him!” An attitude that may be the most American of attitudes. Sneering at literature.
In real life, Sheridan was a career U.S. army officer, played a vital role in the Appomattox campaign that brought the Civil War to an end. He was also the one who initiated the scorched-earth policy Sherman would later follow through Georgia to the sea.
After the war, Grant sent Sheridan out west where he fought in the Indian Wars – The Great Sioux War, the Red River War, the Ute War. Popular history credits Sheridan with saying, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”
In 1870 Grant sent Sheridan overseas to observe the Franco-Prussian War, and the next year he was in Chicago to coordinate military relief efforts during the Great Chicago Fire. In the 1880’s he became a great supporter of the Yellowstone area, preserving it from development (later to become a national park, of course). Sheridan died from a heart attack at the age of fifty-seven, in 1888, having just sent his memoirs to a publisher. He outlived Read by sixteen years, though obviously Read’s poem was still being read in the mid-twentieth century.
“Sheridan, what a bloodthirsty bastard he was,” I commented to Buddy, still marveling at how American history and literature’d been so casually part of a knockoff TV western.
Buddy grunted. We always greeted each other casually when we saw each other at the gym, not exactly friends but familiar, on a first-name basis.
“I figured he was a made-up character,” he said. “You never know, do you? The Golden Girls comes on next.”
A commercial for some kind of deodorant came on then, and I proceeded to the showers.
Taxi Driver
It was a year before the movie with Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster came out, but I still thought it would be a romantic adventure, more than just a job. Trouble was, I’d just moved to Boston from a tiny town in the Middlewest – Potawatomi Rapids, Michigan – that didn’t even have one-way streets or left-turn arrows. But I figured the fares I picked up would know how to get to where they needed to be, right? How hard could it be?
I got a Hackney License downtown somewhere in Copley Square, no problem. I didn’t have a criminal record, I’d just gotten a Massachusetts driver’s license, I was over 21 (22 to be exact), a clean-cut corn-fed college kid.
I must have looked honest. The management at the taxi company over near Fenway Park hired me with no problems. My first day of work was the day the clocks jumped ahead an hour, February 23, a bleak, sleety, slushy morning For some reason – one of the original “energy crises” – somebody had decided that starting daylight savings time in February was going to save power. I trudged over to get my cab from my roominghouse in Kenmore Square, a huge sprawling Romanesque Revival style building with conical towers built in 1901, the hallways of which were as confusing as a rabbits’ warren.
My first – and only – fare I forgot to throw the meter. Fortunately, the guy was only going a short way, and he kindly gave me a five-dollar bill.
“You wanna go back to the garage,” he confided, “hang a left onto Beacon.”
I was way out of my depth, for sure. Reality had run smack into the crazy romantic dream of a madcap escapade. I headed back through Kenmore Square, a middle-aged lady on Commonwealth Avenue yoohooing at me with her scarf. I ignored her, driving on and turning into Brookline Avenue and on toward Landsdowne Street, back to the taxi company, like the Trojans fleeing inside the walled city, escaping the Greeks. Smartest thing I ever did in my life, even if I felt like a failure, my pride a dirty doormat.
Inside the garage, I got out of my cab, handed the dispatcher my keys and the five-dollar bill, explaining my folly to him, pleading incompetence. No harm, no foul. He agreed I should maybe try again some other time when I was more familiar with the area. Then I went back to the Charlesgate and crawled into bed. When I woke up a few hours later, I began scheming about Plan B.
Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. A collection of persona poems and dramatic monologues involving burlesque stars, The Trapeze of Your Flesh, was recently published by BlazeVOX Books. His collection, The Tao According to Calvin Coolidge has been accepted by Kelsay Books.