Charles Pinning: 'When what you want comes to you'

 

"Hope'' (oil and gold leaf on panel), by ELLEN GRANTER, at Alpers Fine Art, Andover, Mass.

I was devastated! I’d given Lisa Goodrich a Valentine’s Day card and a box of chocolates, and she could barely say thank you before shoving them into her book bag and hurrying off to her mother’s waiting Cadillac.

I walked home from school and must have looked as dejected as I felt, for as I approached our house, Anna Pasch, who lived next door, came out of hers and asked me what was wrong.

“Nothing.”

“That’s not true,” she said.

“I gave a Valentine’s Day card to this girl in my class and she just put it in her book bag and walked away.”

Anna slung her arm around my shoulders. “C’mon inside and have some banana bread.”

Halfway through my second slice, Anna got it out of me that it was Lisa Goodrich and that I’d also given her a box of chocolates.

“Oh, boy,” sighed Anna.

I made a wounded animal sound.

“Will you do me a favor? asked Anna. “Will you be my Valentine?”

My older brother was slapping English Leather on his face in preparation for his Valentine’s night out with his girlfriend.

“I’m taking Sally to the Pier,” he said. The Pier was a fancy restaurant on the harbor in downtown Newport.

“I’m going to the White Horse Tavern,” I said.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Anna’s taking me.”

My brother stopped. “What is it with you two, anyway?”

“I—” but before I could say anything he cut me off.

“Anna Pasch is the most gorgeous creature in Newport, possibly the entire United States. I’ve asked her out. Everybody has asked her out, and my fourteen year old brother is the only person she’ll go out with. I’ve asked you this before and I am asking you again: What do you two do together?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s impossible! Two people cannot do nothing together! Did you tell Mom and Dad?”

“Not yet.”

“They’ll let you go. They love her. You’ve never been to the White Horse.”

“So?”

“Well, you better start getting ready. It’s very fancy.”

“As fancy as The Pier?”

“Fancier.”

“Can I borrow one of your ties?”

“No.”

Anna and I sat at a round table in front of the fireplace in the barroom. I wore my blue blazer, plaid bell bottoms and loafers. I took a tie of my brothers anyway. He had so many he wouldn’t even notice, if I put it back just right.

Anna looked like a movie star. Sixteen years old and over six feet tall, her effect was always impressive. Add to that her sapphire-blue eyes and bright blonde hair, perfect complexion and Wonder Woman body and basically everyone in view was dropping dead.

Anna’s uncle was a manager at the White Horse, hence the table in front of the fireplace and the immediate tendering of two flute glasses of French ginger ale.

“Happy Valentine’s Day, Sweetheart,” Anna toasted, and after our first sip she kissed me. Her lipstick smelled like roses, made somehow more red and fragrant by the snow falling outside the windows, the candlelight and burning wood.

“Charlie, Lisa Goodrich will waste your time and break your heart. Her family came over on the Mayflower, and they think all that crap is actually important. She is cute but she’s conventional. Lisa will always be about Lisa.

“You are intense and you are smart. And you are sensitive. If you try to please Lisa Goodrich, your edge will dull. Did she wiggle her tail for you?”

Stifling a laugh, I aspirated ginger ale out my nose.

“A female does that to attract and then sort out the possibilities and you’ve been rejected. Consider yourself lucky. She’ll eventually settle on Barclay Belmont, or someone like him. You, as a male, are wired to fight for her and try to control her, even though actual life has surpassed the slow steps of biological evolution.”

“Wow.” I said wow a lot when I was around Anna.

“My love, you don’t win something by conquering it. You win when what you want comes to you.”

Before we got out of Anna’s yellow Mustang convertible, we kissed. Anna and I had a way of getting lost in our kisses. We could let one kiss just go on and on, breathing in out of each other. Our lips had fit together perfectly from the start.

She took my hand. “Here. Feel my heart. Can you feel it beating?”

“Wow.” I’d never felt anything like that before.

“Happy Valentine’s Day, Sweetheart. All we have to do is be ourselves and the world is ours. It will be easy for us, if you let it.”

Charles Pinning, an occasional contributor, is the author of the Rhode Island-based novel, “Irreplaceable.”

I would forever be a complainer

-- Photo by JOHN PINNING

Green End Farm, in Middletown, circa 1960, where the author savored his Thanksgiving dinner.

We’re rolling merrily down my grandparents' lane in Middletown,  R.I.,  which is next to Newport. A border of weeping willows just beyond the passenger windows drapes into Green End Pond before the lane curves away at the stone wall and up between two towering maples and past the rarely-used front door of the white farmhouse. We pull around back by the cast iron water pump with the long, curved handle and trundle in through the back door.

My grandmother is at the kitchen stove, a pot on every burner, opening the oven door to baste the turkey. The entire house is rich with the aroma of pies, vegetables and turkey.

Everything glistens. The mahogany table, the backs of the chairs. The window glass and the cut glasses and candlesticks on the table. The silverware. Heat comes up through the scrollwork of the floor registers. It is here, in the big dining room, behind lace curtains with the afternoon sun streaming in, that we celebrate Thanksgiving.

Aunts and uncles and cousins arrive from Newport, Bristol, Warren and Providence. I am shy around some of these people whom I only see a couple times a year. These are working people; Portuguese, Irish, fishermen and plumbers. They are jostling and physical, and my head is rubbed many times, and I am hugged and kissed by aunts with booming voices wearing too much lipstick and perfume. I am not a loud person. I don’t know how to smile unless I am genuinely happy. I am feeling pretty happy at the moment, just overwhelmed and crowded.

The grand feast is served forth, the plates are loaded and the eating begins, soon followed by the arguing. Something is said about the Kennedys and my father starts in about the Bay of Pigs, and then an uncle accuses a brother-in-law of “double-dipping,” and the battle cry is raised about taxes in Newport and taxes in Bristol and why am I being sent to a private school — aren’t public schools good enough for me?

My mother’s younger sister is in high spirits with her new boyfriend and my mother has to take her down a few notches, accusing her of having more growing up than she did, and nobody notices when I slide down out of my chair and crawl out of the room. In the back hall I grab my coat and slip outside.

The sky is a watercolor wash of blues, grays and pale whites as I head up to the barn. My grandfather is inside, arranging the milking machines, the big grey tabby following him. I hadn’t notice him leave the dining room before me. He is wearing a work coat over his suit and a red plaid hat with flaps up.

I walk past him to visit the bull with the ring in his nose, watching us from behind the thick iron bars of his stall.

I follow my grandfather back to the front of the barn, where he takes another plaid wool hat, a green one like the red one he wears, and fits it onto my head. Then we walk down the lane to the pond.

Two swans glide over to us and my grandfather takes a chunk of bread out of his pocket, breaks off a piece and tosses crumbled bits of it into the water. He hands the chunk of bread to me and I do the same.

A group of mallards stream in, darting at the bread furthest from the swans and the last of the sun starts streaking the sky orange and purple.

“Time to bring in the cows,” my grandfather says.

We turn and head up the lane, toward the farmhouse and the pasture beyond. My grandmother is standing in a window watching us and I smile and wave to her. She smiles and waves back.

“She can listen to that. I can’t,” says my grandfather.

“Why do they complain so much?” I ask him.

“Not enough money,” says my grandfather. “That’s why your parents want you go there,” and he points to the Gothic spires of the St. George’s School chapel, lordly stoic beyond the fields on the highest point of land in the area.

And one day, I did go to that prestigious boarding school. But it was already too late for me. I was of the complaining class, and no matter how far life took me, I would forever see everything that was wrong and complain about it.

Still, Thanksgiving remains my favorite holiday — even if for turkeys it is a complete disaster, and for the American Indian, a day of national mourning.

Charles Pinning is the author of the Rhode Island-based novel “Irreplaceable.”

Charles Pinning: Lessons from the Old Portagee

A couple of times each summer, the family station wagon transported us an hour or so, from Newport across the Mount Hope Bridge, through Bristol and Warren to the capital city of Providence. By Rhode Island standards, we had traveled halfway around the world.

These odysseys were generated by a visit to my Aunt Teresa in the Fox Point section, a woman with numerous ailments, none of which affected her ability to talk. I was left in the company of a pudgy, desultory cousin with greasy hair who crammed himself into a couch and stared at the TV. Nobody minded if I wandered the neighborhood by myself.

There was a drugstore I would head off to, to buy comic books or a James Bond paperback. Maybe wax lips, if they had them. On the way, I passed a cracked cement driveway shaded by trellised grape leaves. This trellis was made of the same kind of pipe that formed the top rail of the chain-link fencing that ran alongside the driveway and in front of the green, asbestos-shingled house.

In the shade of the grape leaves sat an old man in a low aluminum lawn chair with nylon webbing. He wore a beat-up straw hat and suspect trousers. At his feet to one side of the chair was a hibachi grill with sausage and peppers roasting. On the other side of the chair a radio was broadcasting the Red Sox game.

Seeing me staring, he said, “You want some chourico?”

Because he pronounced this Portuguese word for sausage in the same earthy way as my Azorean mother, I accepted. He speared me a piece  that  I plucked off the prongs of the long fork.

“Good, eh?” he said, watching me chew.

It was delicious, better than my mother made.

“It’s the coals,” he said. “Here, have another.”

He smiled at me. His teeth were good for an old man.

A young woman with a dark tan walked by. She smiled and waved and the old man nodded and tugged the brim of his hat.

“You don’t want your wife to look like leather,” he said, following her with his eyes. “That’s what she will look like one day. Look and feel like leather. You don’t want that.”

Later, in my Aunt Teresa’s kitchen, I asked my parents: “Can people turn into leather?”

“Why would you say that?” asked my father, and I told him about the man in the driveway.

“Oh,” said my Aunt Teresa. “He’s been talking to the Old Portagee. Never mind him; he just sits there all day.”

I didn’t think that was so bad. I spent many hours in the summer on my bed reading. What was the difference, really?

On subsequent trips over the years, I always stopped by to visit the Old Portagee.

“I only wear Brooks Brothers shirts,” he told me. “They wear like iron!” and he pulled at the sleeve of his faded blue shirt, basket-woven with white, the button-down collar frayed. “This one I’ve had more than 40 years!”

In addition to the chourico on his hibachi, the Old Portagee always had homemade wine to offer. Sometimes young women in the neighborhood would stop by, and he would pour them a glass or two. Rarely, I noticed, did men of any age stop by to talk to the Old Portagee.

“Men,” he said, “are lions. When they meet another lion, they know to keep their distance. If a man has a woman, a beautiful woman, then the other lions only come around for the woman, no matter what they say.”

“Do you have a woman?” I asked him.

“Once,” he said, pulling on the sleeve of his shirt. “Once the Old Portagee had the woman of all women,” and he looked up at the grape leaves shading us, and the plump red grapes ripening.

His wine was the best I’d ever tasted and he told me that he would give me the recipe before he passed.

He reached down to yank a dandelion that flourished in a crack in the cement but stopped. He caressed the yellow flower with his thumb.

“Remember,” he said, “You don’t have to go far to learn what you need to know. Just far enough.”

“And what else?” I asked.

“What else? Nothing ever changes. All change is false change.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense!” I exclaimed.

“If you say so,” smiled the Old Portagee. “But you might want to think about it.”

One night, deep in summer, the Old Portagee and I were sitting in his driveway drinking wine, blending into the evening shadows and eating fava beans out of the pod.

“Remember to keep the women happy,” he said. “Either do not let them into your life, or keep them happy. There is no middle road.”

He pulled a black and white photograph with crinkle-cut edges out of his Brooks Brothers shirt. It was a woman sitting sidesaddle on a horse. She was attired in the garb of the 1930s.

“Who is she?” I asked.

“A woman of Providence,” grinned the Old Portagee. “We’ll be riding together again soon.”

Shortly after I graduated from college, I received a hand-addressed envelope in the mail, the penmanship elegant and cursive. Inside was a folded piece of paper with the Old Portagee’s wine recipe. Beneath it was written: “The Right Woman, The Right Wine, The Right Chourico. T.O.P.”

Charles Pinning, an essayist, is the author of the Rhode Island-based novel “Irreplaceable.”

Charles Pinning: In '63, encountering a music legend to be

  Deep in the summer of 1963, my world consisted of two things: baseball and cars. I lived in Newport. When I was 11 years old and wasn’t playing for my Little League team, I’d wend my way up to Vernon Playground, often stopping at my friend Buddy’s house to snag him. After several hours playing pick-up ball under the blazing sun, we’d backtrack down Bliss Road and head into Koozy’s (Kuznit’s), our neighborhood corner store, for sodas and packs of baseball cards with bubble gum. If the Newport Folk or Jazz Festival was on, we’d head up to Broadway to watch the cars rolling into town. Between the Newport Hospital Nursing School and Rhode Island Avenue, there was a stone wall that rose up six feet above the sidewalk, shaded by two enormous beech trees. Buddy and I climbed the steps to the front lawn of the house and planted ourselves on the wall, our legs dangling over so we could get a good view of the cars coming down Broadway into downtown Newport. “Porsche,” intoned Buddy, making the first identification. The idea was to see how early you could tell what kind of car it was coming. “Jag, XK 120,” I jumped in. “Sting Ray ... Sunbeam Alpine.” “Healey 3000 ... Citroën.” Because of the music festivals in Newport, you got a sudden influx of foreign cars, filled with kool kats, hep cats, berets, long hair, depending on whether it was the Jazz or Folk Festival. We first spied the big-finned Cadillac as it passed DeCotis’s Barbershop, steam billowing out from under the hood, and it pulled over right below us. It had New York plates and the driver, a solid, middle-age man with glasses, stepped out and popped the hood. A skinny, college-age guy with curly hair that was almost fluffed up into a pompadour got out of the backseat. He looked up at us and then leaned against the wall, watching the steam rise out of the engine compartment. The man in front of the hood called to us: “You boys know where there’s a service station?” “Yep. You just passed a Mobil station up there,” I said pointing. “Right before that barbershop.” The man told the skinny guy that he was going up there. The skinny guy said, “OK. I’ll wait here.” Then a woman, about the skinny guy’s age, with long dark hair, got out of the back of the car. She looked up at us and said, “Hi.” She had pretty eyes and a nice smile. The skinny guy looked up at Buddy and said, “Kid, can I have a sip of your soda. I’m dying a thirst.” Buddy hesitated then said OK, and handed down the bottle of RC. The guy took a couple of  good slugs and handed it back. “That was good,” he said. “Thanks.” The woman looked at me with her big brown eyes, so I handed her my bottle and she took a swig. The skinny guy took out a pack of cigarettes and asked us if we wanted one. We glanced at each other and said, sure. The skinny guy shook the pack and out popped  a couple of Lucky Strikes. Buddy took a drag and started coughing. I held my smoke in my cheeks. The skinny guy went to the car and pulled a guitar case out of the backseat. He and the woman came up and sat down next to us on the wall. “You guys like folk music?” he asked. “It’s OK” I said. “But I prefer rock ’n’ roll.” “No kidding? Electric guitar?” he asked, and looked hard at me with his blue eyes as if he was actually thinking about what I’d said. Then he began playing a song. His guitar playing was good, but his voice was just terrible! Buddy and I looked at each other as he screeched, “The answer my friend, is blowin’ in the wind, the answer is blowin’ in the wind .... ” But when the woman chimed in, she had a voice like an angel, high and pure. Then he played “This Land is Your Land,” and we had fun singing that together. When the older guy got back with a jug of water for the radiator, the skinny guy put his guitar away and thanked us for sharing our sodas. So did the woman and she got back in the car. Before the skinny guy got in, he turned to us. “Hey, what are your names?” he asked. I told him, “I’m Chuck and that’s Buddy.” “Well, OK, Chuck and Buddy. I’m Bob, and I guess that’s about it. Good luck.” With a blast of the Caddy’s horn they pulled away and Buddy and I went back to our car spotting, making jokes about what a horrible singer Bob was. Of course, our estimation of him was destined to change over the next few years. Charles Pinning, an occasional contributor, is the author of the Rhode Island-based novel “Irreplaceable.” While he is a fiction writer, he insists that the above story is true.

Charles Pinning: My fire and my father

Dad held property in high regard, perhaps because he’d had very little of it growing up, not even a bicycle. Our bicycles were to be put on the porch at the end of the day, in case it rained. If you used a tool, you returned it to its proper place, and you certainly didn’t touch anything that didn’t belong to you.

Dad was also a belt-spanker and hand-spanker, and one could expect such punishment with varying degrees of severity, depending upon the infraction. It was a dangerous way for me to live, as every day presented so many ways to incur his wrath. My mother covered for him by calling him a perfectionist.

School just out, summer hovering on the horizon, infractions were in the air. When I was about 7, Dad and my older brother had driven from Newport up to Boston to buy my brother skis at off-season prices. I had exhausted a neighborhood friend-search and sat sullenly on my bed. My mother was somewhere around.

Between gazing at my baseball trophies and emptying my ceramic piggy bank, it occurred to me that the thing to do was to go down into the basement and try my hand at soldering. I’d never actually done it myself, but I’d watched my father solder stuff plenty of times.

How hard could it be?

Plugging in the iron, I removed a spool of solder from the cupboard beneath the workbench. Unraveling a few inches, I touched it to the iron and watched silvery globs of it fall inside the lid of a peanut butter jar. Resting the iron on the edge of the lid, I was looking for some wire to cut and solder back together when I heard my friend Ernie calling me from outside. I left the basement and went to find him.

Ernie was on my Little League team, Scotts Rug, and he’d just gotten back from Edward’s Sporting Goods down on Thames Street with a brand new baseball bat. It was a nice 26-ounce Mickey Mantle model and I swung it a few times. I told him I’d get my glove and a few balls and we could go up to Vernon Playground and hit some balls.

That’s when we smelled smoke. The soldering iron! I ran down to the basement where flames were sweeping the workbench. Somehow, the iron had rolled off the lid and fallen onto a stack of Popular Mechanics magazines. I tried putting it out with a sheet my mother had on top of a laundry basket but that caught fire too.

“Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom!” I ran outside. “Mom! Mom!”

She was visiting next door and came bolting out.

“What is it?”

She could smell smoke and called the fire department.

They showed up within five minutes, complete with Pat Reilly, my father’s tennis partner, who was a fireman, and put it out. The workbench was ruined and the cupboard beneath it and all the contents. Flames had scorched the ceiling above the workbench.

I actually heard Pat say to my mother before they left, “Your husband’s gonna love this.”

“Get into your room!” my seething mother commanded me, “and stay there until your father gets home. You could’ve burned our house down!”

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said.

“Then go to the bathroom and then get into your room.”

I went to the bathroom. Then I threw up. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t do anything except wait. It was late in the afternoon when I heard the car pull into the driveway and doors open and close.

I started crying. I was frantic. On pure survival instinct, I took a preemptive strike and ran downstairs and burst out the front door to get to my father before my mother could.

My brother was standing alongside the car admiring his new Head skis, and my father was walking around the front of the car holding a basketball he’d bought for me, which made my crying even more frenzied.

“What happened?” He demanded. “What’s wrong?”

I couldn’t speak. All I could do was cry harder and harder.

My mother appeared in the door and just stood there with her arms crossed. My father handed me the basketball and walked up to the porch and through the front door with my mother.

“No!” I screamed. “No! No! No!”

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” my brother said. All I could do was cry. I was shaking. My brother had never seen anything like it and didn’t even have a sarcastic remark.

Finally, my father came out of the house. I tried to run away, but I couldn’t move. I was welded to the spot, shaking and crying hysterically. My father came toward me, but instead of beating me he took me up in his arms.

“It’s all right,” he said, hugging me, kissing my cheeks. “Calm down. It’s fine . . . it’s fine. You’re OK and nothing’s been damaged that can’t be fixed.”

I clung to him, sobbing, drenched in sweat, my heart racing.

Charles Pinning is the author of the Rhode Island-based novel “Irreplaceable.”

Charles Pinning: A separate peace in Newport

By CHARLES PINNING

An enemy ambush had separated me from my battalion and I was alone in the field. Crouching in the tall grass, I took a long pull from my canteen and wiped my lips. The noon sun was beating down and I would have to handle my water carefully. I squeezed some dirt and smeared it on my face for camouflage.

A big, orange monarch opened and closed its wings only a foot away. Running to my position, I’d flown past blackberry bushes that had ripped my pants. My goal was to reach the ocean where, hopefully, I would find a landing craft to get me the hell out of here.

I checked my compass and looked up at the sky. In a house at the edge of the field, a woman was hanging laundry on a clothes line. A cherry tree in the yard had lost most of its pink blossoms. There was a small shed in the yard and a sandbox. I squinted back into the field, scanning the tall grass for any movement that might signal the enemy.

I pondered when to make my move.

The woman hanging clothes looked out across the field and I lowered myself. There was no telling whose side she was on. One couldn’t be too careful in these parts.

A funny sound came from a stand of trees and I flattened myself to the ground. Footsteps, many footsteps. I unholstered my .45 and lay still as a corpse. They passed by, without seeing me, not more than 10 feet away.

When I raised myself again to look around, a girl in a red blouse was standing in the yard next to the one where the lady had been hanging clothes. She waved to me. I signaled her to stay quiet and as she retreated into her house I lowered myself back into the grass.

I reached down and touched my leg where the blackberry bush had ripped my pants. When I brought my hand up there was some blood on it. This was not good. The enemy had dogs and the smell of blood would only make me more easily discovered. I fingered the leather handle of my trench knife. I would have to kill the dog first, quickly, with the knife in its throat and then shoot the handler with my .45. That would be loud and, I hoped, unnecessary.

The thing to do now was inch forward on my belly. Slow work, but I would remain invisible as well as be able to spot any mine trip wires.

Suddenly a plane came in low and strafed the field. I drew my helmet down over my head and gritted my teeth as the ground around me jumped up like popcorn, then it was gone. The butterfly opened its wings again on the blade of grass and I took another pull from my canteen and wiped my lips. The water, what was left of it, was warm but I was grateful for it.

From my breast pocket, I withdrew a letter from my wife, Pamela. She said all was well at home and that everyone prayed for me all the time. God, my leg hurt from the blackberry bushes. It was possible a thorn was embedded. I was susceptible to such things, having had blood poisoning twice from thorns.

I missed Pamela. I missed our walks in the neighborhood and I missed riding our bikes together. If I ever got out of this hellhole alive, I’d tell her every day how much I loved her paintings. She’d painted the side of our Pontiac station wagon: flames streaming down the sides from the front wheels.

Now, she was in our house in Newport, probably having lunch. A sandwich. Probably turkey and cheese, her favorite. God, I was getting hungry! And my leg hurt. What if I did have blood poisoning again? And stuck in this hellhole!

Back home, my team might have a baseball game tonight. I played in the Sunset League, an adult league. We played down at Cardines Field just off the bay. Pamela came to all of my games. She brought snacks. After the game, we’d sit in the stands eating celery and peanut butter. She had freckles. God, I loved her freckles. She didn’t like her freckles.

I was probably going to have to make a break for it. Between the blood poisoning in my leg and my hunger, I had to get out of this hellhole!

Slowly, I rose to my knees. I adjusted my helmet strap, checked everything hanging off my equipment belt and made a run for it. I zigzagged through the high grass to make myself a harder target, was almost there when I was hit by machine gun fire. I dove down, knowing I’d have to crawl the rest of the way if I had any hope of making it alive.

But as I dove into the grass, a stiff piece hit me in the eye.

“Raaah!”

I dropped my rifle and ran toward the backyard. My mother came running out and immediately saw the stalk of grass sticking out of my eye. She threw me in the station wagon and we drove straight to Dr. Grimes’s house, where he’d just sat down for Sunday lunch with his wife and 12 kids.

He brought me into his office at the front of the house and removed the stalk. I was going to live. I was going to be fine. He put a pirate’s patch over my eye.

At home, my mother made me take a bath and then daubed Merthiolate on my scratched leg and put me to bed. She ferried up a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup.

Pamela, who’d heard me screaming earlier, came over and sat on my bed. She brought her sketch pad and drew while I thumbed through a Mad magazine. I thought about how pretty she looked in her red blouse. Suddenly, she crawled up and kissed me on the cheek.

“I don’t want you playing war anymore,” she said. “I don’t want to lose you.”

I sighed. After a rough start, it had become a perfect summer’s day.

 Charles Pinning is  a Providence-based writer and the author of the New England-based novel "Irreplaceable'', about, among other thing, the art world.