Mrs. Faustroll told me I need to get my facts straight when I'm posting on this blog, although I'm not a goddamn journalist. I just make shit up when I can't remember the facts and I can't verify them using one of my favorite search engines, so she had me go back and correct Crescent's age and other information in this post and then pointed out that the silverfish eaten copy of Gone With The Wind that she is reading in this post was actually a first edition and not, as I so clumsily wrote, "an original copy."
I spent an hour or two last night gathering pictures of Ocean into iPhoto and plan to upload a few of the best ones to a photo album on this site later tonight, but this post is actually about Arnold Stang, who played with Frank Sinatra in the film version of Nelson Algren's The Man With the Golden Arm.
I remember him in my earliest memories on the Milton Berle show on a little Phillips black and white console television in a small apartment in Ravenswood before we moved to the projects in the Bronx. I think my mother was pregnant with my brother Dennis at the time.
Stang was also part of the inspiration for one of the funnier poems written while I was in Arkansas in the early seventies. I can't remember if it was published in New York Quarterly by William Packard or Counter Measures by X. J. Kennedy, but I guessing it was the latter. The other part of the inspiration was Long Song: I and Thou, by Alan Dugan.
Here's what I came up with.
Arnold Stang Gets Pissed Off At His Lover
There is a kind of crab so small
He almost don't exist at all.
His body's like a grain of salt.
His size, thank God, is not a fault.
Was nature made him small like that
So he could copulate and scat.
His mate, you see, is awful mean,
Her eating habits quite obscene,
Especially when screwing's done
And lover boy's too weak to run.
We both can see how this might lead
To cruel extinction of the breed,
But nature worked a clever trick
And made his mama like a brick,
As big perhaps as a black-eyed pea
And him too fine for her to see.
When done he climbs up on the bitch
So she can't tell him from an itch.
This way he gets to get away
And screw again another day.
In case the case in point ain't clear,
I wrote these lines for you, my dear.